The Dangers Of Police Discretion

Police discretion essentially alludes to the decision-making power/choice that is afforded to police in terms of the handling of a given situation; the fewer rules given to officers and the more individual power they wield, the greater the discretion. Alternately, with more rules placed on officers concerning the ways in which they should conduct themselves/police business, the lower the level of discretion.
In many ways, police discretion is very important; every day, officers are faced with situations of varying danger and complexity. No situation is ever exactly the same; even routine traffic stops are ever changing because of different citizens of the public that officers encounter, all of which could pose possible danger to law enforcement
Many factors contribute to police discretionary behavior, including situational (e.g. race of suspect) , organizational (e.g. police departments/their varying rules and expectations), and environmental characteristics (e.g. racial or socioeconomic composition of given neighborhood or area patrolled by police), in addition to characteristics of the individual officer (such as personal beliefs/morals). All of these factors combined leave far too much availability for unfair treatment of civilians, as all officers, and areas across the country in which they patrol, are different; one officer could have bias against a certain groups of civilians that could sway his/her discretion; different officers could exercise varying levels of harshness in arrests/traffic stops if the option was available to them (ie: a citizen could receive a warning from one officer, while another (for committing the same offense) could be fined, arrested, etc). High levels of police discretion leaves far too much power to an individual officer and his or her own personal beliefs, which should not have any place in a person’s working environment that pertains to the policing of peoples of varied race, gender, religion, etc. For this reason, in addition to factors listed above that influence the behavior of police discretion, I believe that officers should exercise limited discretion to avoid (to the greatest extent possible) any/all bias in the treatment of American