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Comment by born2discover | Hacker News Reader

Police does not hold any discretionary powers on whether to enforce a law. In a functional State, Police is a subordinate of the executive branch, not it's willing accomplice. It can't enforce laws it deems "ok" and turn a blind eye on those it deems "meh".

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Police absolutely have discretionary powers; it would be logically incompatible for them to not have such powers.

They have a chain of command, and at each level decide where to focus their efforts (guided by existing laws, to be sure). Patrol routes are chosen, dispatchers must (effectively) triage calls, and officers make decisions like whether to assess a warning or a citation.

But that is not true, most countries have what is called prosecutorial discretion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutorial_discretion The police can, for the most part, decide whether or not to enforce laws. They can also choose not to investigate certain crimes as they simply don't have the time to look into absolutely everything. Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.

I sometimes wonder if this would be a net benefit in the long term. My hunch is that after a week or two of people being constantly arrested, and the accompanying collapse of society, there’d be a push to repeal laws that aren’t relevant anymore and revise those that were overly broad.

Yeah I agree, its kind of silly that we allow ancient irrelevant and overly broad laws to stay on the books, especially in most societies that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. For example, in Canada, the police can issue a DUI if you have a BAC exceeding the limit for driving up to 2 hours after you have parked your car. If they literally went to every bar and drinking establishment (or door to door) and enforced that to the letter, it would be changed in quite a hurry.

> Furthermore, if police had to literally enforced every law on the books to the letter, they would not be able to drive or walk down the street without having to arrest people constantly.

It sounds to me that addressing that problem at the enforcement level, as opposed to the legislative level, is the wrong place to address it.

Yes of course but I was not describing how things should be, I was describing how they currently are.

And yet, this happens literally every day. Many individual officers, if not entire forces, have effectively stopped enforcing marijuana posession laws. If that happens, why not refuse to enforce fascist anti-protest laws?

They are not meant to enforce anything, they bring before the courts. Enforcement is a police state.

If that were literally true, then the police would arrest everyone who goes even a mile over the speed limit. Everyone who throws out junk mail addressed to a previous renter.[1] Etc.

So there is definitely at least some sense in which the police have discretion. The question is when and how much.

[1] I don't actually know if that's illegal in the UK; in the US it's a federal offense.

Downvoted for pretty much the truth.

I think it's a little silly people pointing to the extremely limited "discretion" police have and saying they should have used it to ignore the law. That's not how police discretion works and in modern policing it hardly exists alongside it's counterpoint which is : neglect of duty.

Policing is not a job I'd want to do. Damned if you do, damned if you don't; and everyone knows how to do it better than the people actually doing it. But those people given the chance wouldn't do any better.

Incorrect. They absolutely do and I've seen it with my own eyes.

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