The Investigation of Police Officers’ Perception Related to Police Ethic Codes

Codes of ethic are crucial for a profession to produce services in quality. in case of not obeying ethical principles, services would be meaningless and futile. codes of ethic are more important for police organizations because they work for security, which can affect people’s quality of life. in addition, police can use force on citizens, which makes policing are more conducive to corrupt. police officers’ obeying codes of ethic have great potential to protect police corruption, to build public trust and to produce better security service. on the other hand codes of ethic are one of the most neglected subjects in policing. also, there is a small number of research study investigating police codes of ethic. this current study investigated the police officers’ perceptions related to codes of ethic and the factors affecting these perceptions. the data were collected from 484 police officers with different levels of rank using questionnaires. data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, anova, correlation and multiple regression tests on spss 17.0. findings showed that police officers perceived that some unethical behaviors are more serious than some others. serious unethical behaviors are seen less frequently, but punished more severely. police officers’ age, level of rank and year of service can cause significant changes on their perceptions related to codes of ethic.