ZZ PAPER WD (NIGHT BEFORE SESSION) 1123 Perceptions of Justice and Police Accountability: Measuring Satisfaction and Deterrence Benefits of Mediating Police Complaints.

Mediation has been used to address a range of social and interpersonal conflicts, but it is currently underutilized in the handling of citizen complaints of policing. The literature recognizes that oversight systems should contain a mixture of adversarial and non‐adversarial procedures as well as a variety of dispositional outcomes but the institutional reality is quite different. The fact is that the criminal trial model with its punitive, disciplinary approach dominates the citizen review landscape. The model is often perceived as costly, unsatisfactory to the parties, and ineffective. The literature also shows that empirical tests of the effectiveness of mediation have been very limited and that this is one of the obstacles for the growth of mediation programs. This paper addresses these two key topics and presents the results of recent quantitative studies on the effectiveness of mediation. These studies show that mediation has effective deterrence benefits and provides greater satisfaction to the parties in conflict, both with the handling process and the final resolution of the complaint. I argue that the underutilization of mediation in the civilian oversight context is the result of insufficient empirical research, deficient program evaluation and, more importantly, a profound misunderstanding about the goals, interests, and sense of justice of both civilians and officers. A more careful reading of the research currently available or in‐progress and proper analysis of programs will show that the ultimate goals of deterring police misconduct and building public trust on police work could be better attained through the implementation of innovative alternative dispute resolution approaches. The quantitative part of the study uses survey analysis as well as survival and probability hazards analyses to measure the estimated impact of participating in the mediation process in an officer's complaint history. Findings show that the likelihood of complaint re‐incidence is greater among officers who rejected to participate in mediation than among officers who participated in the mediation process. It also shows that, although recidivist patterns are similar among those officers who receive a new complaint, there is a significant difference among minority and white officers who accepted mediation. The results suggest that the implementation of mediation programs produce more significant changes in the behavior of individual officers than disciplinary proceedings. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]