Human beings are human beings, to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, before they are professionals and public servants. And, as Mill saw, if they become able, judicious, and competent human beings, they will be prepared to become able, judicious, and competent in the specific walks of public and private life that they enter. This is true of people who enter policing, just as it is true of the rest of humanity.

The fundamentals of good judgment-and the fundamentals of character excellence-do not vary significantly from one walk of life to another, even though the domains of required factual and technical competence often do. A competitive police examination for promotion and a qualifying examination for certification as a professional engineer cover very different ground. But assiduous preparation and diligent attentiveness are suited to both, and cheating is wrong no matter the topic.

Honorable and wise individuals who can be trusted to exercise discretion and authority have much in common, whether they are conducting themselves as surgeons or teachers, police or engineers, parents or neighbors. The habits of justice, temperance, courage, fortitude, honesty, and compassion constitutive of the achievement of integrity transcend vocation. S0. too, do the intellectual virtues constitutive of wisdom- concentration, a balanced sense of proportion and relative importance, a keen eye for relevance and rigor, generous understanding, intellectual honesty and humility, timely decisiveness without arrogance or delusions of infallibility, and a reliable knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses.

These common features of the human condition suggest why it is misleading to speak of medical ethics rather than ethics in medicine, business ethics rather than ethics in business, professional ethics rather than ethics in the professions, police ethics rather than ethics in policing, and so on. Ethics is ethics, however diverse may be the range of its applications.

Similarly, the transvocational status of integrity and wisdom make it both possible and necessary to identify and describe the fundamental ethical and intellectual purposes of general education without referring to subject matter specific to any vocation. Such a description, much needed in our own time, was offered with particular eloquence by a nineteenth century English schoolmaster, cited by Michael Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics: "[Y]ou go to a great school ...for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice, a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refusion, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. And above all you go to a great school for self-knowledge."

The indispensability to responsible policing of these moral and mental accomplishments cannot be lost on experienced insiders or knowledgeable observers. Nor is there any escape from the staggering price of their absence. Variations in the character, judgment, and conduct of police illuminate in practice the insight of James Madison that for governments to advance justice, they must be based on constitutions whose first purpose is to secure public servants who have "most wisdom to discern and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society."

Not long ago, I entered a crime scene in a midwestern inner city with a lieutenant of homicide. A man's body lay on the floor of the bloody kitchen in the small house where he lived. The man had been beaten to death so savagely that homicide detectives and
medical examiners at the scene were unable to tell whether he had also been shot.

Well-trained patrol officers outside the house kept the curious at a distance as attendants carried the body to the ambulance. Investigators who had canvassed the neighborhood in search of witnesses throughout the afternoon spent time discussing their next steps, explicitly organizing for the sake of mutual cooperation.

Plainclothes detectives and supervisors-women and men ranging from their late twenties to their forties-mingled with uniformed officers as they sealed the crime scene. Talk was as strictly business, respectful of the victim, with no grisly jokes to counter the grim and gory reality.

The homicide lieutenant in charge was a born teacher. Well educated, articulate, experienced, he carefully instructed each of his people about their follow-up responsibilities. He took questions patiently. In this city, unlike many larger ones, most homicides are solved, and these police were determined to keep it that way.

An hour later, several of the same police worked the street where two teenage boys-one, certainly, a member of the local gang-had fought with a knife and an axe over a bicycle that neither of them owned. Both were hurt, neither would die.

The uniformed police at the scene were impressively competent. Most of them conducted interviews well. They clearly knew how much of policing consists of talking with people -asking the right questions, listening diligently, giving people room to tell their stories. With girls, boys, and women alike-there were few grown men to be seen- the police were respectful but insistent, taking care to pronounce difficult and unusual names correctly, comparing notes, covering the ground again.

The officers' notes of interviews with witnesses were well written, thorough, legible, to the point, their drawings prepared with due attention to relevant detail. They reviewed with the lieutenant what they had done and proposed charges to be filed.

Where he approved, he explained why, and where he thought another course might be wiser, he asked whether they had considered it. Young officers, properly trained and already fit to bear the public trust, visibly learned in his presence. His instructions were unambiguous, and differences of race, ethnicity, and gender among these police posted no obstacles to communication and cooperation. It is not everywhere so in America.

Such high levels of character and judgment can be found in virtually all police departments of any size. But not all departments enjoy an abundance of personnel who are so thoroughly fit to bear the public trust.

Standards of recruitment are not everywhere high enough, sometimes because of mandates to change the composition of the department, sometimes in order to enlarge the applicant pool, sometimes to compete for personnel despite low salaries. Some departments try to meet high standards but lack the money to conduct rigorous background investigations and psychological testing essential to weeding out prospective candidates who are unsuited for policing. In one small Virginia town, the entire police department was suspended in 1991 when officials learned that no background investigations had been conducted for anyone.

Where recruitment standards are too low, training is often more difficult and less effective, and as a result, closer field supervision than can be provided, is often needed. Unfortunately, budget cuts often lead to reductions in supervisory personnel, a profoundly dangerous outcome for public and police alike.

The effects are disheartening to watch. In one mid-Atlantic city, beset by a history of corruption in government and poor performance by some police, inexperienced officers sometimes jeopardize others and themselves by failing to take proper control in risky situations. They seem not to know how to use their legitimate authority to minimize danger, and their judgment is too lacking in foresight to prevent clever and assertive suspects from manipulating them.

Such incompetent officers are normally vulnerable to panic, and therefore to brutality. When they feel a situation getting away from them, they tend to behave rashly and unpredictably. This makes them dangerous to suspects, bystanders, and each other. One distinguished senior officer, after we had observed this problem together, said to me, "They don't want to listen. We can't seem to teach them much:'

In a city two thousand miles to the west, the situation is discernibly different. Plagued by the incursion of Los Angeles-based gangs, the police department formed one of the best qualified gang enforcement units in the country. Though skeptical of state laws that legalize concealed sophisticated weapons, and of media coverage that glorifies gangs and spurs their members to violence, these police are not cynical. Limited by lack of funding for drug stings, they persist.

The command sergeant-with eighteen years experience-hand picked that officers for the unit. He also wisely secured for his staff police confined to light duty by injury or pregnancy to maintain daily updated computer intelligence on all known gang members and activities.

The gang unit members provide instructions on gang enforcement for police departments throughout their region, commonly traveling on their own time and at their own expense, except for motel costs. Why? In their reasoning, they show that the comprehensiveness of their judgment goes far beyond immediate questions of what to do in specific critical situations. They say simply, "If we don't do this, the gangs will have an easy time of it all around us. We will be surrounded:' This is the quality of judgment required in any walk of life to anticipate and avoid the consequences of narrow self preoccupation.

Since the savage beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles on March 3, 1991, when working on ethics with police, I am now often asked, "What should we do about video cameras out there?" The answer is not complex: if police are busy second-guessing themselves or looking behind them to see whether they are being taped, they will not handle the situations in front of them reliably. So I tell them, "Do your job the right way, the way you have been trained -use only minimum necessary force, and respect the people you serve- and you don't have to worry about cameras." And I remind them always that nothing is incorruptible -except personal character that will not be corrupted.