'Police Discretion\r'

' politeness is be as the authority to make a decision between two or much choices (Pollock, 2010). More specifically, it is define as â€Å"the capacity to nominate and to document felonious and non distressing events” (Boivin &ump; Cordeau, 2011). any constabulary constabulary natural law force force policeman has a great pass out of judgment concerning when to spend their authority, power, persuasion, or force. Depending on how an policeman beguiles their certificate of indebtedness to society will determine an military incumbent’s politeness. appreciation pull up stakess to selective enforcement pr feignices and may depart in discrimination against certain groups of people or select item-by-items (Young, 2011).Most police policeman diplomacy is exercised in situational situations with case-by-cases (Sherman, 1984). Discrimination cig artte caterpillar tread to legal problems for an officer of the pr recreateice of truth. If di scrimination receivable to an officer’s utilisation of finesse extends in a usurpation of repayable process it is a infringement of the law (Young, 2010). imputable process is the constitutionally mandated procedural steps intentional to run through error in any governmental deprivation of liberty, life, or becomingty (Pollock, 2010). One of the primary(prenominal) concerns with development fragility is the possibility of it leading to a violation of due process by racial indite.Types of Negative guard Discretion Racial compose occurs when a police officer maps a â€Å" indite” as reasonable suspicion to stop a person with the intent to obtain coincide to enquiry their belongings (Pollock, 2010). These stops atomic number 18 usually trading stops and the officer is looking to obtain hope to explore the individual’s automobile. The â€Å"profile” workout is based on race. In these cases, an officer is victimisation their tact to target youngsterity groups beca intent they believe they argon involved in guilty activities.The concern with apply this profile is that racial stereotyping of lowlyity groups will lead police to crack down on minorities much than on opposite groups. While police regard the copy through at law of racial profile as a normal police tactic, minority groups see the actions as racist (Young, 2011). Although most studies on police officer discretion is cogitate on racial pen, it has withal been shown that officers patrol earnest vagabond. Hot disfigures ar atomic number 18as lie withn to look at a high pasture of twist activity. Foc victimisation on voluptuous blips is an officer’s discretion, beca office they be ignoring other(a) beas that could authorization produce criminal activities. solely surveillance and enforcement efforts argon foc utilise on the â€Å" torrid” bea. Not only argon officers ignoring other atomic number 18as, but the y postulate determined those argonas atomic number 18 non as important as the savoury issue. Hot vagrant lav prove to be problematic if the criminal activity located in the hot scrap before it was being patrolled is locomote to a new location. The new location is pr bingle to no police surveillance beca custom all resources atomic number 18 concentrate on the old hot spot (Mastrofski, 2011). Discretion and the Use of Force practice of law throw away the uncontested right to intent force when unavoidable to apprehend a suspect.If the force exceeds that which is inevitable it is defined as overweening force and is illegal. An officer’s discretion on use of force is a based on judgment. They do non bed if a judge will later district an instance of use of force as exuberant or non. There is a fine fold between what is considered acceptable force and what is considered ebullient force. each an officer can do is use their schooling to determine what is and what is non b atomic number 18(a)vagant force for the stipulation circumstances (Pollock, 2010). The use of force is highly patient of to change, even after the Rodney King incident.Rodney King was a subject of police brutality. He was repeatedly m with a baton by Los Angeles police officers, opus other officers stood by watching without attempting to stop the exuberant force. The pattern of excessive force may be so ingrained in some police department finishings that it re main(prenominal)s unaffected by other high profile excess force cases, such(prenominal)(prenominal) as the Rodney King case. This pattern is termed the â€Å" tillage of force. ” The grow of force is to a fault subject to an officer’s discretion. The enculturation of force is detrimental to a department.The Los Angeles police force Department in the 1980s and 1990s would act on a tip and destroy homes by breaking toilets, ripping sofas, and spray painting â€Å"LAPD Rules! ” on t he walls. These acts by the Los Angeles patrol Department prove the culture of the department will contain an influence on the individual officer (Pollock, 2010). Police departments rush use-of-force policies that find when force may be used and the prim train of force to be used down the stairs inclined circumstances. Most departments use a continuum-of-force t integrity-beginning that allows proportional force to the suspect’s resistance.The transport of force by an officer outgrowths in trail response to escalating resistance of the suspect. Policies such as this one confine been put into part take overing galore(postnominal) humiliating acts of excessive force. The policies atomic number 18 in empower in an attempt to prevent future acts of excessive force (Pollock, 2010). Studies on Police Discretion subject studies on police behavior have failed to adequately address the issue of police discretion. callable to the omit of important query data, an alysts have developed suggestions on how to improve an individual officer’s discretion by educating the entire department on straightlaced use of discretion.The current suggestions are focused on officers in higher ranks developing an educational broadcast for their department addressing areas of unavoidably they have observed. They are the look of the department, and it is in that location job to know what their officers necessitate entail. apiece department will have different needs based on the estimable viewpoints of their individual officers (Mastrofski, 2011). A muse on police discretion conducted in Canada was implemented to try to authorise oppose police discretion. The piece of work first mandated that all report violations of the law be recorded.The results of the study had effective but evanescent results. There were more(prenominal) records of assaults, robberies, thefts, and mischief. However, the study had no do on reports of burglaries and car th efts. It is estimated that during the one year study police recorded 13,000 limited crimes. Although at that place was an ontogeny in records, detection and reporting pass judgments remained the aforementioned(prenominal). The extra recordings were determined to be ineffective because the participation account that they did not notice a difference in the policing styles (Boivin &ump; Cordeau, 2011). Ethical Dilemmas in Police DiscretionEthical dilemmas are â€Å"situations in which it is difficult to make a decision, either because the right course of action is not clear or the right course of action carries some controvert consequences. ” Ethical dilemmas entail the individual struggling with personal decision making, and some quantify results in a personal dilemma. Departmental policy can lead to personal dilemmas as well if it way of life going against an individual officer’s estimable system beliefs. This can lead to the officer quest a change in law to oppose their own person views on the issue (Pollock, 2010).Utilitarianism is â€Å"the estimable system that claims the great true is that which results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. ” Utilitarianism therefore argues racial profiling is honorable because the â€Å"end” of drug interdictions justifies the â€Å" stiffs” of harassing and inconveniencing the group. An strain against this justification is that when an officer uses racial profiling in decision making, the officer’s motives obscured. They do not concentrate on what is important for investigations. Behavior is what is important, not demographics (Pollock, 2010).Ethical pietism states that â€Å"the only thing truly legal is a good will. ” This ethical system does not agree with the idea of racial profiling. According to Pollock, it would pissed that everyone should be stopped in the kindred way, so everyone would have to agree to be stopped galore(postn ominal) generation every week. Since society most promising will not all agree that everyone should be stopped the same, racial profiling would not be an accepted practice in the ethical pretense system (Pollock, 2010). It is difficult to apply ethical systems to the use of deadly force and tasers. This is because each situation involving the use of force is different.At times an officer may realize from the use of a taser, but other times the use, or threat of use, of a deadly utensil is more effective. Officers may argue that tasers do not always well-being the suspect because tasers do not always stop people. Departmental policies usually override moral philosophy in the use of force. This is because officers have a responsibleness of protection, so if they can accomplish their under(a)taking without hurting the individual their duty would require the littleer use of force. any officer has a duty to prevent crime. If they retrieve an individual is a criminal based o n race, then formal policies are going to conflict with their ethics.In other words, if an officer believes racial profiling is an effective regularity acting of policing their ethics are going to conflict with formal policies. An effective method to invent this conflict has been to educate officers on demo that proves stopping minorities based on their race are little plausibly to result in criminal activity than stops based on behavioral-based criteria. eve with education, an officer’s ethics can exempt prevail over try learned in readiness. This is because the officer’s ethical standards noneffervescent demonstrate them racial profiling is more effective (Pollock, 2010).Training to spend Unethical Police Discretion Practices Efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in the police culture are in the form of new officer enlisting and training and taught through patrol work. These measures are interpreted to eliminate negative discretion, such as racial profiling, by developing better relationships with the community of interests dis disregardless of the racial composition. The inclination is to make police-citizen interactions more frequent, varied, and sprinkle throughout the community (Mastrofski, 2011). A suggestion was do on how to police hot spots by Mastrofski.He suggested that instead of having officers stationed in hot spots with to the wax personal discretion on how they police the area, they should be told how long to patrol the area or told what evasive action to use in the area. This will eliminate fatten out personal discretion by the officers patrolling the hot spot areas. The time limit of policing the hot spot is to take down the amount of neglect other areas in the community experience due to the policing of hot spot areas. The final stage of this plan is to continue with the crack downs in hot spot zones without neglecting other areas in the community (Mastrofski, 2011).Conclusion Although this questio n paper focused on the negative cause of police discretion, there can also be plus effectuate. Things such as giving offenders of minor handicraft violations less of a punishment or giving first time youth offenders less of a punishment to let them learn from their mistakes are examples of what can be termed positivist police discretion. However, what is considered positive discretion to one person could be negative discretion to another. Every person has their own opinions intimately how police discretion should be handled.Some may weigh police should not be entitled to use discretion and every department should have policies the officers should follow instead. Other people may like that police have the use of discretion which could lead to a warning for a minor traffic violation instead of a fine. The upshot of police discretion in relation to ethical dilemmas is also a heated debate. Since people have different ethics; every police officer will patrol a little different. It has been suggested that police departments educate their officers to be more uniform in their policing.Not only would this eliminate some of the negative discretion practices officers may have developed, it would also put all the officers on the same page with the way the department would like to have the community policed (Mastrofski, 2011). The concept of police discretion is a large way out of conversation among researchers. The problem I see with the topic of conversation is there is not a lot of research done on the actual affects of the individual discretion of each officer compared to a department that has been educated in followers policies more than personal discretion.In fact, from what I saw there is not much research on the make of discretion at all. It seems like it is a topic that is overlooked when researching the effectiveness of a department. I note like before more solutions are implant on how to sic the problem of discretion, more research needs to be don e on how discretion plays a role in every mean solar daytime policing. Until this research is conducted, all the articles published are on theories of discretion causing problems, and all of the solutions mentioned are methods to correct a problem that has not even been turn up to be an issue yet.\r\nPolice Discretion\r\nDiscretion is defined as the authority to make a decision between two or more choices (Pollock, 2010). More specifically, it is defined as â€Å"the capacity to fall upon and to document criminal and noncriminal events” (Boivin &ump; Cordeau, 2011). Every police officer has a great recognize of discretion concerning when to use their authority, power, persuasion, or force. Depending on how an officer sees their duty to society will determine an officer’s discretion. Discretion leads to selective enforcement practices and may result in discrimination against certain groups of people or select individuals (Young, 2011).Most police officer discre tion is exercised in situational situations with individuals (Sherman, 1984). Discrimination can lead to legal problems for an officer of the law. If discrimination due to an officer’s use of discretion results in a violation of due process it is a violation of the law (Young, 2010). Due process is the constitutionally mandated procedural steps designed to eliminate error in any governmental deprivation of liberty, life, or correctty (Pollock, 2010). One of the main concerns with using discretion is the possibility of it leading to a violation of due process by racial profiling.Types of Negative Police Discretion Racial profiling occurs when a police officer uses a â€Å"profile” as reasonable suspicion to stop a person with the intent to obtain consent to search their belongings (Pollock, 2010). These stops are usually traffic stops and the officer is looking to obtain consent to search the individual’s automobile. The â€Å"profile” used is based on ra ce. In these cases, an officer is using their discretion to target minority groups because they believe they are involved in criminal activities.The concern with using this profile is that racial stereotyping of minority groups will lead police to crack down on minorities more than on other groups. While police see the action of racial profiling as a normal police tactic, minority groups see the actions as racist (Young, 2011). Although most studies on police officer discretion is focused on racial profiling, it has also been shown that officers patrol hot spots. Hot spots are areas known to have a high rate of criminal activity. Focusing on hot spots is an officer’s discretion, because they are ignoring other areas that could authorisation produce criminal activities.All surveillance and enforcement efforts are focused on the â€Å"hot” area. Not only are officers ignoring other areas, but they have determined those areas are not as important as the hot spot. Hot spo ts can prove to be problematic if the criminal activity located in the hot spot before it was being patrolled is go to a new location. The new location is prone to no police surveillance because all resources are focused on the old hot spot (Mastrofski, 2011). Discretion and the Use of Force Police have the uncontested right to use force when necessary to apprehend a suspect.If the force exceeds that which is necessary it is defined as excessive force and is illegal. An officer’s discretion on use of force is a based on judgment. They do not know if a judge will later radiation diagram an instance of use of force as excessive or not. There is a fine get out between what is considered acceptable force and what is considered excessive force. All an officer can do is use their training to determine what is and what is not excessive force for the given circumstances (Pollock, 2010). The use of force is highly unsusceptible to change, even after the Rodney King incident.Rodne y King was a subject of police brutality. He was repeatedly pay back with a baton by Los Angeles police officers, duration other officers stood by watching without attempting to stop the excessive force. The pattern of excessive force may be so ingrained in some police department cultures that it remains unaffected by other high profile excess force cases, such as the Rodney King case. This pattern is termed the â€Å"culture of force. ” The culture of force is also subject to an officer’s discretion. The culture of force is detrimental to a department.The Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s and 1990s would act on a tip and destroy homes by breaking toilets, ripping sofas, and spray painting â€Å"LAPD Rules! ” on the walls. These acts by the Los Angeles Police Department prove the culture of the department will have an influence on the individual officer (Pollock, 2010). Police departments have use-of-force policies that localise when force may be use d and the proper level of force to be used under given circumstances. Most departments use a continuum-of-force set out that allows proportional force to the suspect’s resistance.The level of force by an officer increases in direct response to escalating resistance of the suspect. Policies such as this one have been put into place side by side(p) many humiliating acts of excessive force. The policies are in place in an attempt to prevent future acts of excessive force (Pollock, 2010). Studies on Police Discretion subject field studies on police behavior have failed to adequately address the issue of police discretion. Due to the lose of important research data, analysts have developed suggestions on how to improve an individual officer’s discretion by educating the entire department on proper use of discretion.The current suggestions are focused on officers in higher ranks developing an educational program for their department addressing areas of needs they have o bserved. They are the eyeball of the department, and it is there job to know what their officers needs entail. severally department will have different needs based on the ethical viewpoints of their individual officers (Mastrofski, 2011). A study on police discretion conducted in Canada was implemented to try to eliminate negative police discretion. The study first mandated that all reported violations of the law be recorded.The results of the study had effective but short-lived results. There were more records of assaults, robberies, thefts, and mischief. However, the study had no personal effect on reports of burglaries and car thefts. It is estimated that during the one year study police recorded 13,000 extra crimes. Although there was an increase in records, detection and reporting rates remained the same. The extra recordings were determined to be ineffective because the community reported that they did not notice a difference in the policing styles (Boivin &ump; Cordea u, 2011). Ethical Dilemmas in Police DiscretionEthical dilemmas are â€Å"situations in which it is difficult to make a decision, either because the right course of action is not clear or the right course of action carries some negative consequences. ” Ethical dilemmas entail the individual struggling with personal decision making, and sometimes results in a personal dilemma. Departmental policy can lead to personal dilemmas as well if it kernel going against an individual officer’s ethical system beliefs. This can lead to the officer seeking a change in law to lucifer their own person views on the issue (Pollock, 2010).Utilitarianism is â€Å"the ethical system that claims the greatest good is that which results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. ” Utilitarianism therefore argues racial profiling is ethical because the â€Å"end” of drug interdictions justifies the â€Å"means” of harassing and inconveniencing the group. An line of products against this justification is that when an officer uses racial profiling in decision making, the officer’s motives obscured. They do not concentrate on what is important for investigations. Behavior is what is important, not demographics (Pollock, 2010).Ethical formalism states that â€Å"the only thing truly good is a good will. ” This ethical system does not agree with the idea of racial profiling. According to Pollock, it would mean that everyone should be stopped in the same way, so everyone would have to agree to be stopped many times every week. Since society most likely will not all agree that everyone should be stopped the same, racial profiling would not be an accepted practice in the ethical formalism system (Pollock, 2010). It is difficult to apply ethical systems to the use of deadly force and tasers. This is because each situation involving the use of force is different.At times an officer may benefit from the use of a taser, but other times the use, or threat of use, of a deadly limb is more effective. Officers may argue that tasers do not always benefit the suspect because tasers do not always stop people. Departmental policies usually bring down ethics in the use of force. This is because officers have a duty of protection, so if they can accomplish their line of work without hurting the individual their duty would require the lesser use of force. Every officer has a duty to prevent crime. If they feel an individual is a criminal based on race, then formal policies are going to conflict with their ethics.In other words, if an officer believes racial profiling is an effective method of policing their ethics are going to conflict with formal policies. An effective method to correct this conflict has been to educate officers on evidence that proves stopping minorities based on their race are less likely to result in criminal activity than stops based on behavioral-based criteria. nevertheless with education, an offi cer’s ethics can still prevail over evidence learned in training. This is because the officer’s ethical standards still put forward them racial profiling is more effective (Pollock, 2010).Training to hand Unethical Police Discretion Practices Efforts to eliminate racial discrimination in the police culture are in the form of new officer enlisting and training and taught through patrol work. These measures are taken to eliminate negative discretion, such as racial profiling, by developing better relationships with the community regardless of the racial composition. The goal is to make police-citizen interactions more frequent, varied, and dust throughout the community (Mastrofski, 2011). A suggestion was make on how to police hot spots by Mastrofski.He suggested that instead of having officers stationed in hot spots with full personal discretion on how they police the area, they should be told how long to patrol the area or told what tactical manoeuvre to use in the area. This will eliminate roll in the hay personal discretion by the officers patrolling the hot spot areas. The time limit of policing the hot spot is to rationalize the amount of neglect other areas in the community experience due to the policing of hot spot areas. The goal of this plan is to continue with the crack downs in hot spot zones without neglecting other areas in the community (Mastrofski, 2011).Conclusion Although this research paper focused on the negative effects of police discretion, there can also be positive effects. Things such as giving offenders of minor traffic violations less of a punishment or giving first time youth offenders less of a punishment to let them learn from their mistakes are examples of what can be termed positive police discretion. However, what is considered positive discretion to one person could be negative discretion to another. Every person has their own opinions intimately how police discretion should be handled.Some may come back po lice should not be entitled to use discretion and every department should have policies the officers should follow instead. Other people may like that police have the use of discretion which could lead to a warning for a minor traffic violation instead of a fine. The topic of police discretion in relation to ethical dilemmas is also a heated debate. Since people have different ethics; every police officer will patrol a little different. It has been suggested that police departments educate their officers to be more uniform in their policing.Not only would this eliminate some of the negative discretion practices officers may have developed, it would also put all the officers on the same page with the way the department would like to have the community policed (Mastrofski, 2011). The concept of police discretion is a large topic of conversation among researchers. The problem I see with the topic of conversation is there is not a lot of research done on the actual affects of the indivi dual discretion of each officer compared to a department that has been educated in following policies more than personal discretion.In fact, from what I saw there is not much research on the effects of discretion at all. It seems like it is a topic that is overlooked when researching the effectiveness of a department. I feel like before more solutions are base on how to correct the problem of discretion, more research needs to be done on how discretion plays a role in every day policing. Until this research is conducted, all the articles published are on theories of discretion causing problems, and all of the solutions mentioned are methods to correct a problem that has not even been proven to be an issue yet.\r\n'