CJRU 231 week 6 Police Discretion When Handling Juveniles Response
Business Finance
need to respond to this in 300-400 words in A.P.A. format with at least 2 references
One of the things that fascinated me about the police ride alongs in my internships with Chesapeake and Virginia Beach police was the amount of discretion that these police officers actually had in their job. Almost every decision is up to the discretion of the officer responding to the incident. Where one officer might arrest a juvenile for something such as drinking under age, another officer might deal with the same situation by calling the parents and letting them be the ones to discipline the offending child. One writer for a local newspaper said, “A police officer working the street would be like a dog chasing its tail if that officer strictly enforced every violation observed to the ‘letter of the law’” (Kinsey, 2010). And to a large extent he is correct. If an officer charged every j-walker, there would be no meaningful police work being accomplished.
The same principle applies to juvenile cases. If a police officer cracks down on a juvenile for a minimal infraction, such as being out a few minutes past curfew, the juveniles otherwise straight path could turn towards delinquency. As discussed in this week’s reading, “[a] police officer thus becomes a legal and social traffic director who can use his or her wide discretion to detour juveniles from the justice system or involve them in it” (Bartollas, Schmalleger, & Turner, 2019, p.352). In this sense then, this is where it shows how God has given us the power to go beyond merely the law and also use our brains to decipher what the correct course of action might be. In Galatians 5:1 we read, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (English Standard Version [ESV]). This does not mean we use that freedom to commit wrong, whether we do good with the freedom we have, even as police officers with discretion.
References
Bartollas, C., Schmalleger, F., & Turner, M.G. (2019). Juvenile delinquency. New York, NY: Pearson.
Kinsey, R. (2010, February 15). Discretion is the measure of a police officer. Retrieved February 18, 2019, from http://www.annarbor.com/news/discretion-is-the-mea…
