Law Enforcement

In an article some years ago, a police officer posed the following problem: If Christians are to love their fellows, suffer on their behalf, submit to the assaults of evil, pray without ceasing and set their minds on higher things, then how can one be a police officer and serve God, and how can one see police work as Christian service? There is, the author concluded, a deep moral ambiguity in policing that needs to be recognized, not only by those who engage in it, but also by all of us who rely on it (“In This World,” p. 253). Yet even if we grant this troubled conclusion, we are not left to reflect on such paradoxes without assistance. The following discussion seeks to indicate some directions that Christian reflection might take.

Background

Human frailty has made it necessary that our communal life be directed not only by our personal and congregational lights (whether Christian or otherwise) but also through various institutional mechanisms that promulgate rules, regulations and directives. This much seems to be implicit in the concession of kingship (1 Samuel 8), the exilic concern for the welfare of Babylon (Jeremiah 29:7) and the Pauline recognition that even secular authorities may be ministers of God’s justice for the common good (Romans 13:1-7; 1 Tim. 2:1-2). In the awareness of this John Locke, a seventeenth-century writer, argued that humankind has a need for three governmental institutions: a legislature to determine shared rules, a judiciary to interpret and apply them and an executive to give them effect.

It is to the last of these, the executive, that law enforcement belongs. Initially a communal responsibility (Phillips, pp. 17-32; Ascoli, chap. 1), law enforcement has tended to become increasingly professionalized as communities have grown in size and complexity. Nowadays such enforcement generally falls to police, though policing as we know it has been around for less than two hundred years, and the work of law enforcement today is shared among many agencies, both private and public—private security agents, corrections officers, IRS agents, postal inspectors and so on. For simplicity, our focus will be on the police.

Neither the biblical witness nor contemporary reality would limit police work to law enforcement. Indeed, if we look to the larger picture of biblical and contemporary concerns, it is preferable to see in policing a dominant concern with social peacekeeping, that is, the fostering and maintenance of a social environment in which individuals, families and groups can pursue their legitimate goals. For a Christian that will include the preservation of a social order that allows people access to and freedom to express the life of God’s kingdom. It does not imply the imposition of Christian values. In relation to a police officer’s conduct of his or her work, there are two or three biblical passages that may have fairly direct relevance to the work of a Christian police officer.

When John the Baptist is asked by soldiers (strateuomenoi) what is required of them, he tells them that they must not engage in blackmail or extortion (as characteristic abuses of their authority) and that they should be content with their pay (Luke 3:14). It is not clear whether the lack of satisfaction with their pay is what leads such officers into corruption, though such an understanding helps to explain why that issue was mentioned. What is clear, however, and is still true, is the significant temptation to corruption that is inherent in police work. Note, however, that it is not simply the self-servingness of corruption on which John the Baptist focuses but the abuse of authority that is involved. Such too is the concern of Jesus.

Jesus contrasts the authority of earthly rulers with the authority to which his disciples are to aspire: true greatness is to be found not in lording it over others but rather in service (Mark 10:42-45; Luke 22:25-26). Although police do have an earthly authority to exercise, a Christian officer will be inclined to recognize its conditional and limited character. As the Son of Man came to transform the world via an eschewal of earthly power (Matthew 4:1-11; Matthew 26:52-54), so too must his servants not seek to change it by means of that power.

Contemporary Issues

Although the biblical material is sparse, there are several problematic dimensions of contemporary police work on which Christian reflection is appropriate. The three issues considered here involve force, deception and loyalty.

Use of force. As the film Witness amply illustrated, Christian pacifists will be reluctant to countenance even the police use of force. And certainly there is a scriptural aversion to seeking to achieve significant spiritual ends by recourse to force (Matthew 26:52-54). Yet the biblical writers do not seem to support a total rejection of all force, at least in the mundane pursuit of social order.

The real problem concerns limits. Although some police officers have felt that what is necessitated by their work cannot be sanctioned by faith (“In This World,” pp. 249-53), the more general concern is the need to avoid excess because of the recognition that those with whom one must sometimes deal were created in God’s image, have before them the possibility of redemption and must therefore not be denigrated and depersonalized. Any force used must be appropriate and reasonable, guided by the legitimate law enforcement ends that need to be achieved, that is, in the case of police, by the needs of apprehension rather than those of punishment.

Use of deceptive practices. With the decline of the third degree, police have needed to find alternative ways of acquiring evidence necessary to meet the high expectations of the criminal justice system (proof beyond a reasonable doubt). And so there has been an increase in the use of deceptive tactics—from the use of informants and ruses, to wiretapping and bugging. Can such deception be justified?

Once again the problem is one of limits. Truthfulness is an important value, but not the only one. Just as the Hebrew midwives lied to Pharaoh and were blessed for it (Exodus 1:15-21), so one may sometimes promote a greater good by engaging in some form of deception. Police, therefore, in order to secure or restore a just order, may sanction the use of deceptive practices. The danger with this is that such practices—just because of the secretiveness involved—will be misused and will avoid the scrutiny to which such deviations from a norm of truthfulness should have. It is no accident that Satan is said to be the source of lies (John 8:44; compare Genesis 3) and that lying is generally condemned (Proverbs 12:22; Proverbs 13:5). But not everyone has an entitlement to full truthfulness (2 Kings 6:12-20). In their investigative and interrogatory practices, police may seek to elicit the truth by means of deception, but such activity will need to be constrained by a recognition that those who are being deceived must not be degraded. Furthermore, deception is not justified at all in the courtroom, for not only is the officer there sworn to tell the truth, but a lack of truthfulness in that context will undermine the integrity of the very forum within which other deceptive practices can be appropriately scrutinized.

Loyalty to fellow officers. Police culture is marked by deep loyalties. This has been one of policing’s great strengths, for in the face of perceived danger, it has enabled officers to rise above the limitations of self-interest to serve a collective purpose. Yet much of the criticism that is associated with police work has centered on another facet of that loyalty—the so-called blue wall of silence—that has often served to shield officers from public accountability. The blue wall, though born of loyalty, is also reinforced by fear and cynicism and ultimately perverts the very value that it seeks to manifest.

At the heart of loyalty lies the need to transcend our private and self-interested pursuits and to risk ourselves for the sake of some greater value, whether it is the good of another or some cause. Jesus’ observation that there is no greater love to be shown than that displayed when a person lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13) captures the essence of loyal love. Yet, as with other values, loyalty needs to be moderated by integrity. The loyalty of scoundrels is not more to be valued than the honor among thieves. Or, to put it somewhat differently, the loyalty that police officers owe to each other needs to engage with the loyalty that they owe to the community they serve, the loyalty they owe to the ideals that underpin their work and, in the case of Christian officers, the ultimate loyalty they owe to their Lord and his ways.

» See also: Civil Disobedience

» See also: Justice

» See also: Law

» See also: Principalities and Powers

» See also: Structures

References and Resources

D. Ascoli, The Queen’s Peace: The Origins and Development of the Metropolitan Police, 1829-1979 (London: W. Hamilton, 1979); G. Forster, “To Live Good”: The Police and the Community (Bramcote, Notts, U.K.: Grove Books, 1982); S. Holdaway, “Policing and Consent,” Modern Churchman 25, no. 3 (1983) 30-39; “In This World: By a Policeman,” Student World 56, no. 3 (1963) 247-53; J. Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); E. A. Malloy, The Ethics of Law Enforcement and Criminal Punishment (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982); A. Phillips, Ancient Israel’s Criminal Law: A New Approach to the Decalogue (New York: Schocken, 1970); T. L. Winright, “The Perpetrator as Person: Theological Reflections on the Just War Tradition and the Use of Force by Police,” Criminal Justice Ethics 14, no. 2 (1995) 37-56.

—John Kleinig