Our findings from a survey and an incentivised cheating game conducted by phone 20 months after the implementation of the program, show that the training was successful in its primary objective of shifting officers’ values, beliefs and perceptions related to unethical behavior, as well as their own willingness to engage in such behaviour, as measured through an incentivised cheating game. The training also significantly affected officers’ attitudes toward and relationships with citizens. We see no impact, however, on officers’ reporting of unethical behaviour, their monitoring of subordinates and their perceptions of corruption in the police. We find no evidence of spillovers from trained to untrained officers, which suggests that active participation in the program is necessary for changes in attitudes and behaviours to occur.
In line with our expectations, the program operated primarily on officers who were intrinsically motivated to serve the public when they initially joined the police, and on younger, lower rank officers. Overall, we conclude that our ethics training program had a significant impact on police officers’ values, beliefs and propensity to engage in unethical behaviour, as well as their attitudes toward citizens. While the localised context of our study and the relatively small sample size make it desirable to replicate the program in other settings, we see our study as an important first step toward a better understanding of the role that carefully designed ethics training programs, centred around individual and shared identities, may play in shifting preferences and behaviours of police officers and, possibly, other service providers.
