Police Arrest

Police System: Prior to an arrest of a crime is going through an investigation. When the police have decided that a crime has been committed, afterwards the police decide whether it is worth investigating or not. If they then decide it is worth it, they have to think about how carefully they are going to have to investigate. The basic idea of an investigation is to search for any type of evidence that associates the person to the specific crime that was committed. An example of this would be if there were an individual stalking someone. The police officers and detectives would then track any type of phone calls that the victim received. Not only would they track certain phone calls received, they would look into any footprints near the house, …show more content…
Police officers are not obligated to arrest every single violator of criminal law. They get to make the decision on if they want to arrest the suspected individual or not. In other words the term arrest means to take an individual into custody and they do not have the option to leave. There are many factors that could affect the decision of the arrest. The two most essential factors that help determine whether the police should make the arrest are first, is to determine the seriousness of the suspects offense and second, determining the quality of the specific evidence that is used against the suspected individual. Based on discretionary decisions to not arrest the individual means that the officer is attempting to successfully accomplish street justice. The term street justice is often used to describe police officers that do not use formal processing to deal with certain problems. In other words, a police officer will just give the individual a warning rather than arresting them. When the police officer does not arrest the suspect, this is called non-invocation discretion. Non-invocation discretion means when the police officers invoke the law based on their decision. In cases like this, officers try to solve problems in a certain way that avoids formal processing that could lead to negative consequences. Most police work consists of problem solving, and arresting individuals is how they solve problems. When the police officers made the decision of not arresting the individual, nobody knows about it beside the individual and the police officer. This is then called low visibility. In other words, low visibility means that most people such as the police administration have no idea about the police officer not arresting the individual. When a police officer makes the decision to arrest the individual and invoke the law, this is called invocation discretion. After the arrest, the police officer is