Holding the Police Accountable? Insights from a Police Oversight Agency.

• In Event: Responses to Police Misconduct: Promises and Pitfalls

Abstract

This presentation uses audio data from the office of police accountability of a large Northwestern American city. Specifically, it analyzes recordings of interviews conducted during internal investigations where agents tasked with oversight duties (hereafter, investigators) and representatives of the local police labor union inquire officers from the department about different allegations against them. Methodologically, I use Conversation Analysis, a method for analyzing talk-in-interaction. Fine-grain analysis of investigators' talk suggests that these actors design their questions to facilitate the provision of exculpatory accounts, typically indexing the appropriate response to different allegations (e.g., "Did you use pepper spray because you had no other reasonable alternative?"). Therefore, more than overseeing police conduct, this agency seems to oversee allegations of police misconduct as investigators and police labor union representatives help officers under investigation account for their actions. Only in situations where officers are under investigation for actions that breach aspects of the police working personality (e.g., making derogatory comments about other members of the force or putting them in danger by not using policing procedures appropriately) do investigators take a more adversarial stance, more markedly scrutinizing an officer's responses. Thus, only conduct at odds with the police working personality will likely receive severe sanctions.

Author

• André Buscariolli, University of California, Santa Barbara