The Ethical Acceptability of Gratuities: Still Saying "Yes" after All These Years

It is flattering to be invited to respond to critics of my previous work in Criminal Justice Ethics, (1) and it would be even more flattering were those critics not so critical, or were my work truly original. The position I have taken with regard to police accepting gifts and gratuities was not originally mine but was based on many earlier discussions of the topic. I have repeatedly noted that the agency in which I served in the 1970s allowed its officers to accept small gifts and taught us to distinguish them from the conditional gratuities that the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) code taught us to reject. As I examined these matters as a graduate student, I found arguments and evidence in support of this position in the views of such distinguished criminal justice scholars as Dorothy Heid Bracey, Herman Goldstein, and Albert J. Reiss, Jr. This is not to say that they openly advocated the position I took, but what they and others presented in their reasoned discussions fortified me in staking out the position I did in 1988, defended again in 1994, (2) and still support. Primary among my theoretical predecessors is Bracey. She wrote about why corruption persists in spite of a broad consensus against it and serious efforts to eradicate it. (3) She saw that gratuities serve functions beyond the improper personal enrichment of corrupted officials, such as agency solidarity and good relations with some elements of the public. She seemed quite able to distinguish gratitude from corruption, and still recognizes the value of gift exchange in building and solidifying good police-community relations. (4) This viewpoint has been supported by Joseph A. Schafer and others as they see the value of acceptance of minor gratuities within community policing efforts. (5) For example, Herman Goldstein saw some gratuities as sincere expressions of appreciation for lawful services appropriately rendered. (6) Even Edwin Delattre, who is clearly outspoken in his opposition to gratuities, (7) acknowledged that the "slippery slope" was not inevitable and that some forms of hospitality shown to police were not wrongful: My experience leads me to conclude that, for some police, the small kindness--like making fresh coffee when the police arrive in the middle of the night--is just that. It is not like a tip for a bellhop, and is not the beginning of a slippery slope. Since the intentions of the restaurant personnel are often equally innocent, police acceptance and appreciation are not illicit. (8) Reiss was an early researcher on police violations of law and regulations, supervising ride-along observational studies of actual police behavior. (9) His observers witnessed few serious violations of law, but did see a substantial number of violations of police anti-gratuities policies: Many businessmen in a community engage in exchanges or practices with police officers that from the standpoint of the law could bring charges of bribery. A variety of such practices were uncovered in our observations of the police including almost daily free meals, or cigarettes, the profferment of gifts marking anniversaries and holidays, and discounts on purchases. Such practices are specifically prohibited by the rules and regulations of any police department and subject to disciplinary action if "officially" discovered. (10) His observational data confirmed my own more limited personal police experiences. I knew that minor gifts and gratuities were commonplace in my agency and in the agencies I studied in researching my dissertation. Those establishments not offering them were few, and the very few officers not taking them were clearly the exceptions. The exchanges matched Reiss's carefully worded description about a "profferment" of gifts, and not a solicitation of gifts, although it would be shamefully naive to believe that police officers never solicit such gifts. The Knapp Commission's 1972 report addressed various payments to police, observing that "[a] third category of payments to the police is that of gratuities, which the Commission feels cannot in the strictest sense be considered a matter of police corruption, but which has been included here [in the report] because it is a related--and ethically borderline--practice, which is prohibited by Department regulations, and which often leads to corruption. …