After nearly seven years as a police officer in Northern California, Janelle Perez was no stranger to a courtroom. But she never imagined that she would find herself in one as a plaintiff suing her former employer, the Roseville Police Department.  In her lawsuit, Janelle cited gender discrimination and a right to privacy when she was fired for an off-duty relationship with a coworker while separated-an assertion denied by her employer and a loss only she endured. Despite winning a ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Janelle faced defeat when the ruling was suspiciously overturned. In The Moral Police, Janelle shares the story of her seven-year fight for justice in the biggest betrayal of her life. Providing an insider's look at life as a female police officer, Janelle shares what happens when you follow the rules and respect the process in a system that doesn't respect you. No matter your gender or profession, you'll gain valuable insight into the power of leadership and the devastation caused when it's misused. This book will inspire you to fight for what's right and will reveal how we can come together and do better as a society.

This book provides an examination of noble cause, how it emerges as a fundamental principle of police ethics and how it can provide the basis for corruption. The noble cause — a commitment to "doing something about bad people" — is a central "ends-based" police ethic that can be corrupted when officers violate the law on behalf of personally held moral values. This book is about the power that police use to do their work and how it can corrupt police at the individual and organizational levels. It provides students of policing with a realistic understanding of the kinds of problems they will confront in the practice of police work.

The authors develop a system of ethical standards by which to measure responsible police behavior and apply these standards to several familiar yet challenging cases encountered daily in municipal patrol work.

After nearly seven years as a police officer in Northern California, Janelle Perez was no stranger to a courtroom. But she never imagined that she would find herself in one as a plaintiff suing her former employer, the Roseville Police Department.  In her lawsuit, Janelle cited gender discrimination and a right to privacy when she was fired for an off-duty relationship with a coworker while separated-an assertion denied by her employer and a loss only she endured. Despite winning a ruling in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Janelle faced defeat when the ruling was suspiciously overturned. In The Moral Police, Janelle shares the story of her seven-year fight for justice in the biggest betrayal of her life. Providing an insider's look at life as a female police officer, Janelle shares what happens when you follow the rules and respect the process in a system that doesn't respect you. No matter your gender or profession, you'll gain valuable insight into the power of leadership and the devastation caused when it's misused. This book will inspire you to fight for what's right and will reveal how we can come together and do better as a society.

This book offers the fullest, most rigorous and up-to-date treatment of police ethics currently available.

In accepting the authority to govern, what responsibilities do the police incur? Power and Restraint answers this question by using a moral perspective grounded in the social contract, and by defining an ethical basis for police work. Howard S. Cohen and Michael Feldberg posit five standards by which to measure responsible police behavior: fair access, public trust, safety and security, teamwork, and objectivity. To test their proposals, Cohen and Feldberg apply these standards to several familiar yet challenging cases that are encountered in municipal patrol work in the United States, illustrating how police officers can develop appropriate moral responses to complex and difficult circumstances. These developed standards of ethical behavior can be used as a basis for the rehearsal of decision-making and action in police training as well as for the judicious evaluation of police behavior after the fact. The authors developed their theories over a 10-year period by spending hundreds of hours in seminars on police ethics with officers and trainers from across the country, carefully discussing specific cases and examples of moral issues that were most troubling to the officers themselves. With its systematic and integrated approach to the analysis and evaluation of cases, this timely work extends the field of police ethics. The two-section volume begins with an introduction that describes how the authors arrived at the system of ethical standards that is developed in detail in the three chapters of Part I. In Part II, four chapters present challenging scenarios that test the developed standards in the context of real policing situations, addressing such issues as excessive force, gratuities and corruption, balancing individual rights with keeping the peace, and sorting through the conflict between loyalty to colleagues and telling the truth under oath about possible wrongdoing. This book will be invaluable to instructors in university-level criminal justice courses that deal with ethics or the police. It could also be used in courses in applied ethics in philosophy and will be an important resource for police academy trainers for both in-service and recruit training.

The police are among the most powerful agents of the state. They can disrupt the daily routines of citizens more than any other public official by deciding who shall be stopped, who shall be detained, who shall be arrested, and who shall go free. This book is intended to document, aid and abet the work of analysis now well underway and to enhance the discussions that have begun.