Response to Davis and Claxton: Teaching Police Ethics as Professional Ethics (From Teaching Criminal Justice Ethics: Strategic Issues, P 79-85, 1996, John Kleinig and Margaret Leland Smith, eds.)

• NCJ Number: 170177
• Author(s): D E Roberts
• Date Published: 1996
• Length: 7 pages
• Sale Source: Anderson Publishing Co
• Publication Type: Conference Material
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Paper presented at a workshop on criminal justice ethics education held June 6-8, 1996, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Annotation

In responding to the essays of Michael Davis and Charles Claxton on objectives in teaching and learning police ethics (NCJ-170175 and NCJ 170176), this paper emphasizes the need to address a problem that is hinted at by the "informal codes" that characterize some police behavior, codes that apparently stand in tension with their formal codes and ordinary morality.

Abstract

Does police ethics allow exceptions to ordinary morality, as these informal codes seem to suggest, rather than just the addition to which Davis draws attention? In this response, the author links this question to a larger debate in professional ethics about role morality and, implicitly, the problem of "dirty hands." This response also notes a shortfall in Claxton's discussion, seeing in his view of education as a creative, self- transformational process the beginnings of a more radical transformation. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, the author notes the "liberating" possibilities of an education that elicits students' construction of knowledge and draws on their own experience. Minority students involved in an analysis of criminal justice concerns could result in a constructive critique of the status quo. 22 notes