Recent commissions of inquiry into police corruption, including the Mollen Commission into the New York Police Department and the Royal Commission into the New South Wales (NSW) Police Service have uncovered corruption of a profoundly disturbing kind. Police officers have been involved in perjury, fabricating evidence, protecting pederast rings, taking drug money and selling drugs. In South Africa, police have been involved in murder, armed robbery, rape, as well as theft, fraud, fabrication of evidence and the like. Indeed, recent statistics compiled by the South African Police Service (SAPS) indicate systemic corruption within the Service.

According to a Weekly Mail & Guardian report,¹ the SAPS has 1 500 police officers on its staff who were convicted of criminal offences in the preceding seventeen months, and South African police are three times more likely to commit a crime than the average South African civilian. There may well be features of the policing context in South Africa which can explain the very high levels of corruption in the country — including the legacy of policing apartheid, the nexus between corruption and injustice, and the destabilising side effects of the recent (and in themselves highly desirable) processes of political and social transformation. However, high levels of police corruption have been a persistent historical tendency in police services throughout the world. Corruption in policing is neither new nor especially surprising. There are a number of features of policing which combine to provide an explanation for the tendency toward police corruption. Police officers are exposed to an extraordinarily high level of temptation in areas such as the investigation of drug-trafficking and gambling. Police officers have very considerable powers, including the power to take a person’s liberty away from him or her, and it is well-known that power tends to corrupt. Police officers have high levels of discretionary authority which they often exercise in circumstances in which close supervision is not possible. They also have ongoing interaction with corrupt persons who have an interest in compromising and corrupting police.

However, there is a structural feature of policing which has not received the amount of attention it warrants, and which contributes to the moral vulnerability of police. This feature concerns the relationship between means and ends in policing. This article will discuss this feature, especially in relation to so-called noble cause corruption, and then consider measures to reduce corruption in policing.

In relation to policing, as with other relatively modern institutions — the media is another example — there is a lack of clarity about what its fundamental ends or goals precisely are. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that there can be no overarching philosophical theory or explanatory framework that spells out the fundamental nature and purpose of policing, and that this is because the activities that the police engage in are so diverse. Certainly, the police are involved in a wide variety of activities, including control of politically motivated riots, traffic control, dealing with cases of assault, investigating murders, intervening in domestic and neighbourhood quarrels, apprehending thieves, saving people’s lives, making drug-related arrests, shooting armed robbers, dealing with cases of fraud, and so on. Moreover, they have a number of different roles. They have a deterrence role as highly visible authority figures with the right to deploy coercive force. They also have a law enforcement role in relation to crimes that are already committed. This latter role involves not only the investigation of crimes in the service of truth, but also the duty to arrest offenders and bring them before the courts so that they can be tried and — if found guilty — punished. But, the police also have important preventive and social work roles. How, it is asked, could any defining features possibly be identified, given this diverse array of activities and roles?

These features can perhaps be identified by recourse to the notion of moral rights. Criminal law is in essence about ensuring the protection of basic moral rights, including the right to life, liberty, physical security and property. The moral rights enshrined in criminal law are those regarded as fundamental by the wider society. They constitute the basic moral norms of the society. Naturally, some of these are contentious, and as society undergoes change these moral norms change — for example, in relation to homosexuality — but there is reason to believe that there is a core which will never change or ought not to change, e.g. the right to life, freedom of thought and speech, and physical security.

The end or goal of policing is therefore a moral good — the protection of moral rights. However, there is an additional distinctive feature of policing: its inescapable use of what, under normal circumstances, would be regarded as morally unacceptable methods. The use of coercive force, including deadly force, is in itself a morally bad thing. It may be morally bad because it infringes a right, such as the right to autonomy, or the right not to be coerced; it may be a morally bad thing because the person who is coerced, is harmed; or it may be morally bad for both these reasons and/or for some other reason. The same point holds for some of the other methods used in policing, including deception, co-operating with informers who are criminals, and intrusive surveillance.

Unfortunately, these methods, which are considered to be immoral in normal circumstances, are on occasion necessary in order to realise the fundamental end of policing, namely the protection of moral rights. An armed bank robber might have to be threatened with the use of force if he has to give himself up; a drug dealer might have to be lied to if a drug ring is to be smashed; a blind eye might have to be turned to the minor illegal activity of an informant if the flow of important information provided by him in relation to serious crimes is to continue; a pederast might have to be surveilled if evidence for his conviction is to be secured.

The paradox whereby police necessarily use methods which are normally morally wrong to secure morally worthy ends sets up a dangerous moral dynamic. The danger is that the police will come to think that the ends always justify the means; to come to accept the inevitability and desirability of so-called ‘noble cause corruption’. From noble cause corruption, they can graduate to straightforward corruption, in normal circumstances; corruption motivated by greed and personal gain.

The notion of noble cause corruption receives classic expression in the Dirty Harry film.² Detective Harry Callaghan is trying to achieve a morally good end. He is trying to find a kidnapped girl whose life is in imminent danger. Under the circumstances, the only way in which he can determine where the girl is in order to save her, is by inflicting significant pain on the kidnapper who is otherwise refusing to reveal her whereabouts.

The image of Harry Callaghan inflicting non-lethal pain on a murderous psychopath is emotionally and, indeed, ethically compelling. However, the question that needs to be asked is whether fabricating evidence, beating up suspects, ‘verballing’ suspects and committing perjury to obtain convictions is in the same moral category as Harry’s action. The answer is in the negative.

For one thing, Harry Callaghan’s predicament is a romantic fiction, or at best a highly unusual combination of circumstances. Most instances of the police fabricating evidence, and even excessively using force, have not been used to save the life of someone in imminent danger, and nor have they been the only means available to secure a conviction. For another thing, the ongoing recourse to such methods not only violates the rights of suspects, it tends to have the effect of corrupting police officers. To this extent, the moral harm that results from such methods not only harms suspects; it can eventually destroy the moral character of those police officers deploying these methods.

The dangers attendant upon noble cause corruption demand that a principled account of the difference between justifiable use of normally immoral methods and noble cause corruption is provided.

Firstly, any use of normally immoral methods has to be provided with an adequate ethical basis. Consider coercive force: it is ethically justified in relation to the apprehension of offenders under certain conditions — if it is necessary, restricted to the minimum level required, and is not disproportionate to the offence that has been committed.

A further example will suffice. While intrusive surveillance is an infringement of privacy, it is at times necessary to realise the moral ends of policing. However, ethical principles preclude intrusive surveillance except in the case of serious crimes, where there is reasonable suspicion and a likelihood that the resulting information will substantially further the investigation.

Secondly, these ethical principles need to be clearly articulated and communally sanctioned. It is unacceptable for public officials, including the police, to conduct their professional activities in accordance with their own private ethical principles, or in accordance with ethical principles specific to some element of their profession. The need for a clear articulation and communal sanctioning of the ethical principles governing the use of harmful methods in policing is achieved by enshrining these ethical principles in the law. The law prohibits the police from using coercive force except to apprehend offenders, and only if other means are not available, the use of force is not disproportionate to the offence, and so on.

When police officers act in accordance with the legally enshrined ethical principles governing the use of harmful methods, they achieve three things at the same time. They do what is morally right; their actions are lawful; and they act in accordance with the will of the community.

While this account is so far correct, some important residual moral problems remain in relation to noble cause corruption. Specifically, the problem of noble cause corruption remains when moral considerations pull in two different directions, and especially when the law thwarts, rather than facilitates, morally desirable outcomes. Types of cases need to be distinguished in this regard.

Assume that a police officer breaks a morally unacceptable law, but acts in accordance with the law as it ought to be. For example, suppose a police officer refuses to arrest a black person who is infringing the infamous pass laws in apartheid South Africa. Such a police officer is not engaged in noble cause corruption; for breaking a morally unacceptable law is not engaging in corruption, and the officer is therefore not engaged in noble cause corruption.

A second kind of case involves a police officer breaking a law which, although not morally unacceptable, is nevertheless flawed in that it does not adequately reflect the ethical balance that needs to be struck between the rights of suspects and the rights of victims. For example, assume that a law only allows a suspect to be detained for questioning for a limited period of time, a period which is completely inadequate for certain kinds of criminal investigations. The law is not necessarily immoral, but it ought to be changed. A police officer who detains a suspect for slightly longer than this period, has technically breached the law; but the officer has not violated a suspect’s rights in any profound sense. Once again, the term corruption is too strong. This is not a case of noble cause corruption; although it is a case of unlawful, and perhaps unethical conduct.

A third case involves a police officer violating a suspect’s legally enshrined moral rights by, for example, fabricating evidence or committing perjury. The point about these kinds of cases is that the police officer has not only acted illegally, but also immorally. If a police officer engages in this kind of corrupt activity, and does so in order to achieve morally desirable outcomes, such as the conviction of known perpetrators of serious crimes, then the officer is engaged in noble cause corruption. This kind of case warrants further examination.

Noble cause corruption is obviously not morally justified if there is some lawful means to achieve the morally desirable outcome. But are there cases in which the only way to achieve a morally obligatory outcome is to act immorally? Genuinely morally problematic cases are hard to find, but they are not impossible to find. Consider the following scenario based on a real life situation. It was provided by Father Jim Boland, Senior Chaplain in the New South Wales Police Service and is provided with his permission.

Joe, a young officer, seeks advice from the police chaplain. Joe is working with an experienced detective, Mick. Mick is also Joe’s brother-in-law and looked up to by Joe as a good detective who gets results. Joe and Mick are working on a case involving a known drug dealer and paedophile. Joe describes his problem as follows:

"Father — he has got a mile of form, including getting kids hooked on drugs, physical and sexual assault on minors, and more. Anyway, surveillance informed Mick that the drug dealer had just made a buy. As me and Mick approached the drug dealer’s penthouse flat, we noticed a parcel come flying out the window of the flat onto the street. It was full of heroin. The drug dealer was in the house, but we found no drugs inside. Mick thought it would be more of a sure thing if we found the evidence in the flat rather than on the street — especially given the number of windows in the building. The defence would find it more difficult to deny possession. Last night Mick tells me that he was interviewed and signed a statement that we both found the parcel of heroin under the sink in the flat. He said all I had to do was to go along with the story in court and everything will be sweet, no worries. What should I do Father — perjury is a serious criminal offence."

In this scenario, there are two putative instances of noble cause corruption. The first one is Mick intentionally and unlawfully manipulating the evidence and committing perjury in order to secure a conviction. As it is described above, this instance of noble cause corruption is not morally sustainable. In the first place, it is by no means clear that these unlawful acts are necessary in order to convict the drug dealer. In the second place, achieving the good end of securing the conviction of the drug dealer is outweighed by the damage being done by undermining other important moral ends, namely, due process of law and respect for a suspect’s moral rights.³

Nor is there anything in the description of this example to suggest that it was a once-off unlawful act by Mick, and that he had a specific and overriding moral justification for committing it on this particular occasion. Indeed, the impression is that Mick loads up suspects and commits perjury as a matter of routine practice. Further, there is nothing in the description to suggest that police powers in this area — at least in Australia — are hopelessly inadequate; that police and others have failed in their endeavours to reform the law; and that police officers have therefore no option but to violate the due process of the law, if they are to uphold (so-called) substantive law.

The second possible example of noble cause corruption is more morally troublesome. This is Joe committing perjury in order to prevent a host of harms to Mick, Joe and their families. If Joe does not commit perjury, Mick will be convicted of a criminal act, and both the careers of Mick and Joe will be ruined. Moreover, the friendship between Mick and Joe will come to an end, and their respective families will suffer great unhappiness. The second example is a candidate for justified, or at least excusable, unlawful behaviour on the grounds of extenuating circumstances. It it is assumed that, were Joe to commit perjury, his action would be morally justified, or at least morally excusable, the question that has to be asked is whether it is an act of noble cause corruption.

Certainly, such an act of perjury is unlawful. But a number of different categories can be distinguished. Some acts are unlawful, but their commission does not harm any innocent person. Arguably, such unlawful acts are not necessarily immoral. The drug dealer will be harmed — he will go to prison — but he is not innocent. He is a known drug dealer and paedophile who deserves to go to prison.

But the fact that the drug dealer is guilty, does not settle the issue. Some acts are unlawful, but their commission does not infringe upon anyone’s moral rights. Joe’s act will certainly infringe upon the drug dealer’s moral rights, including the right to a fair trial based on admissible evidence. Moreover, perjury undermines a central plank of the law; without truthful testimony, the whole system of criminal justice would founder. It has to be concluded that it would be a serious moral wrong for Joe to commit perjury.

Unfortunately, as has already been shown, the moral costs of his not committing perjury are also very high; perhaps higher than those involved in perjury.

It can be concluded that Joe faces a genuine moral dilemma. Does it follow that this is an instance in which noble cause corruption is justified? It does not seem so, as Joe’s action is not a corrupt action, though it may well be an immoral one. The distinction between corruption and immorality is minute, but it needs to be made in this context.

Corruption is a species of immorality, and corrupt actions are species of immoral actions. But not all immorality is corruption, and not all immoral actions are corrupt actions. Minor misdemeanours might count as immoral without being acts of corruption. Negligent actions are sometimes immoral, but not necessarily corrupt. And some serious and intended wrongdoings do not constitute corruption. For example, if a man kills his wife’s lover out of hatred, his action is immoral, but not necessarily corrupt. Finally, harming oneself can be morally undesirable in some instances, e.g. undermining one’s autonomy and health by becoming a heroin addict; but such actions are not necessarily corrupt.

Corrupt actions have a number of properties that other immoral actions do not necessarily possess. Firstly, corrupt actions are not once-off actions. For an action to be properly labelled as corrupt, it has to be a manifestation of a disposition or habit on the part of the agent to commit such an action. Indeed, one of the reasons why noble cause corruption is so problematic in policing, is because it involves a disposition to commit a certain kind of action. Acts of noble cause corruption are not simply once-off actions; they are habitual. At any rate, Joe’s action fails this first test for being a corrupt action.

Secondly, corrupt actions — involving as they do a habit to act in a certain way — are not performed because of a specific non-recurring eventuality. They are rather performed because of an ongoing condition or recurring situation. In the case of noble cause corruption in policing, the ostensible ongoing condition is the belief that the law is hopelessly and irredeemably inadequate, not only because it fails to provide the police with sufficient powers that will result in offenders being apprehended and convicted, but also because it fails to provide sufficiently harsh punishments for offenders. Accordingly — so the argument runs — the police need to engage in noble cause corruption. That is, they need to develop a habit to bend and break the law in the service of the greater moral good of justice. Once again, Joe’s action fails the test for being a corrupt action. Although Joe is motivated to do wrong in order to achieve good, or at least to avoid evil, he is responding to a highly specific — indeed extraordinary — circumstance in which he finds himself, and one that will not necessarily be repeated.⁴ He has not developed a disposition or habit in response to a felt ongoing condition or recurring situation.

Thirdly, corrupt actions are typically motivated, at least in part, by individual or narrow collective self-interest. In the case of policing, the interest can be individual self-interest, such as personal financial gain or career advancement. Or it can be the narrow collective self-interest of the group, such as in the case of a clique of corrupt detectives. Since Joe’s action is not motivated by self-interest, it is presumably not a case of corruption. On the other hand, it might seem that so-called acts of noble cause corruption are likewise not motivated by self-interest (or narrow collective self-interest), and thus ought not to be labelled as acts of corruption. But this move is a little too quick.

It has already been pointed out that corrupt actions, including acts of noble cause corruption, are habitual actions; they are not once-off actions performed in accordance with moral principles that have been applied to a particular non-recurring situation. Thus, in the case of noble cause corruption — as distinct from once-off ‘immoral’ actions performed for good ends — the motivating force is partially that of habit, and there is no attempt to perform a rational calculation of the morality of means and ends on a case-by-case basis. Accordingly, there is an inherent possibility, and perhaps tendency, for acts of noble cause corruption not to be morally justified when individually considered. After all, the police officer who has performed an individual act of noble cause corruption has simply acted from habit, and has not taken the time to consider whether or not the means really do justify the ends in this particular case.

This article so far points to the morally problematic nature of doing wrong to achieve good as a matter of unthinking routine. But how does this show that noble cause corruption is motivated by self-interest (or narrow collective self-interest)? It does not. However, it provides some evidence for a weaker claim, namely, that acts of noble cause corruption are motivated, or at least in part sustained by a degree of moral negligence. The officer who performs acts of noble cause corruption does not feel the need to examine the rights and wrongs of his (allegedly) justified immoral actions on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, acts of noble cause corruption have not been communally sanctioned; they are actions only justified — if they are justified at all — by some set of moral principles adhered to by the individual police officer or group of officers. There is therefore a possibility of and perhaps tendency to moral arrogance and moral insularity inherent in noble cause corruption. This combination of moral negligence, moral arrogance and moral insularity, is both dangerous in its own right, and likely to be self-serving at least in part. In short, while acts of noble cause corruption are by definition not motivated by self-interest (or narrow collective self-interest), they are likely to be indirectly linked to, and in part sustained by self-interest (or narrow collective self-interest).

Indeed, this conceptual claim of an indirect connection between noble cause corruption and self-interest seems to be supported by empirical studies. It appears to be an empirical fact that police who start off engaging in noble cause corruption often end up engaging in common or ‘garden’ corruption.⁵ In the final section of this article, strategies for reducing corruption are considered.

The tendency to corruption in policing depends in part on the means/end dynamic discussed above, and the attendant problem of noble cause corruption, as well as a number of other factors mentioned earlier. In South Africa, it undoubtedly depends on particular features of the South African socio-economic and policing context. The general point that has to be made is that policing is a morally hazardous occupation. This being so, the tendency to corruption in the profession of policing perhaps ought to be regarded as a basic occupational hazard and treated accordingly. The ongoing threat of being killed is an occupational hazard for soldiers. Soldiers therefore undergo elaborate training and testing in order to ensure that this threat to their lives is kept to a minimum.

There are four basic areas which can be looked at in relation to reducing corruption in policing: recruitment, reducing opportunities for corruption, detection and deterrence of corruption, and reinforcing the motivation to do what is right.

If there is a tendency to corruption in policing, it is crucial that those who are recruited, have the highest moral character in terms of issues that have a bearing upon their task. In addition to virtues such as courage, loyalty, suspiciousness and physical prowess, they will have to have a high level of resistance to temptations to use their position for financial gain, abuse their various powers, including their coercive powers, and allow their sense of loyalty to fellow officers to override their moral duty to expose corruption in their ranks. If there is a good chance that even those of good character can be corrupted, there is obviously no chance of those of bad character being reformed by undertaking police work. It is also important to recruit those who are capable of becoming competent. For the incompetent will find it difficult to identify strongly with the ends of the profession, and they can easily become disaffected and cynical. They are therefore susceptible to corruption. Consider in this regard problems arising from the recruitment of kitskonstabels in South Africa in the 1980s.

While it is important to reduce the opportunities for corruption — for example, through regular rotation of personnel in high-risk areas — the very nature of police work militates against a massive reduction in the opportunities for corruption. Probably the greatest reduction in the opportunities for police corruption have occurred as a result of legislation, and policies and strategies directed at offences and offenders. For example, decriminalisation, including the decriminalisation of abortion and homosexuality, had the effect of reducing the opportunities for police corruption. Currently, the intractability of the drug problem is providing extraordinary ongoing opportunities for corruption in many countries. Police corruption may therefore well remain at high levels as long as the drug problem remains unresolved — and the drug problem cannot be solved only through recourse to law enforcement strategies. In South Africa, and in many other countries, the general levels of corruption in the core economic and other institutions are high. The opportunities for police corruption are correspondingly high. Accordingly, efforts to reduce opportunities for police corruption need to go hand in hand with strategies and policies to reduce corruption in the society’s core economic and other institutions.

The third area is detection and deterrence of police corruption. Detection and deterrence of police corruption are achieved in large part by institutional mechanisms of accountability, both internal and external, and by policing techniques such as complaints investigation, use of informants, auditing, surveillance and testing. The tendency to corruption in police work described above can be used to justify an extensive system of accountability mechanisms — a system more extensive than may be necessary in other professions — and also used to justify the deployment of techniques of detection and deterrence that might not be acceptable in some other professions.

In most police services, there are an array of accountability mechanisms, including internal accountability on the part of individual members of the police service to their superiors and departments of internal affairs. There are also typically mechanisms to ensure the external accountability of a police service to the government and the community.

These internal accountability mechanisms are sometimes less successful than they might be, due in part to the tendency of such mechanisms to embody and reinforce the ‘us-them’ mentality that often exists between lower echelon police officers and the police hierarchy on the one hand, and between police officers and departments of internal affairs on the other. Part of the solution to this problem may lie in the introduction of mechanisms of peer accountability to supplement existing mechanisms. Accountability mechanisms with membership that includes lower echelon police officers may be more successful because peers may have a more precise knowledge of what is actually going on at street level in a particular place at a particular time, but, more generally, because such mechanisms may be more acceptable to lower echelon officers due to the fact that they are ‘owned’ by them.

Mechanisms of accountability ought to include joint police/community institutional structures. Such structures allow communities to air problems and to hold the police to account — for example, via ministers of police — in relation to the police’s responsiveness to these problems. It is a platitude that police/ community co-operation is necessary for successful policing. An ambivalent community will shield law breakers, contribute to an ‘us-them’ mentality, and lead to a secretive police force in which police corruption is more likely to flourish. Given the history of community/police relations in South Africa under apartheid, it is obvious that the development of a relationship of trust between communities and the police must be both a general priority, and a particular priority for a campaign to reduce police corruption.

Techniques of detection and deterrence that may be appropriate for a profession with a constitutive tendency for corruption, include not only routine procedures such as complaints investigation, but also techniques such as granting indemnity to corrupt officers in order to get them to implicate others, and elaborate testing for corruption. If corruption is an occupational hazard in policing, extraordinary methods may have to be used to combat it. Some of these methods raise important ethical and other problems. For example, it is not unknown for criminals who have been granted indemnity to provide evidence which turns out to be false.

It is indisputable that police officers need to have a great capacity to resist temptations, and it is reasonable to subject this capacity to ongoing testing. Some have suggested that such testing should include entrapment. Entrapment raises a host of ethical issues which cannot be discussed in detail here. The following tentative and preliminary observations are rather made. Targeted testing through entrapment may be morally justifiable if the following conditions prevail: investigators can provide adequate evidence to warrant their suspicion; tests involve the kind of situation that the evidence has indicated, is the kind in which the suspect is engaging in a corrupt practice; and the inducement is of a kind which the suspect could reasonably be expected to resist.

The final area that can be looked at in relation to reducing corruption is that of the motivation to do what is morally right. It is not enough to reduce opportunities for corruption, and to introduce an elaborate system of detection and deterrence.

For one thing, systems of detection and deterrence have significant costs, not only in terms of resources, but also in terms of the institutional independence of the police service, and the proper exercise by individual police officers of their discretionary powers. In a context of over-regulation and excessive preoccupation with detection and deterrence of police corruption, police officers tend to be ruled by fear and develop a ‘by the book’ mentality.

Most importantly, the reliance on detection and deterrence alone bypasses the issue of moral responsibility which lies at the heart of corruption. In the last analysis, the only force strong enough to resist corruption is the moral sense — the desire to do what is right and avoid doing what is wrong. If most police officers, including members of departments of internal affairs and of the police hierarchy — the ones who investigate corruption — do not have a desire to avoid doing what is illegal or otherwise immoral, no system of detection and deterrence no matter how extensive and elaborate, can possibly suffice to control corruption.

The desire among police officers to do what is right can be reinforced by ensuring a just system of rewards and penalties within the police organisation. Unjust systems of promotion, unreasonably harsh disciplinary procedures for minor errors, unfair workloads, and so on, are all deeply corrosive of the desire to do one’s job well and to resist inducements to do what is illegal or otherwise immoral. It is of particular importance that police organisations seeking to combat corruption develop a judicious mix of punitive, even ruthless, measures in relation to the genuinely corrupt, with a forgiving and formative culture in relation to those who make honest mistakes or are otherwise retrievable. Only by developing such a mix will the honest and decent majority of police officers be won over; the majority who must be relied upon to combat, contain and reduce police corruption.

The desire to do what is right can further be reinforced by ensuring an appropriate system of command and control; appropriate, that is, to the kinds of responsibilities attached to the role of police officer. It may be that very hierarchical, militaristic or bureaucratic systems of command and control are inappropriate in most areas of modern policing, given the nature of the role of police officer. Police officers have considerable powers — including the power to take away people’s liberty — and they exercise these powers in situations of moral complexity. It is inconsistent to give someone a position of substantial responsibility, involving a high level of discretionary ethical judgment, and then expect them mechanically and unthinkingly to do what they are told.

The desire to do what is right does not exist independently of the habit of reflection and judgment on particular pressing ethical issues. Accordingly, the desire to do what is right can be reinforced by ensuring that ethical issues in police work, including the ethical ends of policing itself, are matters of ongoing discussion and reflection in initial training programmes, further education programmes, supervision, ethics committees and in relation to ethical codes. The problem of noble cause corruption in policing illustrates the importance of ethical reflection in policing. The ethically problematic nature of noble cause corruption is not adequately understood in policing circles or in the wider community. The general view is that corruption is corruption is corruption; there are no degrees, and no distinctions. But this is simply a mistake and one that can have significant costs. If the distinctive phenomenon of noble cause corruption in policing is not properly understood, efforts to combat police corruption in general are unlikely to be successful.

Finally, the desire to do what is right can be reinforced by utilising the intrinsically collective nature of policing and, in particular, by stressing that police officers are collectively responsible for controlling corruption. It is a mistake to simply undermine police solidarity and loyalty, leaving only isolated individuals who are responsible only for their own actions and who do what is right only because they fear to do what is wrong. It is equally a mistake to rely completely on individual heroism.

It is obvious that police officers are collectively responsible for ensuring that the moral ends of policing are realised. Law enforcement and the maintenance of order, among others, cannot possibly be achieved by individual police officers acting on their own. Policing is a co-operative enterprise. Police corruption, however , undermines the proper ends of policing. Police corruption depends in part on the complicity or tacit consent of fellow officers; controlling police corruption is therefore a collective responsibility. It follows that loyalty to corrupt officers is not only misplaced, it is an abrogation of duty. Collective responsibility entails selective loyalty — loyalty to police officers who do what is right, but not to those who do what is wrong. The loyalty of police officers is only warranted by those who embody the ideals of policing and, in particular, by those who are not corrupt. Indeed, collective responsibility also entails such actions as whistleblowing, and support for, rather than opposition to well-intentioned whistleblowers.

Seumas Miller is Professor of Social Philosophy, Head of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, Charles Sturt University. He is also Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues, University of Melbourne.

Weekly Mail & Guardian, 27 November 1998.



See C B Klockars, The Dirty Harry problem, in A S Blumberg & E Niederhoffer (eds.), The ambivalent force: Perspectives on the police, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1976.



H Cohen, Overstepping police authority, Criminal Justice Ethics, Summer/Fall 1987, p. 57.



See E Delattre, Character and cops, AEI Press, Washington, DC, 1994, chapter 11 for a discussion of such extraordinary situations, and the need — as he sees it — for consultation with senior experienced police officers.



See Justice J Wood, Final Report: Royal Commission into Corruption in the New South Wales Police Service, NSW Government, Sydney, 1998.



Much of this section is taken from S Miller, J Blackler & A Alexandra, Police ethics, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1997, chapter 7.