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Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach (2022)

Chapter: 3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing

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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
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3

Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing

Policies for police accountability encompass a wide range of principles and practices that aim to control, manage, regulate, and hold police responsible for their overarching mandates and their specific daily tasks to achieve those mandates. In modern 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 the mechanisms they employ to achieve accountability, and they differ as well concerning to whom they believe themselves to be accountable. However, even in the most advanced democracies, accountability systems can be weak and undermined by other priorities. There can also be tensions between democratic accountability and police commitment to the rule of law (ROL) (Herbert, 2006). Nonetheless, the committee views accountability systems as critical to the ability of a police service to promote the ROL and protect the population.

This chapter focuses on police accountability to the principles of the ROL, as laid out in Chapter 1, and to the fundamental mandate of the police to protect the population within the confines of the ROL. The chapter explores mechanisms for police recruitment, the use of technology for tracking and monitoring police behavior and activity, and internal mechanisms for supporting a policing agency accountable to the population they serve. These mechanisms are far from inclusive of all the policies appropriate to achieve complete accountability. Here some visible issues are highlighted to illustrate the importance of critical attention to the development

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
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of policies for policing. A comprehensive review of accountability policies was not possible given the timeframe for this study.

Notably absent from the succession of policies presented in this chapter are those governing the training of recruits and continued in-service training. The next workshop and report by the committee will address issues of police training. As noted in Chapter 1, this near-future work will address these questions: “What are the core knowledge and skills needed for police to promote the ROL and protect the population? What is known about mechanisms (e.g., basic and continuing education or other capacity-building programs) for developing the core skills needed for police to promote the ROL and protect the population?”

Further, the committee recognizes that policies that govern both the police use of deadly force and tactics for managing public protests would be essential considerations in efforts to promote the ROL. Normative differences currently exist across countries in their policies, laws, and judicial decisions governing the use of deadly force. Some countries give wide discretion to police officers in deciding whether a threat to harm human life justifies taking a life to prevent that harm; others tightly restrict police discretion to kill with a web of procedures and decision frameworks that prohibit officers from deciding on their own whether to kill someone. Subsequent work and reports by the committee will address these types of policies. As noted in Chapter 1, future commissioned papers and workshops will engage discussion on two questions regarding decisions to use force and police legitimacy in relation to use of force: (1) “What policies and practices for police use of force are effective in promoting the ROL and protecting the population (including officers themselves)?” and (2) “What policing practices build community trust and legitimacy in countries with low-to-moderate criminal justice sector capacity?”

The committee recognizes that very few policies for accountable policing, and the practices embedded therein, have been subjected to rigorous evaluation. Further, studies that do examine accountability mechanisms often determine that such efforts have been poorly implemented, or that they require other factors to be effective, or that they are thwarted by the police unions or other elements of police institutions. Thus, it is premature to conclude whether specific policies strengthen or weaken the accountability of individual officers or police institutions to the ROL. In Chapter 5, we discuss how research in this area can be moved forward.

POLICE RECRUITMENT

Globally, police are increasingly serving diverse populations. A fair and open recruitment policy that promotes a workforce representative of the

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

community it serves, and reflecting the diversity of that population, matters for two reasons.1 First, it is intrinsically valuable for police services to reflect the demographics of the local communities they serve. They can do so through policies that actively encourage recruitment of underrepresented groups or by removing structural obstacles to such recruitment. Second, a diverse police workforce may improve police legitimacy and community confidence in the police by reducing hostility between police officers and citizens, as the case study of Northern Ireland demonstrates to some degree (a case in which its police workforce shifted from being one notably dominated by a single religion to one evenly representing the two widespread religions). This can happen through changes to the type and quality of decision making (Owens and Ba, 2021) and by fostering a sense of symbolic identification with the police. However, shaping the characteristics of police service personnel requires more than recruitment policies; it also requires a retention and promotions policy, especially for the retention or promotion of historically underrepresented identity groups. There is evidence that such groups often have negative experiences within police departments, suffering disparately higher reports of discrimination and general unfair treatment (Zempi, 2020).

In recent history, the diversification of police has particularly emphasized gender considerations in hiring practices. Promoting women’s involvement in policing services and the broader security sector has been a central tenet of international reforms aimed at resolving conflicts and advancing peace processes, particularly building upon the recommendations found in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.2 The lack of women’s participation in policing has had historical consequences related to procedural justice. Over the years, perceptions of procedural “injustice” have stemmed from insufficient and insensitive attention to crimes against women (e.g., rape, domestic violence). Conversely, as examined by Miller and Segal (2018) in the United States, violent crimes against women (especially domestic violence) are reported at a significantly higher rate when women’s representation within policing services increases. This finding may indicate a greater willingness of the community to report the crime, or of the police to record the crime when reported (Black, 1970), rather than an increase in the crime rate itself. Meanwhile, research on the inclusion of women in police in Liberia suggests that increasing women’s representation in police forces may have little effect on the police response to sexual and gender-based violence, but may increase cohesion among police (Karim et al., 2018) and increase community trust in the police (Karim, 2019).

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1 For additional information regarding corrupted police recruitment policies see K.R. Hope, “Police Corruption and the Security Challenge in Kenya,” African Security 11(1), 84–108.

2 See https://www.un.org/womenwatch/osagi/wps.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

Multiple countries have explored police stations staffed by and serving only women, but with limited evidence and mixed results. In India, the opening of one such station increased the reported crimes against women by 22 percent (Amaral et al., 2021). In Brazil, the availability of a women’s police station did not strongly increase in crime reporting but was associated with a reduction in the rate of homicides of women (Perova and Reynolds, 2017). Researchers in Argentina found that women’s police stations in postcolonial societies improve access to justice and protect against gender-based violence (Carrington et al., 2020). The value of a women-only police station is incredibly context specific and should be explored with greater rigor across countries.

While the representation of women in police services has improved overall, their numbers are still quite limited in many countries (Prenzler and Sinclair, 2013). One workforce challenge is that disparate roles between men and women police officers exist. For example, there are policies that have created specific gendered roles for officers, directing women officers to handle only certain types of procedures and/or certain citizens. Box 3-1 provides additional information from the committee’s workshop on measures that have been taken to increase women’s representation in this field.

There is emerging experimental evidence on how potential police candidates respond to different recruitment strategies. See Box 3-2 for an example of randomized controlled trials replicated in multiple cities in the United States around different recruitment messaging. These studies examine whether messages that emphasize policing as a long-term, stable career option have different effects from traditional messages that focus on one’s desire to serve and protect the community. The studies find that the new messages do appear to attract different and more underrepresented types of candidates.

This appeal to career stability messaging is not necessarily surprising. There is evidence that police candidates attracted by career-oriented appeals are slightly more likely to complete additional screening tests required to enter a police training academy and appear to perform equally well within the academy as candidates attracted to serving the community. Further, there is some evidence from Zambia that nurses who responded to career-oriented recruitment strategies outperform nurses responding to public service-oriented strategies;3 such findings suggest the value of further exploring the links between motivations and performance for public service positions like the police.

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3 See https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/recruiting-and-motivating-communityhealth-workers-zambia.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

What would it mean for recruitment if the performance of police officers were tied to actions that promote the ROL and public protection? Currently, the United Nations recommends a vetting process that, at a minimum, excludes individuals who are “personally responsible for gross violations of human rights or serious crimes under international law” and “persons with serious integrity deficits.”4 The emphasis on personal responsibility is reflected in UN guidance, across multiple documents, to not vet candidates based on broad categories such as political affiliation or identity group. Specific actions that preclude appointment to a UN Police post include genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, extrajudicial

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4 See https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/RuleoflawVettingen.pdf.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

execution, torture and similar cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, enforced disappearance, and slavery.5

These basic minimum standards for vetting police officers are intuitive and compelling. These questions also align with criminal records and background checks in the United States. In the United States in 2016, policing agencies employing more than 100 officers used an average of 14.8 different

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5 Other types of offenses which do not rise to these levels of internationally recognized violations of human rights are recommended to be approached on a case-by-case bases, with the following questions suggested as guidelines: (1) What was the specific nature of the abuse or misconduct and what was the context?; (2) Was it a generalized institutional practice (e.g., a generally corrupt professional milieu)?; (3) Has the act of abuse or misconduct concluded or is it continuous?; (4) If concluded, has the act been acknowledged? Has the record improved?; and (5) Has the act fundamentally affected civic trust? If so, will it be possible to regain civic trust? Under what conditions? (see pp. 21–22 of UN guide for Rule of Law Tools for Post-conflict States, Vetting: An Operational Framework; available at https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/RuleoflawVettingen.pdf).

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

types of screening tools, including background investigations, credit history checks, criminal history checks, driving record checks, social media checks, personal interviews, personality inventories, polygraph exams, psychological interviews, voice stress analyzers, written aptitude tests, analytic or problem-solving ability assessments, assessments of understanding diverse cultural populations, mediation or conflict management skills assessments, drug tests, medical exams, vision tests, and fitness tests (Owens and Ba, 2021). This intensive screening may provide insight into one’s character and ability to promote the ROL; however, to date, the effectiveness of these screening tools has not been successfully linked to policing performance, and they have certainly not been tested against one’s ability to promote the ROL in the field (see the call for research to validate hiring criteria in Box 3-1).

There are also contextual considerations for different countries. The idea of screening police candidates for prior crimes is beyond the reach of

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

countries without systematic crime records. Further, in some countries (e.g., South Africa), police service is one of only a few options available to low-skill individuals, and this has contributed to an extremely high number of applications for limited positions. Attention to the fairness and quality of very basic assessments of police candidates will be important in countries with limited resources and databases.

Closely related to this is the ability to track dismissals of police officers for crimes or misconduct. A system for tracking this, so that officers dismissed in one community may not be hired in other places, was only recently established in the United Kingdom and remains unadopted in most U.S. states (Sherman, 2015). Chapter 5 provides recommendations on this and other reforms that require the institutionalization of reliable digital records.

Finally, in some countries policing may not be viewed as an occupation that protects and serves the community in the first place, nor as a job that provides a living wage, but rather is viewed as an explicit tool of political elites to maintain their personal power and authority. The committee views these contexts as ones where the ROL is weak and the policing authority is not viewed as legitimate. It is unlikely that small tweaks to recruitment campaigns, as discussed here, could offset the influence of such conditions without the integration of recruitment strategies into larger reform efforts.

APPOINTMENT OF POLICE LEADERSHIP

An important aspect of police recruitment and retention is defining police leadership and its appointment. Historically, there have been three models for leadership: (1) bottom-up, in which all leaders are promoted from the same entry-level ranks of police service over the course of their careers; (2) elite preparation, in which potential senior leaders are identified as an “officer corps” at the beginning of their careers with exclusive access to promotions to senior leadership; and (3) lateral entry, in which high-level leaders from other contexts (e.g., military, banking) are selected for direct appointments to police leadership.

The bottom-up leadership approach is a common feature of several countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The officer corps model is found in countries that are former British colonies, including Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, and Singapore. The direct-entry model is found in some U.S. cities, Sweden, and (recently), to a very limited extent in the United Kingdom. Recent reform efforts in Latin America have resulted in a similar approach to appointing leadership; the majority of police directors are high-ranking officers appointed by the corresponding ministers in the region, chosen from a pool of eligible individuals.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

Is one model of leadership likely to be superior in regard to promoting the ROL and public protection? There are many opinions on this, but no systematic evidence. The challenge to evaluating the consequences of these models is that they are embedded in so many other cultural and political factors of different countries. Even without that challenge, changes in these systems are so rare that there is scant opportunity for even before/after comparisons, let alone controlled comparisons with control groups.

What may be more important than the system of recruitment to leadership is the training and certification required for the highest leadership ranks. This certification—the idea of licensing police leaders—was pioneered in the context of the up-from-bottom (constable to commissioner) systems of England and Wales. These systems require anyone appointed as a chief officer to have either graduated from the Strategic Command Course of the College of Policing (after selection from a pool of chief superintendents nominated by the 43 police forces) or to have multiple years’ experience in leading police agencies in other countries of comparable size to British forces (most with a minimum of 1,000 officers each).

Once certification requirements are met, certified persons may be appointed as chief officers by local police and crime commissioners or their equivalent to fixed-term contracts of service. Once appointed, they cannot be easily dismissed. This system is intended to support operational independence, whereby chiefs and leaders who are, in theory, trained to promote the ROL are then given the freedom to exercise their judgment in support of the ROL (just as leaders of the London police were [from 1829 to 1998], all appointed to the ancient office of magistrate, a lower court judgeship). See Box 3-3 for the case of police reform in Northern Ireland and the experience leaders learned to appreciate.

USES OF TECHNOLOGY

Research suggests that several technologies may have the potential to increase police accountability to the ROL and their public safety mandates. However, achieving these outcomes depends on police services having access to essential technologies that can fulfill such mandates, how that technology is used, the strength and supervision of implementation policies concerning those technologies, and whether citizens and the police share similar expectations about those technologies. As this report recommends in Chapter 5, the most important technology for evidence-based policing is a set of digital recordkeeping systems that can track the most important facts about police, starting with a list of all police officers, reports of crime, and reports of police actions, from vehicle stops to shooting suspects.

Some of the newer technologies that may allow for additional useful data collection include information technologies, body-worn cameras,

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

automatic vehicle locators, and systems for early identification of officers at risk of serious misconduct or suicide. Pressures to adopt particular technologies stem from the belief among police and citizens that technology can make policing more efficient, effective, or responsive to its mandates (Koper et al., 2014; Lum et al., 2017; Sanders and Sheptycki, 2017). For example, certain technologies are believed to improve an officer’s ability to identify, detect, and monitor high-risk offenders and places, thereby improving public safety goals. Other technologies, such as body-worn or in-car cameras, officer early intervention systems (EISs), and specialized records management systems are viewed as strengthening an agency or community’s ability to hold officers accountable to fair treatment of citizens, human rights

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

protections, or adherence to the ROL. Both citizens and the police often have high expectations about what technologies can deliver and may even have incongruent expectations of what technologies should be used for and the outcomes technologies might produce. The allure of technology is also its challenge; while technologies are often seen and logically deduced as a panacea, they frequently fail to deliver the desired outcomes. They also require a significant budget for training and maintenance, which may not be feasible or prioritized in every country.

Information Technologies

Information technologies, such as computer-aided dispatch and records management systems, are accountability mechanisms meant to ensure that officers perform their duties: responding to citizen calls for service (if that is the national policing model) or recording crime reports and police actions. Such information technologies also provide data that can be analyzed to see trends in police activities and responses, which can be analyzed against expected outcomes for better evidence-based policing. Information technologies are often the least faddish, so they may be underused and undermaintained in policing without substantial efforts to gain compliance. When they are deployed properly, they can add great value to the accountability of police to their ROL and public safety mandates.

When designed well, information technologies can systematically and transparently capture, record, manage, maintain, organize, and analyze large amounts of data. They can capture crime and other public safety information as well as daily police activity and citizens’ concerns and complaints about both crime and police activity. The use of such information would be necessary for an evidence-based policing approach to effectively, fairly, humanely, and transparently operate within a rule-of-law framework (see Chapters 1 and 5).

Poor information technology development can result in a police service and its community inaccurately gauging the public safety challenges it faces and failing to track what police agents are doing to address those challenges. Further, information technologies can also have unintended consequences, including making officers more reactive and inefficient by creating more reporting requirements that might slow them down or create negative officer attitudes toward all information technologies (see discussions by Chan et al., 2001; Koper et al., 2015; Sanders and Condon, 2017). The use of technology is regularly filtered through an agency’s values and organizational structures (referred to as “technological frames”—see Orlikowski and Gash, 1994; Robey et al., 2000), producing outcomes that may not align with the broader ideals of promoting the ROL or protecting the population. Any decisions regarding the adoption of information technologies should

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

consider not only how they work in principle, but also how they would work in practice in a given social context.

Body-Worn Cameras

Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are believed to generate self-awareness in officers, that is, the awareness that they are being recorded and watched, to deter wrongdoing or poor behavior (Ariel et al., 2015). As with cellphone cameras, BWCs are regarded as providing a recording of an officer’s activity, especially when no other witnesses are present. Unfortunately, the promise of BWCs has yet to be realized. Recent reviews of high-quality empirical evaluation research on the impact that this technology has on most (but not all) specific outcomes have been disappointing.

As Lum and colleagues (2020) find in their meta-analysis of evaluation research, the ability for BWCs to increase police accountability with regard to their use of force and other behaviors is still unclear, despite the finding that BWCs are associated with reductions in levels of citizen complaints. Lum and colleagues (2020) conclude:

Overall, there remains substantial uncertainty about whether BWCs can reduce officer use of force, but the variation in effects suggests there may be conditions in which BWC could be effective. BWCs also do not seem to affect other police and citizen behaviors in a consistent manner, including officers’ self-initiated activities or arrest behaviors, dispatched calls for service, or assaults and resistance against police officers. BWCs can reduce the number of citizen complaints against police officers, but it is unclear whether this finding signals an improvement in the quality of police-citizen interactions or a change in reporting (p. 1).

The reason for these generally disappointing findings is not because the cameras do not work mechanically. Rather, BWCs—and police technologies generally—rely upon several other policies and practices to achieve the outcomes expected of them. BWCs may be effective in holding officers accountable to reducing their use of force, corruption, or violation of human rights. However, this effectiveness relies on agencies having and enforcing policies that require police to turn on and use the cameras. Policies must also dictate how the agency will process and actively use BWC footage for internal and criminal investigations of suspect police actions (see further discussion in Lum et al., 2020).

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

Automatic Vehicle Locators

Automatic vehicle locators (AVLs) are global positioning system (GPS) tracking devices on police vehicles that can determine where those cars are located at any time; other technologies include GPS on officers’ personal radios or phones, which can identify where the officer is, in or out of a vehicle. This technology was initially adopted for officers’ safety reasons and to locate officers quickly if they were not responding. AVLs can serve as an accountability mechanism insofar as supervisors can see where officers’ vehicles are, whether officers are within the post they are assigned to, and whether they are actually responding to a call for service. AVLs do not indicate what officers are doing, only where officers are.

It is unclear how much AVLs are used as an accountability tool or whether they can effectively be leveraged to strengthen police accountability to their jobs. Jones (2018) finds that police managers and supervisors struggled with using AVL information to manage how their patrol units were being deployed and that supervisors varied widely in their use of AVL information. Nonetheless, in recent hot-spot patrol experiments in the United Kingdom (Basford et al., 2021; Bland et al., 2021), handheld GPS trackers for foot patrols were successful (after initial challenges) in delivering scheduled patrols to assigned hot spots.

Early Intervention Systems

EISs use data collected by agencies about officers, such as complaints, uses of force, and personnel data, in risk assessment tools to predict which officers may be at risk for a future harmful event, such as excessive use of force, citizen complaint, officer self-harm, or officer accident (see Shjarback, 2021; Walker and Milligan, 2005). Such systems try to identify officers early enough in their careers for prevention through remediation and correction.

The research is limited and mixed regarding whether an EIS combined with an effective intervention may be effective. After reviewing this research, Shjarback (2021) finds that simply having an EIS is not enough to reduce complaints or use of force (see also Shjarback, 2015). Worden and colleagues (2013) find that when comparing EIS-flagged officers who had participated in an intervention training to improve police-citizen interactions with those who were flagged but had not participated in that training, there were no significant differences between the two groups as to the number of complaints (although complaints went down for both groups). Others, using pre-post research designs, have found that such systems with interventions were associated with reductions in complaints (Broidy and Prenzler, 2020; Macintyre et al., 2008; Walker et al., 2001).

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

INTERNAL GOVERNANCE

Internal police culture may have significant consequences for external police engagement. The concept of procedural fairness internal to a police organization encompasses the level of respect perceived by police in their relationship with their supervisors, fairness and inclusion in decision making, and the values and ethos that are culturally perpetuated by supervisors (Trinkner et al., 2016).

Recent research indicates that policies aimed at creating a culture of accountability, fairness, and justice within a police department may have a notable effect on police interaction with the community. In a U.S. study undertaken in a large urban area,

[r]esults showed that when officers were in a procedurally fair department, they were more likely to trust and feel obligated to obey their supervisors, less likely to be psychologically and emotionally distressed, and less likely to be cynical and mistrustful about the world in general and the communities they police in particular…these effects were associated with greater endorsement of democratic forms of policing…[t]aken together these results clearly support the utility of infusing procedural justice into the internal working climate as a means to improve police officer job performance … and their relationship with the communities they police (Trinkner et al., 2016, p. 3).

Likewise, a study in the mainly rural Durham, England, Police Constabulary found that identification with the organization as a result of positive procedural justice “was consistently associated with stronger motivations or self-assessed propensities across a range of desirable behaviours, including towards community policing.” This study was further summarized by its authors, who said

fairness and respect, internally within police organisations, can have a similar effect [of encouraging co-operation and compliance with the law] on the attitudes and behaviour of the workforce. Fairness at a supervisory and senior leadership level was associated with officers ‘going the extra mile’ without personal gain, following work rules, valuing the public, feeling empowered, and supporting ethical policing (Bradford and Quinton, 2014, p. 2; see also Bradford et al., 2014).6

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6 See also Bradford et al. (2014). For a complete discussion of the literature regarding the definitions of procedural justice, and the consequences of departments employing procedural justice, see David H.F. Tyler, “Fairness Within: Sources and Consequences of Procedural Fairness in Police Agencies,” Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, May 2020.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

The relationship between procedural justice and positive relationships with supervisors and organizational commitment was also studied in Accra, Ghana (Tankebe, 2010); however, that study—one of the few studies in this area external to the U.K./U.S. context—did not include an evaluation of the effect that commitment had on external policing behavior. These studies have relied on the self-reporting by police officers of their perceptions and attitudes, not on objective external measurements of behavior. However, the reported results of similar studies are quite consistent in noting the correlation between police experience internal to the organization and attitudes about policing and community relations.

Internal governance structures examined in the following sections of this chapter include immediate line supervision, audits of individual officer behavior and conduct, disciplinary systems and citizen complaints, and oversight.

Supervision

Supervision in police agencies includes both first-line supervision of officers and detectives and the supervision of supervisors. First-line supervision is an essential accountability mechanism yet one that is often weak in practice. First-line supervisors are most able to see the day-to-day activities of officers, to notice problems or warning signs in officer behavior or work performance, and to directly mentor and hold officers accountable to disciplinary measures when they violate procedures. In research undertaken by Engel and Worden (2003), the perception of a supervising officer’s priorities had a strong influence on whether the officers under their command prioritized or disregarded the value of independent problem solving.

In practice, first-line supervisors are rarely empowered to hold officers accountable or feel comfortable disciplining them. They might not actively supervise or monitor officer behavior and might not be aware of what officers are doing daily. These deficiencies could result from cultural impediments (including poor leadership structure and/or union concerns), lack of knowledge on how to supervise, lack of technologies, resources, or performance tools to supervise officers effectively, lack of supervision of supervisors themselves, an overwhelming or distracting workload, or even threats from colleagues. Similarly, while there may be an official “chain of command” of supervision in policing, whether each rank is similarly supervising or monitoring those below them remains unknown.

Audits

Audits can be either random or regular checkups on officer and supervisor activities and behaviors or targeted assessments and checks of specific

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

individuals. These audits may include a supervisor or commanding officer randomly responding to a call for service an officer is handling to observe the officer’s response, examining reports written by officers, examining what happened to complaints made by citizens, and conducting random quizzes for officers about their up-to-date knowledge of policies, procedures, and effective policing practices. BWC have also been used for auditing purposes, where a supervisor might review footage of police activities every so often to identify any need for corrective actions. Closed circuit televisions inside police stations could also be used in similar ways. As Neyroud’s review (2021) showed, studies focused on combatting corruption by government officials have found that audits can effectively reduce corruption (see Borges et al., 2017; Olken, 2007). Audits can also be conducted at the agency level by government or civilian oversight groups and units (an example is the police inspectorate in England and Wales).

Disciplinary Systems and Complaint Investigations

Police agencies may have internal investigation and internal affairs units that may process complaints and violations of agency rules and policies. These units may review citizen complaints, carry out investigations on specific officers, and carry out audits as described above. Although rarely done in practice, they could also audit the practices of an agency more broadly with regard to disparities in service, effectiveness in activities, or extent of corruption and other negative practices (Sherman, 1978). Very little is known about the current practices of internal affairs units, even in places with well-established and professional police services. For example, in the United States there have been long-standing protective practices of law enforcement officers under investigation. Internal affairs units are often constrained by these protective practices, including police union interference, lawyers hired by officers, the invoking of officers’ “Bill of Rights” or immunity protections, or officers’ refusals to cooperate in investigations (Walker, 2001, 2005).

Citizen complaints in the Global North are generally handled by separate units unconnected to internal affairs investigators. Some of these are external to the police force as well, such as the Independent Office for Police Conduct in England and Wales. In most agencies in the United States, citizen complaints are investigated by police officers, but some have an independent civilian review of the investigation. An eight-city review in the United States found that complaints against officers were more likely to be sustained when a civilian review was undertaken of complaint investigations conducted by internal affairs officers than where there was no civilian review (Terrill and Ingram, 2016). Historically, these investigations have

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

rarely found conclusive evidence for or against the factual allegations made by citizens (Reiss, 1971). Since the advent of citizen cellphone cameras and body-worn cameras, however, many citizen complaints made to internal affairs units are no longer reliant solely on an officer’s or citizen’s word. Whether this has changed outcomes substantially is not yet known.

Some research on organizational justice suggests that how internal affairs units do their work may also matter to their effectiveness. In an analysis of complaint data from the United States, Harris and Worden (2014, p. 1258) report that “officers who received more severe sanctions were actually more likely to obtain an additional [subsequent] sustained complaint when compared with non-sanctioned officers.” They speculate that perceived unfair internal affairs practices produced this effect by creating a sense of injustice and defiance among sanctioned officers.

As recently reviewed by the Task Force on Policing for the Council of Criminal Justice (2021),7 studies of the impacts of civilian oversight are scarce, models vary widely, and there are significant barriers that preclude civilian oversight boards from carrying out their duties. Additional information regarding ways in which police misconduct is investigated and addressed at the structural level is available in Chapter 2.

CONCLUSION

Policies, as presented here, are mechanisms for directly and indirectly ensuring that police services promote the ROL. Empirical evidence linking specific policies to the adherence of ROL outcomes is generally lacking—a theme throughout this report. Nonetheless, knowledge already gained from efforts to examine the effects of policing policies can be appreciated and help guide future research on policies that may affect the ROL and public protection. The committee finds that recruitment strategies and policies that support the appropriate use of technologies are areas ripe for investigation. Research has already begun in these areas in ways that examine the effective reduction of harm to the public, and these could be extended to incorporate ROL measures. See further discussion of targeted research in these areas in Chapter 5.

___________________

7 See https://counciloncj.foleon.com/policing/assessing-the-evidence/xi-civilian-oversight.

Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×

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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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Suggested Citation:"3 Policies for Promoting Accountable Policing." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population: An Evidence-Based Approach. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/26217.
×
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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.

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.

At the request of INL, Policing to Promote the Rule of Law and Protect the Population explores the organizational policies, structures, or practices (e.g., HR and recruiting, legal authorities, reporting lines, etc.) that will enable a police service to promote the rule of law and protect the population. This report presents an overview of the state of research and highlights promising areas to guide policing reform and interventions.

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