This sort of thinking is, I think, pretty important. It is good if people feel responsible for following their oaths and professional obligations. This obviously depends on a personal interpretation of those obligations, so it will have to be performed by all us laymen. I don’t think, as some of the other comments here have pointed out, that the lack of legal training is a huge problem.
But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free!
This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department.
In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.
But that’s a personal obligation. And the obligation is not to simply not comply, it is to blow the whistle. You very well may be wrong about your interpretation of that oath, so the only answer is to, basically, bounce it to the populace and see what the people’s interpretation of that document is (might have to go through the news, courts, and politics to ultimately get the public’s opinion). This will likely be a career killer—it wouldn’t be an obligation, if following it was easy and cost-free!
This is not really what has happened here. In the NYC example: The police department is not an individual with an oath, it is a bureaucratic and legal entity that exists within a defined chain of command, it is supposed to comply with the laws that the government passes. In fact, if the department is asking individual officers to do something unethical by not following the law, the officers have an individual obligation to blow the whistle and not comply with the department.
In the SF strike: The police union is a labor entity, it exists to represent the interests of the members. The officers were not saying they were asked as police officers to do something unconstitutional, they were saying that the order to not strike or protest was unconstitutional. That has nothing to do with their oath.