Summary

The U.S. Department of State, through its Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), provides foreign assistance and supports capacity building for criminal justice systems and police organizations in approximately 90 countries around the world. It has a mandate to “strengthen fragile states, support democratic transitions, and stabilize conflict-affected societies by helping partner countries develop effective and accountable criminal justice sector institutions and systems.”¹ With such a purpose, INL is part of a larger network of international and regional organizations, bilateral donors, international financial institutions, and civil society organizations that work in the broad area of police reform and capacity building in the security sector around the world. Like many donors, it strives to direct its resources to the most effective and efficient approaches to achieve its mission.

In 2018, guided by The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, INL created the Office of Knowledge Management to assemble evidence from research to inform its work. As part of the efforts to gather knowledge and improve its programs, INL asked the Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene an ad hoc committee to review, assess, and reach a consensus on existing evidence on policing institutions, police practices and capacities, and police legitimacy in the international context. A committee was assembled with expertise in criminology, economics, international and organized crime, law, policing, and political science.

___________________

¹ See https://www.state.gov/justice-programs-in-action.

The committee was tasked to produce a series of five reports addressing questions of interest to INL and the State Department. This report, the first in the series, is based on the question: What organizational policies, structures, or practices (e.g., HR and recruiting, legal authorities, reporting lines, etc.) enable a police service to promote the rule of law and protect the population? A commissioned paper and a workshop, structured by the committee to address the question, served as the primary sources of information for the committee’s deliberations.

The complexity and magnitude of the challenges to learning “what works” in global organizational police reform are immense. While the science of policing outcomes has grown in recent years, it is limited in context, with much of the research conducted on policing taking place in the Global North countries (e.g., the United Kingdom and United States). It is also limited in purpose, with much research focused on examining crime reduction as opposed to examining the harms to the public as the result of crimes, violence, and any effects of policing activities.

There are contextual impediments to transferring this knowledge to policing in the Global South countries (i.e., the countries most likely to receive assistance from INL, such as those in Africa and Latin America). For the purpose of promoting the rule of law, impediments include differences in cultures and language, political regimes, legal systems, and the extent of political corruption in each country. Resistance to the rule of law by any element of the state can derail policing reforms, even when the knowledge and skills for reform are ready to deploy. In some places, that resistance can be violent and present harm to the public as well as police themselves who are engaging in reform efforts. When developing programs to assist with police reform, it is important to identify and make transparent the governance, labor, and political conditions that present barriers to sustained reform—whether they be under-resourced police agencies, forms of political repression, or an overlap between police and political elites and organized crime. With additional information, such consideration can help illuminate where and when it is feasible to proceed with any promising interventions, where it is best not to proceed, and where it is feasible to proceed but only with a plan for evading or overcoming any obstacles.

This report is written on the premise that there is opportunity to build on existing evidence. The generation of new knowledge should be directed toward informing the promotion of the rule of law and protection of the public across a variety of policing landscapes in different countries. This can be done, in part, by considering promising approaches, hypothesizing how they might be adapted for the local context, and deploying and evaluating interventions.

This report demonstrates the recent growth in policing research. It highlights preliminary findings on a range of topics, including some of the

effects of various police structures, policies, and practices on some sets of outcomes. What continue to be missing from research in this area are evaluations of policing across different contexts and countries and standard measures of inputs, outputs, and how “effectiveness” might be measured across different agencies and contexts. To this end, the committee proposes an evidence-based approach to guide policing reform and interventions aimed at promoting the rule of law.

EVIDENCE-BASED POLICING

In the past two decades, a professional, social movement of “evidence-based policing” has spurred much research with the objective of applying knowledge to practice for the reduction of crime and protection of the public. Evidence-based policing is an approach to police practices and management that uses science and scientific processes to strengthen police decision making, actions, and overall agency functioning. At the core of an evidence-based approach to policing is the idea that actions, tactics, programs, and technologies used by the police should actually deliver the outcomes expected of them, ensuring accountable, effective, fair, and humane policing that seeks to minimize public harm and promote trust and legitimacy.

An evidence-based policing approach requires (1) a reliable body of knowledge about police practices; (2) the ongoing practice of evidence-based and systematic targeting, testing, and tracking in policing; and (3) the institutionalization and implementation of knowledge in police practices. As noted earlier, much existing knowledge from research focuses on the effects of policing approaches on crime prevention. However, a growing body of research also addresses evidence on such concerns as police efforts to improve relationships with the communities they serve; to improve trust and satisfaction in specific interactions with citizens; or to strengthen internal accountability mechanisms for rule-of-law policing. Notably, the development of this knowledge has required collaborations between researchers and police agencies.

A commitment to evidence-based policing requires agencies to actively and consistently test and evaluate their own practices against consistent standards. This is also true for donors, like INL, that are involved in promoting police reform. They should actively and consistently test and evaluate their investments and programs. In doing so, they will improve their knowledge management. Having high-quality information on crime, internal police functioning, and relevant public outcomes can then facilitate more accurate identification of problems and targeted solutions supported by evidence. The idea of evidence-based policing in contexts where record keeping is a low priority may seem unlikely to succeed, yet building the

capacity to create and analyze records may be precisely the place to begin a global strategy of police reform. Gathering information is also a means to increase accountability, coordination, inclusion, and transparency.

Embedding research into practice requires fundamental adjustments to an organization’s infrastructure, including, for example, management policies and technology. Evidence-based policing may also require legal frameworks and requirements to incentivize and institutionalize this approach in police agencies.

MEASURING THE RULE OF LAW

There are many working definitions for the rule of law (ROL). For this study, the committee leverages definitions from the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, but primarily it has considered how any definition of ROL could be turned into empirical measures.

There have been several attempts to quantify and index ROL. The committee examined and compared two of the most comprehensive efforts: The one undertaken by the World Justice Project and the other by the Varieties of Democracies Project. The committee found a high level of correlation between these two indices, and it found a strong positive correlation between a commitment to ROL and a country’s human rights score as well as its level of democracy.² As such, the committee recognizes that future research can, in principle, assess whether police reforms can achieve outcomes with an impact on improving ROL.

___________________

² See the validation exercise in Appendix A.

The fact that such evaluations do not appear to be regularly utilized in overseas aid is no impediment to doing so in the future. Nor are the metrics currently available—including those reviewed here—the only possible way to assess reform effects on ROL. Rather, the evidence that exists today demonstrates a proof of concept for such measures in general. Improved measures can be sought to enable better evaluations of what benefits can be achieved by various strategies of police reform. Ideally, meaningful metrics can be identified for global adoption to strive for greater reliability in measuring progress within and across countries on ROL standards and protection of the public.

POLICE INSTITUTIONS AND THE RULE OF LAW

Adherence to human rights standards, understood as a set of normative commitments, is related to increased legitimacy in policing, including aspects such as minimizing the abuse of force and the provision of safety to the citizens to ensure that they can exercise their rights and obligations.

Since a fundamental component of the rule of law is that the state be held accountable to the law, and since the state delegates considerable power to the police, police institutions have great responsibility to act in ways consistent with laws and international human rights norms and standards. Promoting the rule of law therefore requires laws and policies that establish clear limits to police authority and actions—particularly regarding the use of force—as well as mechanisms for meaningful oversight and accountability. Such constraints on police authority and action to ensure they adhere to the rule of law are also important for protecting the citizenry from potential abuses by the police institution itself.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES FOR POLICING

Organizational structures for policing have been defined as the arrangements of responsibilities and authority invested in a policing agency to include appropriate oversight mechanisms. At this date, there is no strong scientific evidence that any single form of organization is more effective than any others in promoting ROL and public protection. Given their potential relevance to ROL, the committee examined the research base for the militarization of police, governance structures, and mechanisms for handling police misconduct.

Contemporary democracies tend to maintain a separation between the roles of police (public safety) and those of the military (national security). However, this separation between civilian police and military forces has become increasingly blurred within many countries, notably in Latin America and parts of Africa. This boundary blurring is in part due to the increased

militarization of the police. Despite some perceptions of the effectiveness of militarization in some countries, there is little empirical evidence to conclude that militarization is an improvement over civilian approaches in terms of reducing the harm associated with crime.

There are different models for external and internal governance structures for policing organizations, but no clear evidence about how well any of them support the rule of law. The concept of operational independence of police leaders from directly elected governments is said to support the rule of law by freeing police to arrest and prosecute government leaders when necessary. However, research in Latin America shows that police can become so autonomous that they are unresponsive to elected leadership. More qualitative and quantitative research is needed to understand these dynamics.

Internal governance that includes effective, independent investigative units within agencies may increase government and police legitimacy and foster public trust. Systematic evidence is available on internal governance structures, and it shows that police organizations with internal affairs or professional standards units that provide internal, independent checks and balances are better equipped to prevent corruption within the organization than those without cross-checks. An effective model of internal governance of policing entails promulgated procedural rules for all personnel actions, including appointments, assignments, promotions, and discipline. To promote the engagement of the community in implementing these checks and balances, a fair, accessible, and anonymous system for submitting complaints against police misconduct that is part of agency operations and is regularly acted upon is paramount.

POLICIES FOR PROMOTING ACCOUNTABLE POLICING

Police accountability (both to the community and to the government) encompasses a wide range of policies that try to control, manage, regulate, and hold police responsible for their mandates, including a range of expectations for performance and behavior and the specific daily tasks needed to achieve those mandates. Such policies can include systems for hiring, promotion, supervision, regular audits, disciplinary and internal investigations, community complaints, and monitoring with technologies. Police can be held accountable to ROL principles and to the fundamental mandate to protect the population. In democracies, this means that the police are held to account by—and to—the people who are embodied in these mandates. In practice, police agencies worldwide and within the same countries or states may differ significantly in their use of, and in the effectiveness of, mechanisms they employ to achieve accountability.

The current evidence base on recruitment and appointment of police does not permit country-level conclusions about what sort of staff profiles or recruitment policies explicitly promote the rule of law. Yet policies that support sustaining a police service that is representative of the community it serves, reflecting the diversity of that population, have shown the most promise in promoting police legitimacy and public confidence in a variety of contexts worldwide. Research, though limited to a few settings, has shown that recruitment policies and tactics can be developed to actively encourage the recruitment of underrepresented groups or remove structural obstacles to such recruitment.

Research suggests that new technologies can serve important roles in accountability systems—capturing, tracking, and even analyzing data in efficient ways that will help monitor policing activities. However, this depends on how these technologies are used in practice, the strength and supervision of implementation policies, and whether citizens and the police share similar expectations about those technologies. For example, body-worn cameras may be effective in collecting data on police interactions and holding officers accountable to ROL and human rights standards. However, this effectiveness relies on having community acceptance, enforcement of policies that require police to turn on and use the cameras, and policies and processes that fairly determine handling of data from cameras and any infractions and subsequent discipline.

There is a growing body of research with consistent evidence indicating that policies aimed at creating a culture of accountability, fairness, and justice within a police department can have a notable effect on police interaction with the community. The extent to which police extend procedural justice and fairness to members of the community is likely to depend on the extent to which procedural fairness internal to a police organization encompasses respect perceived by police in their relationship with their supervisors and fairness and inclusion in decision making.

PROACTIVE POLICING PRACTICES

Proactive policing includes any task that is initiated by a police agency for the purpose of reducing harm and detecting signs of crime. It includes a broad range of activities, from foot patrol of high-crime locations to covert surveillance of human trafficking operations. To the extent that proactive policing sets priorities for the protection of human rights and the most vulnerable members of a population, it offers a strategy for making valuable improvements to a policing strategy that is often solely based on answering calls to police (e.g., reactive policing). From domestic violence to armed robbery, proactive policing offers tactics for preventing crime, not just punishing it.

It is important to distinguish an evidence-based version of proactive policing, focused on harm reduction, from more subjective or politically driven bases of proactive policing. Targets of police actions tend to be more objective and appropriate for equal protection of all members of the public when they are derived from comprehensive analyses of the distributions of serious criminal victimization across populations rather than from intuitive selections of such targets. Conducting such analyses, however, requires a substantial information infrastructure for targeting and tracking concentrations of serious harm as well as understanding the underlying conditions that may contribute to crime and victimization.

An evidence-based approach to proactive policing also requires agencies to actively and consistently assess many of their own practices, including where and when police patrol, stop people, make arrests, prosecute suspects, and injure or kill them. Doing so requires infrastructure that allows for collecting and retrieving adequate and accurate information on crime, police activity, and citizen feedback. It also requires integrating evidence from human resources policies, including complaints and disciplinary action. This data collection and analysis should be informed by rigorous and reliable scientific knowledge about effective and lawful practices in policing; and a commitment to transparency, accountability, and responsible spending related to police activities and actions. This list sets a high standard for police agencies, and to the committee’s knowledge, that list has not even been met in entirety by the majority of policing agencies in the Global North.

This research and information-gathering infrastructure is important to pursue effectively two of the most promising evidence-based strategies: problem-oriented policing for protecting the public and community-oriented policing for cultivating dialogue and police legitimacy.

Problem-oriented policing is a strategic approach to tackling patterns of crime, disorder, and even internal challenges in policing.³ Research evidence has indicated across a wide range of experiments that problem-oriented policing can be a promising strategy to reduce crime and disorder. Problem solving may be particularly effective at reducing crime when police target conditions and situations at specific locations and “hot spots” where crime concentrates.

Community-oriented policing is both a philosophy of policing and an organizational practice in which people within a jurisdiction, community, or neighborhood play a more active role in co-producing public safety and holding the police accountable to community concerns. Because of its close

___________________

³ Problem-oriented policing need not only address external problems of crime and disorder. Solutions to many internal challenges in policing benefit from a problem-solving, proactive approach, such as the handling of officers with high frequencies of complaints from the public.

relationship to democratic ideals (inclusion of citizen input in decision making), community-oriented policing is often directly or indirectly viewed as part of promoting ROL in democratic societies. Many practices and programs aimed at improving relationships between police and the public have been associated with community-oriented policing. In practice, even well-intentioned policing agencies and programs have several implementation challenges. Recent reviews recognize that some community-oriented policing activities, programs, or interventions have not been well defined or evaluated. For the evaluations that do exist, many are of modest methodological quality and do not measure long-term effects. This body of research finds that while crime prevention or deterrence benefits are inconsistent, some community-oriented policing programs can improve citizen satisfaction with police services (although the impacts on perceptions of police legitimacy may be weaker). Whether community-oriented policing can be implemented reliably in ways that promote ROL and public safety remains to be seen.

A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR EVIDENCE-BASED POLICING

The following recommendations promote the idea that capacity-building programs must amplify lessons learned from research. Some knowledge has already been generated and can be useful for this area of activity in U.S. foreign policy, including for programs at the Departments of State, Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security, but there is much more to understand. To this end, “evidence partnerships” across various U.S. federal agencies, and between the United States and other countries undertaking similar activities, may be fruitful. In the committee’s view, only the growth of INL’s recent work in building new knowledge and reviewing existing lessons can provide sufficient clarity to fully answering the questions in our mandate and realizing the goal of translating evidence into practice.

To facilitate greater adoption of evidence-based policing practices worldwide, a registry of global policing impact studies is needed. While no such registry currently exists, such a registry could serve as a foundation for the development of both measurement methods and substantive conclusions that will advance qualitative and quantitative evidence and further inform practice. The registry should be designed to manage documents in multiple languages and extend the knowledge accumulated to researchers across countries. Further, the registry should promote the growth of research in Global South countries. Effort will need to be made to group studies by country similarities (cultural or other relevant characteristics), as this can serve to aid moderator analyses in systematic reviews.

RECOMMENDATION 1: In pursuit of better knowledge management, foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, should support the establishment of an open, online registry of all available research worldwide on police organizational policies, structures, and practices with outcomes measuring the rule of law and public protection and analysis of contextual factors contributing to these outcomes.

Existing training programs that discuss police organizational structures, policies, and practices need to reflect the available evidence related to organizational structures, policies, and practices. Foreign assistance donors, such as INL, should examine their training in light of material and resources provided here and be prepared to continue to adapt curricula as additional new knowledge emerges.

RECOMMENDATION 2: Foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, should conduct an evidence-based assessment of their training modules to determine how aligned the curricula are with available evidence on the outcomes of organizational structures, policies, and practices that promote the rule of law and protection of the public and on the contexts in which such structures, policies, and practices work.

The committee recognizes that there are no simple answers to guide decisions around organizational policies, structures, and practices that promote ROL and protect the population. Much organizational effectiveness depends on cultural, political, and social conditions, and such conditions can vary both between and within countries. With better contextualization, many lessons from research in other countries can be tested for applicability in new settings. It would benefit donor efforts to have a better understanding of the conditions that affect the success of organizational-level interventions.

RECOMMENDATION 3: Foreign assistance donors should encourage, and possibly commission, research that examines the cultural, political, and social conditions in which police operate—and assesses which of the contextual variables are likely to lead to successful outcomes from different kinds of police assistance efforts.

There are key gaps in the literature concerning evaluations of policing across different contexts and countries; standard measures of inputs, outputs, and effectiveness; a systematic account of underlying assumptions

of such measures; and reliable counting of those measures. Such standards are needed to interpret the meaning of research results, as uncertainty over the reliability of measurement is a major impediment to translating science into practice.

Foreign assistance donors are in a position to help facilitate the development of a research framework to assess policing interventions in multiple contexts, as well as the development of police-researcher partnerships to expand available policing research and advance evidence-based policing. Local research capacity exists in many countries, even in areas of high violence and civil unrest, but may lack the funding and incentives to form police-researcher partnerships.

RECOMMENDATION 4: To gather data and expand available policing research, foreign assistance donors, including the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, U.S. Department of State, should incentivize partner countries to monitor, track, and evaluate the implementation of promising approaches and other initiatives by linking resources to establish police-research partnerships in assistance agreements.

RECOMMENDATION 5: To advance a policing research framework suitable for multiple countries, foreign assistance donors should raise awareness in host countries of the value of recording and reporting crime and harm metrics. In addition, they should encourage the research community to establish a model crime reporting system for violent crimes and the identification of geographic concentrations of harm from crime and disorder to strengthen understanding of both crime and how officers are responding to crime across countries.

This page intentionally left blank.