Rule bending by morally disengaged detectives: an ethnographic study

Abstract

Rule bending is a well-known practice in policing worldwide, often linked to ‘noble cause corruption’. This ethnographic study shows how police detectives sometimes consider to creatively bend rules when rule abidance would lead to other values being jeopardized. This paper illustrates that the theory of role strain and moral disengagement could deepen our understanding of underlying mechanisms that explain rule bending practices. The mechanism of ‘insulation from observability’ in role strain theory and the mechanisms of ‘moral justification’ and ‘displacement of responsibility’ in moral disengagement seem to be applied often. However, these findings need further testing in future research.

Keywords:

• police
• rule bending
• moral disengagement
• role strain theory
• ethnography
• ethical decision-making

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO Vlaanderen).

Notes

1. The findings in this paper result from a doctoral study on ethical decision-making in the police and the labor inspection that has been completed in May 2012.

2. A classic example is Milgram’s experiment in 1974 where a certain person in charge got people to escalate their level of aggression (i.e. electroshocks) towards harmless victims by commanding them to do so and explicitely telling them that he would take full responsibility for the consequences of their behavior (i.e. ‘displacement of responsibility’ mechanism).

3. The first investigation team consisted of approximately 11 detectives, the second of approximately 16 detectives.

4. The findings that are presented in this paper result from a comparative study on ethical decision making among police officers and labor inspectors. To maximize comparability of the moral dilemmas both professional groups face, the researcher decided to select police officers who are responsible for law enforcement concerning issues that labor inspectors are involved in, such as illegal employment and economic exploitation.

5. The author will use ‘first police agency’ and ‘other police agency’ in an arbitrary way so it is not clear which dilemmas are mentioned in which police agency.

6. As will become clear in the ‘results’ section, the types of rule bending in these five areas are quite diverse. This variety can mainly be explained by the fact that the researcher did not select the rule bending types beforehand, but inductively derived them from the data. Some types of rule bending in this study are violations of the law, while others are not illegal and even accepted by most practitioners. Arguably, all of them are forms of rule bending in which important values, such as equal treatment or following hierarchical orders, are neglected.

7. Most police investigations start as a ‘criminal investigation’ in which the Public Prosecutor is in charge, but when special measures are necessary (e.g. telephone tap, arrest, and house search warrant), the investigation is transferred to the examining magistrate. The ‘criminal investigation’ then becomes a ‘judicial investigation’.

8. This rule aims to protect informants against overzealous detectives who could jeopardize their informants’ safety by their strive to ‘score’.

9. To protect the respondents in this study, no details are given concerning this offense.