Monks, Bailiffs, Constables, and Others

This chapter discusses how, during the period known as the Dark Ages and then the Middle Ages, a few policing institutions began to be developed, but often their existence could be brief and limited in scope. Throughout the period, princes had to fight to gain or maintain territory, and ensuring the safety of frontiers meant that they appointed administrators and/or warriors to protect territory, or to bring in soldiers and revenue as and when necessary. The warriors, increasingly known as knights, established themselves as hereditary rulers over the territory granted to them by the prince. Municipalities could acquire a significant degree of independence from the local prince, and they were permitted to establish their own laws; they also recruited men to enforce those laws, which included market regulation, the supervision of abattoirs, watching for fire, and ensuring the safety and tidiness of the streets. The municipal guards, often backed by all fit men in a town, might also be called upon occasionally to defend the walls and outlying territory. The chapter then considers the role of warrior monks, clergy, and feudal municipalities. Ultimately, officers such as bailiffs, sheriffs, or constables, and institutions such as the watch, emerged across medieval Europe, but they were not police officers in the sense of people seeking to prevent crime or regularly gathering information about offences and pursuing offenders beyond their boundaries.

The Understanding of Public Service Ethics in Turkish Municipalities

Recent legal regulations provided more authorities and resources to municipalities, meanwhile corruption and unethical conduct cases were experienced more in the municipalities in Turkey. This paper aimed to detect the “public service ethics understanding” of municipality administrators in Turkey. To this end, a questionnaire was conducted among elected and appointed administrators of 9 urban-district municipalities in Ankara. Although the majority of municipality administrators agree that institutions and legal-administrative regulations based on universal values of public service ethics rather than the personal moral values, they still keep some local moral values which tolerate corrupt and unethical conducts. This reflects the dilemma of the Turkish administrators on this issue. Therefore, hard (like institutional and legal-administrative regulations) and soft (like training and cultural change) measures of public service ethics should go hand in hand in order to minimize the gap between the “good perceptions” and “widespread malpractices” of municipality administrators.

When Law Enforcement Pays: Costs and Benefits for Elected Versus Appointed Administrators Engaged in Asset Forfeiture

The billions of dollars in assets seized by law enforcement each year represent a crucial source of revenue for these organizations, but also raise important constitutional questions and can create significant tensions within the jurisdictions they administer. Research on asset forfeiture to date has focused heavily on municipal police, largely neglecting forfeiture activities by sheriffs. Thus, it has missed an important opportunity to build theory about the differences between appointed and elected administrators and neglected an important source of institutional variation that may help to explain this particular administrative activity. To develop expectations about the relative levels of asset forfeiture and the response to intergovernmental incentives related to forfeiture, we draw on and extend scholarship comparing the behavior of elected versus appointed administrators in other settings. We test those expectations in analyses of more than 1,200 sheriff’s offices and over 2,200 municipal police departments between 1993 and 2007. Results suggest that sheriffs receive less forfeiture revenue than municipal police and are less responsive to state-level policies that change the financial rewards of asset forfeiture for agencies. These results hold whether we examine forfeitures made through the federal Equitable Sharing Program, where civil and criminal forfeiture cases can be distinguished, or jurisdictional level data on forfeiture, where civil and criminal forfeitures are combined. We conclude with a discussion of implications for both the research on asset forfeiture and on elected versus appointed public administrators more generally.

A Day in the Life: Aryanization Before the Swedish Supreme Court 1941–42

This article examines the jurisprudence of the Swedish Supreme Court during WW2 in disputes between exiled Jewish business owners and the Nazi-appointed administrators of their companies over the rights to the enterprises’ assets in Sweden. Contrary to assertions in previous scholarship, this article argues that the judgments of the Supreme Court were dictated neither by moral indignation in the face of the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich, nor by political considerations in a time of war. Instead, they were based on principles of private international law that predated, and outlived, the Third Reich. The outcome of the cases hinged upon whether the claim to Swedish assets arose before or after the date when the enterprise was placed under forced administration. If before, the claims of the Jewish owners were in principle successful; if after, they were not. This reasoning was well in line with both previous and subsequent case law on confiscations effected abroad. The article therefore concludes that the Swedish Supreme Court's judgments on Jewish assets in Sweden should be viewed not as outflows of extrajudicial considerations, but rather as failures to recognize political or ethical responsibility.

The Understanding of Public Service Ethics in Turkish Municipalities

Recent legal regulations provided more authorities and resources to municipalities, meanwhile corruption and unethical conduct cases were experienced more in the municipalities in Turkey. This paper aimed to detect the “public service ethics understanding” of municipality administrators in Turkey. To this end, a questionnaire was conducted among elected and appointed administrators of 9 urban-district municipalities in Ankara. Although the majority of municipality administrators agree that institutions and legal-administrative regulations based on universal values of public service ethics rather than the personal moral values, they still keep some local moral values which tolerate corrupt and unethical conducts. This reflects the dilemma of the Turkish administrators on this issue. Therefore, hard (like institutional and legal-administrative regulations) and soft (like training and cultural change) measures of public service ethics should go hand in hand in order to minimize the gap between the “good perceptions” and “widespread malpractices” of municipality administrators.