| Law enforcement officers exercise broad discretion while carrying out their duties. While most researchers, authors, practitioners, and the public recognize this as fact, no one has developed a method or an approach to properly manage the exercise of enforcement discretion by law enforcement officers. This thesis provides information that may be used to better manage the exercise of discretion.;Numerous authors have written about the exercise of discretion by officers. Prior to the 1960's, few openly recognized that in fact officers do exercise discretion. Since that time, numerous authors have written about the exercise of discretion with most of those authors either describing or defining discretion. A few, including Brown, LaFave, and Vandall, developed approaches to help manage the exercise of discretion. It is upon the foundation built by Brown, LaFave, and Vandall that this work is built.;The research involved the use of vignettes of enforcement incidents. Boulder County law enforcement officers were asked to select from a series of options as to how they would handle the incidents. Other respondents (law enforcement supervisors, administrators, prosecuting and defense attorneys, judges, probation officers, community leaders, and members of the community) were asked to select the options which best fit what they expected or desired officers to do in the various situations.;The study was descriptive and exploratory in nature. The research pointed out that while differences do exist among the respondent groups, they are not great. In brief, the differences are among the options which had a lesser impact (take no action, warn, or refer to a social service agency) or between the options which involve more impact on the individual (issue a summons or jail). For example, no significant portion of any one respondent group chose an option with great impact while another significant portion of a respondent group chose an option with lesser impact.;The research supported the need for additional efforts to narrow the differences among respondent groups. Some techniques, explanations, and suggestions evolved from the research which would assist in narrowing the identified differences. |
