The Effect of Civilian Oversight on Police Organizational Performance: A Quasi-Experimental Study

AuthorJisang Kim
DOI10.1177/02750740221098344
Published date01 July 2022
Date01 July 2022
Subject MatterArticles
The Effect of Civilian Oversight on Police
Organizational Performance: A Quasi-
Experimental Study
Jisang Kim
1
Abstract
Although civilian oversight has been introduced to make the police accountable to citizens and perform better, its effective-
ness has not been thoroughly investigated yet. To better understand civilian oversight of the police, this study explores its
theoretical basis as an accountability mechanism and suggests how it holds police agencies accountable even without direct
disciplinary authority. The data from Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the
Uniform Crime Report (UCR) program, and the Fatal Encounters (FE) database are analyzed to estimate the effect of civilian
oversight on police organizational performance, using a propensity score matching analysis. Among the dependent variables
included in the analysis as performance indicators, civilian oversight turns out to have a signif‌icant inf‌luence only on police
agenciesclearance rates. The police agencies with civilian oversight have lower clearance rates by 2.71 percentage points
on average compared to those without civilian oversight. The implications of civilian oversights negative impact on police
organizational performance are further discussed.
Keywords
civilian oversight, accountability, performance, administrative procedures, citizen participation, propensity score matching
Introduction
Accountability initiatives accompanying citizen involvement
can be commonly found among modern democratic govern-
ments (Ferdik et al., 2013; Prenzler, 2011). Especially in the
policing context, civilian oversight has been introduced to
make the police accountable to citizens and perform their
functions better (Clarke, 2009; Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). To
fulf‌ill such goals, civilian oversight generally has focused
on establishing the procedure that enables citizens to
provide public input regarding police operations (De
Angelis et al., 2016; Ferdik et al., 2013; Walker, 2001).
Often, civilian oversight has been regarded as a solution
for the long-standing issues of police misconduct, and it
even has become recognized as an essential component of
police reform necessary for recovering the publics trust in
the U.S. policing system in more recent years (Presidents
Task Force on 21st Century Policing, 2020). Nevertheless,
civilian oversight has constantly faced challenges even with
all its promises (De Angelis et al., 2016; Wilson &
Buckler, 2010). Civilian oversights capability in dealing
with police misconduct has been doubted because of the
lack of civiliansexperience and expertise in police work
(Kerstetter, 1985). Similarly, civilian oversight initiatives in
the United States have confronted severe resistance by off‌i-
cers and police unions questioning the validity and eff‌icacy
of civilian oversight in holding the police accountable for
the work they perform (Kerstetter, 1985; Skolnick & Fyfe,
1993; Walker, 2006). Yet, the questions remain largely unan-
swered if civilian oversight with no direct authority to oblige
police agencies can indeed hold the police accountable to the
community they serve and whether civilian oversight can
make an actual difference in police organizational perfor-
mance. Especially with the ongoing Black Lives Matter
movement inf‌licted by police misconduct and the record-low
public conf‌idence in the police, the current study sheds light
on such a timely topic of police accountability and civilian
oversight in an attempt to answer the questions above.
Admittedly, there has been comparably little systematic
research on the effectiveness of civilian oversight in improv-
ing police performance to be more desirable to citizens (De
Angelis et al., 2016). Except for the recent research investi-
gating the relationship between accountability and police per-
formance (e.g., Ali & Nicholson-Crotty, 2021; Ali & Pirog,
2019), the existing research tends to provide sporadic
1
University at Albany SUNY, Albany, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jisang Kim, University at Albany SUNY, 135 Western Ave, Albany, NY
12203, USA.
Email: jkim44@albany.edu
Article
American Review of Public Administration
2022, Vol. 52(5) 382397
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02750740221098344
journals.sagepub.com/home/arp
evidence not suff‌iciently supporting the arguments of either
proponents or opponents of civilian oversight. The previous
literature (e.g., De Angelis, 2009; Kerstetter & Rasinski,
1994; Wells & Schafer, 2007; Worrall, 2002) has shown
how civilian oversight inf‌luences the perception of individual
citizens or police off‌icers either positively or negatively.
Nevertheless, they have not explicitly investigated how
their f‌indings are related to the broad range of other critical
aspects of police organizational performance. More recent
studies have come to focus on public and police off‌icer
safety(Ali & Nicholson-Crotty, 2021) and racial disparity
(Ali & Pirog, 2019) in police misconduct. Still, there remains
a gap to f‌ill in our understanding of civilian oversight as an
accountability mechanism and how it functions to induce
changes in police agencies.
Thus, the current study examines the quantitative impact
of civilian oversight on police organizational performance
by looking into police agenciesnumber of arrests, crime
reduction, clearance rates, use of deadly force, and homicide
of police off‌icers. More specif‌ically, it attempts to address the
following questions: Is civilian oversight effectively func-
tioning in the policing context?and Does civilian oversight
make a difference in police agencies to yield better organiza-
tional performance as theorized?A quasi-experimental
method is employed for causal inference to answer these
questions. Based on Bovens (2007, 2010), this article f‌irst
theorizes how civilian oversight renders administrative
accountability relationship with the police. Then it hypothe-
sizes that civilian oversight inf‌luences police agencies to
perform better in a way more desirable to the community
they serve. For the analysis, the data retrieved from the
Law Enforcement Management and Administrative
Statistics (LEMAS) survey, the Uniform Crime Report
(UCR) program, and the Fatal Encounters (FE) database
are examined using propensity score matching.
This research has both theoretical and practical merit.
How civilian oversight operates as an accountability mecha-
nism within the organizational context can be diff‌icult to
observe from outside. Nevertheless, by focusing on the
changes in organizational performance indicators, we
would be able to see if the police change how they perform
law enforcement functions in response to civilian oversight
and understand if civilian oversight has a positive impact
on police organizational performance as it is theorized
without any other undesirable consequences. Furthermore,
the empirical evidence of this study would show whether
civilian oversight of the police is effective or not and
provide a link to bridge the f‌indings of accountability
studies and management studies in public administration.
Lastly, understanding the causal impact of civilian oversight
of the police will also help us design better accountability
systems to improve police organizational performance in
alignment with citizensinterests.
In the following sections, this study reviews previous lit-
erature on civilian oversight and accountability and proposes
a theoretical framework to examine the effect of civilian
oversight on police organizational performance and the
hypotheses based on its theoretical propositions. More
details on the propensity score matching method utilized in
the analysis and its merits in this research are presented.
After reporting the result of the analysis, the f‌indings of
this research and the implications are discussed.
Civilian Oversight and Police Accountability
Civilian oversight is frequently referred to as terms such as
citizen oversight,”“citizen review,or external review
(Alpert et al., 2016; Ferdik et al., 2013; Walker, 2001).
Regardless of the terminology applied, civilian oversight
can generally be def‌ined as a mechanism of facilitating civil-
iansinvolvement in holding the police accountable to the cit-
izens they serve (De Angelis et al., 2016; Ferdik et al., 2013;
Walker, 2001).
Typically, civilian oversight has been understood to focus
on the citizen complaint process,providing feedback to law
enforcement agencies based on the complaints f‌iled by citi-
zens (De Angelis et al., 2016). However, civilian oversight
agencies in the United States are now known to play a
much broader range of roles in practice. Some civilian over-
sight agencies may still play their traditional role of review-
ing or monitoring compliant investigations of the police
internal affairs, but others have started to conduct investiga-
tions of complaints or allegations of misconduct independent
from the police (De Angelis et al., 2016; Finn, 2001; Walker,
2001). Furthermore, some oversight agencies are even autho-
rized to play more active roles, such as reviewing and assess-
ing a police departments policies, supervision, and
management practicesor even training, hiring and recruit-
ment standards(De Angelis et al., 2016).
1
Although oversight agenciesauthority and practice in
overseeing police agencies vary considerably, independence
from the police organization remains a signif‌icant feature
common across oversight agencies. By def‌inition, civilian
oversight should remain external to police organizations as
it is supposed to ensure nonpolice civilian actors provide
public input to the police. However, as much as civilian over-
sight remains outside the chain of command of police organi-
zations, oversight agencies generally do not have the legal
authority to direct police agencies (Bovens, 2007, 2010;
Walker, 2001). The inputs of civilian oversight agencies to
the police are mostly taken as recommendations, not neces-
sarily leading to further disciplinary actions in many cases.
Civilian Oversight as an Accountability Mechanism
Bovens (2010) has specif‌ied the accountability concept and
suggested that accountability as a virtueand accountabil-
ity as a mechanismshould be distinguished. While account-
ability as a virtue is a normative concept which entails a
broad set of desirable qualities of public off‌icials or
Kim 383

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