Police Discretion

Introduction

The use of discretion is extremely important in the Criminal Justice field. Discretion is the ability for an individual to make a choice based among a number of possible courses of action. Police officers are trained on as many possible situations that they may encounter during their academy days. The problem arises when they get into the field and encounter a situation that they were not trained for. Their training cannot possibly cover every situation that a police officer may encounter. Our laws also do not cover every situation. There are new laws constantly being placed on the books that an officer will have to use discretion with due to it being new. There are also cases in which the law may not be clear, and an officer may have to ignore certain interpretations of the law and use his/her own discretion as far as a decision. Police discretion is used by officers when they are in situations where they need to make a choice from a number of choices given.

Analysis

The mythical aspects of Police Discretion come about when police agencies are questioned about whether their officers practice full enforcement on a consistent basis. Police are often questioned about whether or not they followed policy in certain situations. The myth comes about due to the fact that although society believes officers follow all policies and that full enforcement is always used, this simply is not true in all cases. This is when discretion comes into play. Society can see through the myth of full police enforcement when incidences like traffic citations vs. traffic tickets are given. Discretion is used during traffic stops many times due to factors involved with the traffic stop. If full enforcement was always used, there would never be citations issued, there would only be tickets issued. Three reasons as t why this myth has come about are" legality, the nature of the police organization and the authoritative image of the police." (Walker, 1999)