ABSTRACT

Police officers act under highly variable constraints. Some drug arrests occur on routine patrols in which officers’ exercise discretion, others are a product of departmental priorities, and the remainder occur after police are called to the scene. In his treatise on the Behavior of Law, Donald Black asserted that law behaves directionally according to rank, status, and social integration. Using multilevel data on felony drug arrests in one metropolitan Southern U.S. county, we examine the extent to which police behavior shows the discretionary application of law to be disproportionately levied against offenders in disadvantaged neighborhoods or against black individuals. The findings suggest that Black’s theory is well-equipped to explain police discretion in drug enforcement patterns, with disadvantage and race predicting discretion.

摘要

警察在高度可变的约束下行事。一些毒品逮捕发生在警察行使自由裁量权的例行巡逻中，另一些是部门优先事项的产物，其余的发生在警察被召集到现场之后。在他关于法律行为的论文中, 唐纳德·布莱克断言，法律根据等级、地位和社会融合而有方向地表现。使用美国南部一个大都市县的重罪毒品逮捕的多层次数据，我们研究了警察行为在多大程度上表明对弱势社区的罪犯或黑人个人不成比例地酌情适用法律。研究结果表明，布莱克的理论能够很好地解释警察在毒品执法模式中的自由裁量权，以及劣势和种族预测自由裁量权。