V ol. 11 No. 4 (April 2001) pp. 177-180.

CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT OF POLICING: GOVERNANCE, DEMOCRACY, AND HUMAN RIGHTS by Andrew Goldsmith and Colleen Lewis (Editors). Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000.331 pp. Cloth $69.00. ISBN: 1-84113-030-3.

Reviewed by William Lyons, Fulbright Scholar, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and Department of Political Science, The University of Akron.

"Most investigations into internal and external systems for handling complaints against police officers suspected of illegal use of force have produced similar findings: they do not act as a deterrent for police officers; they fail to satisfy complainants [or police officers]; they do not improve the public image of the police; and complaints data are not usually used by police management for internal purposes" (p. 129). If this is the case, is it time to abandon civilian oversight? How should we proceed in our efforts to increase police accountability and effectiveness? Is it time to reconsider long-entrenched positions regarding civilian oversight and police accountability? This volume will be a valuable tool to assist practitioners and scholars interested in innovative thinking on this and related social control issues.

This volume of articles, although inconsistent in quality, consistently highlight the complex political struggles central to understanding policing reform in general and police accountability in particular. This volume is important for two reasons. First, human rights provides a refreshing, and refreshingly candid, framework for analysis. It is refreshing because this framing provides a bridge for linking our analyses of the politics of policing reform within and without the U. S., even as the one article focusing on the U. S. chooses to ignore this potentially important analytical connection and targets putative excessive democratization as the key obstacle to effective civilian review in the United States. It is refreshingly candid because no players, including the human rights community, are insulated from the constructive critiques offered here.

The second important contribution of this volume is linked to the human rights focus; this volume is a much-needed international and comparative discussion of civilian oversight. The volume contains 12 articles, including 9 separate case studies of a non-U. S. efforts to implement civilian oversight, a chapter on Washington D.C., a macro-analytical review of a wide range of cases that focuses on the tendency of civilian oversight to emerge out of a bargaining process with the police and elected officials as the primary parties to the negotiations, and a disappointing description of the inadequate efforts to date to evaluate external oversight.

The opening article identifies a common theme in this volume: we will only know whether civilian oversight is a good idea when we are able to first make sense of the multiple, locally diverse, and internationally homologous political forces that construct civilian oversight bodies in ways that further insulate police misconduct. "[T]here is a wide gap between civilian oversight the principle, and civilian

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oversight the practice. Factors that determine the breadth and depth of the gap are not confined to internal matters under the control of the oversight body. Many are external and can be linked to the vested interests of police, the special relationship between police and governments and the tensions which sometimes arise between independent oversight bodies and governments" (p. 20).

The "disproportionate and negative influence" (p. 20) that the police have over the powers and composition of civilian oversight bodies and the failure of elected officials to actively embrace their leadership responsibilities were consistently identified as major obstacles to police accountability, democratic political culture, and the rule of law. There is some agreement that civilian oversight bodies, and the blue ribbon commissions that often precede them, often serve a simply symbolic function, but that even this function was often constructed more to insulate elected official from both police resistance and citizen complaints than to responds to public safety and accountability demands (p. 23).

In Ontario, for instance, policing reforms emerged as one part of a larger conservative "downsizing, devolution, and dismantling of most public services.. These reforms thus combined a law and order, pro-police agenda with massive restructuring and, in the case of policing the police, disturbing results.. [I]nput from community stakeholders. [was] virtually absent" (p. 70). As a consequence, it should not be surprising that civilian oversight-when it exists at all-is usually designed to fail in a way that increases the ability of the police to insulate themselves from scrutiny. The meaning of policing reforms that are designed to fail, from civilian oversight to community policing, is more likely to be found at the political level. "In the face of routine, rather shallow proselytizing about the inherent accountability of community-based policing and the 'win-win' partnerships it creates," according to the Ontario study, "other significant forms of accountability have been overshadowed. In the current political climate, government sponsored pro-police, law-and-order legislation is coupled with an increasingly militant police association.. The pre-reform era of the 1960s and 1970s foreshadows our present, if not our future and a policing culture entrenched in political, legal, and moral untouchability" (p. 77).

An analysis of civilian oversight in Albuquerque suggests that this design failure can be traced to process as well as structure. In Albuquerque civilian oversight failed, not because the body lacked the necessary powers, but because elected officials lacked the necessary "commitment to making oversight work effectively" (p. 99). This lack of what the authors call 'political will' shines a spotlight on mayors, city council members, and other public and private community leaders. "Commitment to making oversight work effectively involves several elements: a concern about police accountability, a willingness to listen to critics of the police department, a willingness to pursue corrective actions in the face of opposition from the police and their political allies" (p. 99). The political will was lacking in Albuquerque, as well as in other locations covered in this volume, and this political failure was linked to undermining the operations of oversight bodies in response to police (and sometimes citizen) pressure.

A study of civilian complaints in Israel documents the routine (and sometimes absurd) pressures that elected officials must

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be prepared to respond to from police officers and police unions. In the Israeli case, while the civilian oversight body was composed entirely of former police officers (p. 128) the analysis found that "[t]wo-thirds of police officers complained about the partiality of the investigators against them and [a] general anti-police predisposition" (p. 134). Strong police resistance, even under such favorable conditions, often leads to the exclusion of entire categories of complaints from the oversight agenda, as was found in a paper on policing in Northern Ireland. "Most commonly, only complaints of 'misconduct' against individual officers will be accepted. This leaves a whole category of 'service' or 'policy' complaints-that is, complaints about levels or quality of service generally, or about the policies of the police service-unaddressed. Yet such complaints are not uncommon, and may be regarded as no less important than complaints about misconduct by individual officers" (pp. 150, 282).

The final section of this volume-Extending Civilian Oversight-is the strongest. These pieces are the most detailed accounts of concrete political struggles, the most analytically engaging, and the most likely to yield the kind of critical insights that practitioners and scholars expect. An analysis of policing reform in Colombia identifies the importance of political will in overcoming police resistance. In a context of violence, public outrage, and the erosion of territorial sovereignty to drug cartels "the sense of institutional crisis had reached the highest levels. There was little option for the police but to engage in open self-examination and to co-operate with a government-approved external inquiry" (p. 179). However, this case also demonstrates the importance of both sustaining the political will and structuring oversight bodies with the necessary powers, since once oversight was established it was allowed to atrophy in the face of resurgent police initiative and lacked the institutional authority and support to survive in this context.

The article on South African policing reform further highlights the difficult political dilemma facing even presumably more progressive elected officials. "While public confidence in the police is low, the demands faced by politicians are for crackdowns on crime, not for the protection of suspects and respect for human rights" (p. 200). No public opinion data is provided to substantiate this claim-a claim I find hard to accept at face value, since the analysis of public opinion in other contexts has revealed a far more complex political picture than the one only suggested here. Regardless of what South African publics might have wanted, however, it remains true that one concrete consequence of this approach to public opinion was a decision by the Minister for Safety and Security to be "ruthless and aggressive" against crime, even if that meant weakening protections for human rights (p. 200).

Once one identifies elected officials without political will as a problem, inquiry then turns to understanding this widespread failure shared by leaders in developing and developed countries alike. In an analysis of policing reform in Northern Ireland the authors conclude that, "successive failures in this regard stem from a lack of political understanding and will which mirrors the wider crisis in police accountability" (p. 261). This is not surprising, since several other authors found that the motivations catalyzing reform in the first place were more about political control or electoral advantage than about public safety and accountability. It only follows that the source of political cowardice repeatedly

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documented here would also be rooted in larger, ongoing political struggles that have less to do with policing than they do with governance and legitimation.

Political will, according to this volume, is needed to "ensure that the complaints system does not stand alone" that it is "integrated into the wider oversight structure with emphasis on improving police and public understanding and perception of how increased accountability serves us all" (p. 292). In fact, the "creation of mechanisms of civilian review of police in Latin America is intimately tied to the effort to exert civilian control over security functions during transitions to democracy.. In Central America and Haiti, police reform was the axis of this larger effort to dismantle authoritarian structures and move from 'regime policing' to 'democratic policing'"(p. 225). Progress in this area, the study of Latin America concluded, "is intimately linked to genuine democracy building" (p. 228).

The counterfriction to the need for political will, and the tendency of elected officials to take advantage of this real need to construct policing in ways that favor their own partisan interests, has often been the human rights community and as such many articles in this volume examine their role in policing reform. "In this context, a principle challenge for the human rights community is to incorporate popular concerns with crime and insecurity into human rights discourse and, in turn, incorporate human rights standards into anti-crime policy" (p. 233). In Latin America, according to one author, human rights groups are now making this transition from 'denunciation to proposition'. They are maintaining their critical posture and independent information gathering practices, but they are simultaneously working with elected officials to create more effective ways to reduce citizen and official violence.

Perhaps the central political struggle, present in some form in all these cases, is made most apparent in the article on Palestinian policing reform. There it becomes clear that understanding 'political will' and using it to effectively analyze policing reform involves understanding the relevant communities officials are representing. In the Palestinian case, the authors argue that, "the number of officers recruited to the PPF [Palestinian Police Force] has only served to heighten a perception among ordinary Palestinians that a militarized police serves the executive authority of the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] not the community at large" (p. 304). And, finally, this Palestinian "army-in-waiting for a state-in-waiting" also demonstrates the importance of analyzing local, national, and international communities of interest to fully understand and direct policing reform. "The Donor Community and those involved in bilateral assistance, therefore, have created a political paradox. While their politicians and foreign policy- makers speak of assisting the Palestinian experiment to the creation of a stable liberal democratic society, large parts of their budgets are directed towards wittingly or unwittingly creating an authoritarian system of rule at the heart of which lies a police force which acts with considerable impunity, has a poor human rights record, and increasingly militarized against its own will" (p. 316). I recommend this volume.


Copyright 2001 by the author, William Lyons