Police Accountability Research Articles

Reimagining public safety: Public opinion on police reform and gun violence prevention by race and gun ownership in the United States

Inequitable experiences of community gun violence and victimization by police use of force led to nationwide calls to “reimagine public safety” in 2020. In January 2021, we examined public support among U.S. adults for 7 policy approaches to reforming policing and investing in community gun violence prevention. Using a nationally representative sample (N = 2778), with oversampling for Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and gun owners, we assessed support overall and by racial, ethnic, and gun owner subgroups. Overall, we found majority support for funding and implementing police and mental health co-responder models (66% and 76%, respectively), diversion from incarceration for people with symptoms of mental illness (72%), stronger laws to assure police accountability (72%), and funding for community-based and hospital-based gun violence prevention programs (69% and 60%, respectively). Support for redirecting funding from the police to social services was more variable (44% overall; White: 35%, Black: 60%, Hispanic: 43%). For all survey items, support was strongest among Black Americans. Gun owners overall reported lower support for public safety reforms and investments than respondents who did not own guns, but this distinction was found to be driven by White gun owners. The views of Black gun owners were indistinguishable from Black non-owners and were similar to White non-owners on most issues. These findings suggest that broad public support exists for innovative violence reduction strategies and public safety reforms.

Advancing Representation Theory to Reflect the Police Reform Process in Post-Troubles West Belfast

Policing institutions throughout the world face a legitimacy crisis. This crisis’ immediacy necessitates the exploration of theories that provide answers regarding effective reforms. The representation theory of policing offers one such answer; it holds that accountability mechanisms are an avenue for public input that increases confidence in police and affords them democratic legitimacy. This article applies and evaluates representation theory by examining one such reform attempt: post-Troubles policing restructuring and its impact on relations between police and the militant nationalist community within West Belfast. It assesses print media coverage of accountability reforms throughout the peace negotiation period and the early years of reform implementation and ultimately affirms the association between police legitimacy and accountability; however, it also suggests that this association is more complex than a simple positive correlation. Rather, legitimacy is correlated with public debate regarding accountability that encompasses both positive and negative evaluations of policing. This indicates that the predominance of police accountability as a subject of public discourse may serve as an essential component of efforts to instill policing with democratic legitimacy. The article presents an original model of representation theory that more accurately reflects the dynamics of legitimacy-building efforts in West Belfast and proposes applications of this advancement to the contemporary, global movement advocating for police reform.

The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles

The Limits of Community Policing: Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles

The New Dread, Part I: The Judicial Overthrow of the Reasonableness Standard in Police Shooting Cases

This Article series argues that the U.S. Supreme Court’s excessive force jurisprudence from Graham v. Connor to the present has undermined the objectivity of the reasonableness standard. In its place, the Court has erected a standard that reflects modern conservative political ideology, including race conservatism, law-and-order, increased police discretion, and the deconstruction of the Warren Court’s expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. Indeed, the Court, dominated by law-and-order conservatives, is one of the greatest triumphs of modern conservatism, which developed as a backlash against various social movements like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the spontaneous urban rebellions that characterized the decade.Part I of this Article series examines fear from a biological, political, and sociological perspective. It highlights how most Americans impute reasonability to statistically unjustifiable perceptions of danger. Part I also examines the concept of reasonableness and analyzes the native and inevitable partiality of the standard. Finally, Part I explores the relationship between the social value of unarmed victims of deadly force and the perceived reasonableness of an officer’s use of such force. It posits an inverse relationship between the perceived social status of the victim and the degree of statistical unreasonableness the law is willing to tolerate.The lower the victim’s rank on America’s racial hierarchy—the hierarchy created by nineteenth century pseudo-scientist Samuel Morton to justify slavery—the more likely decisionmakers are to find a statistically unjustifiable fear to be reasonable. African Americans are ranked the lowest. The same presumption of Black inferiority that Taney so boldly proclaimed in Dred Scott lies covertly beneath the contemporary Court’s decisions involving unarmed police killings.Part II of this Article series discusses the sea change in excessive force standards from the common law’s reasonableness standard to the current “rationalized fear” or “new dread” standard. Part II chronicles the change from different social, institutional, and legal perspectives, which have been factors influencing the sea change. These factors include: (1) the erosion of the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest; (2) the evolution of the modern police force; (3) the development of the law-and-order Supreme Court after the social tumult in the 1960s and the simultaneous development of radical social conservatism; (4) the Court’s holding in Graham v. Connor which was the first to express the shift legally; (5) the culture of police accountability encouraged by the law-and-order Supreme Court; and (6) the judicial creation and expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine. Part II exposes how the new dread standard operates by providing evidence that distills the current, amorphous excessive force rule into an articulable legal standard reflecting its true effect and intent.

“Everything I Believe In Is Rooted in Love”: Women and Non-binary Activists of Color Fighting for the Practice and Promise of Abolition

The police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the first half of 2020 sparked a powerful movement against police violence, white supremacy, and the carceral state with millions taking to the streets in the U.S. and globally. The movement coalesced around calls for police accountability, and to defund and abolish the prison industrial complex. While these calls for abolition were certainly not new, they reached national dialogues in a way not previously experienced. Although there are significant projects exploring abolition as a theory, there is not much scholarship on the specific area of the social movement that advocates for the abolition of police and prisons in practice. In this paper, I use an intersectional framework to explore participation in movement spaces, critiques of the criminal legal system, and visions for alternatives to the system among Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and multi-racial women and non-binary activists and organizers who engaged in the uprising of 2020. The findings reveal important insights into how white supremacy and patriarchy interplay with activism and the carceral state, as well as impact the possibilities for the transformation of the criminal legal system. Ultimately, experiences with intersectional oppression and state violence were central to this group’s commitment to the practice and promise of abolition rooted in the ethos of Black radical feminism.

Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights and Police Violence

There is widespread concern among activists and legal scholars that Law Enforcement Officers' Bills of Rights (LEOBRs) limit police accountability and potentially impact the use of force. We exploit variation in the timing of the adoption of LEOBRs across states to examine their impact on police-related fatalities using a stacked event study approach. We find no evidence that the introduction of LEOBRs impacted police-related fatalities for either White or non-White civilians. It is important to note that police killings result from the most extreme use of force and our results do not rule out changes in the use of nonlethal force.

The continuity of police brutality in post-apartheid South Africa

The objects of this research are: First, to highlight that police brutality is still ongoing in South Africa despite the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994. Second, to explore the concept of police brutality and its definitional related concepts like excessive force, reasonable force, lethal force, and de-escalation. Third, to explore possible avenues of rebuilding citizens’ loss of trust and confidence in the police.
 The researcher investigated the following problems: Police excessive use of force on citizens resulting in injuries or loss of lives, understanding of reasonable force, when can police officers make use of force, a lack of proper police accountability, and citizens’ lack of trust and confidence of the police.
 The main results of the research are: first, police brutality is still ongoing in South Africa due to reported incidents of brutality in some instances resulting in loss of lives at the hands of the police. Second, a conceptualization of police/citizen partnership is needed in South Africa, benefits derived from community police need to be explored more for the understanding of all stakeholders. Third, the culture of promoting violence within and outside the police service needs to be addressed. Fourth, Police brutality is an abuse of power, it portrays police officers in a bad light seen by many as oppressive apparatus of the state designed to perpetuate immediate unlawful violence against citizens. The police service has a lot to do when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of citizens. Contemporary policing must respect the rights and dignity of citizens and enforce the law without fear or favour within the laid down the constitutional mandate.
 The area of practical use of the research are all citizens affected by crime, police and safer communities, human rights organisations, university students and staff members of the criminal justice department

Looking at the Big Picture: Using Systems Theory to Understand the Impact of Body-Worn Cameras on Police Accountability

Looking at the Big Picture: Using Systems Theory to Understand the Impact of Body-Worn Cameras on Police Accountability

Haiti and the Pitfalls of Sharing Police Powers

ABSTRACT This article examines the benefits and pitfalls of international policing in Haiti over the past quarter century. It shows the importance of the political foundations for joint policing arrangements. Haiti's experience illustrates that international personnel can provide useful stopgap policing services when the interests of national and international partners converge around public order crises. However, the Haitian case also shows how weak political commitment on one or both sides can lead to vague mandates, poor cooperation in the field, weak police accountability, and stalled domestic reforms. These problems have undermined the performance of international personnel and the Haitian National Police, eroding public trust in both. Ultimately, international intervention has failed to yield a capable, trusted, and apolitical Haitian police force or a notably stronger rule of law. Haiti thus offers a cautionary tale for international policing.

Policing the police: predicting citizen support for police accountability

ABSTRACT Recently, there has been a push for policies that seek to increase police accountability. Two of these policies, requiring independent investigations and prosecutions of police shootings, have been suggested by academics and activists. Using a sample of undergraduate college students from a large Midwestern university, this study examines the extent and correlates of support for these two policies. The results of the study indicate that both policies enjoy overwhelming support. Respondents who perceive police officers to be like soldiers in a war on crime are less likely to support both policies while those who believe police misconduct to be more common are more likely to support them. Symbolic racism was predictive of a lack of support for independent investigations. Based on the findings, we recommend that more jurisdictions adopt these policies, so that they may improve perceptions of transparency and legitimacy compared to international contexts now relying on citizen reviews.

THE WHITE ALBUM

In an interview with Mavis Nicholson in 1987, James Baldwin said: “Black people need witnesses in this hostile world, which thinks everything is white.” Baldwin’s statement invokes the witness as one who bears a responsibility to the violence that renders Black life vulnerable to premature death. But what is it to bear witness in a world structured by anti-Blackness? This paper charts a relation between the 1992 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, asking why such mediated witnessing of such moments of racialized state violence regularly fail to provoke an ethico-juridical crisis for the state. Against the idea that the ubiquity of mobile media – from smartphones and platform media to police dash-cams and body-cams – produce greater levels of police oversight and accountability, the paper argues that the scene of witnessing is structured by a racialized perception of the human which creates a situation in which artefacts of witnessing are challenged and contested. Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s notion of “the crisis state” and Judith Butler’s articulation of a “racially saturated field of visibility,” the paper explores the limits of the figure of the witness and offers a critique of techno-fixes to state-sanctioned anti-Blackness such as body-worn cameras. Against the presumption of the witness as an objective conduit of truth, the paper reads the work of the artist Arthur Jafa, whose video works Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death and The White Album stage a confrontation with a visual field structured by racism and suggest an articulation of the human in excess of liberal subjectivity.

Police Training and Accountability: A Remedy or an Impediment for Reducing Unarmed Police Shootings?

The deaths of unarmed black citizens at the hands of police have led to dramatic calls for police reform. Some observers claim that officers are poorly trained and unaccountable for their actions. In this study, I test whether measures of organizational training and accountability reduce the likelihood of unarmed fatal officer-involved shootings (OIS). The results suggest external review of deadly force may decrease the likelihood of fatal OIS of unarmed black citizens. Other training and accountability mechanisms are unrelated to, or increase the likelihood of, fatal shootings. More research is needed to determine the causal links between the training and accountability mechanisms outlined in this study and fatal police shootings.

CORRUPTION: A LONG-LASTING HISTORICAL DISEASE INFECTING THE INTEGRITY OF THE POLICE

Police actions require a high level of integrity, accountability, and transparency. “Police integrity” refers to the demonstration of the qualities of reliability, honesty, and respectability in police work. These are the most important qualities required for all police officers when carrying out their duties and that are necessary to maintain trust in law enforcement agencies. “Police accountability” refers to the high expectation placed on police officers and police departments to act responsibly within the boundaries of the law in ensuring the safety and security of citizens. Transparency in policing aims to make both rules and procedures easily accessible to the public, unless there is a legal reason for keeping them confidential. If police departments do not strictly adhere to the principles of integrity, accountability, and transparency, the risk is that their members will feel less inhibited to abuse their legal powers for personal benefit. Police corruption is, therefore, a specific form of police misconduct aimed at obtaining personal benefits, gained through a criminal modus operandi. The purpose of this article is to discuss and analyse police corruption and to recommend measures which can effectively prevent, combat, and reduce this problem.

Officer-Created Jeopardy and Reasonableness Reform: Rebuttable Presumption of Unreasonableness Within 42 U.S.C. § 1983 Police Use of Force Claims

This Note analyzes the current state of civil law surrounding police use of excessive force, highlighting the evolution of the “objective reasonableness” test employed in civil police use of force lawsuits brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. This Note also discusses the role that social movements and surveillance technologies have played in furthering police accountability and shifting public opinion surrounding police use of force. After detailing this social and technological context, this Note addresses the numerous problems presented by the “objective reasonableness” test employed within civil police use of force cases, analyzing this problematic test from the perspective of both the public and the police. This Note coins the term “officer-created jeopardy liability loophole” and explains how, under the current test, officer-defendants can escape § 1983 liability when they deliberately or recklessly escalate a situation or create the need for force in the first place. To close this liability loophole and resolve other problems presented by the current “objective reasonableness” test, this Note proposes a rebuttable presumption of unreasonableness, in which a § 1983 plaintiff can present evidence to establish a prima facie case of officer-created jeopardy which, if not sufficiently rebutted by an officer-defendant, presumes the officer-defendant’s use of force unreasonable and in violation of § 1983.

POLICE BODY CAMERAS AND LIABILITY INSURANCE: THE DETERRENT TO POLICE MISCONDUCT

The Justice in Policing Act of 2020 propose mandatory body cameras for all uniformed federal officers in the United State. Advocates of this policy insist the practice will enhance police accountability and has the potential to also reduce police misconduct. In the same vein, advocates of mandatory liability insurance for police officers argue the policy will likely deter police officers from engaging in misconduct. How effective these policies are in enhancing police accountability and reducing police misconduct remains debatable. This paper examined the arguments for whether or not police body cameras have positively influenced police officers’ behavior based on an extensive literature analysis of the issue and some informal interviews with police officers. We make a case in this paper however, that body cameras alone will not deter police officers from engaging in misconduct. In line with the Rational Choice theories, police officers are more likely to restrain their actions if they know they will be held personally liable for their actions, and that is why we concur with the advocates of mandatory police liability insurance. Other provided arguments for the increase in police misconduct and that need to be addressed, include lapses in screening out psychologically unstable police applicants must be undertaken. Further contributing to police misconduct according to some critics is the unintended consequences of recent court pronouncements that seem to have watered down the exclusionary rule.

You Have the Duty to Remain Silent: How Workplace Gag Rules Frustrate Police Accountability

You Have the Duty to Remain Silent: How Workplace Gag Rules Frustrate Police Accountability

The reconciliation of the development and implementation of police accountability in the United Kingdom

The objects of this research are: first, to explain some of the issues surrounding police accountability in the United Kingdom. Second, to make attempts in reconciling two opposing views as to whom police in the UK are accountable for? Third, to clarify the vagueness and ambiguous definitional concepts of the police constable, constabulary independence, and the use of police discretionary powers.
 The author investigated the following problems: lack of police proper accountability, vague and ambiguous meaning of constabulary independence constable oath of office, and the use of police discretionary powers.
 The main results of the research are: first, more clarity is needed as to whom is the British police accountable to? Second, a review of the current oath of office for police constable, the implementation of finding by previous committees set up by government: Lord Scarman, Rt Hon Christopher Patten, and Lord Nolan reports. Third, the monitoring of police officers' use of discretionary powers.
 The area of practical use of the research: is for all citizens, directly or indirectly affected by police and safer communities. Criminal justice students in higher institutions and criminal justice practitioners, government officials, and policymakers.

Pakistani Police Governance and Accountability: Challenges and Recommendations

The persistence of massive corruption, a lack of accountability, departmental clashes, constitutional crisis, and a deteriorating law and order situation, particularly in the police department, are ample indicators of the country's poor governance. Pakistan has been engulfed by opinionated volatility and turbulence, resulting in the formation of a dark crevice in the country's economic growth and development. Good governance cannot be respected while there is opinionated disarray, a politician's appetite for power, and an unreformed Police Department. The current police system in Pakistan was designed by the British in 1861 to address a more diverse set of social, administrative, and political realities than the country currently portrays. Numerous national and international experts have concluded that colonial architecture is unsuitable for Pakistan. Pakistan requires comprehensive police reforms as a necessary component of the national framework, regardless of which party is in power. The public interest in reclaiming law enforcement's value has never been greater than it is today. There is growing recognition that the assignment requires concentrated effort. There can be no expectation of momentous police reforms without a continuing corporation and partnership edifice among the major players involved. A progressive and unwavering political leadership, a towering altitude of public support, and an enthused and well-led general public that demands higher standards of police performance are all necessary components of change and good governance.

Flipping the “New Penology” Script: Police Misconduct Insurance, Grassroots Activism, and Risk Management–Based Reform

Through a multi-method qualitative case study, I examine the failed 2016 ballot campaign of the Committee for Professional Policing (CfPP), a police accountability group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In attempting to make Minneapolis the first city nationwide to require police to carry professional liability insurance, the CfPP turned the logic of Malcolm M. Feeley and Jonathan Simon’s “new penology” paradigm onto police. Their thesis argues that a contemporary penal shift occurred away from rehabilitation toward managing aggregates of dangerous criminal categories through risk management approaches. I extend their thesis in a new direction by examining how—in the emerging age of “algorithmic risk governance”—social movement organizations, like the CfPP, are starting to invert the new penology onto criminal justice personnel. In flipping the script, the CfPP called for a new private insurance market using mandatory police misconduct insurance to manage aggregates of dangerous police officers. After highlighting how the CfPP developed new penological objectives, discourses, and technologies, I discuss the implications of grassroots groups adopting and redefining traditional penal logics and propose future research avenues.

Rationales for body camera implementation and outcome measures

AbstractAs police body cameras develop as a widely used mechanism to promote police transparency and accountability, researchers are tasked with measuring whether the treatment of this surveillance mechanism meets its stated goals. But the goals have not been clearly outlined and instead, the array of stated goals varies by jurisdiction, creating obstacles for policy diffusion and comparative analyses across numerous randomized controlled trials. Without clearly defined goals, there is no alignment on what success looks like. This narrative review seeks to uncover why body cameras have been implemented in police agencies and what these agencies expect to gain from their use. It details the range of rationales for the adoption of body cameras, which stakeholder parties benefit from goal attainment, and what outcome measurements researchers have and can use to measure body cameras' ability to reach those goals. Most systematic literature reviews of body camera studies simply focus on one outcome measurement. This paper provides a broad view of the body camera research involving multiple outcome variables. It maps these findings onto the stated goals to demonstrate which goals seem to be attainable and which seem to expect body cameras to be a silver bullet solution to societal problems.