Güvenlik Çalışmaları Dergisi
Yazarlar: Osman KAYABAŞI
Konular:-
Anahtar Kelimeler:Police Integrity,Police Ethics,Code of Silence,Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,Narcotics and Prevention of Smuggling Directorate,Survey.
Özet: Narcotics and Prevention of Smuggling Directorate, which is one of the twelve police directorates in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus TRNC Police Organization, is the police unit that combating drugs in TRNC. This article explores Narcotics and Prevention of Smuggling Directorate police officers’ perceptions about police ethics in TRNC, by using the second version of international police integrity questionnaire developed by Klockars and colleagues. The questionnaire administered to police officers which employed in Narcotics and Prevention of Smuggling Directorate in December 2013. Firstly, police officers evaluated eleven hypothetical scenarios. After reviewing each scenario, the respondents were asked to report; own and others’ evaluations of its seriousness, knowledge of official rules, views about appropriate and expected discipline, and own and others’ willingness to report the misconduct. The respondents evaluated scenarios described in the questionnaire to range in seriousness from the least serious to the most serious. Unlike the results of similar surveys, in three scenarios failure to arrest friend with warrant, cover-up of police driving under the influence accident, and sergeant fails to halt beating of child abuser respondents tended to have a higher view of the integrity of colleagues compared to their own position. According to the results most of the respondents supported and expected dismissal for the theft of knife from crime scene and autobody shop 5% kickback scenarios; they only supported dismissal for unjustifiable use of deadly force scenario; and they only expected dismissal for false report on drug on dealer scenario. Although most of the respondents supported and expected some discipline for the rest scenarios described in the questionnaire. We also measured the contours of the code of silence and found that the code was much stronger for the behaviors evaluated as the least serious and the weakest for the behaviors evaluated as the most serious. Finally, we found that, most of the respondents believed that other officers in their directorate would be much more likely to protect all these behaviors -except unjustifiable use of deadly force, verbal abuse, cover-up of police driving under the influence accident, and sergeant fails to halt beating of child abuser - in the code of silence than they themselves would