Organizational Structure and Forms of Independence in Citizen Oversight of Police

• In Event: Policy Panel: Strengthening Law Enforcement through Police Oversight

Abstract

A great deal of academic and policy writing has discussed the potential for citizen oversight of police to improve police internal investigations. Within that literature, it has been commonly assumed that the effectiveness of oversight will hinge, in part, on the extent which oversight actors are independent of the police departments they oversee. Even though most academic and policy experts agree that independence is a desirable organizational trait for oversight, we know relatively little about the strategies local jurisdictions use to achieve meaningful independence, in practice. In order to explore how “independence” is operationalized at the local level, this paper mobilizes data from a comparative textual analysis of the foundational legal statutes/ordinances for 145 police oversight agencies and from a national-level electronic survey of citizen oversight executives in the U.S. More specifically, the paper explores variation in the specific legal and organizational strategies that local jurisdictions use to achieve structural and process forms of independence in citizen oversight of police. The final section of the paper discusses promising approaches and strategies for achieving independence in police oversight.

Author

• Joseph De Angelis, University of Idaho