ABSTRACT

This chapter will discuss the developing concept of prevention and organisational learning in professional standards. It is useful at this stage to explain the terminology used within this article. Some commentators consider the issue solely from a corruption perspective; elsewhere the subject is discussed with reference to complaints whereas others write in broader terms of malpractice or police deviance. The police themselves talk in terms of professional standards within which all the aforementioned descriptors can be found to reside. Distinguishing between these various terms or activities is not the purpose of this chapter (for example, see Taylor’s Chapter 3 for the definition of misconduct and Jackson’s Chapter 4 for the IPCC understanding of professional standards). Instead the intention is to focus on how to prevent problems rather than define them. Thus the terms in this chapter are used interchangeably as, in a paraphrased refrain of the US Supreme Court, ‘we may not necessarily be able to define the full range of misconduct but we all know it when we see it’ (Martinelli, 2007).