On Sunday, the New York <i>Times</i> ran <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/nyregion/13homes.html&quot; target="”_blank”">an
article based on a long-term investigation</a> of group homes for the
developmentally disabled in New York state. It found that "in hundreds
of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or
taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses and,

Another way in which violence and unethical conduct are similar is the
way they are handled by the news media. Just as violence is generally
discussed
in terms of separate
battles and wars, day by day, unethical conduct is discussed in terms
of separate
scandals and individuals, day by day. And unethical conduct is
responded to in the worst possible atmosphere.<br>
<br>
What this does is prevent an awareness of the problem of
unethical conduct in general and what constitutes a poor ethics
environment. In

<b>Conning Citizens</b><br>
Car towing is one of the biggest temptations in local government. A
police officer goes to the scene of an accident, and one or more
drivers needs to have their cars towed. The drivers are injured or at least in
shock, and rarely thinking straight. The officer has been offered so
many dollars per car that he steers to a towing company or a bodywork
shop with a tow truck. No one will know and no one will be hurt. It
might be called a kickback, but it's no more than doing a service for

<br><br>
Nonviolence, as Michael N. Nagler presents it in his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Search-Nonviolent-Future-Ourselves-Families/dp/19…; target="”_blank”">The
Search
for
a
Nonviolent
Future</a>, is not just a way of standing up to
dictators, as in Egypt, or trying to change discriminatory laws, as in

Faida Hamdy was a
municipal inspector in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. She was not a very
respectful municipal official. So when she found that a young fruit
vendor did not have a license, she slapped him. She humiliated him
in front of others. The fruit vendor set
himself on fire, and this set the Arab world on fire, because the
same sort of disrespect from government officials was felt throughout
the Arab world. Disrespect
is a very powerful thing. And so is respect.<br>
<br>

I talk a lot about poor ethics environments, probably the single most
important element in unethical conduct. But since loyalty is the
strongest force in such environments, a great deal of work is done to
hide the existence of poor ethics environments. After unethical conduct
is discovered, it is rare for anyone to set out just how bad things
were.<br>
<br>
But sometimes things are so bad, it becomes clear that there aren't

<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/confidentiality-after-officials-resig…; target="”_blank”">My
last blog post</a> raised an interesting question. When an annual
financial disclosure form (or, in some jurisdictions a special

It is generally agreed that it is best to preserve an ethics
commission's jurisdiction over officials and employees after they quit
or leave office. There are two reasons for this. One, to prevent them
from escaping enforcement by quitting or leaving office. This is
especially important because it can take a long time for information to
come out that an ethics violation might have occurred, and for an
ethics proceeding to be completed. The second reason is to allow for
post-employment restrictions. But many ethics codes ignore this best

What politicians say about a government ethics issue is sometimes so devoid of a basic
understanding of government ethics that it's hard to believe that they
are not being willfully ignorant (i.e., not discussing ethics matters
with ethics professionals) or cynically disingenuous. If only there
could be some requirement that, before an official opens his or her
mouth to say something about government ethics, he or she actually
discussed the matter with someone who does understand it. Not any

<br>
According to <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/way-back-machine-rough-boy…; target="”_blank”">an
article in today's New York <i>Times</i></a>, this allegorical neoFlorentine