Factors Of Police Discretion

There are a number of different factors that impact police discretion. There are four general categories that include Organizational Factors, Neighborhood Factors, Situational Factors, and that also contain subcategories within them. For this paper I will be focusing on Individual Officer Characteristics and Situational Factors.

Individual officer characteristics which are influenced by an officer's age, education, experience, gender, ambition and attitudes towards their job. The way that a police officer may present themselves or act a certain way affect the way that they make decisions while on the job.According to Landsman, “a survey of officers assigned to minority districts in New York City found that minority officers were more likely
Causes these officers to be more selective with their arrest decisions. The way that an officer may feel about their job or their beliefs are reflected in the way that they work or act. If an officer may not enjoy their job, then it would be seen through the actions that they take such as maybe ticking a number of individuals or disobeying the rules that the department that they work at have. Furthermore, another example of would be the years of experience that the officer may have can help guide them to a choice between decisions that they having in a certain situation. There was a “research [done] into the influences of officer education and experience has suggested that officer education and experience have a positive effect on the use of force in that officers with more experience and formal education are more likely to use alternate forms of citizen control...The research found that a more educated and experienced officer shows more restraint when
In other words police officers act or do a decision that is going to go in accordance to the situation that they are in. According to UKEssays,“ An officer is also heavily influenced by the legal factors involved when an officer encounters a citizen such as the citizen's resistance to orders, officer and citizen safety, and evidence of a crime. Usually when an officer finds her or himself dealing with a situation that requires arrest or the use of force within a legal framework, they will behave accordingly rather than rely on officer attitude or other officer characteristics.” When an officer will react to the situation according to how they were trained to do back in the academy. They will be focusing more on calming down the situation rather than focusing on their own emotions. A person's mental status or health can be influence the decisions that an officer will have to take when dealing with them. The reason being is that, “Even though there may be a correlation on an officer's education level in respect to the officer's predilection to arrest a mentally disordered suspect...officers have not been shown to disproportionately arrest mentally disordered persons based on mental health.” (UKEssays) These individuals are to be treated a bit differently and so the officers have to keep that in