Police Violence and Faulty Notions of Discretion

  

Discretion to arrest in police work in the United States is based on four factors.  That is, formal quotas in police departments that require their officers to obtain arrests, informal quotas that are manifested by internal cultures within police departments of all size, external influences from other public officials, and societal conveyances.  Because of these four factors, discretion in the line of duty is regulated and police officers often make decisions based upon the four above-mentioned factors.  However, many of the decisions to arrest individuals do come from the forced professionalism by executive police officers and thus diminishes authentic public service and creates a system that allows an officer to strive for detainment for minor offenses.  Simply knowing that arrests are necessary to not gain flack from other coworkers also transitions into prejudiced police efforts in general, and many police officers will not target an accused offender if they know that their arrest or conviction will be troubling for the police department and court system.  Therefore, police officers routinely seek out persons who lack the resources to properly defend themselves in legal action or are simply willing to negotiate to return to their lives as soon as possible – which is conducted through the aforementioned perverse detainment and quick plea arrangements.  It should, again, be noted that these deliberate searches are mostly found in charges for minor offenses; this is because discretion in serious offenses is not proper.  In other words, felony offenses usually will not include an officer’s discretion of arrest or no detainment and many of these arrests are made by detectives who have already proved their loyalty to coworkers and the law enforcement world. 

Police-community relationships often become stymied because of these actions and entire jurisdictions do not enjoy the presence of police officers and, in turn, hostility between the citizens and law enforcement practitioners is repetitious.  Police departments also lose interest in helping citizens in particular areas and violence unfortunately becomes the norm.  In the United States, the rate of police officer-citizen violence is at extremely high numbers.  Many of these encounters include lethal force, and to this date 1,079 persons have been killed by police officers in this country in 2017 – which is almost three people a day.  Once more, the civilians who are targeted because of these quotas and internal police cultures are often sought because of their easy acquirement of guilt and less obstacles that law enforcement may face.  Unfortunately, these characteristics are often found in urban communities of African American and Hispanic/Latino individuals.  Social ills are used as an excuse for police officers to target the individuals from these communities, and posit the notion that community policing and positive role models are not found in police departments that conduct these biased arrests. 

  In contrast, there are encounters that entail necessary force – including lethal force – by street level law enforcers and the statistics should be understood with this element in mind.  Nonetheless, this blog will concentrate on police officer violence in urban African American and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods and depict the facts of the matter as well as present notions to better comprehend the violence and, hopefully, quell the deliberate harms by police officers.  Community policing efforts are required to eliminate this horrific trend of police-associated assaults in the United States, and it can be sustained while simultaneously deterring criminality and not require increasing budgets or shift hours for police departments.  As the information and discussions are presented, an additional variable should be considered by the reader; which is that police officers are trained in quasi-military approaches to justice.  This structure explains many of the thoughts behind police officer authority and topics to resolve this issue will be discussed too.                                                                   

Internal Cultures in Police Departments

As in any organization, internal cultures are everyday occurrences that stem from the history of the organization and the individuals who work within the entity.  Organizational structure has a significant impact on how policies are regulated and individual frames of mind about the workplace environment and assigned duties that are required.  Negative and positive perceptions about workplace environments are manufactured by the individual, and thus have more power to guide the organization in its skills and future functionality when compared to a singular or executive approach.  This is seen with the behaviors of unions or guilds, board meetings, other group congregations in workplace environments, and informal gatherings between coworkers. 

Isomorphism regarding internal organizational cultures with police departments is apparent.  In other words, internal cultures in police departments not only exist, but also endure similar patterns as seen in other business practices as the individuals become acclimated to the structure of the police department and tasks that they are responsible for.  Again, perceptions can have a massive authority in configuring the outcomes of the workplace productivity and even provides for augmentations throughout the entire police department.  The chain-of-command in police departments is simply for formality reasons in respect to oversight, executive leaders in police departments use “top-down” and “bottom-up” structures to glean individual performances in both professional and personal aspects, as well as to comprehend what changes can be made to produce favorable workplace environments.  Moreover, external influences in police work has a significant role in shaping police departments because of the professionalism’s public service element.  Other public servants and pressures from citizens are the primary factors for changes in police departments’ internal cultures.  However, and as aforementioned, these external influences are not mutually exclusive with internal influences – they both occur simultaneously.  Laws, crimes waves, political agendas, and jurisdictional activities are constantly telling police officers how to do their jobs because of the previously mentioned public servitude and internal culture that is associated with police work.

Detailed internal influences are construed by the perception of police work that is viewed as necessary in an area that the departments are responsible for maintaining.  Meaning that if executive-level police decisions are made to enforce laws in a stringent manner, then the lower-level officers will cater to this command.  Police work entails arresting accused offenders, and officers are required to be proactive in their line of work like any other organization.  If police officers are not making arrests, then a negative individual and organizational perception is retained.  Because of this, police officers are forced to arrest people even if they do not want to; faulty notions of discretion are obvious in our current understanding of police work.  Internal influences cause police officers to remove these sensitive feelings and ensure that their service is valid given the standards of the departmental culture; once more, this is done by arresting offenders who are incapable of acquiring resources to deliver adequate legal defense.  Numerous variables cause police officers to make an arrest to not attain a negative perception by other employees in their police department, so the officers will select a process that is almost certain to provide a result that would not produce unfavorable opinions about their performance.

External influences need to be understood in a more in-depth fashion as well.  Laws are the easiest mechanism that influences police work; as laws are enacted or amended, police departments have the responsibility to properly enforce these codified rules in our society.  Second to this, political pressures and civilian complaints also significantly influence the methods that police officers decide to utilize.  When other public officials and civilians call for crime policies to be enforced, the police department is implicitly and explicitly forced into performing the notions in the political or citizen-based agenda; furthermore, police departments work side-by-side with other public officials that have authority with the media and finances associated with police work.  This contributes to police officers performing duties in order to secure occupational retention and favorable thoughts from their coworkers, families, politicians, and the public.  Fear of negative perceptions and monetary inclinations are solid incentives to perform tasks that produce positive psychological impressions, sociological attrition, and professional validity.

Discretion in Police Work and its Ties with African American and Hispanic/Latino Communities

Minority communities – African American and Hispanic/Latino areas – are usually targeted by police departments because of their low socioeconomic statuses and cultural depictions that are presented to the general population via the media.  These areas are routinely shown in the media as having large amounts of sociological dysfunction; such as various types of routine criminal activity, familial problems, and dissent towards governmental projections.  Police departments use these elements to adhere to internal cultures that are found within their police department and to ensure that negative attention from various environments is not acquired.  As previously mentioned, formal and informal quotas drive the biased police work in these jurisdictions because of mandatory arrest statistics in police departments and the camaraderie between police officers.  Formal regulations that require a specified number of arrests forces police officers to produce offenses in communities that will ascertain fulfillment of mandatory arrest policies.  Locating easy targets becomes common because of these regulations and African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos are discriminated against because of racist and ethnic biases that permeate from the aforementioned media propaganda and cultural misunderstandings of the communities in which these residents reside in.  Police officers do not seek out mandatory arrests in areas of White privilege because of the fear of repercussions that these communities are able to produce.  The consequences may include longer court processes, better legal defense, civil complaints against officers and police departments, and activism that White communities participate in during block clubs, town hall meetings, and informal gatherings.  Police officers use the dissent and lack of community efficacy in minority communities to their advantage; which makes the notions of discretion regarding arrest a biased process and not authentic public service. 

Police Violence

          Because of the faulty notions of discretion in these communities, violence between citizens and police officers occurs and thus creates data that represents how minority communities are deliberately being sought by law enforcement.  Killings by police officers in minority communities usually never leads to prosecution or serious inquiries by ombudsman personnel.  In fact, 99 percent of all police officer-related deaths never retain any form of legal intervention, and police officers will deal with little internal scrutiny from their organization.  Additionally, demographics and crime statistics do not show that police violence is conducted in areas that have high crime rates, but do demonstrate the racial and ethnic biases that are mentioned in this piece.  Specifically, African Americans are three times more likely to be assaulted by police officers in the United States when compared to White people.  Particular areas are worse than others as well, and there are no statistical analyses that suggest police officer-citizen encounters that have violence associated with them are situations that entail armed civilians or violent episodes that require aggressive force – the data suggests that specific police departments in the United States act more violently without justifiable reasons when compared to departments in other jurisdictions in similar situations.  In fact, 48 percent of the people killed in the top 100 largest cities in the United States were African American and were unarmed.  Many of these encounters were initiated with contact by law enforcement and were not emergency response calls. 

In 2017, police violence against Hispanic/Latino persons increased from previous years and 159 Hispanic/Latino individuals have been killed by police officers.  The ratio of this police violence to the total population of Hispanic/Latino people in the United States is 600 to 21,886,7925.  Hispanic/Latino-related deaths by police officers have many situations where the homicide included an unarmed person.  Statistical data for police-related violence towards Hispanic/Latino people in 2017 has not been fully tracked or projected thus far, however prior years can be used to comprehend the violence toward this ethnic group and, in turn, allow for proper forecasting to be done.  For example, in 2016 approximately 20 percent of Hispanic/Latino people involved in police-citizen violent encounters were killed by police while not being armed.  This number demonstrates that Hispanic/Latino communities – which are not as vast in the United States when compared to African American or Caucasian neighborhoods – are being subjected to police officer violence at a disproportionate rate when compared to the previously mentioned racial areas.  So, the police departments are patrolling these areas and performing violent actions at an unusual rate.  These statistics also do not depict that amount of Hispanic/Latino people who are killed crossing the United States’ border illegally.

Policy Implications

Police officer violence needs to be better tracked and displayed in media broadcasts throughout the United States.  Many of the police officer-related violence is not configured by law enforcement groups on a local, state, or national level.  Police departments are infamously known for hiding this type of data as well as the resolutions that occur after a violent incident between police officers and citizens.  Moreover, mandated arrests in local departments should not be included in their public agenda; as it forces police officers to find crime that may not typically be viewed as concerning or occurring at all.  Targeting individuals in specific neighborhoods is harassment and violates federal policies; which in turn causes social despair and discrepancies in police departments. 

Also, community relations need to be restored within the targeted communities with the use of positive actions that entail positive role modeling for all the citizens in African American and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods.  Local police departments need to be better trained on the causation of criminality and quality-of-life issues that unfortunately are abundant in these areas.  Second to this, community leaders ought to be produced and allowed to be liaisons for residents to the police departments.  Communal meetings that discuss daily problems in the neighborhood would allow for police officers to learn about pro-active measures rather than only aggressive or dismissive gestures toward the public in these communities.  By performing community relation meetings, police violence would be decreased and may not occur because of the positive relations that are acquired in these gatherings.  Knowing who the residents are in a community, and understanding their daily living conditions, makes it harder for police officers to simply arrest people because of the personalization that is manifested.  Restoring the imagery of the police department in racial and ethnic jurisdictions must be conducted and sustained if violent actions or reactions are attempting to be diminished.  More events that include youth relations would also diminish police violence in future generations.  Hiring more minorities for police professions would also allow for better communication in communities and police departments.  These individuals (minority police officers) are able to sympathize with racial and ethnic communities as well as properly explain matters to police personnel so that violence does not occur.   

Finally, police officers who use lethal and non-lethal force in an improper manner need to be removed from the police profession.  This includes executive officers who condone such behaviors.  Federal and state prosecutors should perform authentic public service and prosecute officers who improperly use force and send a message to the community that public service is not a position that allows people to break the law and receive no consequences.  Training for police departments should include identifying hostile police work and methods to deal with the problems in an internal and non-bias external fashion.  Training should also include development in implicit biases that exist in this country so that police officers are able to recognize prejudiced thinking and counteract it before arrests are made.  In regard to minor offense arrests and quasi-military police work, minority communities should be pro-active and require police departments to help create community courts and informal meetings that help individuals and allow them to see why their actions may have acquired police officers' attention; that is, if individuals in minority communities are actually be suspected of criminal activity and are not being selected because of their innate or environmental statuses.  County jails should be not flooded with offenders who have misdemeanor offenses or other low-level accusations in the legal profession.  Appearance tickets and community courts would properly eliminate police violence and burdens for courtroom professionals.