This chapter reflects on some of the ethical dilemmas that are raised by the approach to policing advocated in this book. As I have indicated in earlier chapters, there are some real ethical issues facing both front-line police officers concerned with maintaining their own authority and those more senior officers who need to foster the legitimacy of their organisation.

At the level of both the individual officer and the institution, the ethical dilemmas spring from the use of what might be seen as ‘low-visibility techniques of persuasion’ for securing compliance and for getting people to acquiesce or accept police action that is not in their best interests. The chapter starts with a discussion of these low-visibility persuasive techniques. It then examines, in turn, the ethical dilemmas faced by individual officers and by the police as an institution. In the final part of the chapter, I suggest a resolution to these ethical issues.

To anticipate my conclusions, a focus on fair and respectful treatment does indeed provide a set of behavioural techniques that could be deployed to secure public tolerance of illegal practices or compliance with illegitimate regimes (or with judicial systems, police forces or other forms of authority). However, in relation to individual officers’ behaviour, any approach needs to specify where the boundaries fall between behaviour that is genuinely courteous and respectful, on the one hand, and that which is manipulative, on the other. (Put simply, policing styles must respect the boundaries between charm and deviousness.) More important, however, police organisations need to recognise that building trust in the police and fostering police legitimacy is not simply a tactic for securing compliance, but actually reflects values that ought to underpin democratic policing. Policing styles should be built firmly on a foundation of social rights, with a recognition that treating people with fairness and dignity flows naturally from the adoption of social rights principles. The chapter argues that policing (and the criminal law) has – and should have – an unavoidable connection to morality, while recognising potential risks in proposing close connections between moral standards and the enforcement of the law.