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DO CIVILIAN REVIEW BOARDS WORK?  
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Zina Hutton
August 30, 2024
Governing
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_ 2020 made police reform “sexy” on a policy level, leading to a
significant increase in civilian oversight boards around the country.
However, in the years following, many of these boards are still trying
to find their footing. _

, Seth W. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

In Brief:

* In the wake of 2020, states and localities created a number of new
civilian police accountability boards to meet widespread demand for
transparency.
* Civilian boards have limited power, and despite community members'
attempts to change that, law enforcement and legislators are
increasingly aligned. In states like Florida and Tennessee,
legislators have all but banned civilian boards from being created or
from operating.
* However, advocates for police reform continue to push for what
they see as a necessary phase of accountability, encouraging
legislators to develop a civilian-led oversight agency that has both
power and independence.

In the years following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis
police officer, states and localities across the country introduced
hundreds of pieces of legislation
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meant to address police violence. Many of those new laws included the
creation of civilian police accountability boards: civilian-led groups
that receive complaints about police misconduct and have the power to
advise police departments on potential consequences.

These boards were a kind of low-hanging fruit for people looking to
make immediate changes to policing, says Rachel Moran, founder of the
University of St. Thomas School of Law’s Criminal and Juvenile
Defense Clinic.

“[Civilian boards] were something people could seize onto,” Moran
tells _Governing_. “It seemed attainable.”

The thinking, Moran says, has been that civilian boards would
encourage behavioral changes in officers, cause departments to rethink
certain procedures that led to complaints or controversy, and rebuild
trust between the community and law enforcement. But a few years after
the creation of many boards, their efficacy has come into question.

Experts who’ve studied police accountability say civilian boards’
power is too limited to make a real difference: Most of them can only
review misconduct accusations and make disciplinary recommendations in
an advisory role. Moreover, some boards have begun to face challenges
from legislators trying to further strip them of power, or dismantle
them entirely.

But the civilians on these boards aren’t ready to write them off
yet. They say there are concrete ways to give these boards the power
to hold officers accountable for misconduct.

Most boards’ ability to effect change in their local police force is
limited by their inability to influence disciplinary decisions in the
department or in the courts, says Suat Cubukcu, a lecturer in American
University’s criminology department. The perception that officers
will face consequences for misconduct is the most effective way to
deter them from committing it, he says.

“The most important factor to increase deterrence is the perception
that you are going to be prosecuted,” Cubukcu says.

In a study Cubukcu conducted in Chicago on the effect that in-car
cameras had on police accountability, five percent of complaints
against police were sustained after review. After the creation of a
civilian accountability office, that number increased to 10 percent
— not enough incentive to discourage or deter misconduct, he says.

According to Cubukcu’s research, it takes two to three years on
average to see a result from civilian oversight investigations. Even
when disciplinary actions are taken at the end of that time period,
they are often inconsequential and limited to recommended training or
the loss of vacation time, he says. Reducing the time between
receiving a complaint and closing a review or investigation could be a
way to streamline the process, as would increasing the recommended
penalties for misconduct, Cubukcu says.

There are three main types of civilian oversight agency:
investigation-focused, review-focused, and a hybrid of the two.
Investigation-focused oversight agencies investigate reports of
misconduct as a third-party organization separate from police
department internal affairs. These civilians are independent from the
local police force, but generally have some experience with running an
investigation, and some members may have a background in law
enforcement.

Most established agencies, however, are review-focused boards, meaning
that they come in well after officer-led internal investigations. The
members of these groups — who may include a wide range of people
like former officers, lawyers, religious leaders, activists, and
community figures — often lack full access to data related to a
complaint, and can rarely subpoena that data due to state or local
legislation.

The review board in New Castle County, Del., for example, still only
has access to a handful of police disciplinary records, according to
Kailyn Richards, full-time county liaison to the Board and a former
Director of Policy at the Delaware Center for Justice. “That’s
something that has been a barrier to the board’s successes with the
community,” Richards explains.

Solving the problems caused by a lack of access to data or boards not
having investigatory power is up to legislators, according to Dawn
Blagrove, executive director of North Carolina progressive criminal
reform organization Emancipate NC. Through her organization in
Raleigh, she advocates for the General Assembly to draft and pass
legislation that would give oversight boards power to investigate
complaints.

However, many police officers don’t believe civilian oversight
boards should get that expanded power. “These [boards] are often
redundant,” says Jay McDonald, president of the Ohio Fraternal Order
of Police and police chief at the Marion, Ohio, police department.
Critical incidents — which McDonald describes as some kind of
in-custody death or officer-involved shooting — are regularly
reviewed by both external and internal agencies. McDonald notes that
grand juries are “the original civilian review board,” and that
officers are subject to those as well. McDonald also believes that
civilian oversight boards could negatively impact departments’
ability to recruit and retain police officers.

Some legislators across the country agree.

Florida recently passed legislation that prohibits civilian oversight
agencies from investigating misconduct or overseeing law enforcement
agencies’ misconduct investigations. While state Rep. Wyman Duggan,
who sponsored the bill in the House, told
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local CBS affiliate
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that “no boards would have to be disbanded” as a result,
Tallahassee’s citizen board was shut down this month. In 2023, the
Tennessee Legislature passed
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law abolishing civilian oversight boards
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just five years after Nashville and Memphis developed them.

Some progressive organizations, ones focused on police reform, have
expressed their own critical opinions of civilian oversight agencies.
Back in 2020
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when Raleigh first approved a citizen review board, Blagrove called
them “facades for accountability.” That same year, Greear Webb,
who was a member of that board, said that the board “looks like a
publicity stunt.” Four years later, Blagrove stands by her belief
that these boards are often toothless. However, she’s also unwilling
to write off civilian oversight, especially if these boards are given
both independence and authority.

“What I’m finding is that in order to create accountability, there
has to be an external source that is doing independent investigations
of complaints from the community,” she says.

[Zina Hutton] [[link removed]]

Zina Hutton is a staff writer for Governing. She has been a freelance
culture writer, researcher and copywriter since 2015. In 2021, she
started writing for Teen Vogue. Now, at Governing, Zina focuses on
state and local finance, workforce, education and management and
administration news.

* police brutality
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* police reform
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