Chapter 2 introduced two ideas from the literature on ethical failures:
Volitional failure – defined by people knowingly acting unethically in their self- interest.
Cognitive failure – where people know the standards that apply within their
organisations, but do not accept they apply to them or justify why an exception applies in their case.
lack of integrity. It may be the responsibilities and challenges of leadership that increases the risk of a person ‘crossing the boundary’ into some forms of unethical behaviour. In the ‘real world’, however, these two concepts are likely not to be discrete, but to exist on a continuum, with varying degrees of self-interest and ‘neutralisation’ (Sykes and Matza 1957) being
evident.
Two slightly different points should be mentioned. The first is the matter of where
professional judgement becomes a conduct issue, notably in respect of some of the decisions referred to above that have to be taken at chief officer level, often on the basis of advice received from others. That can only be assessed on a case-by-case basis. The second, which will be discussed below in respect of personal vulnerabilities, concerns where misconduct arises either directly or indirectly from a lack of individual competence, and seems to be a distinct problem from the kind of decision-making being discussed here.
Volitional failure
There was a general consensus among our interviewees that only a very small number of chief officers who have been involved in misconduct have done so for personal gain (understood broadly) in circumstances where they have been aware of the rules but disregarded them (e.g. a chief officer procuring a contract, from which they benefited, without following correct procedure, having got a member of police staff to countersign the purchase order).
Another area where volitional failure seemed to have arisen was in the context of personal relationships, particularly relationships that constituted ‘notifiable associations’ for the purposes of vetting (e.g. where a previously undisclosed partner was subject to a criminal investigation) and especially where there was a degree of adultery or other sensitivities. In at least two cases, it was suggested that chief officers had been less than candid when responding to questions about their alleged misconduct in situations where circumstantial evidence had pointed towards them being culpable, but where there was no compelling evidence or ‘organisational weaknesses’ had provided them with an alibi (for example, by allowing them to argue that they had not been formally notified about changes to expenses accounting rules in the absence of a document audit trail).
In these cases, the chief officers did not stand to benefit directly from their alleged actions in a material sense (the exception being the contract example). However, they did seem to gain on a personal and professional level, as result of them protecting their reputations (which might benefit them indirectly in a financial sense by preventing the loss of future earnings).
Cognitive failure and exceptionalism
Where circumstances were less clear-cut – and this applies to more of the cases we discussed – one of two issues was evident. First, chief officers were reported to have disputed their behaviour constituted misconduct at all:
I don’t think ACPO see the stuff they do as misconduct. I think they see it that’s how the business is done… ‘I don’t see it as misconduct. I did it because I
needed to achieve this aim.’ I think they just see this as how business is done. I don’t think they sit and look at it and see it as an integrity matter. And if you ask people sometimes what is integrity, they… don’t recognise that some of the stuff they do is acting without integrity. (IO)
…the moral compass just it’s all gone, it’s just disappeared for some reason… I just think that judgement is what’s gone awry… if you read the interviews from
the [particular case], they just couldn’t see they’d done anything wrong. (Stakeholder)
Second, we were told of cases of exceptionalism, in that chief officers seemed to have understood the rules, but felt they did not apply in their particular case. Several cases
highlighted the way that chief officers allegedly behaved in a way that suggested the rules did not apply to them.
It’s almost like, ‘These rules don’t apply to me’. Certainly [the chief officer] was off the lead. Any sense of the rules which apply to everybody else around
propriety did not apply to the most senior person. (S/IO and Stakeholder) …it wasn’t necessarily what he did, for me, that caused him the most difficulty. It was his response to being investigated. It was kind of, ‘I haven’t done
anything wrong, I’m the boss, I have it within my powers to [do that]’. (S/IO and Stakeholder)
It was notable that a number of the cases we discussed or identified through open sources involved chief officers who had previously held senior PSD roles and who would have, presumably, been particularly well-informed about the standards expected and that they apply equally to everyone.