6 1 Police and Law Enforcement—Adult ForensicsDiscretionary decision making by law enforcement officers is closely tied to
the concept of police ethics and morality. To demonstrate this, H. S. Cohen and
Feldberg (1991) discussed the necessary empowerment of police and their ability to
exercise power. The authors stated that "[p]olice have considerably more authority
over others than most people in society and, consequently, have more opportunities
to use that authority in impermissible ways" (p. 7). Therefore, decision making by
police is, at times, a result of personal judgments and natural biases. The authors
concluded by stating that police must retain all the discretionary power that they
currently possess. However, this power must be exercised cautiously, since the effects
of police officer decisions affect the community in a multifaceted manner and have
potential ramifications that may be unseen.
From a psychological standpoint, decision making encompasses a wide variety
of cognitive processes. The ability to organize data, to synthesize that data, and to
translate the results into an appropriate behavioral outcome is clearly a complicated
process. It is no surprise, then, that police make some decisions based on suspect
behavior and their interpretation of that behavior. Suspects' behavior may help the
officer to gather particular data regarding a situation, to assess the potential danger
of the situation, and to form effective strategies to deal with the predicament.
The above paradox has been debated by numerous criminologists, psycholo-
gists, and other scientists (Fyfe, 1996; Klinger, 1996; R. J. Lundman, 1996a; R. E.
Worden, Shepard, & Mastrofski, 1996). For example, Klinger (1994) discovered
that the demeanor of citizens had an impact on police decisions to arrest. More
specifically, Klinger detailed a two-phase process by which officers interact with
citizens: there is (1) a "pre-intervention" phase that incorporates the circumstances
that bring a police officer to the intervention with citizens and (2) an "interaction"
phase that begins when the officer actually deals with the citizen and ends when
these two parties separate from each other. During these encounters, the citizen's
demeanor comes into play and influences how an officer may deal with an arrest
decision. However, demeanor was found to have an effect on an officer's decision
to arrest only when demeanor included illegal conduct (Klinger, 1994).
As an opposing viewpoint, R. J. Lundman (1996b) stated that demeanor has a
larger effect on police decisions to arrest and is not confounded by research flaws to
the degree that Klinger purports. Previously unpublished results of drunk-driving
encounters were used in order to determine whether demeanor and other extralegal
variables had an effect on an officer's decision to arrest when the effects of the crimes
themselves were statistically controlled. It was found that the effects of demeanor
vary with how the citizen's demeanor was presented to the officer. More specifically,
race and social class had effects on decisions to arrest. Members of minority classes
were arrested more often, while members of the economic upper-class were also
cited more often, due to the officers' beliefs that they can better afford the monetary
fines.
Police face a wide variety of law enforcement situations every day. These range
from minor traffic stops to interventions dealing with robbery and other serious