How does police accountability function? How can the poor or disempowered be better involved in police accountability processes? What changes in public-police relations do community-policing initiatives bring about? Current models of police accountability may not meet the needs of the community. This is because systemic failures in the police force are overlooked.
This chapter, in the book ‘Poverty and The Law’, addresses the extent to which the accountability of public police to local governments and their communities has resulted in a meaningful shift of power to those groups traditionally most disadvantaged in local political processes. The focus of the paper is to assess the potential of police accountability mechanisms to assist members of the community, especially poor or disempowered, to mobilise for political action and to exercise greater control over their destiny.
The first section briefly describes the professional model of policing and the associated formal-legal approach to accountability. The second section considers the case study of Ontario, Canada, where community policing has been introduced. Finally, three different approaches to policing reform, each of which implies a different orientation to police accountability and a different approach to the design and implementation of accountability mechanisms, are outlined.
It is contended that access to structures and processes, which allow the community to influence police decision-making in a meaningful manner, is imperative. Other key findings include:
- Providing the community with access to resources to participate effectively in police decision-making processes is key
- The relationship between inequality, power, crime and social control is undervalued in current approaches to police accountability. By concentrating on individuals as the cause of police violations, wider issues relating to the relative power of police forces and the community they serve are ignored. These issues may be of more importance to disadvantaged communities than the sanctioning of individuals
- Involving the public as complainants in accountability processes has been the most popular position in including the community in police accountability processes to date. While this method is effective in bringing individual officers to account, systemic issues cannot be addressed meaningfully.
The paper argues for the need to examine accountability from a wider perspective, which adopts a more integrated approach to the control of public police, and which attempts to tie these efforts to a broader range of policing reforms at the structural, educational, professional, and police-work levels in order to increase not only accountability, but more importantly the empowerment of those communities which are currently most disadvantaged.
Current police accountability mechanisms fail to include the community in meaningful ways. Policy implications include:
- Accountability should be viewed as a continuum involving a number of different options and approaches. The continuum runs the gamut of possibilities between the two extremes of complete police autonomy and complete community control
- In addition to the public as complainant, they can act as either an advisor to the police or as a participant in the delivery of policing systems. This opens the police service up to public input
- Additionally, the public could be involved as a partner in the design and delivery of policing services. This would result in the focus of accountability shifting from the individual officer to the wider police service. This would redistribute the current power, control relationships and provide the community with a real and significant role.
