Fatalism In The Police Department

Unless there is a full proof way to read the thoughts of potential recruits we can only go by other effective testing methods to try and select a pool of good ethical police officers. This view may fall into the fatalism category but does have a valid argument to made. “Fatalism insists that police departments are no more than microcosms of society itself. Since the general public includes a great range of excellence, mediocrity, and depravity, every police department must be expected to include the same characteristics. In the broad society are to be found brutality, incompetence, excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs, financial corruption and other forms of lawbreaking, and racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. Therefore, the argument runs, a roughly proportionate incidence of such attitudes, ineptitude, and misconduct will inevitably find its way into police departments” (Delattre, 2011). It’s also possible to have police officer’s that come into the force with good intentions about making a positive impact in the communities they serve but may experience burn out or even a negative attitude change as time goes on. “The realistic goal is to minimize the adverse social influences through selective recruiting, rigorous training, able supervision, deft leadership, and so on. A police leader must make clear that the department is not intended to be a microcosm of society. The bigotry, brutality, corruption, and incompetence in the society at large are among the very facts that compel the department to live up to higher standards” (Delattre, 2011). An important contemporary issue is that of the slippery slope. Specifically, when it comes to the issue of accepting gratuities. The slippery slope (or moral career) hypothesis states that corruption begins with apparently harmless and well- intentioned practices and leads over time, either in individuals or in departments as a whole, to all manner of crimes-for-profit (Delattre, 2011). This was the first contemporary issue that was discussed with Officer Fields during his interview. Officer Fields states that the RPD has a no gratuity policy. …show more content…
He says that a lot of store owners and managers located in the areas that they patrol daily, tell their workers that police officer’s don’t have to pay for coffee or sodas. Some managers won’t take no for an answer. “Gratuity is definitely one of those ethical issues that we witness from time to time. I 'll put it this way, it 's one of them grey area type things for the force, and not just for my department. That 's all departments, across the nation that has this issue. If an officer goes into a community convenience store or something like that and he 's going to purchase a drink or, I could use coffee, coffee is the big one, a lot of store merchants will probably be like, "Hey! You know you 're fine." Basically, it’s just them showing the officer, "Hey. We appreciate your service. We appreciate what you do. This one is on us". That 's why I don 't get it, I don 't get that whole gratuity thing, I don 't get that twisted. If I go in there, if I 'm getting something, I go right to the register like I 'm about to pay for it. I make sure I have them give it to me. With that whole thing, what that 's there for is, today it may be a cup of coffee, tomorrow it may be a sandwich, the next day it may be a couple of sandwiches. It can start small and lead up to big stuff” (T. Fields, personal communication, Feb 16, 2016).