Introduction,NACOLE/ CJPR Special Issue

Civilians and Police Accountability

Should we think about civilian-led police accountability efforts as a kind of police/civilian partnership? They are not usually considered in this way. The concept of “civilian oversight” was developed in the 1950s and 1960s more in the spirit of police confrontation than collaboration. In these early years, the term referred to volunteers on civilian review boards whose task was to review complaints against police and the way departments disciplined their officers. Civilian oversight was created by civil rights lawyers and community activists in reaction to police abuse and racial tensions, and oversight has long been associated with anti-police sentiment. However, as the concept of civilian oversight has evolved, so has its form and orientation (Walker & Archbold, 2014).

Civilian review boards still exist in many American cities, but contemporary civilian oversight is often performed by paid, professional staff. Volunteer boards have been supplemented, and in some cities replaced, by inspector generals, police auditors, ombudsmen, and monitors. Much of civilian oversight is still focused on officer misconduct, but many oversight agencies, as the title of this special issue suggests, have moved beyond discipline to consider more general areas of department policy and practice—a change prompted, among other things, by community advocacy, private litigation pressure (Epp, 2009), the passage of 42 USC §14141 in 1994 (Rushin, 2015), and Department of Justice investigations of local police departments and federal consent decrees (Walker & Archbold, 2014).

The idea of partnership is relevant in this non-disciplinary context. When civilian oversight practitioners and police leadership are both given the task of department improvement, what should their relationship be? Is a high degree of collaboration between oversight practitioners and police conducive to reform? Or—as some members of the media and the oversight community maintain—is cooperation something to be avoided, and tension a necessary condition for change? Considering civilian oversight in the partnership context raises important questions about what actually works when it comes to oversight, and what its goals should be. More research is clearly needed to determine what kind of police/civilian partnerships are successful and, more broadly, whether there are ways that police and civilians can work together to increase police accountability outside of the oversight field. If civilian oversight is inherently confrontational, or confrontational in most of its manifestations, it is important to think of alternative ways civilians and police can work together to improve police practices.

National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE) and the Seattle University/NACOLE Symposium

NACOLE is in a unique position to pose questions about effective involvement of civilians in policing. Since its inception in 1995, NACOLE has brought together individuals and organizations working to promote civilian oversight of the police, and has hosted conferences and regional training sessions to promote developments in the field. In light of the current interest among police reformers in police/community partnerships, this strikes us as a highly appropriate time to consider it in the oversight context.

In February 2015, NACOLE partnered with the Seattle University (SU) School of Law and SU Criminal Justice Department to host its first academic symposium, Moving Beyond Discipline: The Role of Civilians in Police Accountability. Multi-disciplinary scholars were invited to present papers on civilian-led accountability efforts. Our intent, through this symposium, was to attract more scholarly attention to civilian oversight, particularly with regard to how the field has expanded beyond misconduct and disciplinary issues. Our presenters were mostly scholars doing work on police-related issues and, for several of them, it was their first time researching and writing about oversight issues. The symposium and related papers focused on three research questions: (a) What does civilian oversight contribute to policing in the jurisdictions that adopt it? (b) What happens when civilian oversight encompasses functions outside the misconduct/discipline context? and (c) How do collaborative efforts between police and civilians outside of typical oversight structures enhance police accountability efforts?

We held our symposium a few months after the police protest movement began in Ferguson, Missouri, and spread elsewhere, and during a day when a protest march was scheduled in downtown Seattle. The symposium and this special issue represent NACOLE and SU’s interest in being a constructive and collaborative part of this police reform environment, both by encouraging more research about civilian oversight and by creating opportunities for police, community activists, academics, and practitioners to come together to consider policing issues.

Most of the papers in this special issue were presented, in earlier form, at the NACOLE/SU symposium. They represent some of the most promising research discussed at the event, and we hope their publication prompts further analysis and discussion. The papers cover a broad range of topics and reflect our authors’ diverse orientations. However, some general themes emerge that may prove useful to oversight practice.

What Does Civilian Oversight Contribute?

One of the central aims of the February NACOLE/SU symposium was to get a better sense of what oversight actually does—not from its defenders or its critics, but from scholars looking at case studies, surveys, or statistics. Both the De Angelis and the Chanin/Espinosa papers in this issue are data-driven, and both suggest that oversight does not conform to popular expectations. Professor De Angelis’ paper shows, in one jurisdiction, that oversight did not build community confidence in the police, and indeed, dissatisfaction with police paralleled dissatisfaction with a city’s police accountability efforts. This is a cautionary message for those who claim oversight builds community trust in policing practices, as factors affecting survey responses such as race/ethnicity, perceived community context, and contact with police seem to have more of an impact on citizen attitudes than actual oversight practices.

The Chanin/Espinosa paper is based on interviews and surveys of police executives—an underutilized source of information about oversight’s effectiveness. Chiefs and sheriffs in the study have positive views of oversight and transparency, which may strike some as surprising, but they feel it has little or no effect on making departments more effective or reducing officer misconduct. Professor Chanin and Espinosa’s study presents the possibility that civilian oversight’s involvement in matters of discipline does not have a discernable effect on department performance, although, from the perspective of law enforcement, it may be an effective tool in community outreach efforts.

Professor Sam Walker’s paper is a case study of the Seattle Community Police Commission (CPC) and its approach to oversight practice. The CPC is a useful example of an oversight body that does work outside of the misconduct/discipline context. The Commission does not consider misconduct issues at all, but rather provides community input on policing issues and makes police policy and practice recommendations. According to Professor Walker, the CPC can be a useful example for other cities, as it creates an opportunity for stakeholders to meet, compromise, and deliberate on use of force standards and other important reform issues. The CPC is, as Professor Walker acknowledges, a unique case, but its early success shows that, under the right conditions, civilians can have a constructive “voice” in the police reform context and produce workable solutions to complex policing issues.

What Happens When Civilian Oversight Encompasses Functions Outside the Misconduct/Discipline Context?

The Walker paper, as noted above, answers this question in a positive way. The Seattle CPC’s early experience shows that, under the right conditions, non-disciplinary focused oversight can be part of meaningful reform, and encourage compromise on contentious issues. Professor Walker has argued elsewhere (Walker & Archbold, 2014) that the auditor form of oversight is the best form of oversight for affecting long-term, meaningful change; however, this article suggests his support for something more akin to civilian review boards as long as they take up policy questions instead of disciplinary decisions. The Walker paper places the CPC’s activities within the larger context of Department of Justice–led police reform, and the Department’s efforts, in recent years, to encourage community input by provisions in settlement agreements (New Orleans, Portland, East Haven, Newark, and Albuquerque, Professor Walker points out, all have community “voice” provisions). It is an important addition to the literature about the influence of community groups, efforts by the Department of Justice to shape police reform expectations, and expectations of what civilian oversight should be.

A different approach to the topic of oversight independent of discipline is taken by Professor Anne Kringen. She suggests that municipal civil service commissions perform a kind of police oversight through their hiring power, as civil service commissioners are civilians who supervise and influence police-hiring decisions. Her paper considers some of the structural reasons that prevent many civil service commissions from engaging in creative hiring strategies and, as a result, the obstacles these commissions create to hiring minority candidates. In light of the recent wave of attention given to the racial composition of urban police departments, and the President’s Task Force’s recommendation that departments “strive to create a workforce that contains a broad range of diversity” (Task Force, 16), the counterproductive effects this kind of civilian oversight may have on local hiring are an important topic for future study.

How Do Collaborative Efforts Between Police and Civilians Outside Typical Oversight Structures Enhance Police Accountability?

This was the most open-ended question of the symposium, as it encouraged our participants to think about civilian-led accountability efforts outside of the oversight context. Our aim, here, was to attract papers that consider unconventional civilian/police partnerships in the service of police accountability, and/or discuss civilian efforts to improve policing that have not received much scholarly attention.

The Price paper is important in this context. It considers the role civilians far removed from the policing profession can play in training police officers, and the dynamic between academics and police professionals engaged in this sort of collaboration. Ms. Price is the Director of George Mason University’s School of Conflict Resolution, and her paper is a useful case study of the successes and failures that occur when civilians are brought in as part of police reform strategy. Her paper, like Professor Walker’s, also suggests the important role the Department of Justice plays in contemporary police reform; funding for the training program she writes about was provided by a DOJ/Bureau of Justice Assistance grant.

The Hickman and Poore paper speaks directly to the topic of DOJ influence, and the problems that arise when the Civil Rights Division (and other agencies) makes decisions based on faulty/incomplete information. This article considers the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJS) failure to compile reliable data about police use of force, despite the Civil Rights Division’s frequent use of this kind of information. Civilian-led police accountability, according to Hickman and Poore, is taking the form of privately funded data collection efforts, which are already proving more reliable than federally run data collection. The National Police Research Platform Project (www.nationalpoliceresarch.com), for example, teams academics with police agencies to analyze police activity, and it suggests a promising new way of thinking about police/civilian partnerships.

Speaking more broadly, all of the papers in this issue suggest ways police departments might partner with social scientists to improve their performance and accountability. The Hickman, De Angelis, and Chanin/Espinosa papers maintain that data collection is a critical part of the effort to help law enforcement agencies become more transparent and responsive. The Walker, Price, and Kringen papers suggest the usefulness of case studies and historical analysis as a part of reform efforts. At a point when visual data have become an increasingly popular way to assess police performance (consider citizens’ recordings of police and the police use of body cameras), this strikes us as an important time to make the case for police/academic partnerships and the importance of scholarly analysis.

Closing Thoughts

The NACOLE/SU symposium, and this special issue, is intended to encourage more research about civilian oversight. We have not provided conclusive answers about what works or what is needed to enhance the effectiveness of the civilian role in law enforcement. It is clear to many of us involved in police reform that civilian/police partnerships to promote accountability and transparency have great potential—but more research is needed about how, and under what conditions. We hope our efforts encourage more people to think of oversight as something not inherently confrontational and stimulate more creative thought about civilian/police partnerships. For those interested in other papers discussed at our symposium, we recommend the SU’s Journal for Social Justice, Volume 14, Issue 1 (expected publication date—October, 2015), which is a companion to this special issue.

This special issue, and the symposium that preceded it, was made possible by our colleagues at the SU Law School, the SU Criminal Justice Department, and CJPR. Special thanks are owed to the following people for their early and enthusiastic support of this project: SU School of Law Dean Annette Clark, SU Criminal Justice Department Chair Jacqueline Helfgott, NACOLE President Brian Buchner, SU School of Law Director Mark Sideman, NACOLE Director of Training and Education Cameron McEllhiney, Dawn Reynolds, Roger Goldman, and the members of the Symposium Advisory Committee—Steve Bender, Judge Terrence Carroll (Ret.), Rebecca Fish, Seattle Police Captain Chris Fowler, SU Criminal Justice Department Associate Professor Matthew Hickman, Judge Anne Levinson (Ret.), Fe Lopez, and Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission Executive Director Sue Rahr. Finally, we extend a special thanks to CJPR editor David Myers, who has been a joy to work with; we are grateful for his help in bringing civilian oversight of law enforcement to the attention of a broader audience.