Law Commons^™

The Unfulfilled Promise Of Citizen Review, Debra A. Livingston

Faculty Scholarship

Once controversial, the idea that citizens should participate in the administrative review of complaints about police conduct is today widely accepted. Citizen review processes of one type or another can be found in about eighty percent of our largest cities. There are approximately 100 separate oversight agencies in this country and that number has been growing steadily for some time. Even as citizen review has become an accepted feature of the landscape in American policing, however, questions have been raised about just what citizen participation in complaint review is likely to achieve in terms of improving police and the relations …