Morality in Law Enforcement: Chasing “Bad Guys” with the Los Angeles Police Department

Abstract

Police officers regularly construct their work in terms of a morality that is so pronounced that it must arise from unique aspects of their role in society. I draw on fieldwork conducted in a patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to develop an explanation for the prevalence of police morality. Three components of the police function create potent dilemmas that their morality helps ameliorate: the contradiction between the police's ostensible aim to prevent crime and their inability to do so; the imperative that they run roughshod over the ambiguity inherent in most situations they handle; and the fact that they invariably act against at least one citizen's interest, often with recourse to a coercive force that can maim or kill. Reliance on moralistic understandings for the police's mission provides a salve for these difficulties; however, it can also work to harm police-community relations. Paradoxically, the police's reliance on morality can encourage or condone overly aggressive actions that are, in fact, contradictory to the virtuous self-definition officers often construct.