Dr. Stephen J. Vicchio, a professor of philosophy at the College
of Notre Dame in Baltimore, Maryland, and nationally renowned
ethicist, delivered this keynote address at the National Symposium
on Police Integrity co-sponsored by the National Institute of
Justice and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
We should therefore examine whether
we should act in this way or not, as
not only now, but at all times.
-Plato
If he really does not think there is no
distinction between virtue and vice,
why sir, when he leaves the house,
let us count the spoons.
-Samuel Johnson, Letters
There is an old saying that "philosophers bake no bread." What I suppose this expression means is that philosophers spend a good deal of time minding other people's business while not spending nearly enough on their own. Working entirely in this spirit, the spirit of an interloper, I wish to talk about three issues-issues vital, ultimately, to the success of police organizations throughout the country. First, I wish to sketch out in a brief way what I see as the component parts of the concept of integrity. Second, I would like to spend a little time exploring what the latest social scientific research and common sense have to say about whether integrity can be taught. And, finally, I will end with some observations on the question of whether integrity can be measured in professional contexts such as police work. I will also make some general recommendations about additional questions and approaches that might be helpful in discussing the issue of police integrity. I will begin, however, with a short take from Plato's Republic. In Book II of the Republic, Socrates discusses with his friend Glaucon what it means to act in a morally responsible way. Glaucon puts forth a theory that is not all that far from a general view of the issue that many hold in this country. In essence, Glaucon says that we do good because we risk punishment if we do wrong. Thus, we accept certain limitations on our freedom because we are afraid of being caught. So justice, in Glaucon's view, is a kind of arrangement (like traffic lights or stop signs) that is not intrinsically good or valuable but put into place to avoid harm. In the course of their discussion, Glaucon and Socrates allude to an old Greek story, "The Ring of Gyges." The wearer of the ring was rendered invisible, though he or she could still affect the material world as visible bodies do. In the course of the tale, the shepherd Gyges is given the ring, and he uses it without fear of reprisal. Indeed, he uses it to kill the king of Lydia and later to rape the queen.
Glaucon argues that anyone in the shepherd's position would be foolish not to take full advantage of the power of the ring. In essence, it gives the wearer the ability to do wrong with impunity. Glaucon then goes on to suggest that justice is nothing more than a series of checks, a system of preventive devices. But if we possessed the ring of Gyges, there would be no good reason for doing the good. In the remainder of the Republic, Socrates attempts to counter Glaucon's view by suggesting that the citizens of a good society would act justly because they knew and appreciated the moral good and not merely because they were afraid of getting caught.
There are several reasons why I begin with Plato's story. It is best, I think, to look at "The Ring of Gyges" as a cautionary tale, for it seems to me, for better or worse, the police officers in this country, at least when they are working on the street, often are possessors of the ring of Gyges. No supervision of police officers working with the public, no matter how thorough and conscientious, can keep bad cops from doing bad things. There simply are too many police officers and too few supervisors. Like it or not, the police in this country are possessors of the ring of Gyges.
A second realization to be made from Plato's tale is that police departments in this country often operate as if Glaucon's view of justice is the proper one-that we do the good out of fear, a level that developmental psychologists tell us is the lowest common denominator in the moral equation. If we put these two points together, that there will never be enough supervision to catch everyone and that good behavior on the job is motivated by fear, we should see that they are contradictory. If there is not enough supervision, then the bad cop will not be afraid. If we add a third element, that the bad cop always makes the news, then we have a recipe for disaster.
Public Trust in the Police
One of the major repercussions of the confluence of these three elements, 1) Glaucon's view of virtue, 2) there will never be enough supervisors to catch everyone, and 3) the bad cop always makes the news, is that we see over the past two decades in America an erosion of public confidence in public officials and their institutions. Consider, for example, the following tables of Americans' ratings of their confidence in various professionals. In this study, 100 Americans were asked to rank the moral confidence/trust they have in the following professionals to do the right thing. Position 1 is the most trusted, and position 12 is the least trusted of those professions listed.
Trust in police officers recorded the largest drop from 1980 to 1995 (5 spaces), followed by the clergy (3), doctors (1), and lawyers (1), though lawyers simply moved from 10th position to 11th.
Another disturbing element to these findings is that although there was no significant difference between men and women respondents, there was a very big difference between African American and white respondents. Among blacks, "police officer" held the 9th position in 1980 and the 11th position in 1995, just ahead of "politician."
One major conclusion we can make from this and similar studies from around the country is that the public thinks police departments have an integrity problem, even if the police themselves do not.
What complicates this issue still further is that in departments where corruption appears to be low and where citizen complaints are minimal, we assume that our officers on the job are people of integrity. Sometimes this is a faulty assumption, particularly if the motivation to do the right thing comes from fear of punishment. Often in professional contexts in this country we think of integrity as our ability to refrain from certain activities. But, clearly, if the concept is to mean something more than what Glaucon suggests, it must involve higher levels of thinking and feeling on the part of police officers.
If we believe that community policing is the most effective way to protect and to serve the public and then we put officers who operate from the fear of punishment in more direct contact with the community, then the community will not find officers of integrity but, rather, people who know the rules and regulations and keep them simply because they are afraid of getting caught. If this conference has some major goals, they should include these: How do we define integrity? How do we identify it in police officers? How do we make sure that the police officers we involve in community policing efforts are people of character and integrity? If we do not answer these core questions, then a conference like this is useless, and indeed perhaps worse than useless, because we have pretended to get something done. Pretending to get something done in any profession is always dangerous. Let us then try to make some headway in our first question: What do we mean by the concept of integrity?
The Concept of Integrity
The first thing to say about the concept of integrity is that we often use organic or spatial metaphors to explain it. This hints at the etymological origins of the word integritas, "whole or complete." But when we go beyond the metaphors, it is not so easy to articulate what we mean when we say that a person possesses integrity.
In a helpful book called Splitting the Difference: Compromise and Integrity in Ethics and Politics, Martin Benjamin identifies five psychological types lacking in integrity. The first he calls the moral chameleon. Benjamin describes the type this way:
Anxious to accommodate others and temperamentally indisposed to moral controversy and disagreement, the moral chameleon is quick to modify or abandon previously avowed principles.... Apart from a commitment to accommodation, the moral chameleon has little in the way of core values.... The moral chameleon bears careful watching. If placed in a situation where retaining her principles requires resisting social pressure, she is likely to betray others as she betrays herself.
Benjamin's second type, the moral opportunist, is similar to the moral chameleon in that his values are ever-changing. But where the moral chameleon tries to avoid conflict, the moral opportunist places primary value on his own short-term self-interest. While the moral chameleon's motto might be "above all, get along," the moral opportunist's is "above all, get ahead."
The moral hypocrite is a third type lacking in integrity. "The hypocrite," writes Gabriele Taylor, "pretends to live by certain standards when, in fact, he does not." The hypocrite has one set of virtues for public consumption and another set for actual use as a moral code. Individuals comprising Benjamin's fourth type, the morally weak-willed, have a reasonably coherent set of core virtues, but they usually lack the courage to act on them. They are unlike the moral chameleon in that they know what the good is, they simply lack the courage to do it. Benjamin's final type, the moral self-deceivers, have at their core a basic contradiction. They think of themselves as acting on a set of core principles, while, in fact, they do not. To resolve this conflict, and at the same time to preserve their idealized view of themselves, they deceive themselves about what they are doing.
By looking at these five types, we immediately see what integrity does not look like. But if we look a little closer, we also may get some hints about a proper understanding of the concept. First, a person of integrity has a reasonably coherent and relatively stable set of core moral virtues. And second, the person's acts and speech tend to reflect those principles. Individual integrity, then, requires that one's words and actions should be of one piece, and they should reflect a set of core virtues to which one is freely and genuinely committed.
But what should these virtues be? The answer to that question may differ in different professional contexts, but integrity in the context of police work should amount to the sum of the virtues required to bring about the general goals of protection and service to the public. In short, professional virtue should always bring about the moral goals of the professional organization in question. A list of the virtues of a good police officer, then, ought to tell us something important about why police departments exist. Professional integrity, then, in any professional context, is the integrated collection of virtues that brings about the goals of the profession. Presumably, in police organizations those major goals are connected to protection of and service to the public.
Core Virtues
Lists of professional virtues can be difficult, if not foolish, to compose, particularly if someone outside the profession is doing the compiling. But an appreciation of core values is integral to the health and well-being of any profession. The following list is, of course, by no means complete. Rather, I consider it to be essential to the purposes of police organizations. These virtues, in other words, must be required of police officers if the goals of the organization are to be met. These virtues are not listed here in any particular order.
At a minimum, then, these seven virtues are required for integrity because they are required as the general goals of police organizations. There are probably other virtues I have missed, but most others will be variants of these seven. In short, a police officer who exhibits integrity is a person who has successfully integrated these seven virtues so that they become a whole greater than the parts. The police officer of integrity habitually will exhibit traits of character that make clear the goals of protection and service.
In the Johns Hopkins Police Executive Leadership Program, we are planning a study that will attempt to identify exemplary police officers. We hope to determine whether the virtues we have listed above, as well as some others, are consistently found among the best of our police officers. Additionally, we hope to analyze the relationship of these virtues to performance evaluations, commendations, citizen complaints, and other variables and also to ask them for practical advice about how and why they have remained good police officers.
Can Integrity Be Taught?
Needless to say, whether integrity can be taught is a second important question that should be at the top of our research agenda. If one looks at what evidence is now available from social scientific literature, the answer to this question seems to be "yes" and "no." Since most researchers agree that the practice of virtue-the component parts of integrity-is a habitual activity, it must be learned and reinforced. Other evidence suggests that the most effective time to teach virtue is early on, so the "yes" part of the answer is that children in stable, loving homes who regularly have the requisite virtues modeled for them are the most successful people at developing a track record for integrity.
The "no" part of the answer comes with the realization that most evidence about problems with integrity suggest that they, too, are habitual problems. By and large, people who habitually have trouble in school with behavioral problems become adults who have the same problems. This is not to say that people's behaviors cannot change. But change always comes when the person has a clear goal and incentive for changing. The fear of punishment has rarely been enough to change habitually undesirable behavior.
These findings should have some important ramifications for the way we go about recruiting and testing police officers. Testing instruments need to be better than they are now. Longitudinal studies need to be completed that show us how well we have done in the past and the present in recruiting people who will grow to be police officers of integrity. This is one of the goals of the John Hopkins study.
One other area of inquiry worth pursuing is to track the relationship of the kind and extent of ethics training in police academies to the performance of those recruits as police officers. My initial sense is that the more extensive the training, the clearer the effect will be, though the social scientific evidence on the relationship of academic ethics training and moral behavior, at least at this point, is ambiguous. One element about academy ethics training is clear: if it is to be effective, it needs to be rigorous and it needs to emphasize critical thinking skills, reasoning skills, reasoning ability, and problem-solving techniques. In short, ethics training needs to be the right blend of the theoretical and the practical.
Can Integrity Be Measured?
In the general area of professional activity, we do not know if integrity can be adequately measured. If we attempt to measure police integrity the way state medical organizations measure the integrity of physicians or the way state judicial review boards measure the integrity of lawyers, we will not be successful. Historically, these organizations try to determine what their members have been successful in avoiding. Integrity in these contexts is seen as not leaving a sponge in a patient's abdominal cavity or not having conflicts of interest. In short, these governing bodies look to see if the doctor or lawyer has followed the rules and regulations and has avoided doing wrong. But avoiding wrong behavior is not the same as having integrity, any more than simply avoiding bad notes will get a singer to Carnegie Hall.
If we are to be successful in measuring police integrity, we must find measuring tools that not only enable us to determine that police officers effectively avoid certain behaviors, but that they also regularly practice prudence, courage, justice, honesty, trust, self-effacement, and responsibility. One way to begin this task is first to refine the definition and identification of the virtues that go into producing a police officer of integrity. If we have missed the boat in identifying what we see as the core virtues, we will know soon enough.
A second item that must be put on our list of things to do is the development of an agenda-a national mission statement, if you will-that says in a broad way what the moral purposes are of police organizations. All definitions of virtue and integrity, Aristotle forcefully argues, only make sense in the context of what he calls telos, the larger reason or purpose in which those virtues are placed. What we want a department to be ultimately should tell us a great deal about what we want our officers to do.
If we are going to think of policing as a profession, then we must assume the level of responsibility that a professional life entails. The profession should require more from its members than we expect from the general population.
Sidebar 1980 1. pharmacist 2. clergy 3. firefighter 4. teacher 5. police officer 6. doctor 7. dentist 8. accountant 9. stock broker 10. lawyer 11. funeral director 12. politician 1995 1. firefighter 2. pharmacist 3. teacher 4. dentist 5. clergy 6. stock broker 7. doctor 8. accountant 9. funeral director 10. police officer 11. lawyer 12. politician