New Approaches to Data-Driven Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement: An Introduction to the Second NACOLE/CJPR Special Issue (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cardozo Law Review de novo, 2019
The emergence of police accountability as an issue of concern in communities across the nation has led to a watershed era in the evolution of accountability systems involving civilian oversight of municipal police agencies. Several municipalities have opted to either start up or enhance the powers of existing civilian oversight systems in recent years, despite the fact that many civilian oversight entities continue to elicit criticism. This article reports on a survey of the civilian oversight entities in the top 100 U.S. cities. The survey documents that civilian oversight has become sufficiently prevalent among the largest U.S. cities as to now be considered a normative element within the police accountability infrastructure. The article also sheds light on the prevalence of the various civilian oversight functions that the largest U.S. cities employ. Each civilian oversight entity is identified as providing one or more of seven oversight functions: investigative, review, audit, adjudicative, appeals, supervisory oversight, and advisory oversight. The survey illustrates the prevalence of these forms of oversight across U.S. jurisdictions and reveals the recent proliferation of layered, multi-functional civilian oversight systems, particularly among the largest cities.
Police Accountability in the USA: Gaining Traction or Spinning Wheels?
Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice
Police accountability has long been a topic of discussion and debate among police practitioners, politicians, and scholars. This topic re-emerges every time there is highly publicized police shooting or incident of police misconduct. This article provides an overview of the current state of police accountability in the USA. This overview includes several examples of the ways in which police accountability has been enhanced in recent years at the local, state, and federal levels. Next, several obstacles to the progression of police accountability in the USA are discussed including a lack of ‘buy-in’ by some police personnel; limited research on the efficacy of common police accountability tools; lack of financial resources; lack of support and guidance by the federal government in recent years; and police unions. Finally, the article concludes with suggestions for overcoming some of the impediments associated with police accountability in the USA.
American Journal of Criminal Justice, 2021
Some American law enforcement agencies continue to experience disruptions in the level of trust and legitimacy ascribed to them by their communities. Citizen review boards (CRBs), may be an effective means for improving the police-community relationship. Utilizing a framework grounded in procedural justice and citizen participation, this study examines whether a link exists between CRBs and community satisfaction in the police and four procedural justice measures: 1) trust in the police, 2) belief the police are held accountable, 3) belief the police treat all people equally, and 4) belief the police are building positive community relationships. To estimate these correlations, this study uses a unique dataset from 48 U.S. cities and employs bivariate and multivariate methods to analyze the data. The findings indicate a mostly positive association between CRBs and procedural justice measures, which suggests that CRBs may be able to bolster legitimacy and enhance the police-community relationship in some communities.
Measuring What Matters: Data Analysis and the Future of Police Reform
2019
Author(s): Rau, Hilary | Abstract: A fundamental principle of organizational management is that you measure the things that matter. In the field of law enforcement, the most routinely and intensely tracked metrics often relate to reported crime rates. Data-driven management systems like CompStat have a huge influence over law enforcement decisions about resource deployment, patrol assignments, performance evaluations, and promotions. Potential harms of racially disparate or unnecessarily burdensome policing, on the other hand, are rarely analyzed as routinely or intensely. As a result, evaluation of law enforcement policies and practices can often become a benefit-only cost-benefit analysis: Decisions about police intervention are made based on anticipated benefits of preventing crimes and catching offenders with little regard for the direct and indirect costs of police intervention to individuals and communities.
The Police-Community Partnership: Civilian Oversight as an Evaluation Tool for Community Policing
The Scholar: St. Mary’s Law Review on Race and Social Justice , 2016
Citizen review boards (CRBs) tend to act as unofficial criminal courts for police misconduct. Without the binding, legal powers of a court, these civilian oversight bodies are often ineffective and draw resistance from law enforcement. “Community policing,” or community-oriented policing (COP) is a law enforcement strategy that emphasizes the use of problem-solving skills through community engagement and partnerships, but remains limited so long as it evaluates “community‑friendly” officer performance through arrest/citation statistics only. Without a process to evaluate public relations skills, the COP strategy encourages officers to reduce distance between them and the community while retaining a crime-fighting focus—a dynamic that increases tension and violence between police and crime‑prone neighborhoods. If civilian oversight organizations were to review both positive and negative instances of police conduct, and law enforcement were to use this input to evaluate individual officers, then the review board would be able to promote community‑friendly officers over problematic ones, thereby deterring police misconduct. This proposal presents an optimal use of civilian oversight and a partnership that would improve the effectiveness of both the CRB, and the COP strategy currently utilized by the police.
A state-of-the-art review on police accountability
International Journal of Police Science & Management, 2018
The method and results of a scoping review, based on the principles of a systematic literature review, on police accountability are presented with the aim of providing an overview of the characteristics of empirical research on the topic and the main themes covered in this research tradition. To our knowledge, no systematically conducted review has been undertaken although one could help to identify gaps in the (empirical) literature and give insights into the themes studied in this regard. Three main themes were discovered during the review; aside from police accountability as such, many studies related to police integrity or, to a lesser extent, historical facts concerning police accountability or integrity. Two of the most striking findings were the low number of empirical studies included in our thematic synthesis and the limited amount of methodological information reported in these publications. As such, the authors recommend more empirical research regarding police accountabi...