Dirty Harry Problem Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Police may face a conflict between the demand that they should act to bring about just outcomes and the requirement that they uphold the law. Carl B. Klockars called this kind of situation the “Dirty Harry” problem. While Klockars believed that it was at least possible that police facing such a conflict could be justified in violating the law, some other commentators have disagreed. In any case, police ethics needs to be sensitive to the issues which arise in this kind of situation.

The Dirty Harry problem takes its name from the 1971 Warner Bros. movie Dirty Harry. In the defining scenario of that movie, a psychotic killer, Scorpio, has kidnapped a 14-year-old girl, and demanding $200,000 ransom, indicates that the girl is buried with a limited supply of air. Inspector “Dirty Harry” Callahan is charged with delivering the ransom to Scorpio, but when they meet Scorpio tells Callahan he has decided to let the girl die and tries to kill him. In the ensuing struggle Callahan manages to stab Scorpio in the leg before he escapes. Harry tracks Scorpio down and shoots him in his wounded leg as he tries to flee. When Scorpio still refuses to disclose the girl’s location, Callahan stands on his mangled leg and tortures the information out of him—too late, the girl is already dead.

Callahan appears to have powerful reasons both in favor of and against torturing Scorpio. On the one hand, it appears be the only means available to him to obtain the information which will enable the life of an innocent child to be saved. On the other hand, torture is both immoral and illegal.

Since there are strong moral reasons both in favor of and against Callahan torturing Scorpio, he faces what Klockars calls a moral dilemma— “a situation from which one cannot emerge innocent no matter what one does.” As Klockars noted, situations of the kind facing Callahan had already generated a good deal of discussion in the philosophical literature under the description of Dirty Hands situations. People face such a situation when the following occurs:

They have the opportunity to achieve some morally good end, and they aim to do so.
There are means available to them to achieve this end that are normally morally wrong (“dirty”).
The use of these means is the best, or perhaps the only practicable, way of ensuring that this good end is realized.
The good likely to be achieved by using the dirty means substantially outweighs the evil likely to follow from their use.

The first two of these conditions often hold; people commonly find themselves in situations in which they could achieve good ends by using dirty means. Furthermore, sometimes such means are the only or best way to achieve these ends, satisfying the third condition. Normally, however, the fact that someone would have had to use dirty means to produce a good outcome discharges them from any obligation to do so; conversely, that a good outcome was aimed at or even achieved does not provide sufficient justification for the use of dirty means. That is, there is at least a strong presumption that good ends do not justify the use of dirty means.

This presumption becomes moot, however, when the fourth condition holds. If someone can save the lives of a number of innocent hostages by making false promises to the hostage takers, for example, there seem to be powerful reasons for them to make such promises. A person who supports their refusal to do so by appealing to the presumption that the end does not justify the means may be accused of being more concerned with maintaining their own moral purity regardless of the cost to others. Dirty Hands situations appear to support the apparently paradoxical claim that there are some morally bad actions that are nevertheless justified.

The distinguishing features of the Dirty Harry variant of the Dirty Hands situation are, first, that the protagonist is a police officer and, second, that the “dirtiness” of the apparently desirable course of action arises from its illegality. So understood, the Dirty Harry scenario highlights the way in which the animating goal of the role of the police officer—broadly, to protect the fundamental rights of members of a community—can come into tension with one of the most important means available to the officer to achieve that goal, the enforcement of the law. Note that the reasons both for and against torturing Scorpio are stronger for Callahan by virtue of his role as a police officer than they would be for ordinary members of the public. While everyone has a duty to protect innocent life, if they can do so without undue personal cost, that duty is particularly strong for police officers, as the protection and preservation of innocent lives is one of the most important ends of policing. Police are generally better equipped and should be prepared to pay a higher cost to achieve that end than other citizens. Moreover, people will think of the police officer who is highly motivated to protect the innocent as a better officer, not just a better person, than the one who is not.

On the other hand, the reasons to conform to the legal prohibition against torturing Scorpio are also stronger for Callahan than they are for ordinary citizens. It remains a matter of controversy as to whether ordinary citizens have a duty to obey the law, and if they do, how stringent that duty is. But there can be no such doubt about the duty of police officers. The rule of law, essential to a morally well-ordered society, would become unworkable if agents of that rule such as police officers were prepared to act illegally whenever they judged there to be a good reason to do so, even if that reason is a moral one. Moreover, police officers are sworn to uphold the law.

As Klockars notes, the natural response to the Dirty Harry scenario as depicted in the movie is to support Harry’s action—viewers want him to do the dirty thing to try to save a child’s life. Nevertheless, some commentators have claimed that in fact, police are never justified in resorting to such dirty means. Some claim that bad means are never justified by good ends and point to the oaths that police officers swear. Others, such as Edwin Delattre, deny that police actually face a moral dilemma in Dirty Harry situations, since he holds that those who choose the “clean” alternative (in Callhans’s case, trying to find another way to discover the girl’s whereabouts) are not morally tainted, though he also thinks that those who choose the dirty course of action may be excused for their choice.

No doubt Hollywood movies and the like often present sensationalized, unrealistic depictions of police work. Clearly the considerations in favor of police conforming to the law are very weighty indeed. But to deny that police could ever be justified in getting their hands dirty is, in effect, to make the counterintuitive claim that there never could be a situation in which the duty of an officer to obey the law could be outweighed by the good consequences of doing so.

Situations in which police actually would be justified in breaking the law may be rare or even nonexistent. However, the tension that is highlighted in Dirty Harry scenarios between the role of the police officer as a protector of the community and his or her duty to enforce and uphold the law is real and common enough and has important implications for police ethics. As Klockars points out, the tendency to see the demands of due process and the like as unfortunate barriers to punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent is one of the forces driving police “noble cause corruption”—the resort to corrupt actions, such as unjustified use of force, “verballing” suspects, lying in court, and the like, to bring about what is regarded as a just outcome.

Effective training will help police understand that too glib a resort to Dirty Harry reasoning can actually be counterproductive, subverting public trust in the criminal justice system, and corrupting officers who engage in it, and is often ineffective even in achieving its immediate goal (as when evidence extracted by coercion is found inadmissible in court). Finally, both police and the public have good reason to expect that the conditions that make resort to such “dirty” means more attractive to police, such as pressure to produce results, lack of resources, training, and the like, will be addressed.

Bibliography:

Coady, Cecil. “The Problem of Dirty Hands.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2009) http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/entries/dirty-hands (Accessed May 2013).
Delattre, Edwin. Character and Cops: Ethics in Policing. 5th ed. Washington, DC: AEI Press,
Dempsey, John S. and Linda Forst. An Introduction to Policing. 6th ed. Clifton Park, NY: Cengage, 2012.
Klockars, Carl. “The ‘Dirty Harry’ Problem.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v.452 (1980).

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