Discretionary Leniency and Typological Guilt: Results from a Danish Study of Police Discretion

(Cr)immigrant framing in border areas: decision-making processes of Dutch border police officers

“…According to Hawkins (2014, p. 187), criminal justice decision-making involves 'interpretative and classificatory processes from individual decision-makers'. Especially during proactive controls that do not require a reasonable suspicion or concrete evidence of any criminal behaviour, officers have little choice but to rely upon categorisations and typologies (Holmberg 2000, Wilson et al 2004, Bowling and Phillips 2007. Faced with limited time and information, streetlevel decision makers may then highlight certain features while ignoring others, thus developing a 'perceptual shorthand to identify certain kinds of people as symbolic assailants' (Skolnick 1966, p. 45; See also Tillyer and Hartley 2010).…”

“…Meanwhile a wealth of studies has addressed decision-making processes of regular police officers, and the issue of ethno-racial profiling in stop-and-search contexts in particular (Holmberg 2000, Waddington et al 2004, Wilson et al 2004, Alpert et al 2005, Dunham 2005, Schafer et al 2006, Stroshine et al 2008, Parmar 2011, Quinton 2011, Fallik and Novak 2012, Tillyer 2012, Mutsaers 2014. Whereas this body of research has provided valuable insights in the way regular police officers exercise their discretion in crime control, border policing officers have a fundamentally different task -as their main focus is migration control -and they are often equipped with powers in both crime control and migration control (Sklansky 2012).…”

The hole in the doughnut: a study of police discretion in a nightlife setting

“…The study of police discretion is the study of invisible decisions, and it is necessary not only to observe police work in practice but also to be able to discuss with the officers the reasons for their (inter)actions (Holmberg 2000). This triangulation has a long history in qualitative studies of social settings (Fontana and Frey 1994).…”

“…From the police car, I gained insight into Oslo by night, the way the police saw it. Høigård (2005) denotes this as "back-seat research", an approach used in several studies of the police in the Nordic countries (Ekman 1999, Holmberg 1999, Finstad 2003 Because the aim of this research was to study the background for decisions made on the spot (Holmberg 2000), field conversations and discussions were an important part of the observations. In addition, I conducted 10 in-depth, qualitative interviews with eight male and two female police officers in between fieldwork sessions.…”

“…Philosophers have referred to police discretion as the hole in the doughnut, in which discretion is the empty area in the middle of a ring of policies and procedures (Dworkin 1977). In Norway, as in other Scandinavian countries (Holmberg 2000), there is widespread trust in the police, and the police enjoy wide discretionary freedom.…”