The degree of force used by officers is heavily influenced by police discretion in real-world situations rather than supported by a given agenda. Discretion can be classified into four different categories where administrators, the community, and the individual police officer exert varying degrees of influence in the decision-making process. What is needed to foster official discretion is a central ethic that guides discretion when all other rules fail to help. Normal force is distinct from legal and brutal force (Hunt, 1985). Legal force is taught in the police academy. It concerns the ability to subdue, restrain and control a suspect if the officer is threatened with serious bodily harm. Lawful force also includes the use of deadly force. The utility of their choice is much more important than obedience to one's duty or morality. Therefore, when normal force is explained, it is done under the guise of justifiability. To recap, normal force is simply force used at the discretion of the police and which is neither legally taught nor brutal (Hunt, 1985). Normal force is justified by taking responsibility for one's actions, but denying that they were wrong due to situational or abstract events. Other times officers use excuses for using normal force and acknowledge that their use of force is inappropriate. They will remember emotional or psychological states as the reason for such inappropriate behaviors. In these cases the cops don't like what's going on: crimes such as vice, gambling and traffic violations. For crimes such as gambling and vice, a certain level of law enforcement is applied. Officers are forced to achieve these goals by their administrators and the community. For traffic violations, administrators expect a certain number of fines, but the fines do not have much impact on traffic quality, so the community does not hold officers responsible for traffic conditions. Citizen-invoked law enforcement involves situations in which citizens are victims of crimes and call the police (Wilson, 1968). In most cases these are property crimes and the suspect is usually unknown. In these circumstances the police usually take reports and gather information. If a suspect is apprehended at the scene, the officer must decide whether to make an arrest, tell the citizen he or she needs to take care of the matter, or encourage the citizen to make a citizen's arrest. Administrators have a lot of influence because they can establish guidelines and measures
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