Furthermore, there is often a veil of silence from witnesses in these types of assaults, which makes investigation very difficult. However, when an officer exercises the discretion to treat these incidents as lesser-crimes, he reinforces the devaluation of the gang members and actually increases the validity of the gang culture. Furthermore, gang violence does not occur in isolation, and it is unfair to the non-criminal members of gang-afflicted communities

706). Yet, this clearly does not eliminate the possibility of abuse of power and wrongful use of police discretion as the disproportionate application of justice upon those of lower class and of minority races is fundamentally present in both lesser and greater crimes. III. If you were a supervisor within a police department, how would you manage or control the discretionary practices of your officers? One of the most important aspects

Police Discretion The execution of discretion in judgment among police officers has been studied for decades (De Lint, 1998). Before the 1960's, For some three decades now it has been established knowledge that police officers use discretion (De Lint, 1998). Through the 1960's, officers were expected to use "common sense," with little attention paid to analyzing situations where discretion was called for or for applying specific training to improve the kinds of

police discretion? How do the internal and external mechanisms influence police discretion? Is there a better solution to improving police discretion? Police discretion is when the officer will have the responsibility to make their own determinations as to how they should be enforcing the law. The way that this is accomplished is through giving them the flexibility to decide how much emphasis they should place on dealing with specific situations.

Limits to Police Discretion Just as every law environment situation is unique, so too are the police officers that make the decisions concerning how these situations will be resolved. Some police officers appear to have a natural-born knack for knowing how to amicably resolve even seemingly intractable disputes while others routinely incarcerate their suspects with little or no effort made to determine if alternative dispositions might have been more appropriate.

By comparison, more proactive, crime-focused, or zero tolerance policing strategies make discretion more difficult to control administratively for several reasons. Specifically, proactive officers generally function more autonomously in choosing where to initiate police action; consequently, they are involved in much higher proportions of serious criminal matters, requiring many more spontaneous opportunities to exercise discretion. As a general rule, proactive police officers engaged in crime prevention-focused administrative strategies encounter more dangerous situations and