There are four major factors that influence police officers in determining the exercise of discretion
1. Kelsey
I do believe that police officers have an extreme diverse and dynamic role within the community based on statistics. Such as crime fighting, social work, and peacekeeping as a whole. Overall, over the many years, police officer’s main objective has been made primarily to social work. In our textbook, it was found that “In a classic study of patrol activities in a city of 400,000, John Webster found that providing social service functions and performing administrative tasks accounted for 55 percent of police officers’ time and 57 percent of their calls. Activities involving crime fighting took up only 17 percent of patrol time and amounted to about 16 percent of the calls to the police.” So majority of requests and calls sent to police departments and officers are less often situations involving crime fighting and more so social services.
There are four major factors that influence police officers in determining the exercise of discretion which include characteristics of crime, relationship between the alleged criminal and the victim, relationship between police and the criminal or victim, and department policies. It must be taken in consideration, that a police officer’s discretion depends on the type of situation they are involved in, which varies. For example, the same crime that is committed between two suspects may be determined to be handled differently because on the different situation that led up to the moment. The level of impact a crime and/or the behavior of a victim or suspect will determine whether it’s appropriate to exercise discretion.
2. Jordan
I think that Police do their best work to solve and fight crime. However a large component of this is being involved in their communities. A lot of times disputes can be solved with communication. Less then 2% of crimes end up with a conviction, but this does not mean that they are not solving disputes or dangerous traffic violations. Most of the time these do not result in a conviction Therefore I think that it is unfair to say that it is mostly just social work, rather than crime fighting. When majority of the time it takes the police to be social in order to do their job successfully and fight crime. Think about it, earlier on in this course trust was a big concern for a lot of people when talking about effective policing. You cannot have trust if the police are not socially accepted in their area.
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