POLICE FORCES AND SOCIETY: DESIGNING AND DEVELOPING AN ETHICALLY TRANSFORMED POLICE ORGANIZATION

Police Officials are ‘boundary spanners’ in the sense that they are commissioned to deal with several stakeholders of the society, in which they operate, to protect, promote, and project their principal interests. Some of the interactions between police organizations and society are bumpy and controversial. Police and Society do not always get along well with each other. Many social issues that involve police interventions and punitive action or remedial measures are almost always charged with emotion. A few of them seem to pit Police personnel and stakeholders of the society against one another in bitter struggles. While proceeding with the narrative, the reasons for these challenges and difficulties need to be addressed and answered especially from an ethical perspective. Even though the Police-and-Society interface is sometimes scarred by the brickbats hurled by the stakeholders on both sides, we need to build the needed capacities to ethically deal with them and to cooperate smoothly. More often than not—and certainly more often than the stakeholders of the general public realize—Police and Society collaborate in solving problems and ethical dilemmas that neither one acting alone could solve. The ‘social relationships’ are the key to a more effective social role for Police organizations and are one way to increase ethically responsible regulatory, punitive, and corrective police interventions. Administrative challenges that are typical of today’s turbulent societies need to be analyzed broadly using ethical reasoning as a necessary preliminary. Later, a high degree of social sophistication and administration skill is needed by the people working in police organizations before they manage to find ethically acceptable ways to deal with the challenges and concerns at hand. An attempt is made in this ‘concept paper’ to combine the ‘plot—“Ethics” with the ‘central characters’ of the Ecosystem of a Police Organization to produce the “narrative” for the theme of the Article, which deals mainly with a complex range of Police-and-society relationships and ethical issues arising out of them.