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This study aims examine to what extent four variable categories of individual ethical ideology, organizational ethical culture, superior's ethical quality and job satisfaction (JS) are causally linked to personal (un)ethical behaviors among South Korean police officers.

With a stratified sampling technique, 687 surveys were collected from 16 major local police headquarters across the nation. The reliability and validity of the variables were checked. The structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypotheses.

Idealism, principlism, utilitarianism and JS have a negative influence on unethical behaviors, whereas superior's unethical standards are positively associated with unethical behaviors.

The findings can be applied as a reference to improve ethical framework to promote behaviors by enriching the higher level of personal ethical ideology, superior's ethical quality and principlism and utilitarianism by adding an ethics training course to the continuing education program for all officers and developing further education programs for police leadership to raise ethical awareness and quality.

To the authors' knowledge, the study is among the first studies with four comprehensive categories of relevant variables and adds understanding to (un)ethical behaviors of police officers.

Relying on a moral development theoretical framework, the purpose of this paper is to argue that the perceived seriousness of a particular behavior is a reflection of one’s broader attitudes toward ethical behaviors. Attitudes toward ethical behavior should provide both an elaborated explanation for the relationship between the perceived seriousness of a behavior and the likelihood of reporting a fellow officer for that behavior, as well as an alternative approach to the measurement and assessment of police integrity outcomes.

Using data from a sample of 499 Philadelphia police officers, the current study uses a modified fifteen item ethics scale first developed by Hyams (1990) and used by others, in order to examine its relation to integrity outcomes. The paper provides a full descriptive and measurement analysis of the scale and then explores its utility in understanding integrity outcomes through a variety of hypothetical scenarios.

While the perceived seriousness of a behavior is strongly predictive of the likelihood of reporting a fellow officer who engages in that behavior, the findings suggest that seriousness may be a proxy for attitudes toward ethical behaviors.

While Klockars et al.’s approach to the measurement of police integrity has been an important contribution to integrity research, other measures of police integrity such as attitudes toward ethical behavior are also useful as they move us conceptually from assessing attitudes toward ethical behavior to their antecedents – the strength of underlying value premises shaping subsequent attitudes.

Although workplace learning is an important part of professional learning, little is known about the unethical aspects of workplace learning. This study aims to describe students’ learning experiences from in-field training in the police. This paper aims to examine how workplace learning can challenge proper ethical professional development and thus become a question of ethical concern.

The study is based on open-ended questions in a questionnaire among Norwegian police students (N = 277) who had ended their one year’s in-field training and had returned to campus for the third and final year of police education. The data are analysed by means of a qualitative content analysis.

The paper presents two findings. First, the students learn best from assignments that push them beyond their comfort zone. Second, students struggle with their own expectations of themselves as police officers. The findings suggest that workplace learning leaves students aspiring to demonstrate their capability to be a police officer, rather than focusing on learning to be a police officer.

The study can provide organisations such as educations, public services and businesses with better understanding on how to enrich learning in their on-the-job training manuals and programmes to evolve ethical professional behaviour. Ethical considerations can help leadership to improve efficiency and performance at the workplace.

How the potentially unethical aspects of workplace learning can influence the profession’s ethical attitude is an understudied topic in studies on learning to become a professional.

Effective ethical leadership is crucial for law enforcement leaders. Ultimately the presence or absence of ethical leadership has significant implications for society. Yet Western law enforcement agencies (LEAs) invest little by way of time, effort or understanding into how law enforcement leaders interpret and develop a sense of ethical competence for leadership. This is a significantly under-researched area within law enforcement anywhere in the world. The purpose of this paper is to assess, measure and more fully understand how social constructivism, problem-based learning (PBL) and self-reflection assist front-line leaders to learn and internalise ethical reasoning for leadership within a law enforcement environment.

The research was designed to assess, measure and more fully understand how social constructivism, PBL and self-reflection assist front-line leaders to learn and internalise ethical reasoning for leadership within a law enforcement environment. Data were collected during a two-day ethical leadership workshop delivered to 13 leaders in supervisory positions from the Australian Border Force and the Australian Federal Police. The pedagogical approach was to blend PBL and self-reflection within a social constructivist centred learning experience and measure changes in the ethical efficacy of the research participants through qualitative and quantitative measures.

The research suggests that blending PBL and self-reflection within a social constructivist learning environment can contribute towards law enforcement leaders’ learning and internalising of ethical reasoning. This is demonstrated through the measurement of ethical efficacy both before and after the learning experience, with particular growth evident towards understanding ethical perspectives and concepts.

Limitations include the fact that results cannot be generalised due to the size of the case study. This is compounded by the fact that much of the data are self-reported and responses offered by the participants are subjective. As a result, much of the data were subject to the attitudes and personal perceptions of the participants thus making the information subjective. Aside from demonstrating an impactful learning approach, this research has highlighted that amongst contemporary Australian LEAs there has been little effort or progress towards finding meaningful and effective pathways to encourage or grow ethical efficacy.

Given challenges faced by LEAs, both Australian and international, the critical need for investment in learning for ethical leadership is both clear and emergent. Law enforcement ethical leadership learning cannot be satisfied through online learning and other cost-efficient means alone. A face-to-face problem-based and reflective learning environment that combines trust, tools and tension in equal measure offers promise for enhanced ethical efficacy. Achieving this requires significant investment in face-to-face learning utilising high-level facilitation skills.

There is a deep and disturbing malaise within Australian LEAs in relation to ethical leadership development, exacerbated by the dearth of investment directed towards learning for front-line ethical leadership. Australian LEAs sit at the crossroads in relation to their application of ethical leadership learning. Given the recent challenges, if these agencies fail to fully engage with this opportunity, the cost will be unfortunately borne by all citizens.

The implication is a clear need to understand and establish the most effective way for law enforcement officers to grasp the importance of ethics and in doing so, learn ethical leadership. Understanding how law enforcement leaders interpret and develop a sense of ethical competence for leadership is a significantly under-researched area within adult learning and there is little evidence of similar effort within law enforcement anywhere in the world. The overarching objective of this research therefore was to identify pathways that strengthen and enhance ethical leadership as an enabler towards achieving just and corruption-free law enforcement services for the communities.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that police research has reached a level of acceptance such that executive management has an ethical obligation to their communities to use evidence-based practices.

Using an Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) framework the authors apply an ethical-based decision-making model to policing decisions. EBM does not allow physicians to ignore research when giving guidance to patients. The authors compare the two professional approaches to decision making and argue policing has reached a level of research that if ignored, just like medicine, should be considered unethical. Police interventions can potentially be harmful. Rather than do no harm, the authors argue that police managers should implement practices that are the least harmful based on the current research.

The authors found policing has a substantial amount of research showing what works, what does not, and what looks promising to allow police executives to make decisions based on evidence rather than tradition, culture, or best practice. There is a deep enough fund of knowledge to enable law enforcement leadership to evaluate policies on how well the policies and procedures they enforce prevent crime with a minimum of harm to the communities they are sworn to protect and serve.

Policing has yet to view community interventions as potentially harmful. Realigning police ethics from a lying, cheating, stealing, lens to a “doing the least harm” lens can alter the practitioner’s view of why evidence-based policing is important. Viewing executive decision from an evidence-based ethical platform is the future of evaluating police executive decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Australian police officers’ perceptions of unethical conduct scenarios with the aim of understanding unwillingness to report infractions.

The responses of 845 officers were compared across 11 scenarios to explore variation in the extent to which they understood the behaviour to violate policy and their hypothetical willingness, or unwillingness, to report the behaviour. Particularly, it was hypothesised that non-reporters may justify their inaction based on the misperception that other officers hold even less ethical beliefs.

Five scenarios emerged as least likely to be reported, with a substantial minority of officers stating their decision was despite their understanding that the behaviour constituted a policy violation. Contrary to predictions, these “non-reporters” were aware they were less likely to report than their colleagues, but believed they held the same views as their colleagues in terms of the seriousness of scenarios. Comparisons between non-reporters and other survey participants, however, found this belief to be false, with non-reporters viewing the scenarios as significantly less serious. A perceived self-other difference, along with a belief that others will report were shown to reduce the likelihood of not reporting.

The results are discussed in terms of increasing willingness to report misconduct through organisational efforts to communicate values and support officers to make ethical decisions.

The paper contributes to understanding the “code of silence” in perpetuating police misconduct and how it may be reduced.

Police interviews with terrorist suspects are perhaps one of the most challenging interviews a police officer will experience. The purpose of this paper is to explore the social context of these interviews and the impact that this might have upon the way in which police officers carry them out, including the use of robust, even aggressive tactics.

Risks associated with police interview tactics are identified, including obtaining unreliable information, problems with suspect cooperation and the potential impact upon communities including problems with the perceived legitimacy of the police and community cooperation.

Ways of mitigating the risks are considered including improving police officer cultural awareness, a consideration of interview tactics and the use of ethical interview approaches such as the planning and preparation, engage and explain, account, closure, evaluation interview model and conversation management.

The impact of the use of ethical interviewing is considered from a procedural justice perspective, and the paper illustrates how this approach may give rise to improved reliability of information from interviews and may impact upon perceptions of police legitimacy from communities.

This study departed from the aim to progress Malaysia as a high-income nation in 2025 via decent work and economic growth (Sustainable Development Goal 8). Thus, this study aims to examine the effects of demographic, experience and organisational factors on the ethical integrity of local enforcement officers from self-proclaim and colleague perception perspectives.

The data of this study was collected from Pusat Latihan Penguatkuasa Selangor (PULAPES), a training centre for local enforcement officers in Selangor. Based on a survey in 2019, this study used primary data based on a scenario-based questionnaire survey with a total sample of 535 respondents.

From a self-proclaim perspective, the results show that secondment and training factors have a positive relationship with the ethical integrity of local enforcement officers. From a colleague perception perspective, the results indicate that the secondment factor has a positive relationship with ethical integrity. In contrast, the officer rank factor has a negative relationship with the ethical integrity of local enforcement officers.

This research seeks to develop new theories or refine existing ones to explain how diverse circumstances affect law enforcement ethics. Learning people’s habits through observation and consequences like rewards or punishments impact behaviour recurrence are suggested. Law enforcement ethics can be examined by examining how peers, supervisors and organisational culture shape officers’ ethics.

The finding of this study could serve to evaluate training programmes or rewards and punishments for ethical behaviour including how accountability and community involvement aid to promote law enforcement ethics.

The survey results of this study are based on local enforcement officers’ ethics that serve to aid in illuminating the elements which affect ethical behaviour among law enforcement personnel and identify the tactics for fostering ethical behaviour.

Police officers are frequently confronted with moral dilemmas in the course of their job. The authors assume new police officers need guidance, and need to be taught at the police academy how to deal with these situations. The purpose of this paper is to obtain insight into the impact of socialization on police recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills.

The study applied a longitudinal mixed methods design, using two methods. The first method was a qualitative observation of integrity training sessions at five police academies in Belgium. The second method was a quantitative survey-measurement of recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills at three points in time: the beginning of their theoretical training, before their field training and afterwards.

The analyses show differences between the police academies in their integrity training sessions. Some of these differences are reflected in different levels of knowledge of the code of ethics. As for the development pattern of recruits’ moral reasoning skills, the study found almost no differences between the academies. Perhaps this is because recruits already have relatively high scores when they start, leaving little room for improvement during the one year training program. This suggests an important role of the police selection procedure.

Previous research on socialization and police culture has focussed on recruits being socialized in a negative police culture where misconduct is learned. This is a negative interpretation of police integrity. A positive one refers to ethical decision making generally, and moral reasoning specifically. The impact of the socialization process on recruits’ moral reasoning is empirically understudied.

This paper looks at police brutalities in Italy. In particular, the discussion focusses on the case of the death of Riccardo Magherini, who was stopped by the Corpo dei Carabinieri (CC), a branch of the Italian Army operating as a police force, on the 3rd of March 2014. The paper focusses on the way the police agents involved in the Magherini trial, both witnesses and defendants, made sense of the case. Their answers to the questions put to them by case lawyers or judges during the first trial in February 2016 will be closely examined.

Discussion of the case will rely on material drawn from court files. The Carabinieris internal reports on the incident and the court transcription of the agents questioning will form the basis for an ethnographic analysis of the case. The author will then use the case analysis as the starting point for a broader discussion on police culture. While ethnography generally consists of direct on-the-ground participant observation Geertz 1992, the author’s methodology of using legal transcripts and reports can nevertheless be considered ethnographical. .

Discussion will consider the importance of an ethical element to the internal culture of the Italian police forces which influences their street practice. Italian police have an ethical approach in that they believe their role is to be able separate good from bad and protect society from the bad. Moreover they have operated within a context of impunity which has produced over time a critical threshold according to which specific individuals and groups deemed as dangerous classes are considered outside the realm of normal civilised society and as such can be treated differently in contemporary Italy.

The originality of this paper relates to two distinct elements. The first one concerns the context analysed, as the peculiarities of the Italian police are hardly known to the larger international public. The second aspect relates to the specificity of a case. Magherini was not a marginal person, he was an Italian citizen, but he suffered from a brutality that caused his death. The dynamics of this outcome will be closely analysed.