Police Discretion: A Necessity for Criminal Justice Efficiency

When the media sensationalize cases about police officers abusing their powers, the public’s immediate response is to demand restrictions on them. While the abuse of discretion exists, allowing police officers to exercise discretion without controls is vital due to the unpredictable and multifaceted nature of crime. Thus, abolishing police discretion would be detrimental because police officers will primarily become law enforcers who ignore individual circumstances, cannot make meaningful differences in others’ lives, and cause inefficiencies in the criminal justice system.

Police officers must be allowed to exercise discretion given the nature of their job. Discretion is imperative because it permits police officers to select between different

Police use discretion because they need to consider the criminal justice system’s “capacity to process legal violations” (Buvik, 2016, p. 772). Therefore, if a police officer is not allowed to exercise discretion, the police officer must arrest an individual who is breaking the law every time. When an officer “[lays] an information,” the next step is for the Crown to determine whether he or she will accept or reject the case (Griffiths, 2015, p. 174). While the criminal justice system “does not … respond to every breach of the law,” there will still be significantly more cases waiting to be accepted into the court (Griffiths, 2015, p. 25). This is highly inefficient because only “few cases go to trial” anyways (Griffiths, 2016, p. 25). Furthermore, as Cole notes, judges are subjected to heavy paperwork, severe time constraints, and case backlog (2015, p. 76-81). If the “paperwork for even the simplest case is voluminous,” then judges will have even a harder time keeping up than ever before (Cole, 2015, p. 76). “Without discretion the police, and indeed the whole criminal justice system, would become overwhelmed with cases, resulting in public displeasure” (McLaughlin, 2009 as quoted in McCartney, S., & Parent, R., 2015, p. 107) Thus, police officers require discretion to alleviate the criminal justice system’s