The Dirty Harry Problem

Policing constantly places its practitioners in situations in which good ends can be achieved by dirty means. When the ends to be achieved are urgent and unquestionably good and only a dirty means will work to achieve them, the policeman faces a genuine moral dilemma. A genuine moral dilemma is a situation from which one cannot emerge innocent no matter what one does-employ a dirty means, employ an insufficiently dirty means, or walk away. In such situations in policing, Dirty Harry problems, the danger lies not in becoming guilty of wrong-that is inevitable-but in thinking that one has found a way to escape a dilemma which is inescapable. Dire consequences result from this misunderstanding. Policemen lose their sense of moral proportion, fail to care, turn cynical, or allow their passionate caring to lead them to employ dirty means too crudely or too readily. The only means of assuring that dirty means will not be used too readily or too crudely is to punish those who use them and the agency which endorses their use. Carl B . Klockars is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Delaware. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous journal articles and The Professional Fence, a life history of a dealer in stolen property, and is coeditor of Deviance and Decency, 4 collection of essays on the ethics of research with deviant subjects. WHEN and to what extent does call the Dirty Harry problem in the morally good end warrant policing, not the least of which is that or justify an ethically, politically, it is insoluble. However, a great deal or legally dangerous means for its can be learned about police work achievement? This is a very old by examining some failed solutions, question for philosophers. ~ l t h o u ~ h three of which I consider in the it has received extensive consideration in policelike occupations and is at the dramatic core of police fiction and detective novels, I know of not a single contribution to the criminological or sociogical literature on policing which raises it explicitly and examines its implications.' This is the case in mite of the fact that there is considLrable evidence to suggest that it is not only an ineluctable part of police work, but a moral problem with which police themselves are quite familiar. There are, I believe, a number of good reasons why social scientists have avoided or neglected what I like to 1. In the contemporary philosophical literature, particularly when raised for the vocation of politics, the question is commonly referred to as the Dirty Hands problem after J. P. Sartre's treatment of it in Dirty Hands, (Les Maines Sales, 1948) and in No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Modern Library, 1950). Despite its modem name, the problem is very old and has been taken up by Machiavelli in The Prince (1513) and The Discourses (1519) (New York: Modem Library, 1950); by Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," (1919) in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. and trans. H. Gerth and C. W. Wills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); and by Albert Camus, "The Just Assassins,"'(l949) in Caligula and Three Other Plays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958).See Michael Walzer's brilliant critique of these contributions, "Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands" Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2(2) (winter 1972). Likewise the Dirty HandsIDirty Hany problem is implicitly or explicitly raised in virtually every work of Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, James Cain, and other Tough Guy Writers of The Thirties, ed. David Madden (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), as they are in all of the recent work of Joseph Wambaugh, particularly The Blue Knight, The New Centurions, and The Choirboys. following pages. First, though, it is necessary to explain what a Dirty Harry problem is and what it is about it that makes it so problematic. The Dirty Harry problem draws its name from the 1971 Warner Brothers film Dirty Harry and its chief protagonist, antihero Inspector Harry "Dirty Harry" Callahan. The film features a number of events which dramatize the Dirty Harry problem in different ways, but the one which does so most explicitly and most completely places Harry in the following situation. A 14-yearold girl has been kidnapped and is being held captive by apsychopathic killer. The killer, "Scorpio," who has already struck twice, demands $200,000 ransom to release the girl, who is buried with just enough oxygen to keep her alive for a few hours. Harry gets the job of delivering the ransom and, after enormous exertion, finally meets Scorpio. At their meeting Scorpio decides to renege on his bargain, let the girl die, and kill Harry. Harry manages to stab Scorpio in the leg before he does so, but not before Scorpio seriously wounds Harry's partner, an inexperienced, idealistic, slightly ethnic, former sociology major. Scorpio escapes, but Harry manages to track him down through the clinic where he was treated'for his wounded leg. After learning that Scorpio lives on the grounds of a nearby football stadium, Harry breaks into his apartment; finds guns and other evidence of his guilt, and finally confronts Scorpio on the 50-yard line, where Harry shoots him in the leg as he is trying to escape. Standing over Scorpio, Harry demands to know where the girl is buried. Scorpio refuses to disclose her location, demanding his rights to a lawyer. As the camera draws back from the scene Harry stands on Scorpio's bullet-mangled leg to torture a confession of the girl's location from him. As it turns out, the girl is already dead and Scorpio must be set free. Neither the gun found in the illegal search, nor the confession Harry extorted, nor any of its fruits-including the girl's body-would be admissible in court. The preceding scene, the heart of Dirty Harry, raises a number of issues of far-reaching significance for the sociology of the police, the first of which will now be discussed. As we have phrased it previously, the Dirty Harry problem asks when and to what extent does the morally good end warrant or justify an ethically, politically, or legally dangerous means to its achievement? In itself, this question assumes the possibility of a genuine moral dilemma and posits its existence in a means-ends arrangement which may be expressed schematically as follows: