Street-level law enforcement applies the law selectively according to officers’ personal standards

Evidence

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 existing vault claims about Cooper’s social-conservatism argument — discretionary enforcement is a mechanism by which personal moral standards route through institutional roles. — connects to: Street-level policy is immediate and personal while large programs operate at distance; Police power let states regulate contracts for health, safety, or morality — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3212
• QUESTION: Bandura leaves the empirical link unexplored; a study comparing prosecutors’ moral disengagement levels and death-penalty calls would be a natural follow-up worth chasing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2067