Ethical Leadership Challenges in Law Enforcement

Ethical Leadership Challenges in Law Enforcement
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Ethical Leadership Challenges in Law Enforcement
Men and women serving in law enforcement are held to high leadership and ethical standards bearing the nature of their jobs. Law enforcement is characterized by swift decision-making while fostering leadership to achieve positive outcomes. In law enforcement, officials are likely to face challenges based on cultural diversity while executing their duty. However, as communities evolve socially and technologies emerge, law enforcement officers are engrained in new leadership and ethical challenges. The continuous dynamism in ethics and leadership have triggered the need to standardize moral and ethical issues facing policing to ease decision making. In this analysis, the focus is on the ethical and leadership challenges in law enforcement. Those findings should steer the standardization of ethical and leadership paradigms in law enforcement for better outcomes in a dynamic operational environment.
Law enforcement is subject to ethical principles both globally and locally. The International Association of Chiefs of Police is a renowned institution aiming to steer ethical law enforcement globally. The institution developed a code of ethics in 1957, which has been used as the threshold to understand the ethical dilemmas or issues that law enforcers face in their line of duty (Papazoglou, and Schlosser, 2020). Locally, law enforcement has been anchored on the necessity to enforce the law with adherence to provisions such as never accepting gratitude, never employing violence or unnecessary force, never using ill will or malice to execute the duties, and enforcing the law appropriately courteously without fear or favor. With such standards set, law enforcement ethical observance has become a center for criticism in multiple paradigms.
Upholding the law and individual rights is among the ethical challenges faced in law enforcement. While analyzing ethical policies in law enforcement, Blumberg, Papazoglou, and Schlosser (2020) noted that each officer is supposed to swear an oath to defend the constitutional rights of individuals while also upholding the law. Upholding the seemingly contradictory oaths is an ethical issue in law enforcement—for instance, the issue of drug laws and the ensuing drug wars. The law abandons the right to life and liberty when one is faced with a drug charge. For instance, when an individual is caught with a gram of cocaine, he/she risks losing her rights and liberty accompanied by loss of children, loss of social reputation, fines, loss of jobs, and imprisonment (eJournal USA, 2011b). Officers are always faced with the ethical dilemma of gauging the individual rights that can be overlooked at the expense of ridding the community of drug abuse.
The other ethical challenge that law enforcement faces is the use of necessary force. The contemporary Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) has triggered different debates on the ethical considerations within law enforcement. There are suggestions that law enforcement officers use unnecessary force to handle various criminal situations. The movements have been motivated to hold law enforcement officers accountabl...