Strong, courageous, heroic, all words that we hear and used to describe what comes to mind when we think of Police Officers. Policing the police is something that is not heard so often, but is something that should be heard often. Policing relies on the public trust, police legitimacy and accountability, which can be destroyed by unjustifiable police doings, because police officers do not always adhere to the rule of law. When it comes to police accountability many officers do not own up to their wrongs in a situation.
When you hear the term policing it applies to the process of regulating the general health, safety, welfare, and morals of society as it relates to criminal behavior. An example to that would be the Eric Garner case, when an officer had stopped Garner in front of a local store claiming he was selling cigarettes. Garner then stated to the officer, he was not and felt as though he was being harassed the officer then put Garner in a chokehold while trying to arrest him compressing his way of breathing, causing him to lose his life.
When the officers in regard to the apprehension were questioned and asked what went wrong the officers all stated that they had followed all rules and procedures, and had done nothing wrong, when in reality the statements were false because when Garner body was examined by the medical examiner. She stated that Garner had passed away by compression of the neck. That examples goes to show that officers do not take account of their responsibility, and should be taught on how to police the correct way. After the Garner case and many other cases police accountability needs to be taken place in a more aggressive way.
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Police accountability can be separated into 3 levels of accountability the first level is self-accountability, the second level is supervisory accountability and lastly administrative accountability. These all relate to policing the police because if officers cannot own up to their wrongs, they do they will never be able to correctly serve and protect a community. With the first level being self-accountability, it reflects on the behavioral choices that comes from within the individual officers and thus, taking responsibility for one’s actions is determined by an individual, and their internal set of values.
The second level is supervisory accountability falls in line with being the second level because this level is all about how “one of the guys” becomes the boss, an officer feel as though since the superior was just one of the guys, they will have your back with the wrong that is being done, and in most cases that is not true but officers do not realize that until they put themselves in a position where they have to be held accountable of their actions. The last level of accountability is administrative accountability this is the last level because administrative accountability reflects to walking the walk and talking the talk meaning, upholding the rules and regulations of your current statue, not allowing your officers to break the rules and get away with it, and standing your ground.
In regard to all of what is being stated after an officer do not uphold to the right rules and regulations, they should be retrained and put on probation, or desk duty. Policing the police is all about ethics, ethics is about doing the right things and morally owning up to the wrong things that you have done. When an officer fails to do what is right, and especially when what they do is blatantly wrong, they corrupt the public trust more and further degrade law enforcement’s ability to work within the community and carry out its mission of trust.
