Beyond ‘police discretion’: The need for a new conceptual vocabulary

What are we talking about when we talk about police discretion? The concept is ubiquitous yet ambiguous and amorphous. In analytical terms it is redundant, but its continued use remains (for some) convenient and politically expedient. References to police discretion, connote as much as they denote, and in so doing they reproduce politico-legal structures that legitimise, enable, and may even embolden, discriminatory policing practices. We conclude, therefore, that policing scholars ought to move beyond discretion, developing a new conceptual vocabulary for making sense of police power.