1.1: Government and Ethics

The actions of government agencies in the criminal justice system are challenged to balance individual due process rights, with the need to provide effective crime control for the larger part of society. The decentralization of the criminal justice system, as displayed in the picket fence model is designed to provide separate but linked services at various government levels. The theme of this course is the challenge for the criminal justice system to balance its efforts in crime control, while acknowledging due process rights. The central premise of the due process model is the presumption of innocence. Due process protects the rights of a defendant while being processed through the system.

The first acknowledgment of any criminal justice practitioner is to understand that “Rules of Evidence are Rules of Exclusion”. By the same token not all evidence excluded from a trial or not seeing the light of day does not necessarily mean that the evidence was obtained illegally. The study of procedural due process has often been intriguing to me.

This material explores the evolution of ethics, the impacts of ethics within the administration of justice, and how does one maintain a strong ethical center when no one is watching. Sklansky (2006) asserts the demographics of policing has all but removed the "Blue Curtain of Silence" in policing. This author tends to agree with Sklansky, after serving a near 40 years in policing of which 28 years was as the head of an agency. This notion serving some is that most police are honest, which is true, but often never celebrated. Those that make headlines are generally officers in trouble. These headlines often create false equivalences that some accept. That is, officers just cover for wrong doing by other officers and are probably as corrupt. The latter is simply not true. So what keeps most in the CJ system honest? This journey explores these questions and hopefully will dispel false positives.

Before delving into the vast arena of criminal justice and just how ethics apply, one needs to understand the terms commonly consumed, often bantered about that rarely govern personal lives, realized by political affiliates that are often associated with government or lived through daily life-styles. One only needs to look at the disarray of the contemporary political landscape in the United States and the impacts this dysfunction has on the world as well as on U.S. soil. This unforeseen disruption in American life in the embryotic stages of the 21st Century does not bode well for stable life styles going forward. Then how does this turmoil seep into the fabric of all that is thought to be important to citizenry, CJ practitioners, and leadership; and more importantly how then does one sustain routine life free of missteps or misconduct.

This is not merely a practical exercise of follow the leader. The culture within an organization or profession may pose such power or authority over its membership that the members may yield to unsavory behaviors. How then can the CJ system attract ethical people from what may be an unethical society sufficient to alter unethical cultural strategy? Society may be better equipped to deal with the ethical questions posed in this material if we understand a couple basic propositions: “Just because you can, does not necessarily mean you should”; and perhaps “We should guide our conduct on how we ought to live rather than how we actually live”.

As an example of these schemes of ethical behavior, the reader is a police officer with access to the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC) data, and a personal friend of yours asks of you a criminal history on a perspective son-in-law. This is an innocuous request and you would certainly hope a friend of yours would do the same for you, but you know this is a violation of law and rules and regulation. None-the-less you perform the task because everyone else does it and what can it hurt, your friend is not in the mob. Albeit this is not a breach of national security, it is a violation of your oath of office, violation of rules and regulations, and most certainly a violation of law, regardless of enforcement activity. More importantly if you were to follow the former propositions more rigidly, you would not find yourself looking over your shoulder waiting for a formal inquiry.