Why ethics matters in policing: authority, power and the public trust

On the first day of Ethics and Professionalism, Professor Ray Desjardins writes a single sentence on the board: A police officer is a citizen in uniform who has been lent extraordinary powers by everyone else. He asks the class what those powers are. Amara Okafor lists arrest. Marco DiSanto adds the use of force, up to and including deadly force. Priya Sandhu mentions searching people, cars and homes. Jesse Morningstar says officers can stop someone on the street and demand answers. Linh Tran adds a quieter one: officers decide what goes into a report, and a court may later treat that report as the truth. Desjardins nods. Every one of those powers, he says, can be used well or badly, and no supervisor, camera or court can watch every use. That gap between what officers are able to do and what anyone can check is the reason this course exists.

Power that no one else holds

Most people never hold legal power over another person. A teacher can give a detention and an employer can fire someone, but only the state can take away liberty, and in daily life the state is usually represented by a patrol officer. Under the Constitution, state law such as the Ohio Revised Code and local ordinances, officers can detain, arrest, search, seize property, enter places and apply force. These powers are hedged with conditions: reasonable grounds, warrants, necessity and proportionality. But the conditions are applied first by the officer, alone, in the moment, often at night and often with no witness who is not either a suspect or a victim. The law draws the outer boundary. Ethics governs everything an officer does inside it.

Desjardins illustrates the point with a call he handled as a young officer. A teenager was caught shoplifting a phone charger worth a few dollars. The law allowed an arrest and a charge. It also allowed a warning, a call to the parents or a referral to a juvenile diversion program. Every option was lawful. What separated them was judgment: what was fair to the store, what was likely to keep the teenager out of further trouble, and what the community would accept as reasonable if it learned the details. That is an ethical decision dressed in a legal uniform, and patrol officers make dozens of them every week.

Legitimacy: why people cooperate

Police depend on public cooperation for almost everything they accomplish. Most crimes come to police attention because a victim or witness calls. Most cases are solved because someone talks. Most arrests end peacefully because the person arrested accepts, however grudgingly, that the officer has the right to make it. Researchers call this acceptance legitimacy: the belief that the police are entitled to exercise authority and that people ought to comply even when they disagree with a particular decision. Tom Tyler's studies, beginning in the late 1980s, found that legitimacy depends less on whether people get the outcome they want than on whether they feel they were treated fairly. People who are listened to, treated with dignity and given reasons for decisions are more likely to obey the law and cooperate with police, even after receiving a ticket.

Tyler's work became the basis of what is now called procedural justice, which has four elements that recur throughout this course: voice, meaning people get to tell their side; neutrality, meaning decisions are based on facts and rules rather than prejudice; respect, meaning people are treated with dignity; and trustworthy motives, meaning people believe the officer is trying to do the right thing. Each element is an ethical commitment as much as a technique. An officer can recite the right words while plainly not listening, and people notice. Desjardins tells the class that the officers he most admired were not the ones with the best arrest numbers but the ones whom people in the toughest neighborhoods asked for by name.

The asymmetry of trust

Trust is built slowly and lost quickly. Wesley Skogan's research on police contacts found an asymmetry: a bad experience with police lowers a person's confidence much more than a good experience raises it. One rude stop can undo the effect of several courteous ones. The effect also spreads, because people tell others, and today they post video. Port Ardent's 2025 community survey, which the class first saw in LES-101, showed 68 out of every 100 residents trusting the police overall, but only 61 out of 100 among people who had a recent contact with officers, compared with 71 out of 100 among people who had none. Desjardins asks the class what that gap means. Linh suggests that some contacts are going badly. Priya points out that people who have contact with police are often victims or suspects having a bad day already. Both explanations may be partly true, and the code below shows why the gap matters even so.

The Python example uses the survey's published counts to estimate trust among residents with and without recent contact, and then imagines a year in which more residents have contact. If contacts continue to lower trust at the same rate, overall trust drifts down even though nothing else changes. The arithmetic is simple, but it makes a serious point: each individual encounter is a small deposit into or withdrawal from an account the whole service shares.

# Port Ardent 2025 survey: trust by recent police contact (counts from the survey report)
groups = {
    "recent contact": {"n": 420, "trust": 256},
    "no recent contact": {"n": 780, "trust": 554},
}
total_n = sum(g["n"] for g in groups.values())
total_trust = sum(g["trust"] for g in groups.values())
for name, g in groups.items():
    print(f"{name:18s} {g['trust'] / g['n']:.3f}")
print(f"{'overall':18s} {total_trust / total_n:.3f}")

# What if the share of residents with recent contact grows and contact keeps lowering trust?
p_contact = groups["recent contact"]["trust"] / groups["recent contact"]["n"]
p_none = groups["no recent contact"]["trust"] / groups["no recent contact"]["n"]
for share in (0.35, 0.45, 0.55):
    overall = share * p_contact + (1 - share) * p_none
    print(f"share with contact {share:.2f} -> overall trust {overall:.3f}")

recent contact     0.610
no recent contact  0.710
overall            0.675
share with contact 0.35 -> overall trust 0.675
share with contact 0.45 -> overall trust 0.665
share with contact 0.55 -> overall trust 0.655

The output shows overall trust near 0.68 today and drifting to about 0.66 if more than half of residents had a contact that went the way recent contacts are going now. The point is not the third decimal place. It is that the quality of ordinary encounters, multiplied across 54,300 calls a year, shapes how much help the service will get when it needs it.

Ethics, law and policy are not the same thing

Students often assume that if something is legal it is ethical, and if it is against policy it is unethical. Desjardins draws three overlapping circles on the board. Law sets the minimum that the whole society enforces through courts. Policy is the service's own rules, written by the chief, often with input from city leaders, and enforced through discipline. Ethics is the set of principles about right conduct that a professional carries everywhere, including into situations no law or policy anticipated. Most of the time the three agree. Sometimes they do not. A legal action can be cruel, as when an officer uses every lawful power against a person simply because the officer is annoyed. A policy can be out of date. And ethics sometimes asks more than either, such as staying with a frightened child until a relative arrives even though the call has been cleared.

The overlap matters most where the law leaves room for choice, which is most of the time. Officers choose whom to stop, whom to question, whether to search when consent might be obtained, whether to arrest or release, how to word a report and whether to report a colleague. These choices are where careers are made and broken, and where the public experiences the police as fair or unfair. Professionalism, in the sense this course uses the word, means making those choices consistently well, for reasons the officer could explain to a reasonable member of the public.

What the public expects of a professional

Policing in the United States is not a licensed profession in quite the way medicine or law is, but it increasingly behaves like one. Officers complete required training, swear an oath, are bound by state certification standards and agency codes of ethics, can lose their certification for serious misconduct and are expected to keep their knowledge current. The public expects of officers what it expects of any profession: competence, honesty, fairness, confidentiality and putting the interests of the people served ahead of personal convenience. The difference is that police professionals wear a weapon and can compel compliance, so the consequences of falling short are more immediate and more visible.

Jesse raises his hand. In his community, he says, trust in police is not starting from zero; it is starting from below zero, because of a history that includes the enforcement of removal policies and the boarding school system. Desjardins agrees and says that history is part of why ethics cannot be treated as a matter of personal good intentions alone. Officers inherit the reputation of the institution, and they repair it, or damage it further, one contact at a time. Later lessons return to this theme when they look at bias, community trust and accountability.

Every new officer makes a formal commitment before taking up these powers. In Ohio, as in most states, officers take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and of the state and to faithfully perform their duties, and many agencies also have officers affirm the Law Enforcement Code of Ethics. Desjardins says most officers remember the ceremony and few remember the words. He asks the class to read the oath aloud and pick out its key promises. Amara picks out impartiality. Marco picks out faithfulness. Priya notices that confidentiality is a promise to the public, not to colleagues. Those promises, Desjardins says, are the yardstick against which every later lesson measures conduct.

How this course works

The rest of the course moves from theory to practice. Lessons 2 and 3 introduce the main ethical frameworks and a practical decision-making model. Lessons 4 and 5 look at codes of conduct and discretion. Lessons 6 and 7 examine how good officers go wrong, through noble cause corruption, gratuities and the slippery slope. Lesson 8 covers honesty in notes, reports and testimony. Lesson 9 deals with bias and fair treatment. Lesson 10 addresses the code of silence and the duty to intervene. Lesson 11 explains how officers are held accountable, and the capstone asks each student to build an ethics case portfolio. Each lesson uses Port Ardent cases, and each includes a short program that shows how data can reveal patterns that individual cases hide.