Law Enforcement - Police Discretion Term Paper

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By comparison, more proactive, crime-focused, or zero tolerance policing strategies make discretion more difficult to control administratively for several reasons.

Specifically, proactive officers generally function more autonomously in choosing where to initiate police action; consequently, they are involved in much higher proportions of serious criminal matters, requiring many more spontaneous opportunities to exercise discretion.

As a general rule, proactive police officers engaged in crime prevention-focused administrative strategies encounter more dangerous situations and also come into contact with more minor crimes in dealing with individuals suspected of involvement in serious crimes. Experience (as well as intuition) suggests that officers involved in the more dangerous pursuit of serious crime are less amenable to administrative control where official policy contradicts what the officer perceives to be a matter of officer safety in the field (Klinger 1997). Likewise, greater exposure to serious crime naturally increases the officer's tolerance level for less serious crime, and in that environment, the line defining what the officer perceives to be proper use of discretion shifts according to the same underlying principle giving rise to police discretion for the purpose of furthering operational objectives in the most general sense (Wilson 1968).

Conclusion: Decision making is, necessarily, one of the most important abilities of police officers. Where the law allows the officer to make an autonomous decision to determine what level of enforcement action is required under particular circumstances, many factors contribute to the decision.

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In the most general sense, discretion to focus on more serious crimes at the expense of enforcing every technical violation of penal law is essential if police resources are to be available to function in the manner envisioned by legislators and the public alike.

In many cases, human nature may motivate subjective decisions to initiate one type enforcement action over another type, whether as a tool of "street justice" or simply out of sympathy for those subject to police enforcement action. In some cases, exercises of discretion that are lawful technically, are unlawful only in their (undisclosed) motive; other times, discretion that is patently illegal is more consistent with principles of justice than what the law actually requires. Certain styles of policing are more conducive to controlling police use of discretion than others, but more important elements than controlling discretion dictate the use of specific policing styles in different communities. Ultimately, the psychology of police use of discretion is understood well enough to make it controllable administratively, but in different degrees within different agencies, based on the need for specific policing styles in effect within the communities in which they serve. REFERENCES

Black, D.J. (1971) the Social Organization of Arrest. Stanford Law Review, Vol. 23, No. 6. (Jun., 1971), pp. 1087-1111.

Goldstein (1977) Chapter 5: Categorizing and Structuring Discretion.

Klinger, D.A. (1997) Negotiating Order in Patrol Work: An Ecological Theory of Police Response.....

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