A new report about civilian oversight of law enforcement paints a conflicting picture of the situation with diametrically opposed political forces driving both focused attention on oversight work and simultaneous efforts in selected states to pull it back.

The report, commissioned by the National Association of Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement (NACOLE), is rich with new data about the prevalence of civilian oversight charters and ordinances in the two hundred largest US cities by population. It shows that various forms of civilian oversight exist in 76% of the 100 largest US cities, and 36% in the next 100 largest. 

Last week, we talked with Cameron McEllhiney, NACOLE’s executive director, about the report’s deep dive into civilian oversight data, along with the report’s exploration of the field’s impediments to providing the oversight that civilian oversight initiatives seek. 

As she told us, assembling comprehensive data has been difficult in the past, “as civilian oversight has been implemented in a very decentralized manner and we’ve had a hard time collecting standardized information.”

The report compares the oversight powers that are most common in the 200 largest cities. 

Some highlights: 

• Close to 97% of the 100 largest city ordinances and 86% of the 100 next largest provide the ability to review internal law enforcement investigations.

• 65% of the largest cities have statutes that enable “independent investigations of complaints against police” while in the next largest, 31% have investigation authority.

• Among the largest cities, about 59% provide the authority for auditing or monitoring police operations, often with the intent of analyzing policy and patterns of practice. For the next set of cities, auditing or monitoring authority is provided in 31% of ordinances.

• A very small percentage of ordinances – 1% in the largest cities and about 3.5% in the next largest – only given civilian oversight an advisory role.

The report also digs deeper into other issues in just the 100 largest cities. For example, it finds that independence from police bodies is the norm, but with differences in how appointments to boards were made, who is to be included on boards and whether there are mentions of budgetary or staffing resources (For example, 48% of charters and statutes make any mention of funding and that’s generally linked to nominal compensation for board members. 

Another issue is access to information, with most large city ordinances (68%) requiring “unfettered access to law enforcement data and records and 70% requiring access to internal law enforcement investigations staff or administrators. 

But the data only tells what’s required. It doesn’t reveal how the requirements play out. 

In fact, the opposing messages of the report show both the power of data and its limitations in telling a full story. In one of its opening sections, the report lays out the 13 principles that NACOLE has traditionally spelled out as crucial for civilian oversight success – principles that often overlap with the topics explored in the data.

But for each principle there is commentary collected from a wide variety of interviewees about what doesn’t work in practice. For example, report says “from the perspective of oversight practitioners, the level of cooperation between law enforcement agencies and oversight agencies varies widely, ranging from strong collaboration to almost complete obstruction.

The heightened threat to the ability of civilian oversight bodies to function also has increasingly come from state preemption of local action. In an October Route Fifty column about civilian oversight – researched prior to the report’s release – we highlighted some of the state legislation that cancels out the authorities granted by cities. The most extreme example came from Florida, where new legislation this year effectively ended the existence of about 25 long-standing Florida oversight organizations.

Along with its description of what happened in Florida, the new report,  “Impediments and Challenges to Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement,” also provides a section about preemptive legislation in Arizona, Tennessee, Utah, and Wisconsin. 

The author of the NACOLE and University of Colorado Denver report is Lonnie M. Schaible, Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice Research Initiative (CCJRI), UC Denver, with research assistance from Luisa Prout, Stacey Baker and Ema Tilton.

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