Police Misconduct
Police Misconduct
Introduction
The role of police is much more than an interesting problem in government since this is a direct reflection of society’s heart. Policing addresses one of the most fundamental problems of social living -- how to deal with those who violate group customs, norms, rules, and laws that enable cooperation. Cooperating together in large groups enables us to take advantage of one another's strengths and to compensate for individual weaknesses (Morris and Vila, 1999). The resulting sum can be much greater than the parts and, all else being equal, the larger the social group, the larger the potential benefit. But social living also provides opportunities for people to cheat. Instead of cooperating to produce a shared benefit, people can use force, fraud, or stealth to obtain valued resources. Once again, generally speaking, the larger the social group, the greater the opportunities for cheating. Cheaters weaken the cooperative bonds that enable productive social living and, like parasites in an animal, too many cheaters can kill or cripple a society.
The history of humanity is dominated by our struggle to maximize the benefits of social living and to control its liabilities. A great deal of social control is informal. Most often, children are taught and adults are sanctioned by a frown, a negative word, or the chilly response of others to undesirable behavior (Morris and Vila, 1999). But as misbehaviors become more serious, the potential consequences of being the person who provides sanctions increase as well. For example, shushing a child who is talking in a theater or speaking up when someone breaks a queue at the market is much less hazardous than trying to stop a bank robbery or intervening when a man is striking his wife. Larger societies, those with more than a few hundred people, develop cooperative solutions to this dilemma. Instead of individuals shouldering the burden for challenging more...
View Full Essay