| This study tries to answer the question of what factors influence police discretion exercised in the streets. It indicates that the sociological understanding of police discretion might profit from pursuing certain conceptual and empirical directions. One is to redefine the notion of policing and refine the concept of police discretion. A second direction is to pay more attention to the transactional nature of police decision-making at encounter level, i.e. to discover the relationships among series of police actions during the encounter. Still another direction is concerned with the comparison, and ultimately the integration, of competing findings at different levels of explanation. This final direction points to the necessity of searching for theoretical guidance, as well as for the help of statistical modeling.;This study conceptualizes police as an apparatus institutionalized to be affiliated with the general social control mechanism of society. Police discretion is conceived of as selective use of means of control under effective influences. Means of control are defined as the strategies and tactics pertaining to the exercise of social power. Specifically, they are reward inducements, persuasive arguments, authoritative commands, and coercive sanctions. This study is designed to test a set of hypotheses based on the premise that police discretion is a phenomenon of social power that is exercised at many stages of a police-citizen encounter and is affected by multivariate social factors.;Data were collected by Linda A. Teplin et al. through a 14-month observational survey conducted in two Chicago police districts. The data set consists of 1,382 police-citizen encounters that constitute the units of analysis. Discriminant analysis is employed as a statistical tool to help to seek out complex relationships among variables.;Findings of this study show that legal requirements, organizational arrangements, social relations between citizens, and situational contingencies all have some impact on police discretionary behavior. However, factors related to citizens' power, citizens' reaction to police power, and prior police actions are the most significant variables predicting across different categories of the means of control used by the police. |
