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Police Discretion

Police Discretion Position Paper
Police discretion, up until 1956, was a topic void of conversation and discussion; that is, until an American Bar Foundation study discovered it (O'Connor, 2004). Nobody would ever admit it existed. For some citizens, discretion is a privileged license which gives police officers tremendous amount of liberty. For others, it means officers going against the rules, disobeying superiors, and being less than perfect all the time. When it was finally exposed, people like the American Friends Service Committee (1971) (as cited in O'Connor, 2004), called for its abolishment, and police administrators quickly sought a control on discretion.
The attitude of police administrators was perceived to advocate any deviation from accepted procedures as being extralegal and probably a source of corruption (O'Connor, 2004). Others vehemently opine that the use of discretion is extremely important in the Criminal Justice field. The ability for a police officer to make a choice based on several possible courses of action requires such discretion. Further, the extensive training police officers are introduced to, avail those possible situations that they may encounter throughout their academy training. The problem surfaces when these officers encounter a situation that they never received training on. However, the training received cannot cover every situation that an officer may encounter. Additionally, our laws today do not cover every possible scenario; new laws are constantly being added onto the books, forcing officers to use discretion.
Discretion does not provide an endless supply of green lights to police officers. On the contrary, discretion brings to the surface, each officer's basic foundation of norms, values and beliefs. The human dimension is a platform citizens tend to omit from their cognitive process when dealing with police officers. Police officers are individuals just as citizens are, and as such, make...