Arguments Against Police Discretion

3) Police discretion is an official action by a criminal justice official based on that individual’s judgment about the best course of action. This is not limited to patrol officers deciding whether or not to arrest someone, but is used by officers at all different ranks in making discretionary decisions about a wide range of actions. Even though all these officers use discretion, the lowest ranking employees, the patrol officers, exercise the greatest amount of it. The significance of the concept police discretion is that it decreases as you move up the organizational hierarchy, unlike most organizations where the crucial decisions are made at the top of the organization, here they are made at the bottom. Patrol officers have been described

The officer’s beliefs can cause them to deny due process to the people they suspect are drug dealers, prostitutes, and pimps by deliberately harassing them, chasing the individuals out of the neighborhood rather than arresting them. Biases can cause officers to misuse discretion by discriminating against racial or ethnic minorities by racial profiling in actions like traffic stops and stop and frisks. Each officers’ past experiences also affect their use of discretion. If they have always had poor personnel management, they might not have been provided clear guidelines regarding how to handle different situations or have had clear performance standards. Without having these there is no regulation of discretion and they might not know the best ways to handle these different situations. It would also be impossible to fairly evaluate each officer’s performance without any set guidelines or regulations. Officers can also misuse discretion by making decisions that are inconsistent with the policies of the

An interrogation is an interaction between police officers and a suspect and an interview could be with a witness, victim, or anybody else who might have information they need. A suspect can even just be interviewed without being interrogated. Officers conducting these interviews and interrogations must consider what they want from the conversation to decide how to conduct themselves and what style to use during the interaction. If the point of talking to this person is to simply get more information than it is an interview. An interview is typically less formal and has less accusatory conversation than an interrogation because its main point it to gain more information about what the person saw or knows that might help them. An interrogation is formal, normally taken place once the suspect is in custody, and designed to get a suspect to