Powerful Athority
When it comes to authority figures such as police officers, security officers or department of conservation officers you should be able to feel comforted that these people have these jobs to serve us. If you ever feel threatened or uncomfortable when approached by one of these officers it should because you know you did something wrong and are an actual criminal, but if you have done nothing wrong this shouldn’t happen. When you have any uneasy feelings with authority figures something isn’t right. One of the major issues that is becoming more and more common is when these types of officials abuse their power that we gave to them to protect us. Unethical work and corruption among our protect and serve departments is a growing problem and needs to start to change for the better. There have been research studies on ethical and unethical behavior of police officers. Polls show that only 56% of people think officers have a high ethical behavior or above. That’s just a little more than half and it should be a lot much closer to 100%. When a department looks for a new officer they look mainly at their ethics and have been avoiding people with low ethical standards. When looking at ethics the main word that can describe it is integrity. When an officer is doing his job mainly he is by himself and isn’t really with anyone else, unless with a partner, and it’s his job to be professional and know what he is doing without having to be supervised. An officer shouldn’t be intimidating or threaten whatsoever. An officer shouldn’t

even take gifts for doing his job that in itself is considered wrong. Officers should be responsible in the fact that they can admit when they screwed up or did something wrong rather than finding some excuse for their poor judgment or mistake. Police though have trouble with ethics due to many reasons. One of them is performance based. An officer is looked at on how active they are, and when I say active I mean how many arrests, citations, or summonses have they given out. The reason this is looked at is because of promotion. If and officer has low numbers it will seem to administration that they aren’t doing much out in the field and will not promoted them, so officers find ways to do this which is putting them in a position of either miss use their power or do the right thing by doing their job right but look lazy. What kind of a system is that where officers have to make that kind of decision when all they should have to worry about is serving and protecting. Another attribute to unethical behavior of an officer is a police subculture. A subculture is a set of beliefs, views, or ideas that a group of people have. When a whole department has the same set of views it can be rough ”because police work entails so many experiences unique to the field, the subculture almost can become stronger than the officer's family ties”( Martin, R). When you have a department that has such strong bonds and all feel the same way about certain things it’s hard to change things. These bonds create a strong loyalty among all the group members. When questioning new recruits in a department a majority of them would admit when seeing something illegal happening then others that would just turn the other cheek. The main point here is the more time spent working with the same group the

stronger the bonds and chance of these people turning each other in for doing something illegal or corrupt is a problem. If you have a group that is willing to lie for each other then they are probably more than likely to commit crimes for each other by the miss use of their powers. Don’t get me wrong there are good officers out there. I come from a small town area and I have been given a couple breaks when it comes to the lawn. The police know who everyone is in the town and when they talk to you they already know your first name. It’s completely different for the police in the bigger