Fanny Lau, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2021 and Luis Meléndez, Law & Public Policy Scholar, JD Anticipated May 2020
“All my life I’ve been bubbly and the life of the party,” Taraji P. Henson said in an interview with Self Magazine. “Things started to shift for me when Trayvon Martin—when that happened . . . [t]hat’s when I noticed anxiety started kicking in[.]” Fearing that even her fame could not protect her son, who was close in age to Martin, Henson added: “They’re not going to [recognize] Taraji’s son out here on these streets[.] It’s me that is the star. He’s not.”
Taraji is not alone.
Reports have shown that the police killings of unarmed black men damage the mental well-being of members of the black community as a whole. With hard statistics proving that police shoot black people at around twice the rate as the general population, this fear is firmly grounded in reality. 81% of people shot by police officers in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2013 were African American, despite black people accounting for just more than 40% of the city’s population.
Police misconduct, also referred to as police corruption, refers to inappropriate or illegal action taken by police officers. Examples of police misconduct include excessive use of force, selectively enforcing laws, arresting individuals based on discrimination, and physically or verbally harassing individuals. Generally, studies have shown that police are more likely to use deadly force in the poorest neighborhoods and neighborhoods with the greatest number of non-white residents. However, police officers are rarely held accountable for their misconduct.
Police Accountability in Philadelphia
In the 1960s and 1970s, concerns around police accountability spurred systematic reform efforts across the United States. A new “professional” model ultimately changed policing in fundamental ways, but emerging legality issues—racial policing, wrongful convictions, and police brutality—proved that accountability was still a work in progress.
Generally, a police officer who is held “accountable” is asked to “account” for their actions to determine whether they fit with police department rules—rules also written in compliance with the law. Though “police accountability” and “police oversight” are often used interchangeably, accountability is broader than oversight. The concept of police accountability encompasses not only the individual errant police officer, but the ethos of the entire police organization. By examining accountability primarily through the lens of organizational theory, the first wave of researchers in police accountability focused on factors internal to police organizations or certain individuals to explain issues like excessive use of force. However, the social and political environment outside the police department also actively deterred the implementation of important policy and procedural mechanisms. In Philadelphia, both internal and external mechanisms of accountability fall short of ensuring full accountability of the Philadelphia Police Department.
The Philadelphia Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD) is the entity responsible for all complaints made against all Department’s police officers. As the name suggests, the IAD is part of the Philadelphia Police Department. In most cities, police departments are primarily responsible for holding police officers accountable. Herman Goldstein argues that “the nature of the police function is such that primary dependence for the control of police conduct must continue to be placed upon internal systems of control.” However, investigations of alleged misconduct by internal affairs units can be plagued by obstacles in holding officers accountable. As Attorney David Rudovsky of the civil rights firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin LLP puts it, “[i]t’s police officers investigating other police officers.”
The Philadelphia Police Advisory Commission (PAC) is the official civilian oversight agency of the Philadelphia Police Department. Its mission “is to serve the community by helping to improve the relationship between the Police and community.” In practice, the PAC mostly works on police recommendations and rarely conducts investigations. The Police Department is heavily involved in forming the recommendations that are submitted by the PAC to the Police Department, making the PAC far from independent. This lack of independence, coupled with the PAC’s lack of power to investigate individual instances of police misconduct or to discipline police officers, have led many to believe that the PAC should do more than it currently does.
Reforming for Greater Independence
Across the United States, there are nearly 150 civilian oversight boards associated with large municipal police agencies. Although these institutions may differ in size and responsibilities, they exist in three primary forms: investigator-focused models, review-focused models, and auditing models. Many oversight boards in cities are a combination of two or more models, like the Office of the Police Monitor in Austin, TX, which is a combination of the review-focused and auditing models. There is no perfect model to ensuring police accountability; each has its advantages and drawbacks. The key to any effective civilian oversight board, however, is independence from police departments.
Citizens have long played an important role in campaigning for increased independence of oversight boards. In the early 1990s, the New York Civil Liberties Union organized “A Campaign for a Real Civilian Complaint Review Board” in partnership with a coalition of civil rights organizations. The campaign called for the establishment of a new, all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) that was completely independent of the police department. After garnering broad support among the city’s community boards, the NYCLU developed legislation for submission to City Council, where the bill was officially adopted. In a recent report on police misconduct in Chicago, the U.S. Department of Justice found widespread neglect of legally obligated investigations and inadequate officer discipline. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) was formed in 2016 to operate independently of both the Chicago Police Department and the Mayor’s Office. The institutional overhaul and ensuing increase in funding was crucial to building more trust between the community and police department in Chicago.
Ultimately, police accountability in the United States relies on a larger structure of internal and external mechanisms of accountability. Just as there is no perfect oversight board model, there is no single combination of mechanisms that guarantees full accountability. The Police Advisory Commission, however, must be independent of the Philadelphia Police Department, if not also the Office of the Mayor, to effectively fulfill its mission. Civilian review boards rest on the assumption that police subculture prevents police officers from objectively investigating complaints against fellow officers. Without optimizing the objectivity and independence of the PAC, there is little hope of enhancing public safety and increasing public trust in police, especially among marginalized communities in Philadelphia.