The Ethical Imperative of Transparency in Policing

Event details

Abstract: "Authorizing an organization to harmfully interfere with or intimidate people is prima facie wrong. So what could justify it, in the case of (idealized) policing? The justifying goods of law-enforcement seem to be roughly these: preserving the rule of law, securing people from violent intrusions of their rights, and securing them from unjust domination by threats of force. These are risk-reduction benefits: the benefit received by the majority of people is not that a victimization they would otherwise have suffered is directly prevented, but that their risk of being victimized is reduced through the various activities of law-enforcement. I argue that if this is the right way to think about justifying good of policing activities, then rather than viewing police as prima facie morally authorized to use the means necessary to most efficiently prevent the greatest number of victimizations, we should instead frame the task as fairly managing ineliminable social risk. This implies that principles of distributive justice strongly constrain which methods even the most ethically irreproachable police departments may employ. I will show that it consequently has several substantive implications for the contemporary practice of policing, including: (i) it is imperative not only that the laws be public, but that police policies concerning suspicious behavior, as well as patrol records and disciplinary data, be open to public scrutiny; (ii) because of the ways that they pool risk disproportionately on members of disadvantaged groups, predictive tools cannot be permissibly used to control street crime; and (iii) theorizing about the morality of individual self-and-other defense is not a good guide to the moral permissions of police."