Local Government: Social Accountability and #Black Lives Matter

• In Event: Local Politics at the Forefront of America’s Fight for Racial Equality

Abstract

Local police departments in the U.S. are facing increasing pressures for accountability after all recent events surrounding police misconduct and the use of unnecessary force in police work. All over the country, there have been cases of police misuse of their authority and unresponsiveness to the needs of the citizens, which led to many African Americans being killed between 2014-2020. In a more recent cases in 2020, the killing of George Floyd, officers were charged with second-degree murder while the other three officers were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. However, in the killing of Philando Castile, the officer was initially charge, but was acquitted of all charges after five days of deliberation. If the mechanisms of accountability are artificially applied because of an absence of answerable discipline created by the blue walls of silence in the police culture, then we have a problem. It is a significant problem for citizens who may have experienced police misconduct or police corruption of that jurisdiction or entity. It is a problem not only because of the trust and accountability issues that the jurisdiction must face going forward, but because of the reputational or judicial impact to the jurisdiction resulting from the misuse of power in the police departments. That misuse of power, could be deliberately ignored through administrative or political means, may cause adverse impacts due to the failure of the mechanism to hold police accountable for their actions at both the federal and local government levels. However, there is little evidence or understanding of how citizens can exact power to hold public officials accountable and answerable for their actions in local governments.

The article extends the literature on accountability by examining the impact of citizen empowerment on social accountability. Because accountability usually involves the obligation of government officials to answer for their performance (Mulgan, 2019; Gregory, 2017; Bovens, 2007; Dubnick, 1998), and is often seen as the principal and agent relationship, it is easy to understand how accountability could be internal checks and balances that ensure that government carries out their duties appropriately and are held accountable if they fail to do so (United Nations, 2011)—using accountability mechanisms such as administrative and political is likely more useful in the public sector than any other forms of accountability mechanisms and one may be less hidden than the other. It also examines how the lack of accountability hampers the proper operations of public institutions and oversight board that were designed to ensure public officials were held accountable for their actions and decisions.

This article argues that by expanding our focus from the traditional forms of accountability to the more demand-driven accountability, or social accountability, we are able to examine other forms of controls relying on the actions of citizens and organizations to hold public officials accountable.

Authors

• Rosa Castillo Krewson, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Lorita Daniels