Respond to the following :
When a police officer puts on their uniform along with wearing the badge over their heart, it is that officers duty and obligation to enforce the laws and regulations within the city they work for. After reading this weeks required chapters, I have learned moral and ethics play a huge role in law enforcement. For example: As a police officer I was investigating a domestic violence incident. The husband and wife got into a verbal argument and both physically assaulted each other. Due to current laws and regulations if a dominant aggressor is not identified through the investigation, both parties must be arrested. In this situation, I was not able to locate enough evidence to prove who was the dominant aggressor. In the end, I had to arrest both the husband and wife based on the laws. The sad part, there were children present and I had to find their grandparents to come take care of them while their parents went to jail. Morally to me this was wrong to take both parents to jail and force the kids to be taken care of by family. Ethically, I have a duty to enforce the laws even though morally in this incident I disagreed with. Now if I acted on how I felt morally, I could have just arrested one parent; however, this means I am not enforcing the current laws when it comes to domestic violence incidents.
Now is behaving morally the same as being moral? I think behaving morally is when you are expected to act morally right whereas being moral is a more natural approach on how you act. For example, a police officer stops a car for speeding. The driver said they were speeding because of a family emergency and shows proof to the officer. In the end the officer cites the driver for speeding. I would say that officer was behaving morally. They probably felt expected to give a citation due to the fact they just took a report of a major injury accident and the cause for the crash was speeding. An example of being moral would to be, you are at home and you broke something of important value to your significant other. When it happened, the moral thing to do is tell the truth with what happened to your significant other. The normal no pressure feeling of just being honest to your loved one is just moral and not act or behave morally.
Overall, even though issues with moral and ethics have come up in these chapters, the majority of those in the criminal justice system are good people wanting to help and assist others. Yes there are some bad apples and yes they will be exposed and dealt with. But as a citizen or as a law enforcement professional, the majority of us are surrounded by good people who show sound moral and ethical behaviors.
