Civil Lawsuits, Citizen Complaints, and Policing Innovations

📖 The Scoop

This book argues that organizational innovation exposes the police to unanticipated consequences in the forms of litigation and complaints. The introductory chapter lays a conceptual foundation by discussing the importance of examining lawsuits and citizen complaints vis-a-vis police misconduct, and it highlights what is known about the incidence of police-directed grievances (PDGs), the avenues for filing PDGs, and processes for filing PDGs. The second chapter reviews the policing-innovation research found in the Public Administration literature, followed by a review of the literature about the risks associated with administrative reform. The chapter concludes with the selection of the following controversial policing innovations for further analysis: community-oriented policing, civil asset forfeiture, police paramilitary units, and complaint-review procedures. In focusing on these four policing innovations, chapter three examines their etiology, current status, and the reasons they could be associated with the incidence of PDGs. The fourth chapter outlines several hypotheses designed to test the proposition that law enforcement innovations are associated with lawsuits and complaints against the police. This is followed by a chapter that describes the methodology used to investigate the relationships between law enforcement innovations and PDGs. It involved cross-sectional research that used a survey instrument and other data sources to measure the variables of interest associated with a sample of law enforcement agencies. The broad conclusion drawn from the research is that most of the selected innovations appear to be associated with increases in the incidence of lawsuits and complaints against the police. Additionally, most of innovation/PDG activity was concentrated at the complaint level; however, nothing found in the research suggests that innovations such as community-oriented policing lead directly to more lawsuits against police. Still the more innovations reported in certain police jurisdictions, the more lawsuits were found in those areas. Policy implications of these findings are discussed, and directions are offered for future research.

Genre: Political Science / Law Enforcement (fancy, right?)