Police Decision Making

Police officers are gatekeepers of the criminal court system and must make a number of critical decisions during their interactions with citizens and in the performance of their duties. To make decisions, officers use normative criteria such as responsibility and blameworthiness as well as pragmatic and efficiency criteria such as the likelihood of conviction, the amount of time and effort needed, and the organizational barriers that may prevent a desired result. Because officers have much legal authority and make many critical decisions that affect citizens' liberty and safety, it is important to understand how officers arrive at their decisions and the societal consequences of these decisions.

This entry examines what criteria police officers use to make these decisions and what community, departmental, and personal factors affect how they interpret situations, interact with citizens, decide when to stop citizens, ask for consent to search, conduct searches, informally warn suspects, arrest suspects, and decide whether suspects are lying during questioning or interrogation. Using schema theory to examine officers' decision frames, this entry discusses racial disparity in police decision making. Much research supports the contention that compared with Caucasians, African Americans are disproportionately stopped, searched, arrested, and subjected to physical force. Cultural stereotypes and organizational policies contribute to this racial disparity. This entry explores this research on racial disparities, particularly with regard to surveillance, the decision to arrest, and the use of force.

Police work traditionally has been reactive and involves responding to citizens' calls when crimes have already been committed and when community peace has been disrupted. Police duties also involve proactive surveillance to detect criminal activity as it is being committed; for example, police officers may patrol areas that have high rates of drug dealing, prostitution, or gang-related crimes and must decide when to intervene and whether to arrest offenders. Similarly, officers may park their car to detect speeders; officers must decide which of the speeders to pull over, whether to give the speeder a ticket, and whether to search citizens or vehicles for possible illegal contraband such as drugs or weapons. Community policing, where police officers are assigned certain neighborhoods to patrol using bikes or walking, is part of proactive police work and has been implemented to prevent criminal activity and to improve the relationship between the police and citizens so that citizens are more likely to report crimes or suspicious activity to the police. Thus, it is important to examine decision making in both proactive and reactive policy work.