Police Ethical Dilemma Analysis

Law enforcement officers tasked with regulating laws and maintaining peace in society often encounter many standards of trouble. Officers often have to put their life on the line to complete their duty of protecting society and maintaining law and order, they have to fight through aggressive criminals and crack down on fugitives. According to Bier (2014), The average police officer has to confront with the mentally ill, drunken civilians and criminal suspects on a daily basis, this is not only physically draining but also mentally draining from the constant psychological stress that accompanies the occupation. In addition to patrolling around, police officers around the country are constantly and willingly ready to put their

The first of the four categories, Loyalty, is the ethical dilemma officers face when seeing other fellow officers commit offences during their course of action. These types of action can be as minuscule as officers abusing sick leave, all the way to physical abuse and corruption. At the lower level, abusing sick leave typically occurs when officers want a certain amount of time off, these types of sick leave usually happen on workdays and especially on the days they get denied vacation. On sick leave police officers still get paid, when in reality the offending police officer is not actually ill. Other police officers in the workforce may know of this abusive method, however, they do not want to report these offences to the upper officers as they would then lose their friendship and loyalty to the police officer. The offending group would then exclude them socially and it could escalate to physical violence. On the lower level these type of offences do not seem like they affect society, however, the offending officers here are taking money from the government budget for task enforcement with no noticeable increase in the effectiveness of the police taskforce. On a higher level, physical abuse and corruption are also neglected by other police officers. When an offending police officer commits

Discretion is the power given to officers to be able to choose to arrest someone based on their circumstances and the offender 's intentions. In other words, law enforcers are able to use their own personal judgement to judge incidents, Without discretion officers would have to arrest all offenders of the law, however occasionally these offenders had no true intention of infringing the law and it was an honest mistake. With discretion officers are able to turn the other cheek at the infringement of the law, if they feel morally obligated to. There are cases where the offender and victim are not so clear cut, cases such as verbal abuse are hard to determine who the victim. In this case, officers are required to use their own judgement to determine who instigated the fight (Hirbyand n.d.). This becomes an ethical dilemma, as the outcome of justice relies heavily on the officer 's judgement. When an officer 's past experience and discretion come together, morality becomes an issue. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010), Black males aged between 18 to 20 are most likely to commit crimes, when an officer learns about these statistics, it may be applied with discretion. This is where morality becomes an issue as it is morally wrong to generalize a race, however since statistics have indicated that black males aged 18 to 20 are more likely to commit a crime,