Poice Role Report

Some examples of police discretion that I will be using include; traffic violations, domestic violence, mental illness, homeless person - theft, vice crime - gambling.

The first on will be traffic violations - an example would be failure to stop at a red light. The officer can use discretion on whether or not to give the defendant a ticket or just a verbal warning. This all depends on what state you are in and what the traffic law penalties are. As long as the officer senses no presence of drugs or alcohol the officer is free to make the choice of giving a ticket or just a warning.

Next up is domestic violence. When domestic violence is involved if one party is wearing a mark then the other is usually arrested and in most states it is a law. If both parties are either free or wearing visible marks then they are told to separate for a while to let the anger dissipate. If children are involved though one parent usually the aggressor will be removed for the time being so that the children will not be handed over to DCF or DHR.(Department of Children and Families) (Department of Human Resources)

The next category is people with mental illness. Officers have a lot of discretion when it comes to the mentally challanged. They can choose to remove the person from the area and take them for an evaluation if possible or return them home.

A homeless person theft is more based on the old question if a man steals a loave of bread for his straving family is that stealing? Well the general answer is "yes" it is stealing by definition. But in this case it is a homless person, in this case the store owner may have charges pressed or not and may even drive the perosn to a shelter.

Vice crimes such as gambling really depends on what kind of gambling it is. For instance if it is kids outside pitching pennies against a wall that is not really something to bust them for. More of a response to that would be to shoo them away and tell them that gambling no matter what kind is illegeal for a person their age. The officer can then tell the youths to go on home or find something else to do. The fact that officers are all different and exercise discretion differently (Wilson 1968; Muir 1977; Klinger 1997) also creates a problem with the public. That problem is one of lack of consistency. Because each officer acts differently in any given situation, it becomes difficult for a citizen to know what behavior they can expect from an officer, or the behavior the officer expects from them in the situation. To some extent this can create distrust between the public and the police, which in turn can lead to unnecessary confrontations between the two. However the greates part of the problem in nature in the use of discretion is found in its uncontrolled use in the area of violation of individual rights, particularly those requiring due process of law and equal protection of the law, protection from unreasonable search and seizures