Police discretion is a tool used by officers; it gives them the ability to utilize the law to the letter or not to enforce it to the letter of the law. Some say that latitude in decision making by frontline staff is one of the defining characteristics of human service organizations. Discretion is about making the right decision based on input of the situation and surrounding circumstances around the officer. The laws and regulations that are established do not take into account human nature and that in some cases there are legitimate reasons why we should not hold certain actions to the letter of the law.
There are a wide variety of causes of discretion. There is not an absolute to every situation every time. There are different people involved in different locations with different attitudes. Some officers believe that politicians enact laws to make symbolic statements and that they do not desire full enforcement of the laws. Age, race, income, attitude toward the officer, gender, and income status are all factors of how police respond to a situation. Police are more likely to use more force against African Americans, they are less likely to take a juvenile complaint as serious as an adult, and they are likely to deal with a situation involving mentally ill people differently than normal citizens. Police tend to exercise more discretion in lesser or traffic type offenses than in felonies. .
A couple examples of police discretion would be an officer witnesses a car driving down a street doing approximately 30 miles over the speed limit. The officer follows the car and it continues to go 30 miles over the speed limit. The officer turns on his lights and sirens and instructs the driver of the car to pull over to the side of the road. The driver does so. The officer approaches the car and inquires as to why the driver was speeding. The senior citizen female driver explains that her husband, who is in the passenger seat, is having a heart attack and she needs to get him to the hospital.