Police Discretion Analysis

There have been ongoing debates about the guidelines for police officers when conducting discretionary searches. One police department that has been in the headlines for its practices of discretionary searches have been the New York City’s Police Department. New York City’s Stop and frisk policy allowed police officers to stop and search an individual on the street at their discretion based on suspicion of criminal activity. One of the most highly publicized cases of NYPD’s stop and frisk tactic was the 2014 death of Eric Garner in the hands of Staten Island Police Department. The Eric Garner’s case followed outpours from citizens calling for change in NYPD’s stop and frisk guidelines and other police departments as well. This week’s article
Samuel Walker (1993) asserts the problem is not with the use of discretion, but the misuse of discretion in the Criminal Justice System. According to Walker (1993) “The Criminal Justice System is nothing more than the sum total of a series of discretionary decisions by innumerable officials.” (Walker 1993 p.4) Charles Klahm and Rob Tillyer (2015) explains that “Exposure, activity, and performance independently impact the likelihood of the officer initiating discretionary.”(Charles Klahm and Rob Tillyer, 2015 348). The assumption is police officers who are routinely exposed to diversity among age, race, gender, and criminal or noncriminal individuals effect the police use of discretion. The activities that police officers partake in is another factor that shapes the police use of discretion. The suggestion is that police officer's past behavior will reflect their future behavior in other words. Similar to activity, performance looks at police officers past performance. The assertion is that police officers who perform discretionary searches where contraband was founded were more likely to continue using discretion when conducting
The word discretion has been the cause of death among minorities by police officer’s claim that lethal force was the only option. Discretion is an action that has many different outcomes depending on the individual and it is hard to measure and predict police officer discretion in a life or death situation. To what degree do we measures in real time how police officers deploy the use of discretion in a situation that may be described as dangerous. It’s hard to do so discretion just like with the role of police is an unclear