luvsJack
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2007
This is is an inaccurate perception of the way our criminal justice system works. Police are authorized to use discretion on whether to issue a ticket or arrest a person for a given offense. If you've ever had a cop let you off of a speeding ticket with a warning, you've been the beneficiary of this discretion. This discretion is based on a lot of things, such as the severity of the offense, if it seemed to be purposeful or not, etc. So yes, police officers routinely make judgments about the person they're dealing with and the circumstances before issuing or not issuing a citation.
Likewise, prosecutors have discretion in deciding which cases they will or will not prosecute. They typically first try to arrange a deal so that the case never goes to court, and failing that, they want to feel they have a reasonable chance of proving their case and getting a conviction before taking the case to court on the public's dime.
So no, it's not like police officers are robots who must write tickets & make arrests for every infraction they see, and the judge must decide all of these cases. Only a small minority of criminal cases ever end up being decided in front of a judge or jury.
I didn't say they can't use discretion. I said they do not determine guilt. People go to court over tickets everyday that are dismissed. Obviously the judge finds them not to be guilty.
With this being such a hot topic right now, it's very possible that these officers were told to issue tickets in these cases. It's also very possible that the officer saw other reasons to issue the ticket. Many things are possible that do not make the officer wrong in the action he took.