Comparative Ethics Review

Gabby
Bandovich is currently a LEJA Graduate Assistant and student in the Law
Enforcement and Justice Administration Department. She graduated from WIU in
May 2019 as a double major in Law Enforcement and Justice Administration and
Foreign Languages and Cultures. Gabby will graduate from the LEJA Master’s
Program in May 2020 and is looking forward to pursuing a career in federal Law
Enforcement.

In a book
entitled Law Enforcement Ethics: Classic and Contemporary Issues, author
Brian Fitch claims “the patchy, haphazard implementation of ethics training
remains little more than a knee-jerk reaction to police abuse or corruption”
(Fitch, 2014).  Ethics training fails
primarily due to its lecture based methods and lack of practical application
during training.  Utilizing The
Ethics Primer, by James Svara, an evaluation of Fitch’s ideology can be
made through Svara’s ethical triangle. Svara claimed that the three concepts
within the ethical triangle, virtue, principle, and consequence, are the most
important parts of understanding and applying ethics in an organization. 

The virtue
perspective places strong emphasis on how virtues are developed early in life
and highlight the benefits for individuals to apply their virtues and prior
knowledge within police work to new situations. In discussing the Principle
Perspective, Svara declares developing principles which identify the right
actions from wrong actions and being able to apply these principles to
future scenarios is vital in police work. This application is key to ethics
training, as officers must apply principles in training to utilize later in the
field.  The Consequentialism perspective
focuses primarily on how the results of an action determine whether or not the
action was right or wrong. This develops the premise that evaluating future
consequences from the present will automatically cause people to make the
right, ethical decision. However, law enforcement should feel motivated
intrinsically to act ethically in this line of work, rather than extrinsically
simply to avoid consequences.

The
resolution of this issue is critical to the profession of law enforcement
because officers are under increasingly high pressure to perform properly and
ethically each day. After briefly applying Svara’s three principles to this
issue, the benefits to implementing a newfound strategy to ethical policing are
clear. Ethics training should be lengthened within the academy through engaging,
hands-on activities and extended in-service training. This will allow the duty
of officers and the responsibility to the community to be strengthened via
strong ethics.