Police and prosecutors apply written law selectively through personal discretion.

Evidence

There is a notable difference between the formal law and the law that is applied on the streets. Police officers have considerable discretionary power over those they investigate and arrest. In his informative field study, Albert Reiss (1971) found that police tend to apply the law selectively, according to their personal standards. The role of moral disengagement in police enforcement practices remains to be explored. Similarly, state prosecutors have discretionary power over which cases become capital ones. It would be of interest to examine whether those prosecutors who frequently call for the death penalty differ in levels of moral disengagement from those who are reluctant to try murders as capital cases and prefer a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2067

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and other ‘law as applied versus law as written’ themes, and to Milgrom’s institutions work where enforcement relies on private/nonformal mechanisms.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether the Reiss 1971 field study has been replicated or extended; the 1971 date is old.