The NACOLE Achievement in Oversight / Contribution to Oversight Award recognizes a specific accomplishment or contribution to civilian oversight by either an individual, organization, or agency that demonstrated a commitment to the effective oversight of law enforcement, jails, and prisons and to NACOLE’s mission, vision, and values.
Nominees will be evaluated by their:
Impact on the civilian oversight community: Potentially including contributing to changes in a law enforcement agency, jail or custodial facility; advocating or advancing legislation; helping create, advance or strengthen oversight in a community; having a significant impact on NACOLE and/or civilian oversight.
Effort involved in their achievement or contribution: Potentially including time and energy expended; obstacles or opposition encountered; demonstrated courage and conviction; personal or professional sacrifices.
Innovation: Potentially including innovation in oversight or law enforcement practices.
Commitment to NACOLE’s mission, vision, & values
Commitment to transparency and community engagement: Potentially including advocacy of transparency in law enforcement, jails, prisons, and civilian oversight; efforts to advance open and constructive dialogue with stakeholders.
Past award winners include:
- Legislators or elected officials who sponsored legislation that established or strengthened oversight.
- Community activists and organizations that advocated for legislation to establish or improve accountability, or led a successful campaign to defeat a ballot measure that would have weakened oversight of a law enforcement agency.
- Oversight agencies and individual practitioners that performed an exemplary or innovative review, audit and/or investigation of law enforcement actions.
- An oversight agency whose leadership and staff courageously and successfully resisted an attempt to significantly diminish its independence and effectiveness.
- A non-profit journalism production company that published tens of thousands of police misconduct records in an innovative interactive public database.
- Journalists whose investigative reporting uncovered police killings in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, sparking a federal investigation that led to the prosecution of the officers responsible for the post-Katrina shootings and the cover-up of the shootings.
- Journalists who investigated significant issues in San Diego’s local law enforcement, including deaths in the county jails and patterns of misconduct in the police Department.
- Oversight practitioners whose work contributed to effective oversight in their community or to the oversight community at large.
- An oversight agency attorney who successfully negotiated significant policy changes in the San Francisco Police Department that became models for police and oversight agencies around the country.
- An oversight agency mediation coordinator who developed a highly successful mediation program that became a model for other agencies, and whose expertise and guidance supported creation of similar mediation programs.
Potential nominees could include:
- Individual oversight practitioners, including oversight agency staff members or members of volunteer oversight boards and commissions.
- Oversight agencies, boards and commissions
- Grassroots or advocacy groups
- Oversight and accountability organizations
- Community activists or activist movements
- Journalists or news organizations
- Academicians
- Researchers
- Individuals, organizations or government officials or agencies involved with monitoring or implementing consent decrees.
- Civil rights advocates whose work advances effective oversight of law enforcement or jails or prisons
- Educational institutions