<p>In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/world/americas/dominican-plan-to-expe…; target="_blank">an article on the deportation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic in yesterday's New York <i>Times</i></a>, a police officer agonizes over the prospect of having to deport his best friend, a Haitian immigrant. “I have no choice,” he is quoted as saying. “It saddens me to think about being ordered to detain someone I really care about. It will be hard not to make exceptions, but I have to go about my job as professionally as I can.”<br />
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The police officer's problem is the way he puts the issue, which is typical of many ethics codes, as well. He speaks in terms of "making exceptions," of showing preferential treatment to a friend. This is certainly wrong. But government ethics is not only, or even primarily, about showing preferential treatment, about being fair. It is about dealing responsibly with conflicts of interest.<br />
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The police officer is right to believe that he has a conflict of interest, although he does not use this term. What he is wrong about is that dealing responsibly with a conflict requires doing things that would pain the official. Dealing responsibly with a conflict requires instead that a conflicted official withdraw from the matter and let other officials deal with it.<br />
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In this situation, the police officer might detain his friend because he believed he would treat him better than a police officer that did not know him. This would be preferential treatment. Or he may detain him, as in this case, because he felt this was the professional thing to do, to act fairly and equally toward everyone. But the reason doesn't matter. In government ethics, motivation and intent do not matter. The police officer should not be permitted to treat his friend better or to force himself to arrest and detain a close friend.<br />
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The same thing is true with an enemy. A police officer should not arrest someone with whom he has a strong personal enmity (unless the enmity is based on a professional situation, such as a prior arrest), someone who will rightly feel he is being treated unfairly.<br />
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In both situations, it is best for the police officer to tell his supervisor to assign the matter to another officer.<br />
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Robert Wechsler<br />
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br />
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