vicious institutions

It is obvious that Mother Teresa was a virtuous person. Her life was marked by charity, justice, temperance, and a host of other good character traits. We can say the same thing about all kinds of moral exemplars: Thomas Aquinas, Jackie Robinson, etc.

But what about an entire institution? Are these the sorts of things that can be virtuous or vicious? Over the past few years, it's normal to hear from news outlets that "the police are systemically racist." It's not entirely clear what this means. Maybe it means that police departments churn out racists. But this can't be right because of the "few bad apples" rejoinder attached to charges of systemic police racism.

My sense is that the term just means that, on average, the institution of policing (i.e., the collective whole of police departments in the U.S.) tends to produce officers with latent racist bias toward certain minority groups. More pointedly, the charge is that the policing system tends to produce officers with the vice of prejudice. The result is that we have vicious people as a result of a vicious system. 

I may return to this post later, but there's something confusing about attributing the same economy of virtues and vices we attribute to persons also to institutions. I think that, in order for us to do this cleanly, we have to develop a coherent account of what it means for something to be an institution. Maybe this requires a foray into group ontology. But this is enough for now.