A) Police and the Media
Today’s Agenda
1) ‘The stereotypes of policing are woven into the fabric of our collective imagination …’ Discuss
2) The changing characterization of police in the media (film and television) can be mapped onto broader historical changes since WWII
i) State dominated propaganda emphasizing social consensus, cohesion and a defense of the welfare state: police as agents of moral decency and justice.
ii) 1960’s-70’s A youth market increases and with it new images of policing are marketed to capitalize on growing social and generational divisions:.
iii) 90’-present: The moral ambiguity and fantasy of frontier justice remains but is further extended into technological/forensic fantasies
B) Back to Reality: Use of Force and Discretionary Powers
Use of force: The use of force must be minimized to be legitimate, deployed only when absolutely necessary
Questions: Who polices the police? What mechanisms exist to hold police officers accountable for illegal and/or unlawful behavior? (today we’ll look at police culture, discretion and the common law)
A central problem regarding accountability: ‘low visibility’ ….
Attempts at transparency?
An Uncomfortable Fact: Much of low visibility police work involves interactions with groups that are relatively powerless: low status in the politics of credibility; their accounts are liable to be rejected in favour of police officer’s (documented) versions of events.
Black Letter Law and Blue Letter Law in Action: The law represents terms and procedures in which conduct has to be justified at a formal level, but it does not completely determine or condition police work ….
5. The Ethics Surrounding Discretion
a) Discretion can only be interpreted as those decisions that are made with lawful authority rather than decisions made for illegal reasons. Furthermore, the individuals within an institution must have lawful authority to make the decisions and must operate under the constraints acceptable to others within the organization or profession
b) Discretion in law enforcement, and especially within policing, is critical to both the functioning of the police department and to the relationship with the public the police department serves.
c) A dim/dark view of police management’s ability to control the discretion of operational police officers. Discretion has the potential to ……
The ability to control and provide effective leadership to officers, who possess more discretion and autonomy than the management, raises serious implications for police managers.
Because of the discretionary mistakes that are inevitably made by officers, attempts have been made to control operational decision making among police officers.
Discretion is needed to filter offences so that only those that are most important will be investigated, even though at times such discretion may be misused.
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