The Role of Police in Society

There are certain traditions within police departments that govern how an individual officers discretion is to be used. Sometimes discretion comes in the form of strict adherence to the law while other times an officers discretion can be seen as abusive and a misuse of their allotted power. There remains however, an informal structure of discretion in almost all police departments that seems to make up the norms as to how an when discretion is used. Contrary to what you might think, it is actually the officers on the bottom rungs of the departmental hierarchy that have the power to exercise the most discretion, whereas command officers have relatively little leeway in their decision making. This is due to thefact that a command officers is more or less bound by strict orders of protocol and is there in a more managerial type role to see that the department operates smoothly and efficiently. A command officer also has much more to lose than an officer with little experience who walks the street and therefore must be much more careful when using his or her own individual discretion. Another discretional norm would be the notion that it is a physical, economical and mental impossibility for all laws to be enforced at all times. It is unreasonable to expect law enforcement to solve or prevent 100% of crime due to the simple lack of man power that would be needed to realize this. Also it would not be economically feasible to employ the number of officers it would take to accomplish such a goal and with the number of laws on the books consistently growing, some minor crimes will go unnoticed by officers because they are unable to recognize that a law has in fact been broken. Thankfully the types of laws that fall into the latter category are so minor that they would go unnoticed by the majority of citizens due to there extreme lack of severity. Prioritizing laws is also common practice in law enforcement.