The husband is trying to avoid being arrested and wishes to be left alone by the officers.…
Research shows that discretion can be when an officer uses legal sanctions. This can be when an officer is on a traffic stop, giving a ticket or making an arrest. The time when an officer is most at odds to use discretion is in a case of use of force: weather the amount of force or weather to use any at all. (Hunter 1985; Terrill et al. 2002.) One other broad use could be when an officer has to make a decision on dividing the amount of services or various duties that are to be performed. (Engel 2007). A prime example would be when on patrol and answering a call, assisting a stranded motorist, the amount of time spent assisting , and a third would be non-sanction, and non- service that an officer will perform such as community…
Ethical issues in policing reach back to the early ages of law enforcement. The profession of policing plays a vital role in the rationale and motivation of how officers conduct themselves while on and off duty. This is a primary focus point of the society in which they work, due to the society’s level of trust and confidence in the officers to act accordingly and responsibly without any negative person vengeances or vendetta. As a result of the numerous negative encounters of officers interacting with the public, which has been mainstreamed by the media, there is a heightened sense of entitlement and false responsibility of citizens to report to higher authorities or the media when they do not get whatever it is that they want or receive the…
As of now, the current system is experiencing an overflow of cases from felonies and misdemeanors which already takes days even months to resolved. And so the use of police discretion helps the court system trust the police department to use all their resources and good judgment to stop or continue a criminal process. Police discretion is not supposed to be use recklessly it should only be use on certain situations with good reasons. When the police officer uses discretion takes into consideration standards like profession, legal, social and moral norms as well as offender’s age, race, economic status, gender. Besides giving them a warning for their offence they will offer lectures depending on the severity of the crime.…
In our text, discretion is defined as having to decide between two or more courses of action or behavior. Discretion is practiced in all aspects of the criminal justice system, police, corrections, judges and attorneys all have the power and capabilities to exercise discretion. An example of police discretion is a police officer responding to a domestic violence call, the officer can analyze the situation and decide to arrest one or both parties or, attempt to provide them the resources to get help or give a warning. An example of a correctional officer using discretion is, if the correctional officer witnesses an inmate breaking a law or code of the facility and can make the decision to do nothing or follow procedure. Another example of discretion…
Police discretion is a tool used by officers; it gives them the ability to utilize the law to the letter or not to enforce it to the letter of the law. Some say that latitude…
Police discretion is issued to officers for the purpose of maintaining a just society. Discretion is defined the ability to form decisions based on their own judgment. These decisions are concluded through copious reasons such an officer’s experience or through their own individual backgrounds. Police discretion has the ability to dismiss minor crimes, yet laws exist where discretion is invalid and officers must accomplish whatever means legally to punish the criminal.…
Samuel Walker (1993) asserts the problem is not with the use of discretion, but the misuse of discretion in the Criminal Justice System. According to Walker (1993) “The Criminal Justice System is nothing more than the sum total of a series of discretionary decisions by innumerable officials.” (Walker 1993 p.4) Charles Klahm and Rob Tillyer (2015) explains that “Exposure, activity, and performance independently impact the likelihood of the officer initiating discretionary.”(Charles Klahm and Rob Tillyer, 2015 348). The assumption is police officers who are routinely exposed to diversity among age, race, gender, and criminal or noncriminal individuals effect the police use of discretion. The activities that police officers partake in is another factor that shapes the police use of discretion. The suggestion is that police officer's past behavior will reflect their future behavior in other words. Similar to activity, performance looks at police officers past performance. The assertion is that police officers who perform discretionary searches where contraband was founded were more likely to continue using discretion when conducting…
Patrol officers use discretion each and every time while on shift. They will respond to a variety of calls and have to make a decision on scene whether to charge a subject or arrest them. Patrol officers also work traffic and enforce moving violations and equipment violations. Try to imagine if officers did not have discretion and had to fully enforce the law each time a violation occurred. This would have a negative impact on community relations and would also completely saturate our court systems that struggle already with caseloads. However, discretion allows the officer to make a judgment in the field based on the totality of the circumstances to decide which offenders should be tried through the criminal justice system and which should…
Police officers in the United States and around the world have an extremely hard job both physically and mentally. Police discretion is a tool that officers use every day on their jobs (Odom 2009). It is a decision making process where the officer deduces from the situation and observation the best solution. For example, an officer pulls over a driver for running a red light. The officer must decide whether or not to issue the driver a citation. If the officer feels the driver isn’t intoxicated, or a danger to others, the officer may let the driver go with just a warning. The officer might pull over another car for the same thing, but issue the citation because the driver was a danger to other drivers on the road.…
Discretion is a term that describes the flexibility that people like judges have when deciding the fate of offenders. They could choose to give someone the maximum penalty or be a little more lenient. This is all dependent on the situation and the amount of discretion they are given. There are many individuals involved within a case that have discretion. Three of the most prominent of these individuals would be police officers, prosecuting attorneys, and judges…
By definition, discretion means freedom to act or judge on ones own. With this privilege, evolves both pros and cons. A major problem which may occur are inconsistencies with the law. The same type of crimes may be given different punishments by judges. This would create controversy and accusations of prejudice and bias would certainly evolve. If the law were emphasized on discretion, the power would be mainly in judges and government official’s hands. It would be their responsibility that our nation continues to follow the principles of democracy and equality. If this did not occur, discretion could end up marking the downfall of our great nation. However I believe the pros overrun the cons in when looking closely at our legal system, in regards to discretion. In too many cases in our nations recent history, has discretion helped in making the right decisions. Every crime has different scenarios and plotlines, making it impossible for the same punishment to fit all the same kinds of crimes. This is why that in our legal system now, murder has evolved into manslaughter and other types of crimes. I believe that the best legal system looks at every case as a separate entity, and is run by judges that have no bias and do not look at any other factors besides, what is true justice. Our country will continue to evolve if we continue to use the component of discretion in our legal system.…
Discussions in how discretion is exercised in the legal profession often raises debate in the criminal justice system. Discretion is vastly misused in many of the criminal justice fields. Areas such as youth justice, sentencing, policing, and a host of many other legal fields need better understanding, interpretation and communication. As with many practices, the object of measuring these areas is to understand constraints on its use and areas where it can be regulated better. This paper will reflect the role of discretion and how it is conceived in the justice system. In addition, this paper will examine how individuals elect to measure legal discretion from the public’s point of view as often the public sees only the negative terms of it.…
Police discretion is the ability to choose a course of action because of broad limits of power. It "refers to the autonomy an officer has in choosing an appropriate course of action" (The Police In America, 113). It "includes authority to decide which of the various means of helping the helpless, maintaining order, and keeping the peace are best suited to particular circumstances" (www.worldandi.com/specialreport/1989/january/Sa15878.htm). The police need to have discretion since it is impossible to record everything on what they are supposed to do and not do. We can also understand that if you could record all the rules and regulations it would be too extensive for an individual to comprehend.…
Law Enforcement has been around since the beginning of man. The Code of Hammurabi, a book of 282 different codes, which specifically spelled out punishments for crimes, was followed back as early as 1700 B.C. (Geo Quest, Current Events, 00113492, 10/28/2005, Vol. 105, Issue 8) In the Bible's story of Adam and Eve, God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden as a punishment for breaking the rules. (The Holy Bible: Genesis Ch.3) These types of historical records display the fact that law enforcers have always existed. Just as law enforcers have always existed, so have ethical issues surrounding the authority exercised by these individuals. Police corruption is a problem that has always existed.…