preview

The Slippery Slope to Corruption and the Public Corruption of Police Officers

Better Essays
Open Document

For the Running Header: THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO CORRUPTION

The Slippery Slope to Corruption and the Public Corruption of Police Officers
Ricky A Price, Col. U.S.A.F. (Ret)
Kaplan University Online

CJ340-02: Applied Criminal Justice Ethics
Professor Kevin Stoehr
10 July 2012
The law enforcement agent, that represents government, bears the heavy responsibility of maintaining, in his own conduct and the honor and integrity of all government institutions. He, consequently, shall guard against placing himself in a position in which any person can expect special consideration or in which the public can reasonably assume that this special consideration is being given. Accordingly, he should be firm in refusing any type of gifts, favors, …show more content…

(3) The two main types are the logical slope, and the psychological slope, and it is worth taking the time to distinguish the two. b. Logical slippery slopes exist when there are no clearly defined boundaries that can be used to draw distinctions between different cases, and thus any line drawn in the sand between two extremes will have some degree of arbitrariness about it. Suppose that a particular company allows its employees to accept "small" gifts from prospective suppliers. How should "small" be defined in those circumstances? Clearly a gift that has no monetary value would be acceptable, and an expensive piece of jewelry would be unacceptable, but there exists a large gray area in between in which the acceptability or unacceptability of a gift is not so clear.
In relation to police acceptance of gratuities, it could be argued that although there seems to be a big difference between accepting a cup of coffee and accepting a six-figure bribe to look the other way while a murder is carried out, this is not really the case. For there is a logical slippery slope here, given that there is only a small difference between accepting a cup of coffee, and accepting a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and only a small difference between accepting a

Get Access