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Key Text Building Public Confidence in Police Through Civilian Oversight

Author: J Trone, E Philips
Date: 2002
Size: 16 pages (64 KB)

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Summary

How can citizens know about and demand respectful and effective policing? How can public confidence in the police be built through civilian oversight? This paper from the Vera Institute of Justice summarises the views and experiences shared at an international meeting on civilian oversight in Los Angeles in May 2002. The aim of the paper is to connect the conversation in Los Angeles to a wider, ongoing process around the world calling for democratic policing and improvements in how police treat citizens.

In democracies the public seems destined to see the police alternately as protectors and oppressors. Both the police and citizenry must continually strive to build mutual trust and to create practical mechanisms for citizens to routinely oversee and influence law enforcement. These themes applied to all countries represented; Brazil, The Czech Republic, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa and the United States.

Where there is a commitment to democratic governance, civilian oversight appears to arise in response to a specific crisis of confidence in the police. For instance, the Rodney King incidence in Los Angeles in 1991 where officers were recorded beating an African-American motorist. Other trends in civilian oversight highlighted by the paper include:

A crisis in confidence may occur in reaction to a period of undemocratic rule where the authority of the police is abused for political ends, for example the methods used to combat the Shining Path in Peru.
Occasionally, mechanisms for civilian oversight may develop outside government. The Kenyan Human Rights Commission is an example of an organisation that monitors police behaviour.
Civilian oversight can arise organically from concerns of a small group of citizens. In Russia, police involvement in drug-trafficking spurred residents to create a special foundation to combat narco-corruption.
There is a tension between external and internal review systems. In some cases police departments may be better placed to handle the oversight process than non-police organisations.
Some oversight agencies have no influence over how misconduct is punished, for instance in Brazil, whilst others can make recommendations, for example in India, whilst still others have great authority as in South Africa.
One of the major goals of civilian oversight is to make law enforcement more transparent.

Civilian oversight has the potential to become an integral part of maintaining social order. It has emerged not so much as a specific structure, but as the product of changing relationships between government agencies, police departments and civil society. Policy pointers for effective civilian oversight include:

Rather than becoming an alternative to internal review, oversight mechanisms that operate outside the police should help the law establish systems to monitor their own behaviour.
Equipping ombudsmen’s offices with the resources to maintain and analyse their own data would promote more effective oversight.
Police officers should be provided with a fora outside the department to express their own grievances.
Involving the complainant and the officer in the entire process of resolving allegations allows for transparency, building confidence in the police as a democratic institution.
By maintaining sufficient distance from the police, oversight mechanisms are better able to preserve their independence and objectivity.
Holding an oversight agency accountable ultimately depends on maintaining the active participation of citizens in the process of overseeing the police.

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Source: Phillips, E. and Trone, J., 2002, 'Building Public Confidence in Police Through Civilian Oversight', Vera Institute of Justice, New York
Author: Emma Philips , emma.phillips@utoronto.ca
Vera Institute of Justice, http://www.vera.org