Ethical Practice in Policing

All police forces in England and Wales are currently in the process of implementing the new code of ethics (CoE) designed by the College of Policing. This provides an opportunity to learn from the views and experiences of serving police officers and members of staff and how they relate to professional ethics and the recently introduced policing code of ethics. We were interested in how the CoE relates to policing-professionals’ sense of self at work and how they construct an image and discourse of what it means to be an ethical and professionally competent police officer. By exploring how police professionals understand their roles in relation to their own sense of moral identity and outside demands on them, we analysed not only how policing professionals piece together a sense of an ethical self, but also how such identity making fits within the context of a contemporary policing organisation. We were also interested in the way in which questions of ethical practice are embedded in current training and development for police professionals: how does this relate to the ethical identity work of police professionals?