ABSTRACT
Conflicts of interest can arise for police in a number of different ways, such as through a relationship that a police officer has with someone involved in a police matter, through the financial interests of a police officer, or through other employment that an officer holds outside of the police service. Conflicts of interest are a problem for police as they may lead an officer into inappropriate or even illegal conduct, and they tend to create the appearance of bias in an organization that should appear to be strictly impartial in the discharge of its duties to the community. The usual method of dealing with a conflict of interest is to disclose the conflict, to remove the source of conflict, such as by officers divesting themselves of other financial interests, or to avoid the conflict, such as by officers distancing themselves from the particular matter of conflict. However, the very nature of policing is such that some officers, particularly those working in restricted circles, will be faced with conflicts of interest that cannot be dealt with by such means. These sorts of situations present an unavoidable problem for the police officers involved.
Over the last 20 years or so, conflicts of interest have come to be recognized as a significant problem in many professions. A recent book, Conflict of Interest in the Professions, edited by Michael Davis and Andrew Stark (2001) examined the problems that conflict of interest may cause in a wide range of professions, from law and government, 388through engineering, journalism, academia, the financial markets, and health care. In this chapter I wish to examine the problems that conflicts of interest may cause in what is now being recognized as an emerging profession, the profession of policing. Although conflicts of interest in this area share many of the problems of conflict of interest in other professions, I would suggest that there are features of police work that lead to conflict of interest problems that are in some ways unique, and are not amenable to resolution through use of the normal methods. It is this fact that leads me to suggest that conflict of interest is an unavoidable problem in policing.
