Attitudes of police officers toward their professional ethics

Professions are guided by codes of ethics to aid them in performance of their duties and to ensure maintenance of high standards of conduct. Police officers are faced with a maze of obligations in the performance of their official duties. The “Law Enforcement Code of Ethics” and “Canons of Police Ethics” were created to make explicit the conduct considered appropriate for police officers and to guide them in the performance of their duties.This study investigates how police officers in several police agencies view their professional ethics. Some of the broader questions examined in the study are the following: Do police officers have a clear understanding of the “Law Enforcement Code of Ethics” and the “Canons of Police Ethics?” Do they feel constrained by agency, societal, or other factors from behaving professionally? Do they consider their ethics adequate to guide professional conduct, and are they willing to abide by the principles? The responses indicate reliance on personal ethics in situations where standard police ethics are not clear, and suggest the need for further research in police ethics.     

Modeling the longitudinal impact of legal sanctions on narcotics use and property crime

Structural equation models are used to confirm the suppressive effects of legal sanctions, e.g., probation and parole, on narcotics use and property crime. Both concurrent and longitudinal effects of legal sanctions are tested within two different models, which together span the entire addiction career. The findings indicate that (1) the suppressive effects of legal sanctions are evident only when legal sanctions are operationalized as parole or probation officer contact where urine monitoring is utilized; (2) only concurrent suppressive effects are statistically significant, and longitudinal suppressive effects are not; (3) both narcotics use and property crime are suppressed by legal sanctions, although the latter is less responsive than the former to intervention by the criminal justice system; and (4) suppressive effects tend to be more pronounced later in the addiction career. The significance of the findings and the implications for criminological theory related to issues regarding surveillance effects are emphasized.     

Euthanasia and assisted suicide: a liberal approach versus the traditional moral view

Within the context of the debate over the recent suspended sentence given to John Stuart Godfrey by Underwood J in the Supreme Court of Tasmania for assisting his elderly mother with her suicide, this article examines some of the more popular arguments for and against the moral acceptability of euthanasia and assisted suicide. This article considers the arguments put forward on the "difference principle" by Rachels and Nesbitt before critically examining the liberal approach to the euthanasia issue as proposed by Kuhse. It is argued that whilst Kuhse is correct to reject the difference principle, she does so for the wrong reasons. The penultimate section of the article provides an overview of the traditional moral view against killing. The final part assesses whether the arguments put forward by proponents of the liberal approach are capable of overcoming this view.     

Reputation and Public Administration

This article examines the application of organizational reputation to public administration. Organizational reputation is defined as a set of beliefs about an organization’s capacities, intentions, history, and mission that are embedded in a network of multiple audiences. The authors assert that the way in which organizational reputations are formed and subsequently cultivated is fundamental to understanding the role of public administration in a democracy. A review of the basic assumptions and empirical work on organizational reputation in the public sector identifies a series of stylized facts that extends our understanding of the functioning of public agencies. In particular, the authors examine the relationship between organizational reputation and bureaucratic autonomy.     

Evidence Based Policy: Principles of Transparency and Accountability

This article provides a practical guide for improving the quality of evidence‐based policy. Rather than adopting an approach that gives priority to particular types of research methodologies, this paper argues that evidence drawn from any methodology will improve if standards of transparency and accountability are followed in the process of gathering, analysing, interpreting, and presenting evidence for policy. The papers details what these standards of transparency and accountability mean in practice, how these standards can be achieved, and possible limits to their adoption.