[Peace-discuss] Ricky Baldwin's article in Z Magazine

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October 2005 Volume 18 Number 10

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Oversight

Who’s Policing The Police?

By Ricky Baldwin

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Gregory Brown was alone in his house in Urbana
Illinois one evening in 2002 when he noticed a sudden
flurry of police activity outside. He went out with
his camcorder and proceeded to record the police
actions from his porch. Officers promptly yelled at
Brown to stop, at which point he ran back inside his
house. The police gave chase, broke down his door, and
hauled Brown away in handcuffs. Later they obtained a
warrant, confiscated the videotape, and released
Brown.  

Urbana does not seem to have a bigger problem with
police misconduct than other cities. There are reports
of other cases similar to Brown’s, however, with at
least one violent arrest in 2000, in which police
broke a man’s neck by putting a knee in his back and
pulling back on his head, resulting in the city paying
$373,000. Now Urbana is considering an option that
growing numbers of cities, large and small, are
trying: an independent civilian police review board.
In preparation for legislating such a board, a handful
of Urbana residents, including the recently elected
mayor, are planning to attend the 2005 conference of
the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law
Enforcement (NACOLE) in Miami this October 23-26.  

The Need For Oversight  

Several high-profile cases of abuse of unarmed
civilians in the 1990s—among them Rodney King’s
videotaped beating by a group of Los Angeles police
officers, the shooting of black and Latino basketball
players by New Jersey state troopers, and Amadou
Diallo’s fatal shooting by New York City police
officers—drew the national spotlight. But these
incidents were just the tip of the iceberg, even
before the post-9/11 attacks on civil rights, as
advocates of civilian oversight have known for some
time.  

A recent Amnesty International report documents
widespread human rights violations by police across
the U.S. The report details:  

several instances of unarmed civilians shot to death
reaching for a wallet or cell phone  
two men killed by multiple gunshots in the back during
drug raids in which no drugs were found  
police dogs ordered to maul people who were
unconscious or otherwise non-threatening   
several instances of people dying of “positional
asphyxia” after police “hogtied” them, knelt on them,
or forced their faces into the ground, sometimes also
using pepper spray or electro-shock 
on them  
an unarmed “squeegee man” shot in the chest by an
off-duty police officer after the man attempted to
wash the officer’s car windshield  
All of the instances listed above occurred in a
one-year period. In most of these cases, officers
involved received minor discipline or none at all.  

Abuse by law enforcement officers in the U.S. is,
according to the international human rights monitor
Human Rights Watch, “one of the most serious and
divisive human rights violations in the country.” The
group says abuse is persistent and nationwide,
existing in both rural and urban communities, and is
committed by all levels of law enforcement.  

“Police have engaged in unjustified shootings, severe
beatings, fatal chokings, and unnecessarily rough
treatment,” says a 1998 Human Rights Watch report.
While “the proportion of repeatedly abusive officers
on any force is generally small,” responsible
authorities “often fail to act decisively to restrain
or penalize such acts.”  


Part of this problem, say observers, is a result of
“modernization” of police methods far outstripping
police accountability. Police departments these days
operate with increased budgets, more advanced weapons,
and the same old responses to officer misconduct—or
lack thereof.  

But the movement for civilian oversight continues to
grow. Once “dismissed as radical and dangerous by
virtually everyone outside the civil rights and civil
liberties communities,” says professor Samuel Walker
of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the idea has
taken off in recent years.  

A Growing Movement  

Often it takes a particularly shocking incident to
mobilize a community to demand oversight, but not
always. Advocates of civilian oversight say it’s a
good idea for any community to have an objective means
of keeping a watch on law enforcement. “This is basic
democratic stuff, Civics 101,” says Sue Quinn, past
president of NACOLE.  

The first civilian oversight board in the U.S. dates
back to 1969 in Kansas City, but the first oversight
board to have “full independent authority to
investigate complaints” was probably the Berkeley,
California Civilian Police Review Board in 1973. By
1975 there were at least seven civilian boards in the
U.S. officially overseeing police departments in
various ways. One by one cities around the country
began experimenting, forming new boards for review or
oversight at the rate of about one new board every
nine to ten months right through the mid-1980s. The
movement suddenly mushroomed just a couple of years
before the Rodney King incident in 1991.  

That ugly incident, and the outrage that accompanied
it, did not reform the police, but it gave the
civilian oversight movement a boost by dramatizing the
problem, says Walker. The rate of new oversight boards
doubled, then tripled. By 1995 there were more than 65
U.S. cities with some form of civilian oversight. By
2000 that number had topped 100.  

Resources for activists have expanded, too,
particularly with the Internet. The Police Assessment
Resource Center, NACOLE, and Walker’s
policeaccountability.org offer a wealth of practical
information. Networking, too, provides education and
guidance to activists, new and old.  

Today every English-speaking country and several
others have civilian oversight boards.  

No Easy Solution  

This is not to say that civilian oversight is an exact
science. Quinn says there are many different forms of
civilian oversight of police agencies, and no single
model that fits every community. Each model has its
strengths and weaknesses, evaluated in Quinn’s “The
Varieties of Oversight” on NACOLE’s web- site, a
clearinghouse for grassroots advocates. But, Quinn
says, there are three basic mistakes to avoid: (1)
failure to be adequately inform- ed and prepared, (2)
over-identification with the community, and (3)
over-identification with the police.  

There are other difficulties. The initial stage of
gathering information and educating the public can be
daunting, she says, and burnout is common. The process
is long and often community members become frustrated
and give up. Neutrality and independence, essential to
the effectiveness of any oversight body, are also
fragile. Cooptation by the police is not unusual.   

In addition, critics of civilian oversight have argued
that many such boards do not have sufficient powers to
conduct full, independent investigations and so are
ineffective. Opponents ranging from left political
activists to police officers have lodged this
criticism, which advocates admit applies to some, but
not all civilian oversight.  


Experts recommend two models of oversight to avoid
such tooth- lessness: (1) independent civilian review
boards (as in Minneapolis and Iowa City) with subpoena
powers; (2) the power and budget to hire an
independent investigator if necessary, and independent
auditors with similar powers (as in San Jose). The
civilian review board model has the added benefit of
involving people in the process, roughly analogous to
the jury model for criminal trials.  

Effectiveness is difficult to measure, say advocates.
But in Iowa City, for example, witnesses who are
reluctant to talk to police continue to come forward
with testimony for the city’s Police Citizens Review
Board, now in its eighth year. The number of
complaints has dropped significantly, board members
believe police behavior has improved, and the
community remains supportive.  

Advocates in other communities can still expect
opposition, says Quinn, especially from law
enforcement officials and their political supporters,
but they should not assume that all police officers
oppose them. Quinn, a retired probation officer, says
people get involved in oversight for various reasons.
Many of them are former employees of law enforcement
or probation, who see the need for oversight
firsthand. In fact, law enforcement officials who are
supportive, or at least open-minded, can be invaluable
in establishing civilian oversight.  

Still, as Walker has noted, civilian oversight is no
panacea. The arduous tasks of education and
organization—and what Quinn calls “respectful
vigilance,” modeling what communities expect from the
police—is enough to keep activists busy for years at a
time. But the problem of police misconduct is not
going away.  

Where the movement goes from here is a good question,
says Quinn, perhaps for activists at the upcoming
Miami conference.   


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Ricky Baldwin is involved in community activism on
police issues.   
  
 
 



	
		
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