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Police Accountability

Police Accountability essay - received 2:1 and includes key theorists....
Module

Crime and Criminal Justice: Historical Perspective (CRIM2002)

45 Documents
Students shared 45 documents in this course
Academic year: 2020/2021
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University of Southampton

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Police accountability is a hotly contested topic with there being four main thoughts of organisation: top-down and bottom-up, state and non-state external scrutiny. For the purpose of this essay, I will be focusing on the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of police accountability. It is important to hold police to account because it maintains public trust in the criminal justice system, which can easily be destroyed by the unjustifiable use of coercive force or police brutality. Cases like those of George Floyd (killed May 25th, 2020 by Officer Derek Chauvin), Breonna Taylor (killed March 13th, 2020 after being shot 6 times in her sleep by 3 officers) and Stephen Lawrence (April 22nd, 1993) exemplify said police brutality, damaging the reputation of officers in the public eye. Even minor infractions that disregard the rule of law (Newburn and Reiner, 2012) have led to outrage and distrust in the police force. I will assess if police are more accountable now than they have ever been, relating back to top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of police accountability.

Body cameras used by officers are a key bottom-up mechanism of police accountability. They are worn in multiple instances, and have a primary function of providing evidence for criminal sentencing, and can also be used by members of the public as evidence. As a result, body worn video (BVV) can provide evidence against the police in court to demonstrate potential instances of police malpractice. However, there are not many instances where BVV has been used for this; there are gaps in retaining evidence for civil cases against departments or officers, and policies concerning retaining footage are only strong for criminal prosecution. In 59 major US city police departments, only 2% retained data indefinitely and 3% retained data for 1 to 3 years after case conclusion (Fan, 2018). It isn’t clear who classifies footage as ‘evidentiary’ or ‘non-evidentiary’, but ‘non-evidentiary’ footage is stored for a very short time before deletion, limiting the use of footage for officer monitoring and evaluation. I have placed BVV as bottom-up as the top-down nature of it was quickly flipped, as a form of resistance emerged where people were recording the police (“Sousveillance” – Mann, 2013) in response to hold them accountable. Fan (2018), adds with the term “toutveillance”, as this more appropriately describes the multidirectional nature of recording between the officers and the people. This helpfully does increase police accountability, and could suggest are held accountable more than ever before. However, I believe that this is as a result of the people recording and CCTV footage out of police control, and not BVV. This rapid gathering of bodycam data has implications, though; including

privacy issues for both police and citizens, storage costs, data security, and the risk of targeting officers for minor offences. Critics suggest that such a strong focus on BVV recordings and their evidentiary value is a form of “transactional myopia”. First used by Crespo (2016), this means looking only at the case presented, and not at the broader issue it alludes to at a systemic level. This does increase individual police accountability, but does not contribute to ending the systemic inequality presented. This can be demonstrated by the fact that Taser’s evidence (cloud storage market for police BVV) has accumulated over one petabyte (one million gigabytes) of data. This is the equivalent of 500 billion pages of printed text.

To add some context to the bottom-up mechanisms of police accountability, we encounter what the executive director of national organisation representing rank-and-file officers called a “watershed moment in policing”: the tragic shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown, by a Missouri officer in 2014. Brown’s distraught mother urged police to wear bodycams to avoid the factual disagreements that she dealt with regarding his death. However, police officers are within their rights to stop and start recording at their discretion – which heavily limits the ability to use footage to hold them to account. We can take this to a more current context and observe the death of Breonna Taylor – a 26-year-old woman who was fatally shot dead after officers gained access to her home on a “no-knock” warrant. She had no criminal history. One of the 3 officers involved in the shooting was charged, and Sergeant Mattingly is suing Taylor’s boyfriend Kenneth Walker for alleged assault and emotional distress after being shot in the leg, as Walker thought the officers were robbers.

This did have some top-down impact. After Taylor’s death in March 2020, the Police Accountability Act was established 3 months later. This bill established a new criminal offence for law enforcement officers in the line of duty that constitutes manslaughter or murder. Conversely, the various mechanisms of top-down police accountability function completely differently. They are based around a hierarchical rank structure with aims to discipline those lower in the hierarchy. A key moment for this approach is the establishment of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) in 1984. This created a detailed baseline for officers to follow – although it revoked some of their discretion (as there is now a more code to adhere to), it made it much easier to be sure whether an officer has violated this code, revoking subjectivity. It’s supposedly enforced by Professional Standards Departments, and a

accountability more in that region. These commissioners do not publish all of the information that the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (2011) requires, which limits the capacity to hold them to account – the maximum compliance rate found was 75%.

With recent departmental changes and the establishment of aforementioned legal acts, I believe that police are held more accountable now than ever before. Although we observe that bottom-up mechanisms can be overruled by police discretion (police switching off bodycams at will), they become more effective with the increase of social media presence and public engagement of the forces, allowing people to share their own footage of police misconduct for everyone to see. Top-down mechanisms have seen more success - with the introduction of commissioners and new acts, it is now easier to verify when an officer has violated a code. Although the steps being taken in the right direction are small, I do believe that police are more accountable now than ever before and that we will be able to move to a society free of police brutality and inequality in the future.

Word Count: 1468

References:

 Addidle, Gareth. "Holding police accountable." (2014): 382-384.  Ariel, B, Sutherland, A, Henstock, D, Young, j, Drover, P, Sykes J, Megicks, S and Henderson, R (2017) ‘A global multisite randomized controlled trial on the effect of police body-worn cameras on citizens’ complaints against the police’ Criminal Justice and Behavior , 44(2), 293-316.  Fan, Mary D. "Body cameras, big data, and police accountability." Law & social inquiry 43, no. 4 (2018): 1236-1256.  Hough, M., May, T., Hales, G. and Belur, J., 2018. Misconduct by police leaders in England and Wales: an exploratory study. Policing and society , 28 (5), pp-552.  Jones, T, Newburn, T and Smith, D. (2012) ‘Democracy and Police and Crime Commissioners’ in T. Newburn and Peay, J (eds) Policing, Politics, Culture and Control , Hart Publishing, Oxford, 219-  Miah, M., 2020. Outrage in Louisville-Cops' justified'for murdering Breonna Taylor. Green Left Weekly , (1282), p.

 Murphy, P, Eckersley, P, and Ferry L. (2017) ‘Accountability and transparency: police forces in England and Wales’ Public Policy and Administration , 32(3), 197-213.  Murphy, P., Eckersley, P. and Ferry, L., 2017. Accountability and transparency: Police forces in England and Wales. Public policy and administration , 32 (3), pp-213.  Rowe, M., and Lister, S. (Eds.) (2015). Accountability of Policing. Routledge.  Savage, S (2013) 'Thinking Independence: Calling the Police to Account through the Independent Investigation of Police Complaints', British Journal of Criminology Vol 53 (1) 94-  Savage, S., 2013. Thinking independence: Calling the police to account through the independent investigation of police complaints. British Journal of Criminology , 53 (1), pp-112.  Scheindlin, S. and Manning, P., 2015. Will the widespread use of police body cameras improve police accountability?. Americas Quarterly , 9 (2), p.

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Police Accountability

Module: Crime and Criminal Justice: Historical Perspective (CRIM2002)

45 Documents
Students shared 45 documents in this course

University: University of Southampton

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Police accountability is a hotly contested topic with there being four main thoughts of
organisation: top-down and bottom-up, state and non-state external scrutiny. For the
purpose of this essay, I will be focusing on the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of
police accountability. It is important to hold police to account because it maintains public
trust in the criminal justice system, which can easily be destroyed by the unjustifiable use of
coercive force or police brutality. Cases like those of George Floyd (killed May 25th, 2020 by
Officer Derek Chauvin), Breonna Taylor (killed March 13th, 2020 after being shot 6 times in
her sleep by 3 officers) and Stephen Lawrence (April 22nd, 1993) exemplify said police
brutality, damaging the reputation of officers in the public eye. Even minor infractions that
disregard the rule of law (Newburn and Reiner, 2012) have led to outrage and distrust in the
police force. I will assess if police are more accountable now than they have ever been,
relating back to top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of police accountability.
Body cameras used by officers are a key bottom-up mechanism of police accountability. They
are worn in multiple instances, and have a primary function of providing evidence for
criminal sentencing, and can also be used by members of the public as evidence. As a result,
body worn video (BVV) can provide evidence against the police in court to demonstrate
potential instances of police malpractice. However, there are not many instances where BVV
has been used for this; there are gaps in retaining evidence for civil cases against
departments or officers, and policies concerning retaining footage are only strong for
criminal prosecution. In 59 major US city police departments, only 2% retained data
indefinitely and 3% retained data for 1 to 3 years after case conclusion (Fan, 2018). It isn’t
clear who classifies footage as ‘evidentiary’ or ‘non-evidentiary’, but ‘non-evidentiary’
footage is stored for a very short time before deletion, limiting the use of footage for officer
monitoring and evaluation. I have placed BVV as bottom-up as the top-down nature of it was
quickly flipped, as a form of resistance emerged where people were recording the police
(“Sousveillance” – Mann, 2013) in response to hold them accountable. Fan (2018), adds with
the term “toutveillance”, as this more appropriately describes the multidirectional nature of
recording between the officers and the people. This helpfully does increase police
accountability, and could suggest are held accountable more than ever before. However, I
believe that this is as a result of the people recording and CCTV footage out of police control,
and not BVV. This rapid gathering of bodycam data has implications, though; including
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