Ms. Debra Livingston

Professor of Law, Columbia University, and

Member of New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board

 

Citizen Review of Police Complaints:

Four Critical Dimensions of Value

 

Eighth Annual Conference of NACOLE

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

 

Summary: With the growth of citizen participation in reviewing complaints about police, communities must recognize what value citizen oversight provides. Ms. Livingston defines four critical dimensions of oversight, explains their interdependence, and shows how they are being provided in the citizen oversight of New York City, the largest police force in the U.S. The dimensions are the following:

 

1.                  Holding officers accountable for misconduct;

2.                  Keeping a record; recognizing complaints as vital sources of information about a department;

3.                  Identifying patterns and problems related to policies or supervision rather than misconduct; and

4.                  Building public trust and community cohesion through patient listening to all complaint parties, and letting them know they have been heard.

 

Every citizen oversight body can assess if it is clearly providing these components, educating its law enforcement agencies, its leaders, its media and the entire community regarding these dimensions.

                        


 

I’m happy to be here today and I’m extremely happy to have the opportunity to speak to you on the subject of citizen review and how we might get value from it.  Why is that, you might ask? Well, we are at an interesting moment in the history of citizen review.  Citizen review – meaning, broadly, the idea that citizens should participate in the administrative review of complaints about police conduct – was a highly controversial idea when the citizen review movement began in earnest in this country, back in the 1960s.  As Professor Walker has documented, the concept was “dismissed as radical and dangerous by virtually everyone outside the civil rights and civil liberties communities.”[1]  That has changed.  Today, citizen review processes of one type or another can be found in about 80 percent of our largest cities.  There are about 100 separate oversight agencies in this country and that number has been growing steadily for some time.[2]  Citizen participation in complaint review, many scholars say, is becoming the norm in local policing.

 

But at the same time, at the very moment that this is the case, there are those who are asking, “What can citizen review achieve?  Can it accomplish all that reformers hoped it might?  Can citizen review of complaints really do much to improve local policing and the relationship between communities and police?”  “[T]here is a serious lack of research on the activities and effectiveness of oversight agencies,” said Walker, the most consistent academic observer of citizen review mechanisms, just last year.[3]  And “[t]he spread of citizen review,” he said a few years earlier, “has not brought complete joy [to the people who advocated for it].  In fact, there is a pervasive uneasy feeling that citizen review is not the panacea many expected it to be.”[4]

 


So there’s a sense of success, and also a worry that success might elude us.  You can see this with regard to my own agency, in New York.  New York’s CCRB is in many respects doing rather well.  There’s an effort afoot in New York to give the agency responsibility not only for investigating, but prosecuting substantiated cases.  There’s a growing recognition, in many places, that the agency has made big strides since it was established in 1993.  The New York media has acknowledged this – at least on occasion.  So has the City’s Comptroller, who after a recent audit praised the agency for its progress,  noting that “citizens can be assured that the CCRB is working diligently to ensure that complaints of police misconduct [are] handled responsibly.” 

 

On the other hand, if you did a computer search of the New York newspapers for CCRB within 45 words of “ineffective,” you would get more than a handful of hits – and not all of them would be all that dated.  The agency certainly has its share of vocal critics.  And some of them have raised disturbing questions.  At the end of the day, is there any persuasive evidence that the New York CCRB has been an effective instrument for improving policing in New York?  Is there evidence that it has helped to build positive police-community relations?


So it’s a time of success for citizen review, but maybe also a time in which we are taking stock, trying to ensure that success does not elude us.  It’s an interesting time, and an important time, to be thinking about this question, “How do we get value from citizen review?”

 

So I’m going to talk about that today.  And I’m going to talk about it from the perspective of New York’s CCRB, with an eye to the general lessons that the New York experience might suggest.  And I expect that I’m going to be calling on my New York colleagues for some help in all this, so I thought I might introduce them here.  Or better yet, ask them to introduce themselves.  Flo, do you want to start? 

 

Flo Finkle, Executive Director

Ray Patterson, Director of Alternative Dispute Resolution and Communications

Andrew Case, Member of the Research, Report Writing, and Communications Outreach Staff 

 

Here’s the road map for the talk.  First,  I’m going to describe New York’s citizen review agency, so you have a sense of how it compares with the citizen review process that you are most familiar with.  Then I’m going to talk about four ways in which a citizen review mechanism might offer value – might contribute to the improvement of policing, and to the bettering of relations between communities and police.  I’ll talk a little bit about how New York City’s CCRB has done, along each of these four dimensions of value.  And I’ll conclude by arguing that in order to get real value out of citizen review – at least in New York, and maybe elsewhere – there’s a need to recognize all four aspects of value that I’m identifying today.  You can’t focus on one to the exclusion of the other, because they are all mutually supportive.

 

* * *

 

Okay, that’s the roadmap.  Let me introduce New York’s CCRB. 


 

New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board is a 13-member board, though it presently has only 12 members.  Of these, five are appointed directly by the mayor; five are appointed by the mayor, but nominated by New York’s City Council, one to represent each of New York’s five boroughs, and three Board members are nominated by the Police Commissioner.  Only the three Board members nominated by the Commissioner are permitted to have prior law enforcement experience (which in the statute creating the agency doesn’t include prior service as a prosecutor, but does include prior service with the NYPD, or any other police agency). 

 

The law creating New York’s CCRB specifies that appointments to the Board shall be made “so that the board’s membership reflects the diversity of the city’s population.”  The law professor in me can’t resist pointing out – with a smile – that in New York, that means having only nine lawyers on a board of 12!  We also have a college admissions director, a veteran – all sorts of capable and distinguished people.  And we do have a diverse group of people, along race, ethnicity, and gender lines.

 

Okay.  New York’s CCRB is charged with investigating citizen complaints made against NYPD officers and involving one of four things: use of force, discourtesy, offensive language (which is defined to mean some type of racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, or gender-based slur), or abuse of authority. Abuse of authority commonly includes things like improper street stops, retaliatory summonses, and unwarranted threats of arrest.  And here you see an outline of the Board’s jurisdiction.

 

Now, the Board members themselves are part-timers.  When the Board receives a complaint, it is actually investigated by our staff, which is composed entirely of civilian employees.  As of June 30 of this year, the CCRB had on staff 173 full-time civilian employees.  Of these about 125 were investigators of one type or another.  CCRB has nine teams of investigators, each composed of over a dozen people.  Each investigative team has supervisors.  The lead supervisors for the teams generally have at least 15 years of law enforcement or other investigative experience and come from a range of agencies – like the IRS, the DEA, the INS, or a Federal Defenders Service.  The line investigators, in contrast, are often recent college graduates, and this is sometimes their first job after college.  As you might expect, we have relatively high turnover among this second group;  many leave after two to four years for graduate education.  Again, however, I would characterize our staff as having a great deal of talent.  As well as substantial legal authority.  The agency is armed with subpoena power, and investigators can and do issue subpoenas in the course of an investigation, as necessary, to obtain documents and secure testimony.

 

The Board reviews investigative files prepared by the staff and decides cases, generally in panels of three – one mayoral appointee, one City Council representative, and one Police Commissioner designee.  Most of the time – the great majority of the time – the panels are unanimous.  The Board’s substantiated dispositions are forwarded to the Police Commissioner, usually with a recommendation regarding the level of discipline that the Board feels the officer should receive.  The Commissioner retains the ultimate authority to impose discipline and to accept or reject Board recommendations.

 

In terms of complaint activity, the agency generally receives about 4000 to 5000 complaints each year, about half of which are fully investigated.   The remainder are closed as “truncated” – because a complainant chooses not to pursue the complaint or is unavailable, in most of these cases.  Since its inception in 1993, the CCRB has substantiated between 8 and 14% of its fully investigated cases.  The Board reaches an affirmative finding of some sort – substantiated, exonerated, or unfounded – in around 65% of the cases it fully investigates, with the rest being closed generally as unsubstantiated or officer unidentified.  (What you see here are the dispositions most commonly used to close fully investigated cases.)  Since 1993, the NYPD has come to accept CCRB substantiated findings and to impose discipline in substantiated cases at ever increasing rates, but still not invariably.  The NYPD imposed discipline in over 75% of the cases that the CCRB substantiated in 2000, the most recent year for which we have fully reliable data.   

 

I can give you some specifics about the first six months of 2002, just to give you a flavor for our caseload. During that period, we received 2,265 complaints.  We closed 2571.  Of the complaints closed during this period, about 46% were fully investigated.  Fifty-two percent were truncated.  From January to June, the CCRB substantiated 280 allegations of misconduct, distributed over 112 cases. More than half of these substantiated allegations involved abuse of authority – most commonly, allegations of improper frisk or search, or allegations that an officer refused properly to identify himself or herself upon request.  The next most frequent type of substantiated allegation was use of unnecessary force.  

 

* * *

 

So that’s a brief outline of New York’s CCRB.  What about this question of value?  This fiscal year, the CCRB’s budget is just over $11.2 million.  Now, that’s a small fraction of the budget of the NYPD – which stood at $3.4 billion at the end of this last fiscal year.  You have to remember that the NYPD is enormous – with well over 37,000 uniformed personnel.  Our ratio of investigators to police personnel is actually quite large – about one CCRB investigator for every 310 officers.  Still, with a budget of over $10 million, with a staff of highly dedicated and capable employees, and with an administration that supports and wants to see good results from citizen review, it’s perfectly proper to ask what the City of New York gets for its money.  And that brings us to the four dimensions of value that I alluded to at the start.  What should we expect from citizen review?

 

* * *

 

Number one.  The first way in which a citizen review agency might offer value – might help improve policing and the relations between police and communities – is by holding officers to account for misconduct.  This is the “holding officers to account” dimension of value.

  

And it is certainly important, if you look at citizen review from an historical perspective.  Citizen review was pushed by civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s as one way of dealing with police abuse and the inattention of police departments to charges of abuse, particularly involving minority communities.  The early argument for citizen review was an argument about police hostility to complaints and police bias in their investigation and disposition.  Professor Walker has usefully described the argument that supported involving individuals who are not sworn officers in the processing of complaints.[5]  Citizen involvement, the theory went, would improve the fairness with which complaints were handled.  Fair treatment of complaints, it was also believed, would lead to more discipline of officers, and to greater deterrence of police misconduct.

 

It’s this aspect of value that New York’s CCRB has emphasized the most, I think, since 1993.  Our current executive director, and our preceding one, are both former prosecutors with sterling records. (They are used to holding people to account.)  Each executive director has focused on assembling a staff of intelligent, capable, and committed investigators – investigators with the experience, drive and analytic capability to really investigate citizen complaints.  And in the period since 1993, you can see the payoff, in our investigations.  As I mentioned before, of the cases the agency investigates fully, over 65% are closed with an affirmative finding – substantiated, exonerated, unfounded.  NYPD officials, high-ranking city officials, including the mayor, and even media figures, on occasion, have publicly stated that CCRB investigations are thorough and complete – that Board investigations have integrity.

 

Now, no one could argue that this is not important – that thorough complaint investigation for the purpose of identifying and punishing misconduct is not an important part of the value of citizen review.  Indeed, for serious, but comparatively minor abuses of force – like an unnecessary punch  leaving no permanent injury – the complaint review process may be the only process to which victims can turn.  Same for unlawful searches – of cars, homes, and people on the street.  Establishing high quality investigative practices was absolutely the first priority for our agency, once it came into being.  And there was good reason for this.  If police are to comply with both law and internal police policies, there must be a way of identifying those occasions when officers fail to do so.  There must be accountability – and complaints are a vital part of the means by which we identify those officers who must be held to account. 

 

At the same time, though, an exclusive focus on this aspect of value is not, I think, the way to maximize the value of citizen review – to ensure that the citizen review process is contributing all it can to the improvement of policing and the bettering of relations between communities and police.

 

Why is this?  Well, first, as all of you know from your own experiences with the complaint process, not all complaints are well suited to the investigative paradigm.  Some partake of legitimate misunderstandings, sometimes in ongoing relationships, between an officer and an individual.  The question in these cases is not so much misconduct, as getting the parties to work out their problems.

 

There are also limits on our ability to hold officers accountable.  Many cases may involve minor rudeness or discourtesy on the officer’s part, but conduct that is not extremely serious, and that will in any event be near impossible to prove – even assuming the full cooperation of  the complainant.  As one scholar has observed, “[M]ost police encounters occur under isolated conditions . . . [and] even the giving of a traffic citation on a crowded street is often unobserved.”[6]  The facts cannot always be determined in such encounters – whether they are investigated independently, by citizens, or by police.  In fact, citizen review agencies have not necessarily substantiated more complaints than the internal police department procedures that preceded them.[7]

 

I’ve said that New York’s CCRB investigations are really top notch.  But even with top notch investigation, there are many cases where the facts cannot be determined.  The Board completed 2418 full investigations in 2000, for instance.  In about a third of these cases, the Board came to no affirmative finding on any of the allegations in the complaint.  Add to these the large percentage of truncated cases – about half of our caseload – where we make no factual determinations at all.  If the value of citizen review flows entirely from holding individual officers to account so as to deter misconduct, the high percentage of cases in which we just can’t tell whether misconduct occurred may be a problem.  Are we getting enough accountability?  Enough deterrence?     

 

Particularly in light of the fact that not every instance of police misconduct will become the subject of a complaint.  In some contexts, very serious misconduct (even widespread police corruption) may not be reflected in complaints at all.  This has certainly been the experience in New York.

 

All this relates to a broader point.  Holding officers to account through the after-the-fact investigation of complaints is only a part of the project of police reform.  Efforts at improving police and improving the relations between police and communities ultimately involve change within the police organization.  That’s what community policing is all about!  To paraphrase, police reform efforts will be most effective when the police organization itself is involved in the process and when change involves not simply adhering to rules in the face of punitive sanctions – not simply holding individual officers to account – but a change in the values and systems to which both managers and line officers adhere.[8]

  


Okay.  One might conclude from all I’ve said thus far that we should simply lower expectations for citizen review.  The thorough and complete investigation of complaints is important.  But we shouldn’t be surprised that it isn’t enough, at least in many circumstances, to fundamentally reform bad police departments, to enhance the quality of police services, or to improve the relations between communities and police.  It’s still important to hold individual officers to account where we know they have acted improperly.  And that’s enough of an aspiration for citizen review.

 

I think, though, that we shouldn’t let ourselves off the hook quite so easily – at least if our aspiration is to get all the value we can out of the complaint review process.  Because the problem with the investigative paradigm as applied to citizen complaints is not simply that it, alone, may not be enough to deal with issues concerning police performance and the relations between communities and police.  The problem with an exclusive focus on holding individual officers to account is that this approach does not maximize the value to be gotten out of looking at complaints. 

 

Let me say this slowly and distinctly.  It is sometimes lawful police practices – not police misconduct – that can set a community or an individual at odds with the police.  Think of those complaints that I alluded to already, involving legitimate misunderstandings between an officer and an individual in an ongoing relationship.  Think about a perfectly proper no-knock warrant, signed by a judge on proper evidence, that happens to be executed at the home of an individual who is not involved in crime.  Or a decision to place more officers in a high crime neighborhood, and to encourage them aggressively to police low-level infractions, regardless whether community residents support this style of policing.  Such police practices can cause problems between communities and police, even in the absence of misconduct by any officer.  And these problems will likely be reflected in citizen complaints – but not dealt with, if we focus exclusively on holding individual officers to account.   

 

* * *

Okay.  So thorough and complete complaint investigation is extremely important, but does not maximize the value of citizen review.  So how might we go about maximizing value?   

 

That brings us to the remaining three dimensions of value that I want to outline today.  There are undoubtedly others, but I want to talk about these three today, just briefly, before I open it up.

 

A citizen-involved review process can offer value by keeping a record, by noting patterns and problems, and by caring about the experiences of participants in the complaint review system.

 

* * *

 

First, keeping a record. 

 

I said before that in the nature of things, there will be a significant number of complaints in which the facts cannot be determined definitively.  Perhaps there was misconduct, but at the end of the day, the complaint will be closed as unsubstantiated.  One of the ways in which a citizen review agency offers value (even in cases like this) is by keeping a record of this complaint – by ensuring that it remains on an officer’s history, so that it is there – so that if it becomes one of a pattern of such complaints, the citizen review agency and the officer’s supervisors are alerted to a problem.

 

You all know this.  That the existence of a complaint is an important piece of information, even if the facts of that complaint cannot be determined fully.  Let me generalize a little from this common sense observation, to talk about how “keeping a record” is one way in which we might maximize value from citizen review.

 

Complaints are a vital source of information about police conduct and the ways in which police and police practices are viewed in the broader community.[9]  This is one proposition on which every scholar of the police – left, right, old, young – agrees.  So if a citizen review agency wants to maximize its value to the people it serves, it should treat complaints this way – as a source of vital information.  The complaint agency should seek to obtain as much information as possible out of the complaint system.  And it should seek to ensure that the information in complaints is accessible, that it is used fully, to improve policing and to improve the relation between police and communities.  In short, the complaint agency should “keep a record.”

 

How does it do this?  First, a citizen review agency should be visible to the community.  People in the community should know how and where to register their complaints.  If complaints contain valuable information that can be used to improve policing, a complaint agency should be very interested in making sure that it is easy to make a complaint.

 

Notice that this helps maximize the agency’s ability to hold officers to account – even before you get to other aspects of value.  Again citing Professor Walker, one clear benefit that can be claimed for citizen review processes, as opposed to internal complaint review processes, is that they make the complaint process more visible, often more accessible, and perhaps more legitimate – and so they tend to receive more complaints.[10]  So even if the substantiation rate remains the same in a citizen-involved process, the overall discipline rate may well be higher.[11]

 

But the information in complaints serves other purposes as well.  It should become part of early warning systems, that use information from complaints, civil actions, stop and frisk records, and the like to try to identify problem officers and problem situations, before clear violations of law or policy have emerged.[12] 

 

Complaints can also signal organizational problems.  Think about the complaint that I alluded to, of a type that many of you may have seen – the complaint of some homeowner whose home has been invaded by police and whose belongings have been ransacked pursuant to the legal authorization afforded by a no-knock search warrant.  In a case like this, the officers who entered the home may have had probable cause that evidence would be found and reason to fear for their own safety if their presence was announced in advance.  But the information on which they relied proved to be in error.  Assuming that the officers acted with no unnecessary violence or disrespect, discipline in such a case would be inappropriate: no “rules” were broken and the individual officers acted on the authority of a judge.  But repeated complaints of this type could reflect serious managerial problems – like inadequate controls over the use of confidential informants or decisions to seek warrants.  By keeping a record, the citizen review agency makes it possible for information like this to come to the surface, and be acted upon.

 

In New York, complaints against a police officer can be made in the precincts, but also directly to CCRB.  The agency has a 24-hour 800 number for lodging complaints – a number that is periodically featured in public service announcements on radio and television in the City.  New York’s CCRB has an active outreach unit, that conducts presentations at high schools and that places literature in hospitals.  Since September 11, the unit has focused particular attention on the Islamic, Arabic, and South Asian populations in New York.  Flo appeared on the Arabic Channel last summer.  We have also had staff visit local mosques and Hindu temples.

 

There’s a natural tendency, I think, to think of all this as “window dressing”  – as some other stuff the agency needs to do, in addition to its core task of investigating complaints.  But once you start to look at complaints as sources of vital information, you realize how important visibility is to maximizing value from citizen review.

 

You also realize that it’s important to be able to use the information in complaints.  That this information – whether complaints are substantiated or not – needs to be maintained in a user-friendly way, so that it can be accessed now and in the future, and for a variety of purposes.  Say there is concern about the late night shift in one particular precinct in the City.  Can we pull up the complaints received by everyone who has worked that shift for the last five years?  Some of those complaints weren’t fully investigated at the time, because the complainants opted not to pursue them.  Did we get and maintain a reasonable amount of information from the complainants during their initial calls? 

 

Or think back to my no-knock warrant example.  Can we pull up all complaints involving search warrants to see if there are other complaints, like this one?  Could we pull together all the complaints in which officers have used a baton, to see if they reveal any training or supervision problems that need to be addressed?  Many police departments – though certainly not all – look very carefully at incidents in which police officers have fired a weapon.  But scholars who write about other types of force – like baton use or the discharge of pepper spray – often bemoan that incidents involving these types of force are not followed as closely by police.  In New York, until CCRB recommended some changes to NYPD practice in the use of pepper spray, the NYPD kept no record at all of use of pepper spray, unless an arrest took place.  In circumstances like this, the information in citizen complaints may constitute the most reliable – even the only available – information about significant police practices. 

  

For those of you from smaller agencies, dealing with smaller departments, information flow may occur with relative ease.  You may not even have to think about how the information in complaints is managed and used.  For CCRB, the management of the information in complaints is itself a major responsibility.

 

* * *

Okay.  The next aspect of value flows from the last.  Citizen review agencies can maximize value by noting patterns and problems.[13]  I said that citizen review agencies should ensure that the information in complaints is used to better policing and to improve relations between police and communities.  Sometimes this boils down to alerting the police department and the community to patterns and problems that demand attention.

 

New York’s CCRB has done some of this, but not as much as some other places.  We have semi-annual reports, and they seem to get better each year.  We report on the basic things: what happens to our substantiated cases once they are sent to the Police Department; the nature of complaint activity, precinct by precinct.  We provide comprehensive information about the age, race, ethnicity, and gender of both complainants and officers.  We also routinely publish information about the nature of the complaints we receive.

 

In addition, we’ve done some special reports.  In 2001 we published a major study on complaints involving stop and frisk.  We’ve done two reports on the use of pepper spray and have made recommendations in this area that have been implemented by the NYPD.  In the “no-knock” warrants area, we persuaded the NYPD to adopt a policy pursuant to which police help citizens fix their broken doors, before leaving the site where a no-knock warrant has been executed, but no contraband has been recovered.  We also raised the visibility of warrants issued on erroneous information by informing the judges of our concern with the number of such cases that had found their way to CCRB.

 

As our agency matures, I think it will be doing more of this business of noting patterns and problems.  This is an area where our current structure, the NYPD’s size, and also our independence from them, ironically, may work against us.  We receive a lot of complaints each month, potentially involving hundreds of different commands.  We are one centralized office, located in downtown Manhattan.  We have no presence in the Bronx, in Staten Island, in Brooklyn, or in Queens.  And no current police officers serve on CCRB, either as Board members or among our investigators.  In practice, this means that our investigators and our Board don’t necessarily read complaints with a lot of background understanding of local conditions in the City’s 76 precincts.  We may know less than we should about the operations of the NYPD – making it more difficult to intervene to note problematic practices or patterns touching the many neighborhoods of New York.   

 

But as we mature, we are developing more sophisticated ways of reading complaints and noting relevant information.  We are educating ourselves about police information keeping systems and police operations, so that we can recognize the significance of the problems presented in complaints.  The academic in me feels strongly that this is something that needs to be done.  Complaints alert us to cases where officers should be disciplined.  But they can also shed light on broader organizational concerns. 

 

Let me give you just one illustration.  I mentioned that New York’s CCRB did a study last year on stop and frisk.  The final report was based in large part on 641 fully investigated complaints involving the street stop of an individual.  The report showed, among other things, that in over half of these complaints, the officer or officers involved failed to fill out a form that is required by the Police Department for such encounters.  Now, the CCRB’s jurisdiction doesn’t extend to the failure to fill out internal NYPD forms, and this finding of widespread failure only emerged as a result of this study.  But this illustrates, I think, how the information in complaints can shed light on broader police management issues – in this case, on line officers’ failure to comply with an organizational policy designed in part to facilitate managerial control over stop and frisk.

 

* * *

 

Okay.  One last way in which a citizen review agency can offer value – can help improve policing and the relation between police and communities.  The citizen review agency can offer value by caring about the experiences of participants in the complaint review process.  What do I mean by this?

 

There is a substantial amount of social science research that indicates that “encouraging and maintaining public trust in the character and motives of legal authorities” is an important way of ensuring that citizens want to abide by the law and want to cooperate with police and other law enforcement agencies.[14]  It takes no great extrapolation from this work to argue that the manner in which complainants are treated within a complaint review process is important – important for complainants’ view of police and the broader legal system and, ultimately, for their trust in these institutions.  Complainants who perceive that they have been treated fairly and with respect are more likely to view the system, broadly, as legitimate, and worthy of reciprocal respect. 

 

It’s also important how police feel they have been treated.  There’s a simple reason for this. Police officers who feel that the disciplinary system is arbitrary and unfair are less likely to feel any commitment to the rules that this system seeks to enforce. 

 

I tell my students that much could be improved in the average complaint review process if the complaint agency borrowed some lessons from private industry.  When Reebok gets a complaint about its sneakers (if Reebok wants to remain profitable) it’s concerned to learn from that complaint, to improve the sneaker.  It’s also concerned that complainants, as a group, feel that the company has treated them well – that this is a company with which they want to continue to do business.  These concerns are as important – in their case, more important – than holding individual Reebok employees to account for bad manufacturing practices. 

 

So what lessons does this hold for citizen review?  Think about the substantial number of cases in which the facts can’t be determined conclusively.  A complainant says that the officer swore at her, provoking tears.  The officer denies it, and we just can’t tell.  How do we deal with that complaint in a responsible way – in a way that might leave the complainant believing that she has been treated fairly and with respect, even though her complaint cannot be definitively resolved?  Or take the case of the homeowner whose door was lawfully broken down by police pursuant to a no-knock warrant.  It’s not enough to say that no misconduct occurred – and to send that homeowner a letter saying the police action has been exonerated.  How do we responsibly deal with that complaint, so that the complainant feels that his legitimate problem with the police department has been handled appropriately?          

 

Complainants need to understand, as they participate in the process, that their side of the story is being heard.  They sometimes need to understand the limitations of fact-finding in processes like ours.  They need to understand that even if their individual complaint is not substantiated, they have made a record which in itself is valuable to bettering police.  And agencies need to provide complainants with the means of understanding the disposition of their complaints and offering feedback to the agency.[15]

 

On the flip side, police should perceive that the process is thorough – even aggressive – but fair.  We should afford both police and complainants timely resolution of their complaints.  It has taken CCRB, on average, 279 days to complete a full investigation over the last five years.  I’d like to see that number go down dramatically – not only because more timely investigations are more likely to be successful, but also because prompt investigations better serve the needs of both the complainant and the police. 

 

For those complaints that are really badly suited to the investigative process, we also need to offer alternatives.  At CCRB, that means mediation.  New York’s CCRB is working very hard to develop and expand its ongoing mediation program.  I think Board members have concluded that for a range of misconduct allegations, mediation offers a superior way to deal with complaints – a way that will enhance learning by the officer, and that will produce greater satisfaction on the part of both the complainant and the officer involved.

 

We think of our program as very small and in need of nurturing – though in absolute terms, I’m told we now have one of the largest mediation programs of this kind in the country.  Fifty-seven cases have been mediated successfully this year.  We’ve brought 185 cases to the table, and have successfully mediated 176.  What you see on the screen now are the categories of cases that we deem eligible for mediation.  We have 27 trained mediators who conduct the mediations for us, for a small fee.  I’ll let Ray provide you with some more details during the question and answer period, if you’re interested.  But from what we’ve seen thus far, there seem to be relatively high levels of satisfaction among those complainants and police who have opted for this program – higher levels of satisfaction than we think exist among participants in the normal investigative process.

 

* * *

 

Okay.  So that’s my pitch.  To maximize value from citizen review, we should think deeply and clearly about at least four aspects of what we do:  holding officers to account; keeping a record; noting patterns and problems; and caring about the experience of participants in the complaint review system.  Historically, we have tended to focus on the first of these functions, and for good reason.  In a city like New York, with a large police department, the disciplinary system cannot be permitted to atrophy, lest discipline itself break down.  Complaints are a big part of the disciplinary system.  We have an obligation to do thorough and complete investigations for the purpose of identifying and rooting out misconduct.

 

But at this moment in history – this moment when people are asking, “Just what can citizen review achieve?”  – I think it would be wrong to focus too narrowly on holding individual officers to account – no matter how important this function might be.  It is also vitally important that we use the information in complaints to improve the ways in which police offer services.  It is extremely important that the complaint review system contribute, by its good operations, to the legitimacy of the broader criminal justice system – something that requires paying attention to the experiences of participants in the complaint review system, and to the way in which the citizen review mechanism is perceived in the broader community.

 

At this moment in my personal history, as I contemplate finishing up my service on CCRB, it strikes me that all of you in this room have a challenging and exciting job to perform.  You must have the skills of aggressive investigators (or the capability to oversee and provoke aggressive investigation by others).  You need information management skills to ensure that the information in complaints is used, to the max.  You need analytic skills, to notice patterns, to recognize problems.  You need communication skills – to bring those problems and patterns to the attention of others.  You even need empathy – if you are really interested in building relations between communities and police.  Organizationally, that’s a challenging group of skills to bring together.  But I think by bringing those skills to bear – and not one to the exclusion of others – you will help to maximize the value of citizen review and to secure its place in the history of police reform.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selected Bibliography

 

David H. Bayley, Preface, in Complaints Against the Police (Andrew Goldsmith, ed., 1991);

 

David H. Bayley (1983), “Accountability and Control of Police; Lessons for Britain,” in Trevor Bennett (ed.), The Future of Policing, Cropwood Conference Series 15, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, pp. 146-62, reprinted in Robert Reiner (ed.), 2 Policing, Aldershot: Dartmouth, pp. 439-455 (1996);

 

Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (1995);

 

David Dixon, Law in Policing: Legal Regulation and Police Practices (1997);

 

Herman Goldstein, Policing a Free Society (1977);

 

Jerome Skolnick and James J. Fyfe, Above the Law (1993);

 

Tom R. Tyler, Trust and Law Abidingness: A Proactive Model of Social Regulation, 81 B.U.L. Rev 361 (2001);

 

Samuel Walker, Police Accountability (2001);

 

Samuel Walker, Achieving Police Accountability, 3 Research Brief (Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture, New York, New York), Sept. 1998.

 

 


[1]Samuel Walker, Police Accountability 6 (2001).

[2]See id.

[3]Id. at 184.

[4]Samuel Walker, Achieving Police Accountability, 3 Research Brief (Center on Crime, Communities & Culture, New York, New York), Sept. 1998, at 2.

[5]Walker, supra note 1, at 55-56.

[6]Herman Goldstein, Policing a Free Society 161 (1977).

[7]See Walker, supra note 1, at 120.

[8]See Jerome H. Skolnick & James J. Fyfe, Above the Law 187 (1993).  See also David Dixon, Law in Policing: Legal Regulation and Police Practices 157, 308 (1997).

[9]See Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas 96 (1995).

[10]Walker, supra note 1, at 123.

[11]Id.

[12]See Walker, supra note 1, at 111.  See also Walker, supra note 4, at 7.

[13]For discussion along similar lines, see Walker, supra note 1, at 93, 104; Chevigny, supra note 13, at 97-98.

[14]Tom R. Tyler, Trust and Law Abidingness: A Proactive Model of Social Regulation, 81 B.U.L. Rev. 361, 362 (2001).

[15]Professor Walker has argued this point very powerfully.  See Walker, supra note 1 at 135.