EXAM 4 STUDY GUIDE CHAPTER 9 1 Why is arrest a monumental power Being arrested carries a negative image that taints the arrestee for years to come ex People with an arrest history are less likely to get job offers 2 What do the terms full enforcement and selective enforcement mean Full enforcement police confront and deal with EACH AND EVERY single violation that comes to their attention Selective enforcement police do not enforce all the laws all the time against every single violator 3 What is police discretion What and officer should and should not do When handling a call in the field officers must choose from a variety of alternative actions in order to resolve the situation These options range from taking no action to giving advice to issuing a warning to making an arrest 4 What is unarticulated improvisation Officers lack the guidance of explicit policy and must make their own decisions without ay administrative structuring 5 Give two objections to unarticulated improvisation The bottom rung of the organizational ladder is formulating and enacting policy The establishment and enactment of policy by individual patrol officers ensure continuity or uniformity 6 What are LaFave s five reasons for why discretion exists 1 Unclear laws i e obscenity laws and community standards Imprecise or obtuse language In Florida it is unlawful to build a bonfire within 10 rods of a structure How long is a rod 2 Nuisance Behavior Public intoxication 3 Broad Statutes Social Gambling 4 Moral Standards 5 Outdated laws Fornication adultery cohabitation etc Blue Laws i e illegal to wash a pig on the Sabbath 7 Distinguish proactive from reactive policing Proactive poling the officer initiates the discovery and responds to the incident ex An officer who sees a fight in progress and intervenes is engaged in proactive police work Reactive policing a third party notifies the police about a situation and then police respond to the call Ex Answering a burglary alarm THE BULK OF POLICE WORK IS REACTIVE 8 Why do some researchers call police operations and dispatchers the gatekeepers to the police system The civilian employees who take complaints over the telephone control how the call gets categorized and help determine what the appropriate agency action will be The operator Must calm the person down quickly Get the location of the incident and determine if an emergency exists that requires immediate police response Get as many details as possible Must decide what the appropriate agency response should be 9 What does rewriting the police motto from to serve and protect to to serve to serve to serve and then protect mean An overwhelming amount of time goes to non police activities A fair estimate would be that about 20 of all police activity pertains to criminal matters while the remaining 80 is spent on other non criminal matters 10 What is the unwritten rule among police telephone operators Send a police officer unless it is patently clear there is no need to do so 11 What four goals do police officers have in mind when handling a call for service 1 Statutes 2 Agency policy 3 Suspect Demeanor 4 Officer Safety 12 What is a definitional regulation The use of questions to determine who what when where and why of a crime Questions help achieve the goal of information gathering They also force the respondent to acknowledge the officer s presence and to submit to the officer s authority 13 What is imperative regulation When the officer issues a command or and order Ex Directing traffic around an accident scene advising an individual to leave the premises or else face an arrest on a trespass 14 What is coercive regulation When the officer uses or threatens to use physical force or arrest This form of regulation ranges from the actual display of a weapon down to subtle body language or other cues of impending action 15 What is demeanor Why is it so important in the study of police discretion Demeanor the suspects attitude and respectfulness Demeanor constantly appears as an extremely important feature of the decision to arrest 16 What is a quota How can it affect police performance Quota An expectation that officers will write a certain number of traffic citations every month Officers issue citations almost half the time However many officers shirked traffic duties during the first part of the month the second half of the month though witnessed a scramble to write a sufficient number of traffic tickets to appease supervisors 17 Why do some critics think racism influences police discretion Blacks are over represented in arrests The police arrest blacks more often because agencies saturate these areas with more police assignments Furthermore these officers hold jaundiced and biased attitudes Police officers who patrol black areas are less tolerant Thus the higher black arrest rate reflects officer predispositions rather than the criminal actions of the arrest persons 18 Why is the strategy of using legal and non legal variables to study the arrest decision so important Legal offense severity and prior record Non legal offenders race age and gender The research task is to pit these two variables against each other to see which is more capable of explaining official actions If the legal items emerge as being more important than non legal then one could not conclude that discriminatory practices were important But if the non legal variables have more influence than legal ones it would appear that discriminatory practices were operative 19 Explain how race a non legal variable can become transformed into prior record a legal variable Assume for the moment that race a social characteristic is the main determinant of police action in a field encounter the officer makes an arrest in this situation Suppose that this same subject is involved in a another field encounter at a later date If the investigating officer runs a check for priors the computer would show the individual as having an arrest history Any actions taken by the officer in this second encounter would appear to stem from the legal variable of prior record However the fact of the matter is that the attainment of legal variable prior record was tainted originally by a social consideration the subject s race 20 How can analyzing the decision to prosecute cases help us understand the decision to arrest Systematic case tracking can provide feedback about the quality of the arrest decision Before putting a case on the docket the prosecutor reviews it At this point
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