The hole in the doughnut: a study of police discretion in a nightlife setting

Abstract

Policing is permeated by situations in which discretion is most important. A substantial part of police work in the nightlife setting involves management of drunk and disorderly patrons, and police officers operate with considerable discretion. The aim of this paper is to explore patterns of decision-making and to identify factors that influence an officer's use of discretion in nightlife settings. The data were collected during fieldwork with patrolling police on weekend nights in Oslo and from interviews with police officers. This study provides an insight into the everyday work of police officers in Oslo. The officers mostly manage a number of minor incidents, such as disorderly behaviour and alcohol-related trivialities. Police officers generally ignore many minor incidents and seek to resolve cases in the easiest way possible, which implies under-enforcement of the law. Discretionary assessments depend on situational variables, system variables and offender variables. This paper reveals the importance of these variables and argues that we need to include officer variables as well to get a fuller picture of street-level police officers' decision-making. Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucrats describes how discretionary assessments are based on human judgement, personal decisions and normative choices. Similarly, police officer characteristics involving individual norms and moral beliefs are an important part of discretionary decision-making.