NSF Award
2214455
In response to the present conflicts surrounding policing, local and national organizations and policy makers have called for increasing civilian oversight and supervision of police departments as one approach to improving police-community relations. Civilian oversight commissions are locally constructed, making it difficult to effectively assess the impact of these commissions on a broader scale. This project is centered in three counties across the US to ask: what factors shape local oversight practices, and what can we learn from these different entities that can be used to effectively assess outcomes across diverse commissions? Selecting sites with distinctive racial dynamics and varying structures of civilian-led police oversight commissions, this project focuses on the varied histories, forms, practices, and successes and failures of civilian oversight. Investigators and student researchers analyze the variations in discourses and practices to understand the specific implementations of civilian oversight of police and to gauge the potential value of civilian oversight commissions on a broader scale. This project will train graduate and undergraduate students in quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis.<br/><br/>The project uses team-based multi-sited ethnography to study and analyze locally specific features of oversight commissions including their institutional structures, histories, and institutional dynamics. This project develops methods to offer comparative insights into the ways in which oversight commissions operate, with particular attention to what demographic variables are predictive of participation. Tracking the issues that oversight committees engage, researchers will develop theories of the forms through which commissions address community relations and policing. The mere establishment of civilian oversight may be a first step toward a public democratic forum, but this study explores civilian oversight commissions as an institution that can survey possible avenues of accountability and reform, while simultaneously reinscribing the power and influence of policing.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
