THE POLICE OFFICER’S SOLUTION TO MORAL DILEMMAS AND DILEMMAS CONNECTED TO THE ENFORCEMENT OF LAW

The procedural justice theory states that if legal authorities show respect to moral values and laws, citizens will collaborate with them and will better obey the law. Starting from this idea, the study analyses – based on an applied questionnaire – the way in which police officers solve moral problems and choose between moral and legal, between legal and illegal. The results show that police officers are not trained to understood moral and legal problems or to make the right choice: 40.8% of the police officers would sacrify five persons to save one; 68.3% did not recognize that they did not know a person who even did not exist; 26.3% would condemn a person who committed a crime, while 45.3% of them would condemn persons who, possibly, have moral responsibility for that crime; less than 12% did not try to intervene when being fined for the non-compliance to the traffic law, 83.1% would choose to pay the fine and only 59.5% understood the sense of the traffic law. These data put under question the way of selection and training of the police officer