Search

The imposition of appropriate sanctions for substantiated police misconduct is important, but social science offers little evidence about whether the severity of sanctions is related to the gravity of the misconduct, or disparities indicative of biased decision-making, or simply arbitrary decision-making. We examine the application of sanctions for police misconduct in one agency, analyzing sanctions imposed in 1,946 sustained personnel complaints filed against 1,026 officers between 1987 and 2001. We find that the nature of the misconduct accounts for some of the variation in sanction severity, with internal bureaucratic violations sanctioned more severely than officers’ improprieties vis-à-vis citizens. Among the latter, sanctions tend to be less severe than those prescribed by either citizens or police officers. We also find that sanction severity is affected by officers’ characteristics, but also that much of the variation in sanctions is unaccounted for, suggesting a large degree of unstructured decision-making.

People who file complaints against the police tend to experience objectively unfavorable outcomes, for most complaints are not sustained. But features of citizen oversight might be expected to enhance the procedural justice of the complaint review process and, hence, provide positive subjective experience despite the outcomes. Using data collected through interviews with complainants about their experience with complaint review in a city that provides for citizen oversight, we examine the factors associated with complainants’ subjective experiences. We find that complainants’ subjective experiences are shaped mainly by outcomes, while features of the process that might be expected to enhance its procedural fairness have little or no effect on complainants’ judgments.

The “veil-of-darkness” method is an innovative and low-cost approach that circumvents many of the benchmarking issues that arise in testing for racial profiling. Changes in natural lighting are used to establish a presumptively more race-neutral benchmark on the assumption that after dark, police suffer an impaired ability to detect motorists’ race. Applying the veil-of-darkness method to vehicle stops by the Syracuse (NY) police between 2006 and 2009 and examining differences among officers assigned to specialized traffic units and crime-suppression units, we found that African Americans were no more likely to be stopped during daylight than during darkness, indicating no racial bias.