Police Discretion: Issues of Decision Making - Term Paper Example

Police Discretion Introduction Police discretion is the power and the authority vested upon all police officers in exercising their routine duties in the community. Discretion is a vital and significant aspect of every decision made by a police officer to charge a person. In making a decision charging someone, officers must reflect on issues such as impartiality, equality, wider society interests and anticipations, responsibility and uniformity. All police officers are required to be answerable for such decisions by virtue of their office. The decision must not present arbitrary and mysterious disparities in the way that diverse people are handled by police. After making a decision, the officer must then ensure both uniformity and agreement with decrees and prosecutorial policies set by the authority, police policies and any orders. This leaves the police officer with very hard decisions to make. Since the officer knows that he/she will be accountable for all the decisions that he/she makes, it becomes hard to make certain decisions. The officer is compelled to follow the policies set by the higher authorities as well as the interests of the society (Atherton, 3). Police are given the use of discretion specifically since we believe that allowing the use of judgment in some circumstances can lead to improved results than setting up a rigid set of rules, strategies and measures that cannot be changed because of situations. The obvious suggestion of this, of course, is that discretion can be implemented well or badly. Police judgments can be assessed in terms of their eminence. Some judgments will be enhanced than others will and some officers will make constantly improved judgments than other officers will. Recognizing the role of judgment in the implementation of discretion raises definite problems for police administrators. Given these differences in application of judgment by police officers, the use of discretion by them is faced with a major problem. This is because the judgments are not always correct. In addition, some judgments will be made in favor of some people while others will be made in order do revenge on the part of the officer. Some people in the society will argue that some police officers are not competent enough to pass judgments in various very demanding situations. This problem can however be solved in various ways. First, all the police officers should be thoroughly trained on decision making skills so that they can always make competent judgments. The other way is by involving much competent police officers in very demanding situations (Kleining, 71). In the criminal justice scheme, the police, working as gatekeepers, have for a long time and possibly wrongly been identified as the main contributors to the association of people with mental disease. The police have been condemned for over-obsessively arresting people with mental sickness. Investigators have alternately described their use of arrest as a means to handle upsetting behavior, as a sympathetic gesture, or as being founded on beliefs that people with mental sickness are more aggressive than the broad population and are a threat to the society. The surfacing of police plans such as disaster intervention teams demonstrates this emphasis on police accountability. These plans are founded on the basis that preceding police behavior has been insufficient and are intended to improve police reaction to the population. It is believed that the actions of police in the past were not for the interest of the population. The police in many places were known to be very brutal and uneducated. It is due to this aspect that various plans and strategies have been put in place by various governments and states to improve the actions of the police officers in their use of discretion (Morabito, 8) Doing as one pleases is not what makes up discretion; rather, discretion is bounded by norms, which includes society norms, proficient norms, ethical norms and legal norms. Putting discretion to good use or not dictates the prospect of policing as a profession. However, two problems that hinder police professionalization. Firstly, there are few uncontroversial areas of police occupation, unlike other occupations, and secondly, the public appears reluctant to trust casually in the responsibility of police officers. The public asserts that the police seem to want harsh, formal responsibility mechanisms. Occasionally the public needs no enforcement, and other times they wish for harsh enforcement. In the first case, citizens will yell bogus arrest while in the second case; some groups might file a court order of mandamus. These differences in the public judgments regarding arrest present a problem to the police officers in their use of discretion. The officers are often faced with a dilemma when it comes to the first case where the public is resistant to arrest. They do not comprehend whether to follow the law or the interests of the people who they protect. In many cases, the officers will follow the law and arrest the suspects despite various sentiments from the spectators. The people always will assert that the victims are not in any way suspects. This causes a conflict between the public and the police officers (Stevens, 2). Police discretion is essential and practical. Police use discretion in various situations, some of it officially endorsed, but much of it merely included in the prospects of the job. The situations that are officially endorsed are those situations that are generally accepted by the wider community and authorized by the higher authorities. On the other hand, in other situations that are not necessarily authorized, police officers merely apply discretion for the protection of the community. These situations arise without an alarm and can cause a lot of harm. In the exploration of police use of discretion, two main types of concerns remain to be considered: domain issues and decision issues. Given that there is a sphere in which police are endorsed to use their discretion, there are additional issues of police judgment to be discovered. Within the sphere of discretion, the officer usually must choose a path of action from a collection of options. There are, seemingly, genuine choices among the collection. This means that there are alternatives that have the possibility of leading to considerably different results. These alternatives always present themselves before the police officer in a wide range. The police are faced with a tough time of decision making which dictates their use of discretion. As mentioned earlier, the officer absolutely knows that he will be accountable to any of the choices that he makes, which makes him to become very keen in making his choices since they will influence the wider community. The officer is always obliged to make choices that are for the welfare of the community (Kleining, 91). A major cause of discretion arises when police take adult grievances more seriously than those that the youths make. Occasionally, force and arrest are most likely to be applied against African Americans. Citizens who demonstrate good behavior to police are handled more compassionately. It is also noted that people in the middle to upper income groups obtain more and better service from police. How the police handle many occurrences is affected by gender and mental health status. Police commiserate with, and only address some criminals. These disparities in the way that police handle different criminals lead to either sentiments or acceptance of the police discretion. A major sentiment that arises due to this however is that those treated with brutality will tend to resist police discretion (Stevens, 4). Police discretion is best learned in the illegal fairness literature, and through this study, factors have been recognized that impact police actions. The illegal fairness literature can be used to inform discussion of police actions during connections with people with cerebral illness in order to comprehend the arrest decision. Most police job is low visibility, transpiring in settings where officers are not observed by any outside authority. In this framework, discretion is not one decision: whether to arrest or not, but in its place, is a series of decision points: when to stop a suspect, how to approach the suspect, when to use power and lastly whether official endorses for instance arrest are essential. In this case, the police officer, in applying discretion, is faced with a major problem. The officer cannot make these decisions speedily. This makes him or her to make a very haste decision that often overrules the set regulations and policies (Morabito, 6). Police officers are faced with decisions that have no straightforward rule for reaction every day. Discretion is an element of an officer’s decision-making procedure in steering those circumstances that lack a discrete path towards a solution. Discretion is part of the job and all the time it has been, but its utilization can lead to insights of favoritism, bias and a do-nothing appearance. In these situations, police officers will tend to favor some people than others. This implies that justice is not fully exercised on the part of the officer – a major problem facing police discretion. This can however be avoided by paying the police officers adequate remunerations to prevent them from accepting bribes (Lister, 1). Some condition variables also cause police discretion. Police often give severe crime matters more concentration than unimportant non-crime matters. Their overreaction is regularly caused by the existence of weapons or acts of confrontation. The kind of weapons involved in a crime dictates police reaction and investigatory attempts. Activities instigated by citizen complaint are tracked up less often compared to activities instigated by police. When eyewitnesses, spectators or the media are present, police are likely to be much more ceremonial. When court and adjustment schemes are clogged, police are likely to become compassionate. On the other hand, police tend to become firm when the city requires income. Individual discretion is also controlled by structure and size of the division. Officers use more non-arrest alternatives in societies that have adequate social service resources. Moreover, the way in which police officers are called upon plays part in the way they will act when they get there (Stevens, 3). Police discretion is influenced by relative distinctiveness of communities, persons and incidents. There are people in the community who are very stubborn when it comes to police discretion since they are not ready to accept any decision by the police officers even if it is authorized. This causes the police officer involved to be in a dilemma since he/she wants to protect the law as well as his/her personal life and dignity. In addition, there are communities with a tendency of resisting any decision by police officers. Most of these sentiments roots from experience with police officers. On the other hand, there are those communities that generally fear police officers. They believe that the actions that the officers take are final and that they are legally binding and therefore do not resist any of their decisions. However, much of the spotlight of the discretion debate has been on the immediate or incident factors – the instant aspects of actions leading up to arrest. Immediate factors are just one group of factors or prospects of context that describe the arrest decision (Morabito, 4). Police discretion is utilized most frequently in domestic violence. Police come across female sufferers that are stubborn and have complexity in establishing the truest version of a story from both parties. The consequence most frequently is to arrest no one and do nothing. The problem is frequently worsened by a discretionary verdict of inaction. In 1984, the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment established that males that committed marital brutality and were not arrested were double as likely to re-insult as those who were detained. This aspect of domestic violence leaves the police officers as being incompetent in dealing with such issues. The result often is that these problems remain unsolved and they continue to affect most marriages. It is believed that most women once beaten by their husbands run into the hands of police officers to seek justice. This is because they allege that the police can protect them from this violence. This is however not the case as many women are unable to express themselves before the police officers, making it very hard for the officer to make a decision (Lister, 4). Stevens argues that domestic Violence has been one area of discretion where police have been extra-eager to ask professionals, social scientists and social workers for help. Rather than just locking up husbands who punch their wives, the police have constantly emerged more concerned in doing nothing and more lately, testing with options such as cooling-off periods, social service transfers, negotiation and counseling. These alternatives reduce the blame often placed on the police, regarding them as being very violent and cruel. This area of discretion often presents the police officers with tough decisions to make since it includes some aspects of counseling and social work. Due to the apparent problem, there should be the incorporation of social workers in police departments. This will apparently help the officers to get a clue of what to do in such situations. Alternatively, police officers should be adequately trained in community development and social work aspects so that they can be fully equipped with skills to solve problems of domestic violence in their use of discretion (5). We are at present in a societal period where documentation is the key law implementation action concerning hate crime. The belief behind hate crime legislation is that even the main insignificant crime demoralizes the very heart of a society. However, the police have extensive discretion in deciding which acts, which persons and which groups in the society are slight nuisances or society threats. Additionally, the police are accustomed to defending every group's rights, despite their faith or philosophy. Use of force is an area where there has been current organizational control and structuring of discretion in conjunction with high-speed pursuits. In a given situation, the amount of force to be applied by police officers is typically expressed in police manuals as no greater than needed and practical. To protect the department from civil liability, the use of force must be managed and confined indisputably (Stevens, 7). The police need to cultivate an environment in which they can convey public safety without being subject to screaming, allegations and obscenities from any party, even blameless parties. The decisions of policing are apparently subjective and hard. Even as the police are delivering habitual services with a clear cause, their judgments are repeatedly flawed when they are made before individuals issuing provocative remarks. Promoting an environment where the police can do an investigation peacefully and with common respect is in the shared interest of citizens and police. Permitting people to yell at the police in public threatening them with political phone calls, as well as to ridicule their abilities cannot become ordinary. Any individual who has an apparent complaint with the police can disrupt regular acts like rendering assistance to lost children, taking accident statements and issuing traffic infringements. The police service setting is not the excellent place for airing of such complaints. The police officers should be very aggressive in dealing with such persons because they should not deter them from their primary function of helping the needy in the community. These kinds of people only try to disrupt the work of police officers simply because they had an argument or complaint with police officers. They respond by screaming or yelling at a police officer when he/she is carrying out his daily routine. The police officer should understand that every profession has its mandate and that performing the duties of a police man requires respect just as other professions (Gates, 2). Gates continues to argue that police officers who let their giving support to lost children and all the rest of it be disrupted by being yelled at by irritated citizens should not be police officers. Everyone is vulnerable to being yelled at in public life. It is not just police officers but also other people who serve significant public functions that at times bring them into argument. Doctors and nurses, researchers, collection agents, lawyers: all these people have works to do, and many get yelled at. The notion that the heavily equipped agents of state force and the work they do are in someway more susceptible to yelling and more vital than these others is intensely antidemocratic. People’s yelling should not intimidate police officers. They should understand that people would often have a bad picture of their discretion and they should stand firm and perform their duties without fear of being screamed at since they have the authority of performing their duties (3). Police discretion generates a sphere of gray spot for the police officer due to the lack of positive implementation of rules by police administrators. Regulations often experience generalization and officers are only told what not to do. This results in a moment of indecisiveness where the officer faces a condition that is too compound to be resolved quickly or with one rule-based decision. This is mostly seen in the appropriate application of force where the officer must make a ruling on how much force is needed to suppress the suspect versus shielding his/her life as well as the lives of others (Lister, 5). The use of police discretion repeatedly comes under inspection. When the result of police discretion is questioned, the officers are consistently called upon to account for their actions. When grievances about an officer’s behavior are raised, entities such as the Anti-Corruption Commission, Director of Public Prosecutions and Police Internal Affairs or Investigations in many countries are authorized to test the discretion of that officer. Society acceptance of the police use of discretion is often polarized. Certain divisions such as the legal fraternity would perceive the powers of discretion all but eliminated whilst campaigners of community policing see a requirement to unwind written directives and permit police a more elastic approach to problem solving within the society. Distinctive reactions from some members of the society on the issue of police discretion are that there is no answerability, police cannot be trusted: past bad behaviors foresee future bad behaviors and that there is incompatible use of discretion (Atherton, 4). Arrest is a rare happening for the police. How police time is used up is portrayed by order maintenance actions such as patrolling, helping citizens, and handling nonemergency situations. Police encounter people with mental sickness because of their upsetting behaviors and in a range of other situations including provision of transport for emergency hospitalization, response after the commission of crimes police-instigated contact, or enforcement of court orders. It is anticipated that police spend roughly 10% of their time being concerned in situations with people with mental sickness. They police them for various crimes ranging from misconduct crimes to serious aggressive offenses. This arrest causes people with mental sickness to get into the illegal justice scheme. What the officers consider is the reasons for arresting people with mental illness because they do not just arrest these people simply for being mad. Rather, they base concrete reasons for arresting such people. Mostly, they do this to prevent various consequences that may arise when these people are left to wander in the city. They are considered a threat to personal security. Police discretion in this case faces a challenge in that people who are not mentally ill will yell at the police officers, constantly alleging that the arrested people are not criminals in any way (Morabito, 11). There is constant questioning to law enforcement officers on the application of police discretion as a tool for unjustly targeting marginal ethnic populations. These issues are emphasized with regard to ethnic profiling and the integrity of law enforcement officials by the passage of Arizona's harsh immigration laws. Under this law, authority is given to police to confine anyone deduced of being an illegal immigrant if they cannot establish their legal status. This is because failure to carry immigration certificates can be considered an offense in Arizona. Challengers of Arizona's legislation term it a police free pass to harass Hispanics despite citizenship status according to the New York Times website. Many Arizona police officers resist the legislation since they feel it limits their discretion. This legislation often makes the police officers to receive resistance from them. They are viewed as officers whose major aim is to harass the minority groups in the society. This is the reason that the officers always resist this kind of system. They claim that it presents a bad name of them to the wider community. This system is against their principle aim of protecting the interests of the society (Lister, 2). Conclusion Police discretion has been one of the major concerns of states and nations globally. Actions by the police officers have been questioned for many years. As discussed in this paper, the major areas of police discretion are exhibited in domestic violence, hate crimes and in arresting people with mental illnesses among others. It is very essential for the police to use discretion since some aspects should be solved through well thought judgments rather than being solved through rules, laws and regulations. The police however face various problems in their use of discretion. First, some judgments are too hard and complicated to pass and this leaves them in a big dilemma. Another problem is angry reactions from the public regarding arrest. The police officers also cannot make distinct conclusions from a variety of choices presented to them. Another major problem is that some situations require the input of other professions for instance social workers in solving domestic violence. Different views and beliefs held by various individuals and communities also pose a major challenge to the police in their use of discretion. The officer is unable to make clear judgments due to these varying beliefs. Police discretion affects the society in a number of ways since the entire mandate of the police force is to protect the interests of the community. Some police officers are very biased when dealing with different people in the community. They favor people who are nice to them or who live sleek lives. They do this at the expense of the minority who they treat very harshly. There needs to be new strategies put in place to address the problems that the police officers face in exercising their roles. Proper training of the officers will ensure competency in making of judgments under severe situations. The police officers on their part should avoid discrimination and nepotism while using their discretion. They should avoid passing judgments to suit their own selfish interests and they should work for the welfare of the community at large. The police officers are highly accountable for any action of discretion that they engage in. They are answerable to the higher authorities if their actions and behaviors are questionable. In light of this, the police officers are obliged to follow the rules and regulations set by these authorities. If they fail to follow these set regulations and to conform to them, then they find themselves in great problems. There are situations however in police discretion that does not require the conforming to these set guidelines. These situations arise very abruptly and require prompt measures to be taken. In these situations, the police officers act to protect the interest of the wider community and provide the required security. Works Cited Atherton, Tim. Managing Police Discretion. 2010. Web. Gates, Henry. Police Discretion: a different perspective. 2009. Web. Kleining, John. Handled with Discretion: Ethical; issues in police decision-making. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield publishers.1996. Print. Lister, Jonathan. The Disadvantages of Police Discretion. 2010. Web. Morabito, Melissa. Horizons of Context: Understanding the Police Decision to Arrest People with mental Illness. 2007. Web. Stevens, Mark. Police Discretion. 2008. Web Read More