Police Suspicion and Discretionary Decision

¶ … Police Suspicion and Discretionary Decision Making During Citizen Stops" presents the topic of "racial profiling" and how it applies to stop and question suspects during police stops. It discusses just how police offers make the decision to stop and question suspects and suspicious persons in one specific area, Savannah, Georgia. Specifically, the article addresses actual "situational processes" that help officers discover suspicious persons and what actually deems suspicious behavior that will cause an officer to stop a suspect for questioning. The authors maintain that most studies look at the officers and the suspect after the stop, and not at what specifically caused the officers to stop the suspects in the first place. Their main thesis is that how they choose to stop a citizen "has the most profound consequences for the citizens in the criminal justice system" (Alpert, Macdonald and Dunham 408).

The findings and examples used as a foundation for the actually include a literature review, individual and environmental factors, research, and legalities in their decision-making process, and their conclusions seem to be based on real data, research, and a deep understanding of the sociological aspects of policing. One conclusion that what quite interesting in this data was that younger police officers tend to be more aggressive in their behaviors and judgments, and younger suspects tend to be more aggressive and more disrespectful than older suspects, and that this can surely play a part in the officer's decision-making process when deciding to stop a suspect. Race is also a compelling issue, as is how the police officer sees and infers a suspect's nonverbal behaviors. The authors' research shows there are different communication styles between races and they can be misunderstood. As expected, training and experience are deciding factors in decision-making, but so is race - right or wrong. The authors acknowledge that suspicion should be based on how the suspects actually act, but that is not always the case.

These author's conclusions are fairly easy to understand, and the tables were very helpful in making some of the data clearer and more enlightening. The data showed that the researchers, after some study and research, were fairly able to predict many of the nonbehavioral suspicions that would arouse officers' suspicions. The data compiled pointed to some interesting conclusions, and they were not what many people would imagine causes police stops. This is not what most readers would expect, and it seems that while racial profiling may take place initially, it is not always the final aspect of behavior that causes an office to actually pull over a car or confront a citizen. The authors concede there are many variables in their research, and that they do not "address the question of police fairness" (Alpert, Macdonald and Dunham 427). Their data was presented completely and in detail, and was still easy enough to understand that most laymen would understand the issue and the results.