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Police Ethics and Integrity

Conference Paper · June 2000
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3973.9367

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CITATIONS RE
POLICE ETHICS AND INTEGRITY
Milan Pagon
Professor and Dean
College of Police and Security Studies
University of Maribor, Slovenia

ABSTRACT
The paper deals with the importance of police ethics and integrity in contemporary
policing. It first describes the field of applied ethics in general. It explains the basis
for the structure of professional moral obligations, briefly depicts the core imperatives
of applied ethics and describes the process of moral reasoning. It then defines police
ethics, discusses the reasons for its relative underdevelopment, and delineates its
future development in three interrelated directions: (a) applying the principles of
applied ethics to police profession; (b) establishing standards of ethical conduct in
policing; and (c) defining the means and content of education and training in police
ethics. Next, it discusses the organizational environment that is conducive to police
ethics and elaborates on the concept of integrity. The paper concludes that police
ethics and integrity are of critical importance in the professionalization of policing and
the best antidotes to police corruption, brutality, neglect of human rights, and other
forms of police deviance.

Attribution:
Pagon, M. (2000). Police ethics and integrity. In: M. Pagon, (Ed.) Policing in
Central and Eastern Europe: Ethics, Integrity and Human Rights. Ljubljana,
Slovenia: College of Police and Security Studies, pp. 3-14.

INTRODUCTION

For all of us in the field of police and security studies, it has become obvious that we
are witnessing a paradigm shift. While we cannot expect this shift to result in a
uniform approach to policing everywhere in the world, we can assume that all the
various approaches will be based on the same set of assumptions of modern policing,
namely the community involvement, a proactive approach that emphasizes
prevention, professionalism, innovation, and problem-solving, and an integrated view
of criminal justice (Pagon, 1998).

In this process, policing is getting closer to professionalization, a change long

advocated by police scholars. As several authors (e.g., Hahn, 1998; Vicchio, 1997;
Murphy, 1996; Fry & Berkes, 1983) point out, aspirations by the police to become
professionalized either create or at least re-emphasize several requirements, such as
wide latitude of discretion, higher educational requirements, higher standards of
professional conduct, and self-regulation.

At the same time, however, we have witnessed countless accounts of police brutality
and abuse of authority, some of them making the headlines, and others taking place
outside the public eye. In some countries, police corruption has already reached
epidemic proportions. It is obvious that corruption, brutality, and other forms of
police deviance go against the above-mentioned efforts for police professionalization
and community involvement. The community cannot trust nor attribute a
professional status to deviant police officers. No wonder then, that modern police
organizations all over the world are fighting police deviance, trying to achieve proper
conduct of their members. However, according to Sykes (1993), a brief history of these
efforts to enhance police accountability reveals that they relied on rules and
punishment. “Although each of these reform efforts had an impact, the sum total fell
short of providing assurances that they were adequate and serious incidents
continued… In short, the various rulebased systems of accountability seem
insufficient if officers hold different values or there is a subculture which nurture
values different from the ideals of democratic policing” (p.2). The author believes the
answer lies in approaches based on ethics, where accountability rests more on
individual responsibility than it does on external controls and threatened
punishment.

It has become obvious that only the properly educated and trained police officers are
able to respond adequately to moral and ethical dilemmas of their profession. Only a
police officer who is able to solve these dilemmas appropriately can perform his duties
professionally and to the benefit of the community. In doing so, he cannot rely solely
on his intuition and experience. Not only he has to be well acquainted with the
principles of police ethics and trained in moral reasoning and ethical decision-
making, he also needs clear standards of ethical conduct in his profession.

In this article, I will try to show that a proper development of police ethics and
integrity is one of the most important steps toward professionalization of policing, and
one of the most powerful antidotes to police deviance and neglect of human rights by
the police. To introduce the field of police ethics, however, I first have to describe the
field of applied ethics in general.

APPLIED ETHICS

Police ethics is a branch of applied normative, ethics. The most well-known branches
of applied ethics are medical and business ethics. The link between ‘theory’ and
‘practice’ is what makes applied ethics different from philosophical ethics. Applied
ethics is the field that holds ethical theory accountable to practice and professional
practice accountable to theory. Therefore, the philosophers should not dictate to
professionals the norms that are supposed to govern their professional practice,
without a very thorough knowledge of that practice. On the other hand, the
professionals have to understand that their experience and intuition are insufficient
for defensible judgment, and that all their constraints do not exempt their decisions
from ethical scrutiny (Newton, Internet).

Newton (Internet) believes that if ethics is about human beings, we should be able to
determine the structure of our moral obligations from three basic, simple, readily
observable facts about human beings:

- People are embodied. They exist in time and space and are subject to physical
laws. They have needs that must be satisfied if they are to survive. They must
control the physical environment to satisfy those needs. Failure to do so leads to
pain and suffering. The implication for ethics is that the relief of that suffering and
the satisfaction of those needs should be out first concern, giving rise to duties of
compassion, non-maleficence, and beneficence.
- People are social. Whatever problems they have with their physical environment,
they have to solve them in groups, which creates a new set of problems. They
must cope with a social environment as well as the physical one. The social
environment produces two further needs: for a social structure to coordinate
social efforts, and for means of communication. The implication for ethics is that
we must take account of each other in all our actions. We have obligations to the
group in general and to other members of the group of particular.
- People are rational. People are able to consider abstract concepts, use language,
and think in terms of categories, classes and rules. Because people are rational,
they can make rational choices, they are autonomous moral agents. They can also
realize that they could have done it differently, so they can feel guilty and remorse
and assume responsibility for their choices. Rationality’s implication for ethics is
that we have a duty to respect this freedom of choice.

From these facts about human nature, the author derives three fundamental
premises or imperatives of applied ethics (Newton, Internet):

- Beneficence. This imperative, central to any profession, holds that the

professionals must take care of, or look out for the interest of, the client.
Beneficence has several sub-imperatives conjoined in it: first, to do no harm,
second, to prevent harm or protect from harm, and third, to serve the interests or
happiness of the client.
- Respect for persons. The command to respect the autonomy and dignity of the
individuals with whom we deal, to attend to their reasons and honor their
selfregarding choices, is the command underlying all of our interpersonal dealings.
In professional relationships, however, it also limits the boundaries of professional
beneficence. The professional’s expertise may tell him that the client’s best
interests will be served by certain services that the professional is able to provide;
it may even tell him that the client needs, on pain of loss of life or liberty, certain
of his services. But if the client chooses not to avail himself of them, and only his
own interests are concerned, the professional may not impose those services on
the client.
- Justice. This imperative demands that the professional look past both art and
client, and take responsibility for the effect of professional practice in the society
as a whole. In every profession or practice, we can find examples of injustice. For
example, in medicine, the rich get immediate and adequate care and the poor get
late and inadequate care. The demand of justice upon the professionals is that
they work within their professional associations, and in their individual practices,
to blunt the effects of injustice in their fields. The professional who ignores this
demand fails to fulfil all the duties of professional status.

Because these imperatives are logically independent, they can be (and often are) in
conflict. Yet, as Newton says, we may not abolish one or another; we cannot even
prioritize them, which leads her to conclude that applied ethics is not the science of
easy answers. As professionals are struggling to solve moral and ethical dilemmas,
the engage in the process of moral reasoning. There are different forms of moral
reasoning (Newton, Internet): the first is consequentialist (or utilitarian or teleological)
reasoning, in which ends are identified as good (i.e. values) and means are selected
that will lead to those ends; the second is non-consequentialist (or deontological)
reasoning, in which rules are accepted as good and acts are judged right or otherwise
according to their conformity to those rules; finally. The third is virtue-based (or
ontological) reasoning, in which the type of person one is (i.e., his character), and the
type of moral community one belongs to, determines the obligations to act.

The described core of applied ethics does not specify, for each profession, how the
imperatives should reflect in the professional practice, and what are the values and
virtues of that particular profession. These should differ depending on the function of
the profession in the community. That is why we need branches of applied ethics,
tailored to individual professions. So, let us take a look at police ethics.
POLICE ETHICS

Police ethics applies the above-described principles to the field of policing. Compared
to medical or business ethics, police ethics is relatively underdeveloped. There are
several reasons for this, the major ones being the paramilitary philosophy of policing
and misunderstanding of the need for police ethics (Pagon, 2000).

First, within the paramilitary philosophy of policing, police officers are assigned the
role of executors of orders from their supervisors. They are not supposed to question
those orders, so there is not much need for moral deliberations. The basic virtue of
police officers within this framework is obedience. Police leadership, on the other
hand, is either not accountable to anyone (since they are setting their own goals and
can always tailor the statistics to fit their needs) or they are accountable only to the
party in power, with which they are in a symbiotic relationship. It is not surprising
that police ethics does not thrive in such a context.

Second, some practitioners are misled by a belief that as far as police officers perform
their work strictly by the law, they need no police ethics. Proponents of this view also
deny police officers the right of discretion. Unfortunately, when one is faced with a
moral or ethical dilemma, the laws prove themselves to be of little use. As Newton
(Internet) puts it, “our first job…in all fields of practice, is to distinguish, in every
context, between the demands of law and the demands of ethics - between the danger
the danger of being sued, prosecuted, jailed or defrocked, and the much subtler, but
more pervasive danger of being systematically and cruelly wrong. One of our first
lessons was that we must think beyond the law and teach nervous professionals to do
the same.”

With the rise of the new philosophy of policing (i.e. community policing and
problemoriented policing) and with the acceptance of police discretion as a necessary
part of police work, the importance of police ethics is gaining acceptance. Nowadays it
is hard to find a curriculum at a police academy or a program in police studies at a
university that does not include a subject of police ethics. At the same time, the
number of police agencies with a department, task force, or a committee on police
ethics is rapidly increasing. The majority of police agencies also have adopted a code
of police ethics, in a more or less articulated form.

But, as I have already mentioned, police ethics is still at the beginning of its
development. A lot of courses on ‘police ethics’ are mainly dealing with philosophical
ethics, while the word ‘police’ in the name simply means that police officers or studies
of police studies are the target group of the course. Therefore, I will outline the
direction of the future development of police ethics.
Following the postulates of applied ethics, the described development should be
achieved by the joint efforts of police scholars (i.e., theoreticians) and police
practitioners. This development should take place in three interrelated directions
(Pagon, 2000): (a) applying the principles of applied ethics to police profession; (b)
establishing standards of ethical conduct in policing; and (c) defining the means and
content of education and training in police ethics. This development, of course, has to
parallel other efforts for implementing contemporary philosophy and forms of policing
and for professionalization of police work, including the increased educational
requirements for the police. Let us now take a brief look at the proposed directions for
the development of police ethics.
a) Applying the principles of applied ethics to police profession

The above-described principles of applied ethics have to be tailored to the needs of

police profession, based on the nature of police work and the function of the police in
society. There are three main tasks to be achieved in this context.

First, the basic imperatives (i.e., beneficence, respect for persons, justice) have to be
‘translated’ to police language and specified. What does beneficence mean in dealing
with people who committed crimes or misdemeanors? What does it mean in dealing
with victims and other persons who suffered a loss? Who is ‘the client’ of police work?
Individuals? The community? The state? What exactly does respect for persons mean
in carrying out the police duties? How does the imperative of justice reflect in
applying police discretion? Also, the most common conflicts among basic imperatives
in policing have to be identified, so we could discuss them and prepare some
guidelines.

Second, the core values of policing need to be specified. Policing, as any other rational
activity, is directed toward achievement of a certain state or goals. These desired
states and goals represent values. Not only every society has a somewhat different
system of values, they may also differ for each individual. Police ethics has to specify
and rank the impost important values of policing, which will then guide the police
officers’ teleological moral reasoning. Such ranking would not imply that other values
are not important; it would just add clarity in ethical decision-making in policing. For
example, let us say that a police officer, using teleological reasoning, determines that
one particular course of action would lead to increased wealth of a certain individual,
while the different course of action would lead to increased equality of the people
involved. Although both the wealth and equality are values, a hierarchy of values
would enable the police officer to opt for equality. While the choice is obvious in this
example, how about a choice between freedom and safety? Respect for human rights
and health?

Third, police ethics need to specify the core virtues of policing. While there are
commonly accepted virtues such as temperance, courage, prudence, justice, charity,
kindness, patience, forgiveness, modesty, etc. we have to - just like in every other
profession - decide which virtues are the most important for police officers, based on
the function of the police in society. In doing so, we have to accommodate the above-
described changes in philosophy of policing, which caused some ‘traditional’ police
virtues (such as obedience, uncritical loyalty, authoritativeness) to become obsolete.
In police literature, we can find some descriptions of police virtues, which can serve
as a good starting point. Vicchio (1997) believes that if the goals of police organization
are to be met, the following virtues must be required of police officers: prudence,
trust, effacement of selfinterest, courage, intellectual honesty, justice and being
cognizant of other alternatives that might be taken. Delattre (1996) describes the
importance of the following virtues for police officers: honesty, trustworthiness,
justice, fairness, compassion, temperance, courage, wisdom and integrity.

b) Establishing standards of ethical conduct in policing

Expectations regarding ethical conduct have the greatest impact upon actual behavior
if they are not simply assumed, but clearly and unambiguously communicated. Based
on the imperatives, values, and virtues of policy profession, police ethics has to
establish clear and unambiguous standards of ethical conduct in policing. A code of
police ethics is very important within this context. It contains a set of clear, specific
statements, expressing in unambiguous terms the moral principles and the kind of
conduct that police profession demands of its members. The code has to be a product
of interaction between police ethicists and practitioners, based on agreed-upon
definitions of police imperatives, values and virtues. While the research shows that
the mere existence of the code of ethics positively influences employees’ ethical
behavior (Ruch & Crawford, 1991), the police management has to devote a lot of
attention to the implementation of this code.

c) Defining the means and content of education and training in police ethics

Defining the means and content of education and training in police ethics is also a
task that has to be accomplished by a joint effort of police ethicists and practitioners.
We have to keep in mind that listening to one lecture on police ethics or skimming
through some literature on the topic will not make police officers moral nor their
behavior ethical. A lot of time and effort need to be put into education and training in
police ethics, before police officers – when faced with a moral problem, ethical or
moral dilemma – will automatically consider all the alternatives available to them; will
not make decisions based on prejudice or impulsively; will submit their decisions to
reason and change them, if such a change seems reasonable; and will give equal
consideration to the rights, interests, and choices of all parties to the situation in
question.

Furthermore, as Delattre (1996) points out, even the mastery of the process of moral
reasoning and decision-making does not, by itself, guarantee ethical conduct, nor do
all of the situations require moral reasoning and deliberation. An individual has to
have good character (i.e., appropriate virtues) to be motivated for ethical behavior.
This realization makes two additional requirements for police ethics training. First, in
addition to teaching moral reasoning and decision-making, training has to emphasize
and develop virtues characteristic of police profession. Second, the task of ethical
training should also be the development of moral habits, so the police officers would
behave ethically out of habit in all those situations, which do not present a moral
problem, ethical or moral dilemma, so they do not require moral deliberation and
reasoning.

So, the task of police ethics education is to teach the principles of applied ethics in
general and police ethics in particular. It has to cover the imperatives, values and
virtues of policing, the process of moral reasoning and decision-making, moral
problems, and in policing, the code of police ethics, and the process of code
implementation. Vital topics are also strategies for managing ethical behavior in
police organization and ethics training and education.

The tasks of police ethics training are: (a) enable the students to recognize moral
problems and moral or ethical dilemmas; (b) train the students for the process of
moral reasoning and decision-making; (c) emphasize and develop the virtues
necessary for police profession, hence developing the students’ moral character; (d)
develop moral habits of the students.

The development of police ethics, including education and training, will not achieve
its purpose, unless all organizational processes, especially the behavior of police
managers and the top management of the organization, support and encourage
ethical conduct of all the members.

ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT CONDUCIVE TO POLICE ETHICS

If police officers experience inconsistent behavior from their supervisors, preferential

treatment of some officers and/or citizens, solidarity with, and cover-ups for, the
officers who violate standards of their profession, they will sooner or later become
cynical regarding the value and appropriateness of ethical conduct in their
organization. One cannot expect a cynical police officer to be motivated to adhere to
the rules of ethical behavior (Pagon, 1993).

The research showed the importance of moral climate in organization for the behavior
of individual members. Experiments revealed, in schools and prisons, that changing
organizational processes, such as policies and procedures, could create a positive
moral atmosphere that then contributed to improvements in individual moral
development and moral judgment, as well as to reduction in cheating, stealing and
similar anti-social acts (Kohlberg, 1984). Investigations of organizational effects on
moral conduct in business firms appear to support these observations. Firms
demonstrating exemplary business practice attest to the value of creating a positive
moral atmosphere for encouraging ethical behavior and maintaining the firm’s
reputation. Conversely, the organizational environment can also promote unethical
and criminal conduct in business firms (Cohen, 1995). Researchers have also
demonstrated that organizational factors, such as reward systems, norms and
culture, and codes of conduct can significantly decrease the prevalence of unethical
behavior in organizational contexts (Brass, Butterfield, & Skaggs, 1998).

Cohen (1995) defines moral climate as shared perceptions of prevailing organizational

norms for addressing issues with a moral component. These issues include (a)
identifying moral problems, (b) choosing criteria for resolving moral conflicts, and (c)
evaluating the moral correctness of outcomes that ensue from organizational
decisions. Since climate is a function of how employees collectively perceive and
interpret these and other elements of the work setting, climate can be thought of as
an intervening variable. As such it provides the necessary perceptual link between
organizational processes and employee behavior. According to the author, there are
five dimensions that interact to determine the moral climate in the organization: goal
emphasis (prevailing norms for selecting organization goals), means emphasis
(prevailing norms for determining how organizational goals should be attained),
reward orientation (prevailing norms regarding how performance is rewarded), task
support (prevailing norms regarding how resources are located to perform specific
tasks). And socio-emotional support (prevailing norms regarding the type of
relationships expected in the firm).

It becomes obvious that police supervisors and top management are responsible
creating a positive moral climate within the police. The literature on corporate
strategy, organizational transformation, business ethics and corporate social contract
provides support for a claim that moral climate in the organization emerges mainly
from the way in which key organizational processes transmit managerial expectations
about moral behavior – the way employees should handle issues such as
responsibility, equity, or serving the interests of stakeholders (Cohen, 1995).
Therefore, police managers’ expectations about moral behavior of their subordinates
will significantly influence moral climate of a particular police organization or agency.

In the context of discussing ethical behavior in police organization, we should also

stress the importance of social relationships within the organization. Organizational
actors are embedded within a network of relationships. These ongoing social
relationships provide the constraints and opportunities that in combination with
characteristics of individuals, issues, and organizations, may help explain ethical or
unethical behavior in organizations (Brass, Butterfield & Skaggs, 1998).

Social network researchers bring to our attention several factors that might influence
ethical or unethical behavior of organizational members, such as strength of
relationships (in terms of frequency, reciprocity, emotional intensity, and intimacy);
negative relationships; multiplicity of relationships; asymmetric relationships; status
inequality; structure of relationships; structural holes; centrality; density; cliques
social contagion; and conspiracies. The constraints and opportunities provided by
relationships may be most predictive of unethical behavior when personal
characteristics, issues, and organizational factors present moderate or weak
constraints or unethical behavior (Brass, Butterfield, & Skaggs, 1998).

Another important issue that influences ethical behavior is trust among

organizational members. McAllister (1955) distinguishes two main dimensions of
trust: (a) cognitionbased trust, which relies on appraisals of others’ professional
competence and reliability; (b) affect or emotion-based trust, which is present when
people feel save to share their private feelings and personal difficulties, knowing that
the other party would respond constructively and caringly. Emotion-based trust has
been found to be more essential to effective coordination efforts in organizations. This
emotion-based trust incorporates the virtue of benevolence, which refers to an
altruistic concern for the welfare of others and is devoid of egocentric motives (Mayer,
Davis, & Schoorman, (1995).

In police settings, we could extend this notion of trust to include trust between the
police and the community.

It is important to note that all of the above-described factors interact with each other
in predicting ethical or unethical behaviors. Let us take trust as an example. In an
organization with strong moral climate, composed of individuals of good character,
and with dense social networks, it is safe to assume that high level of trust will
promote ethical behavior. In such organizations, people who trust others (both
cognitively and emotionally) and feel trusted by them will be reluctant to violate this
trust by engaging in unethical behavior. On the other hand, if the moral climate is
low, social networks are loose, with a lot of structural holes and many cliques, it is
very likely that high level of trust within a deviant clique will promote unethical
behavior. In this case, people who trust other clique members and feel trusted by
them will be reluctant to violate this trust by giving up their own unethical behavior
or even by reporting on other members’ unethical behavior.

Therefore, to set a climate conducive to ethical behavior in police organization, police

managers have to consider all of the above factors. To summarize, they have to foster
character development and moral habits of police officers by educating and training
them in police ethics; establish high moral climate through appropriate use of goals,
means, rewards, and support, facilitate development of strong and dense social
networks, extending into the community; prevent cliques and conspiracies; and
establish both cognitive- based and affect-based trust among all organizational
members and between the police and the public.

In doing so, the managers will not only facilitate ethical behavior of their officers; they
will also prevent or at least lessen the strength of the infamous police subculture, so
typical of paramilitary policing. In trying to achieve the above goals, police managers
will soon discover that, first, setting their own example is of the utmost importance,
and second, that ethics does not only apply to police officers’ dealings with the
community, but also to their own dealings with their subordinates. Police officers’
human rights are as important as those of the other citizens.

I agree with Sykes (1993) that the quality of policing in a democratic society relies on
the quality of the people doing the work. This is why I believe that in policing we
should strive to achieve a virtue of integrity of all police officers and supervisors,
including top management.
INTEGRITY

Leadership theorists and researchers have found that integrity is a central trait of
effective business leaders, while interpersonal and group relationship theorists have
identified integrity as a central determinant of trust in organizations (Becker, 1998).
Delattre (1996) and Vecchio (1997) agree that integrity is also central to the mission
of policing. To Delattre, integrity is not only the highest achievement there can be in a
human life, but also the most difficult. So what exactly is integrity?

Delattre (1996) defines as “the settled disposition, the resolve and determination, the
established habit of doing right where there is no one to make you do it but yourself”
(p.325). He believes that integrity is “irreplaceable as the foundation of good
friendship, good marriages, good parenthood, good sportsmanship, good citizenship,
and good public service” (ibid).

Vecchio (1997) defines a person of integrity as somebody who has reasonably

coherent and relatively stable set of core moral values and virtues, to which he is
freely and genuinely committed, and which reflect in his act and speech. So, the
person’s words and actions should be of one piece.

Becker (1998) subscribes to the objectivist view of integrity, namely that integrity is
loyalty, in action, to rational principles (general truths) and values. “That is, integrity
is the principle of being principled, practicing what one preaches regardless of
emotional or social pressure, and not allowing any irrational consideration to
overwhelm one’s rational convictions” (p.158).

Integrity in policing, then, means that a police officer genuinely accepts values and
moral standards of policing and possesses the virtues of his profession, and that he
consistently acts, out of his own will, in accordance with those values, standards, and
virtues, even in the face of external pressures.

Of course, not all police officers have integrity. Benjamin (1990) describes five
psychological types lacking in integrity. The first is the moral chameleon, a person
who is anxious to accommodate others, while not being resistant to social pressure,
thus willing to quickly abandon or modify previously avowed principles. The second is
the moral opportunist, whose values are also ever changing, based on his own short-
term selfinterest. The third type is the moral hypocrite, a person who has one set of
virtues for public consumption and another set for actual use as a moral code. The
fourth is the morally weak-willed who has a reasonably coherent set of core virtues,
but he usually lacks the courage to act on them. The final type is the moral self-
deceiver, a person who thinks of himself as acting on a set of core principles, while, in
fact, he does not.

Of course, “it is not a breach of integrity, but a moral obligation, to change one’s
views if one finds that some idea he holds is wrong. It is a breach of integrity to know
that one is right and then proceed (usually with the help of some rationalization) to
defy the right in practice. (Peikoff, 1991): cited in Becker, 1998).

Why do some people lack integrity? Why is it so hard to achieve it? Based on a review
of objectivist literature, Backer (1998) offers the three most common reasons. First,
not everyone is rational. Integrity requires the discipline of purpose and a long-range
course of action, selecting corresponding goals and pursuing them fervently, carefully
choosing the means to one’s ends, and making full use of one’s knowledge. Second, a
person may lack integrity because of desires that are inconsistent with moral values.
If a person, when under temptation, fails to call upon his rational mind, acting upon
a whim of the moment instead, he will indeed lack integrity. The same is true when
an irrational fear drives behavior. Similarly, an individual’s integrity will be called into
question if he does not put rational principles into practice simply out of inertia.
Third, probably the most common reason a person may lack integrity is that he
succumbs to social pressure. Social pressure may come from numerous sources (e.g.,
co-workers, bosses, or clients) and take many forms (e.g., physical intimidation or
verbal and nonverbal disapproval). A person with high integrity will not allow
popularity to take priority over rational convictions.

CONCLUSION

From the above discussion, it should be obvious that integrity can only be achieved if
a person strives to achieve it. Appropriate education and training in police ethics,
good moral climate in police organization, appropriate social networks (both within
the organization and within the community), trust and support, can all both motivate
police officers to strive for integrity and help them achieve it. I believe that, once
achieved, integrity of police officers is one of the most important steps toward
professionalization of policing, and one of the most powerful antidotes to police
corruption, brutality, neglect of human rights, and other forms of police deviance.

Police ethics provides a compass to both police officers and police managers, by
specifying the core imperatives, values, and virtues of policing, by delineating the
process of moral reasoning and decision-making, by setting the standards of ethical
conduct, and by defining the means and the content of police ethics education and
training. Police scholars and practitioners have to cooperate in developing police
ethics. This is not an easy task for either of them. Developing and implementing
police ethics invokes changes in police organization. Police organizations and police
officers, as we know, are very resistant to change. Those police scholars and
practitioners entrusted with developing police ethics must, therefore, themselves be
persons of high integrity. We should not forget the Newton’s (Internet) caution of
flattery. The flatterer is a person who tells people what they want to hear, instead of
what they should hear. Flattery, in Newton’s words, “is the major corruption available
to the ethicist…the only defense against flattery is personal integrity.” In developing
and implementing police ethics, a lot of people will have to be told the things they
most definitely do not want to hear.

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Brass, T. J., Butterfield, K. D., & Skaggs, B. C. (1998). Relationships and unethical
behavior: Social network perspective. Academy of Management Review, 23(1), 14-31.
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Milan Pagon – Biography

Milan Pagon got his doctorate (Sc.D.) in Organizational Sciences in 1990 at the University of
Maribor, Slovenia. In the period between 1990 and 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to the
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he both studied and taught at the College of Business
Administration. In 1994, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in
Management/Organizational Behavior.
During his police career, Dr. Pagon was Educator at the Police High School, Detective, Deputy
Commander and Commander of Police Station, Police Inspector, and State Undersecretary at the
Ministry of the Interior. Outside the police, he was Assistant Director of the Personnel Agency of
Slovenia, Human Resource Manager at a chemical company, Teaching Assistant, Assistant
Professor, and Associate Professor. In 1995, he was elected Dean of the College of Police and
Security Studies, a duty that he initially performed for three years. In 2001, he was again elected
Dean, the position that he is currently holding. In 2003, Dr. Pagon was elected to the rank of Full
Professor. In addition to his administrative and teaching duties at the College of Police and Security
Studies, he is also Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences,
University of Maribor.
Dr. Pagon was invited in the summers of 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 to serve as Visiting
Professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he taught Concepts of Management and
Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Sam M. Walton College of
Business.
Dr. Pagon is a member of the following professional and scientific associations: Academy of
Management, Honorary Management Fraternity Sigma Iota Epsilon, International Society for
Human Resource Management, Society of International Scholars Phi Beta Delta, American
Psychological Society, American Society for Criminology, Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences,
American Association of University Professors, International Police Association, and Association of
Professors of the University of Maribor.
He was a founding father and the Chairman of the Program Committee of the International
Biennial Conference Policing in Central and Eastern Europe, which was already organized four
times, with the following subtitles:
- Comparing Firsthand Knowledge with Experience from the West (1996),
 - Organizational, Managerial, and Human Resource Aspects (1998), - Ethics,
Integrity, and Human Rights (2000) and - Deviance, Violence, and
Victimization (2002).
In his research, Dr. Pagon has collaborated with some of the top international researchers in the
fields of management and police work: Dr. Daniel C. Ganster, Dr. Paul E. Spector and Dr. Carl B.
Klockars from the USA and Dr. Cary L. Cooper from the UK. These cooperation efforts have already
produced papers at scientific conferences and publications in the best international journals.
Dr. Pagon was also appointed to the editorial board of two international and one domestic
journal, namely the Stress& Health, the International Journal of Police Science and Management,
and Varstvoslovje - Journal of Security Theory and Praxeology.
He also serves as a reviewer for one international and two domestic journals, namely the Stress
& Health, Varstvoslovje, and the Organization – Journal of Management, Informatics, and Human
Resources.

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