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Ilan Chesed
PPD 240, Dr. Resh
Final Paper Option #2
December 7, 2016
Public Interest vs. Narrower Department Demands
Due to reprisals for whistleblowing, police officers rarely talk on the record about
touchy subjects like over excessive force, arrest quotas and cultural problems affecting the
department. Conflicting ethical issues such as public interest versus narrower demands of the
organization, largely influences how these officers approach their job. On one hand, police
integrity and ethics are fundamental to carrying out officers’ primary duty of protecting people
and property. The public holds officers to a higher moral standard and expects that the
department do its part to ensure officers are governing their actions with a set of ethical values.
On the other hand, numbers-based policing is real, as pressure from supervisors to reach their
quotas may cloud judgment and cause policemen to try exceed numerical targets, rather than
evaluate decisions with an ethical standard. This essay will explore the story of Officer Adrian
Schoolcraft to show that unless officers can govern their actions with an internal moral code
and set of personal values they seek to uphold, the demands of a performance based system and
pressures from supervisors to reach quotas will ultimately result in unintended ethical
consequences and a failure to fulfill their obligations as public servants.
In 2008, Officer Adrian Schoolcraft, an officer in New York City’s eighty-first Police
Precinct, became concerned with the way his colleagues were carrying out their duties and the
tone set by his superiors. Schoolcraft ultimately felt that the precinct’s duty to act in the
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public’s best interest was not evident, and that officers were failing to fulfill their role as public
servants. After recording his colleagues and superiors with a digital sound recorder without the
knowledge or approval of the NYPD, Schoolcraft showed the ethical dilemma officers are
forced to encounter on a daily basis, and the competing interests they must take into
consideration when making decisions. Some of the cases Schoolcraft documented include a
conversation between a lieutenant and sergeant discussing constant pressure from to reach their
quotas, as well as a sergeant telling cops not to take robbery complaints to make it appear as
though crime rates are lower (Village Voice). Further analysis of these cases produces
interesting insights about expectations of bureaucratic behavior and ethics, as well as unintended
ethical consequences of performance based measurement.
On one hand, Schoolcraft’s decision to act on the injustices he saw, despite
consequences of potential litigation and reprisals for whistleblowing, supports our assumptions
of proper bureaucratic behavior. He shows that ultimately, professional identity and a set of
internal ethical values can trump unhealthy organizational culture. As discussed in class
thirteen, we expect that public servants will not only act within an ethical framework guided by
integrity, but also be responsible for speaking up and acting when their colleagues or
supervisors fail to do so. The extent public servants actually use an ethical framework in
practice, largely depends on the extent of moral reasoning present. Using Kohlberg’s six stages
of moral development as a framework from class eighteen, analysis of the various stages of
morality sheds some interesting light on how severely officers were influenced by the pressures
of quantitative performance measurement.
The officers exposed in Schoolcraft’s recordings showed they were acting from pre-
conventional and conventional stages, supporting the idea that performance measurements
largely influenced their ability to make choices based on ethics rather than self-interest.
Stretching boundaries to reach quotas and limiting the scope of crime reporting to satisfy
superiors and reach standards shows moral reasoning within stages two and three. These
officers were acting out of self-interest and the justification that exceeding arrest quotas while
maintaining lower crimes rates fulfilled their responsibility to the department. The
organizational culture dictated that obedience to standards and loyalty to the department
