On the relationship between prosecutors and the police.

About a week ago we discussed in class how a prosecutor must perform three different roles in one.  Prosecutors are part of the law enforcement team, they are also lawyers who litigate cases and they are "ministers of justice" who are supposed to make sure the rights of the accused are not violated. 

Right on cue, the Prosecutor's Discretion blog has jut published a short interesting post on the relationship between prosecutors and the police.  It starts like this: 

There is a difficult dance that we prosecutors perform with the police. One would think that we are on the same team and that it would be easy to get along with those on our team. I see officers on a daily basis and ... I have great respect for the job that they do.

But it is a different job than mine. A police officer ... has great discretion in how to conduct an investigation and whether to arrest a person, write a ticket, or come to an equitable resolution. The prosecutor's job is to do justice, and with that we are vested with prosecutorial discretion  ...

You can read the full post here.