CITIZEN COMPLAINTS IN THE NEW POLICE ORDER

A dynamic tension exists in the role of government in a society that aspires to be democratic. On one hand, government is created to provide citizens with safety, security, and service, while on the other it serves as an instrument that organizes many aspects of social life bringing a sense of order, stability, and conformity to social interactions. The tension between service and control has been dramatized in the writing of political philosophers. Political philosophers expressed this tension in terms of a “social contract,” attempting to present the proper balance between government as “service provider” and as “citizen controller.” By entering into the social contract, citizens are thought to surrender certain natural rights and vest government with the power to maintain social stability and to ensure citizen interests. In exchange for relinquishing the right to use physical force, for instance, citizens expect government to provide effective systems for regulating conduct and forums for resolving social conflict.

The police institution is the most visible of the government’s formal social control creations. The tension between the dual roles of government is no better portrayed than in the actions of social control agents, who continually struggle with the conflict that arises when balancing their governmental role as service provider and citizen controller. Historically, police have provided little in terms of social service and much in state-sanctioned social control. Yet, if the contemporary rhetoric of leading police administrators, the printed words of scholars, and the remarks of politicians are to be believed, the role police play in society is changing. Spokespersons from both policing and academe are addressing citizens and their colleagues on an emerging philosophy of policing. This new philosophy and its operationali-zation are usually spoken of as “community” and “problem-solving” policing. While these role strategies differ in implementation, they are driven by reconceptuali-zing the police as service providers rather than citizen controllers. While many scholars question the viability of instituting such a reconceptualization (Strecher 1991; Williams and Wagoner 1992), the rhetoric from the trenches is certainly permeated with expressions of a shift in police role strategy.

As with any significant philosophical or political change, this reform movement has been accompanied by a new language. Police chiefs are now referred to as “executives”; citizens are referred to as “clients” or “consumers”; and the control that police provide is shrouded in the jargon of “service.” Remarks of Los Angeles Chief Willie Williams capture the essence of the role strategy: “I liken the L.A. police to a business…. We have 3 1/2 million customers . . .” (Wickerham 1993, 13A). In like fashion, the actions of the New York City Police Department in placing a twelve-page guide on how to use departmental services in a local news source reflects attempts to transform rhetoric into reality (USA Today 1993). As these examples show, police are invoking the language of business and capitalism (Manning 1992). Perhaps because they are relinquishing their “monopoly on legitimate violence,” they are embracing “the language of economics and management . . . to reconceptualize the police mandate” (Manning 1992, 1). This fundamental shift in philosophy and its attendant rhetoric, if accompanied by operational change, promises to have profound consequences on virtually every aspect of policing.

One aspect of policing that provides insight into the integration of the “new” service rhetoric and the “old” control reality is how police respond to citizen complaints. Few other aspects of policing provide a more direct and empirical link between the emerging language of service and actual practices than does the police response to citizen complaints. Within this context, this article explores citizen complaints against police. Highlighted first are some assumptions that drove the development of the current citizen complaint system. Second, the nature of citizen complaints levied against the police is reviewed and assessment is made of the responsiveness of the police institution to these challenges to their control authority. By examining police responses to citizen complaints, an assessment can be made of the division between the emerging rhetoric of service and the reality of citizen control. Finally, the article explores the possible transformations that citizen complaint systems might find if the new police role strategy is institutionalized.

Traditional Views and Responses to Citizen Complaints

The history of citizen complaints against police has been a quest to develop a system of ensuring accountability to the citizenry that empowers it. Fundamental in establishing police accountability was the creation of a system from which assessments could be made as to whether police abused their powers and authorities as citizen controllers. The desire to develop a system of accountability for police deviations in control practices is best expressed in this report: ”In 1903, a New York City police commissioner turned judge noted that his court had seen numerous citizens with injuries received when the police effected their arrest. He felt that many of them had done nothing to deserve an arrest but most of them made no complaint” (Wagner and Decker 1993, 276). Implicit in this judicial observation is that there existed no effective mechanism for citizens to levy complaints against police or even a desire by police officials to encourage citizen complaints. What transpired in the ninety-some years since this observation was the development of a police-controlled citizen complaint system in every major law enforcement organization.

With an overriding concern about police abuse, the emerging system focused on technical rule violations by police—especially physical abuse. To ensure police accountability, the resulting system had to allow agencies to document and investigate citizen complaints so that some assessment of performance could be obtained to demonstrate that police are accountable to and controlled by the government and its citizens. Unfortunately, like many aspects of modern policing, the citizen complaint system was born of two fundamental legalistic precepts: accountability and control. The current citizen complaint system was modeled after, and founded on, assumptions that permeate the larger legal system. Because it stressed localized accountability and patterned itself after other legal forums, the citizen complaint system became legalistic in form and adversarial in nature, therefore mirroring the criminal justice system. With an emphasis on accountability and control, a focus on legally and organizationally defined abuse, and driven by the assumptions that underpin an adversarial model of justice, the citizen complaint system became a quasijudicial forum. From its inception, then, the process pitted police against public in a quasi-legal forum that focused not on the adequacy of police as service providers but on technical violations of legal and organizational rules.

Given a legalistic framework, the system’s twin focal concerns became the establishment of the validity of citizen allegations and the disposal of complaints in finite fashion. The system was constructed with all the safeguards of a due process model of justice, but failed to benefit from its neutrality. Police agencies adopting citizen complaint systems provided an array of shields similar to those offered defendants in criminal trials, thus insulating themselves from sanction by housing investigative and adjudicative functions in stationhouses. Approximately 84% of the nation’s largest police departments use a complaint system that relies exclusively on internal investigation and adjudication (West 1988). The system allowed law enforcement to control the types of citizen complaints it accepted; the extent to which police investigated complaints; the weight given to evidence uncovered by police investigations; the burden of proof required for adjudication; and ultimately the disposition of citizen complaints.

In developing the system, police have erected formidable barriers to citizen complaints. Suffice it to mention just a few obstacles police have used to bar the flow of citizen complaints. First, there are inherent deterrents to citizen complaints against police. These include a lack of citizen knowledge that they can and should complain; a lack of citizen knowledge concerning actionable police conducts; the time and energy needed to complain; and a fatalistic citizen attitude concerning the effectiveness of complaining. While these barriers are inherent in any system of accountability, historically police have done little to remove these obstructions. Second, police have employed a deterrent “strategy” to reduce the number of citizen complaints. Although differences in complaint systems abound, many police departments have adopted tactics that effectively block a large proportion of potential citizen complaints. These tactics have generally included requiring citizens to file complaints in person rather than anonymously; requiring citizens to file complaints at stationhouses; restricting access to the complaint system (either through location or language barriers); requiring citizens to sign written formal statements (often accompanied by warnings of criminal prosecution for falsely reporting); requiring citizens to take polygraph tests before beginning an investigation; and limiting complaints to only those behaviors recognized by police as falling within their self-defined areas of accountability. Finally, and hopefully to a lesser extent, police have used some draconian measures to prevent citizen complaints. Some of these measures have included making citizens wait at stationhouses for hours (hoping they will forego complaining); threatening minority citizens with notification of the immigration and naturalization service; making it known that police will run warrant checks on anyone filing a complaint; and threatening citizens with defamation lawsuits (see generally Christopher 1991; Kolts 1992; Mayor’s Citizen Commission 1991). In short, police have not only availed themselves of the protections of a legalistic system of citizen complaints, but they have used many tactics to discourage challenges to their control authority. Many of these tactics undermine the integrity of the citizen complaint system.

Those citizen complaints that reach disposition are classified according to a typology developed by police officials. This classification functions to sustain police concern with reducing the volume of viable complaints that enter the system and limits the effectiveness of the system as a mechanism of accountability and control. Most police organizations classify the citizen complaints they decide to investigate into one of the following categories:

• Unfounded—the act complained of did not occur. This classification results when the investigators find noninvolved citizens or police witnesses who contradict the allegations of the complainant.

• Not sustained—the evidence is insufficient to clearly prove or disprove the allegations made. This classification almost always results when the only witnesses to the allegations were the accused officer and the complainant, or witnesses in some way affiliated with the complainant, such as the complainant’s family or friends.

• Exonerated—the event of alleged conduct occurred but it was justified, lawful, and proper.

• Sustained—the police officer engaged in the alleged conduct and the conduct was out of policy. Excessive force and improper tactics complaints are rarely sustained unless there are noninvolved, independent witnesses who corroborate the complainant’s version of the facts (Christopher 1991, 155).

Inherent in this classification, as with the entire complaint process, is the assumption that citizens bring improper or false complaints against police. Although false complaints do occur, the existing classification weights more heavily the desire to determine whether a citizen complaint is valid than it does understanding the reason for the complaint. A second intent reflected in the current classification is the desire to dispose of complaints in a finite fashion with the least disruption to the institution. This means that complaints must be disposed of with a designation that generally vindicates police conduct to avoid other legal entanglements. Vindication can take the form of an “exoneration” of the conduct as proper, it can call into question the validity of the citizen’s complaint by labeling it “unfounded,” or it can fail to sustain the complaint by challenging the sufficiency of misconduct evidence. The vast majority of complaints lodged against police are disposed of through this vindication process. A national self-report survey of the largest police agencies found that on average only 11% of citizen complaints are classified as sustained (West 1988).

The police have generally failed to establish either accountability or control of abuse of authority under the present system. Nor does the present system seem able to handle the bulk of concerns citizens have with the police institution. The manner in which citizen complaints are disposed of reflects these shortcomings. Consider how few citizen complaints are sustained by select law-enforcement agencies in various cities.

Table 1 indicates that only a very small percentage of all complaints filed against the police are sustained. The research demonstrates that of all types of citizen claims, physical abuse claims are sustained at the lowest rates (see table footnotes), whereas complaints of rudeness, verbal abuse, or improper attitude are sustained at higher rates (Kappeler, Carter, and Sapp 1992). There are several ironies in this finding. First, a system designed to provide accountability and control of physical abuse has been shown to be the least effective in dealing with this area of police conduct. Second, the system seems most conducive to controlling nonphysical abuse when one would suspect that these forms of abuse would produce the least credible evidence of police misconduct. Finally, of all the sustained complaints reported in Table 1, relatively few officers ever received the sanction of suspension, demotion, or termination from duty (see original sources of data). It is hard not to conclude that the citizen complaint system, as employed by many police organizations, has failed to establish either accountability to the citizenry or governmental control of the police.

Table 1 Police Response to Citizen Complaints in Select Agencies

a Includes complaints initiated by police officials, which inflates the percentage of sustained complaints. b Includes only allegations of excessive force and improper tactics. LAPD sustained only 2% of its citizen complaints for excessive force, but since the commission report contains conflicting percentages, the most conservative figure is reported.

c Includes only citizen complaints of excessive use of force. d Only 2% of citizen complaints for physical abuse were sustained. e Includes four complaints against the city fire department.

f Sustained rate was derived from disciplinary actions taken and may be an underestimate. g The official reports claim a much higher rate of sustained complaints due to the inclusion of complaints brought against civilian employees and excluding unfounded, exonerated, and withdrawn complaints from analysis. The authors’ independent analysis of the official data, however, indicates only 9% of citizen complaints are sustained. In 1990, 12.6% of physical abuse complaints were sustained, whereas 36% of improper attitude complaints were sustained.

Citizen Complaints in the New Police Order

If police adopt a service orientation to citizen complaints, one that fashions its approach on the rhetoric of the business community, police may find that the general assumptions that underpin the existing system will have to be altered. First, a system built around an ethos of service would require police to accept more citizen complaints. Not only would police be obliged to accept complaints in greater volume, they would be required to accept a greater variety of complaints including those that challenge the quality of service and the adequacy of police as service providers. The police would also have to be concerned with the outcome of complaints not as possible disruptive forces to the integrity of the institution, but, rather, as measures of the effectiveness of police in providing service to a consumer population that could go elsewhere for service. Additionally, the process by which police handle citizen complaints would have to be altered under the new police order. The investigation of citizen complaints against police could no longer focus on establishing the validity of the citizen’s complaint, but rather on the underlying concern the citizen had with the police. Police departments might find themselves adopting the business adage that the ”citizen is always right” rather than requiring citizen complaints to meet the current police-imposed burden of proof, as under the existing system. Finally, police would have to abandon the vision of the complaint system as an adjudicative process in favor of negotiation or mediation processes designed to satisfy its ”customers.” Such outcomes if followed by ”imposed service improvements” rather than ”departmental sanctions” could alter both police and public perception of the citizen complaint system.

The likelihood of such a transformation is open to debate. It is questionable whether one can expect substantive changes in the police handling of citizen complaints, given the increasing litigious environment in which they operate and the protective nature of police subcultures. The more important question, therefore, is what consequences can we expect from police attempts to tailor the citizen complaint system to the new police order.

Such an attempt to transform the citizen complaint system has both possibilities and perils. Developing a consumer approach, for example, has the definite possibility of opening up the institution of policing to greater and more detailed public scrutiny and control, an appealing possibility for those who value a government guided by democratic principles and a service orientation. By expanding what constitutes a recognizable citizen complaint, by investigating complaints based on responding to ”consumer” needs, and by processing cases in a mediation format, the citizen complaint system could become a critical component in promoting the new police order.

A realistic peril of this new order and its attendant role strategy is that reform may only appear to seriously address citizen complaints by spotlighting those that coincide with the police definition of service provider. While the police institution focuses the community’s attention on its ”new” role, the handling of complaints associated with the previous role of police as citizen controllers may remain unchanged. This situation is evidenced by some police departments’ attempts to integrate community police with drug enforcement efforts in hopes of generating more intelligence information. As with attempts to reform other organizational practices that threaten members’ security, the envisioned complaint processing practices may end up being only superficially service driven and sustaining, instead of challenging the original problem of police abuses as citizen controllers. Another peril lies in how police might define ”service” and ”customer.” One can envision police definitions that exclude certain segments of society from the distinction of ”customer.” Such a system might develop ”preferred” customers who receive preferential treatment based on their ability to differentially influence the type, quality, and distribution of police services. Whatever the possibility and perils, clearly the citizen complaint system will play a dominant and strategic role in the new police order. Victor E. Kappeler and Peter B. Kraska