Abstract
Scandals over covert policing, historic misconduct, corruption and police-involved shootings have, alongside changing demands and budget austerity, presented police leaders with a very challenging political and operational environment and a loss of legitimacy. In the UK and the USA, there have been debates about the need for a new police professionalism and a strategy focused on building and sustaining police legitimacy. This chapter will draw on the Neyroud Review of Police Leadership, the President’s Commission on Policing for the twenty-first century and the work of Bottoms and Tankebe on police legitimacy to explore ethical leadership in policing. Drawing on Bottoms and Tankebe, the chapter will focus specifically on four dimensions of ethical policing: procedural justice, distributive justice, lawfulness and effectiveness. A particular focus on effectiveness will be the extent to which “doing the right things for the right reasons” increasingly requires police leaders to draw on the best evidence to challenge existing practice and develop and test evidence-based approaches.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for the comments of his colleagues, Justice Tankebe, Sir Anthony Bottoms, Sir Denis O’Connor and Lawrence Sherman as the ideas in this chapter have developed.
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Neyroud, P. (2019). Ethical Leadership in Policing: Towards a New Evidence-Based, Ethical Professionalism?. In: Ramshaw, P., Silvestri, M., Simpson, M. (eds) Police Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21469-2_1
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