Police Discretion And Boredom Summary

When I was young, I thought police officers were super heroes. From the television I watched, police officers were always catching criminals. However, as I grew older, I saw police officers do everything but catching criminals. As I was reading Police Discretion and Boredom: What Officers Do When There Is Nothing To Do by Scott W. Phillips, I came to understand that, as the author theorized, an officer’s discretionary decision making can minimize the boredom that may be associated with down time.
The group of people under study for this research are police officers. The specific paradigm that the author utilises is symbolic interactionism. According to Schaefer & Haaland (2014), symbolic interactionism is a microsociology approach and it generalizes about everyday forms of social interaction in order to understand society as a whole. Likewise, Scott W. Philips created a study using an observational design where he was able to observe everyday social
I was truly concentrated in the reading and I felt every aspect of the research article had very rich data and observations, contributing to the purpose of the article. For instance, the author gave examples of ways police officers use their police discretion to reduce their boredom and gave an explanation. This allows the reader to make connections and understand the article better. For the most part, this study reads true. The reason being, the study allows interaction and understanding with respect to real life situations. Thus, the research allows for existent proof. However, there is a flaw in the study. There is a possibility that because the police officers know they are being observed, they act in a way that is expected of them. In this case, the police officers are expected to engage in police activity, so they do so. This reflects the final result of the study. Thus, there is a correlation, so it may have affected the results of the