Morality can have many meanings.
For some it means the capacity of an individual to make judgements about what is right or good, while for others it describes a person whose behavior is ethical. While some behaviors can easily be categorized as right or wrong, the increasing use of order maintenance policing places officers in circumstances where there is no clear delineation between right and wrong, but instead there are gray areas. Consequently, determination on whether or not an officers actions were ethical, requires an understanding of the context in which the decision was made. Originally, considerable attention was paid to those areas in which there was consensus as to appropriate and inappropriate behavior, for example, bribery, extortion, etc. However, more recent concerns, and probably the most interesting in terms of ethics, are those gray areas of behavior where there is not consensus to the appropriateness of behavior, such as the use of discretion, appropriate use of force, and acceptable limits for undercover operations.