The Effects of Ethics Training on Police Integrity.

This chapter explores whether police integrity can be taught or cultivated through a police integrity training. Specifically, we explore whether a 1-day training called the Holocaust, Police, and Human Rights (HPM) program has an impact on the police officers’ responses to three types of police misconduct. The main focus of the training lies on teaching the participants the causes and mechanisms of group violence, while, at the same time, reminding them that police officers have individual responsibility to act when they witness misconduct. Our results show that the HPM-training had a clear and sustainable positive effect on the level of police integrity among 200 members of the Belgian police. After the training, both immediately and after a month, members of the police considered the ethnic prejudice misconduct more serious than before the training. More importantly, after the training, members of the police were more inclined to state that they would react themselves by reporting a fellow police officer if he or she would partake in one of the three types of misconduct. These effects seemed to be sustainable as we did not only observe a significant and substantial improvement just immediately following the HPM training, but in the follow-up study done after about 1 month post-training.