DQ: Employment with the law enforcement agency

In about 4 months, you will be graduating from the police academy. Your friend, Jim, works at the same precinct to which you are applying. You know that upon your employment with the law enforcement agency, you may be required to take a polygraph test with questions about prior arrests, drug use, or theft—any questions that could disqualify you as a police officer. Your friend tells you to lie on the questionnaire and not to include information from your old college days when you both were arrested for marijuana possession. Although the case was dismissed, it still is in the court system. Jim stated that his district does not employ the polygraph; it just has a questionnaire. Jim admitted to lying on his questionnaire to seek his employment.

Are ethics limited to duty, or does it extend to personal desires?

What are the implications of lying on a questionnaire even though the department may not find out the truth?

What would you gain if the truth was told?

If you do tell the truth, would you include the information regarding your friend, explaining that you and your friend were arrested?

Discuss the implications of including your arrest and the implications for including your friend. Use theoretical concepts associated with ethics to help you determine the consequences (good or bad) associated with immoral behaviors and how you formulate your decision.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument. Get homework help here