How do states address police misconduct? Police violence and abuse occurs throughout the democratic world, presenting a challenge for states committed to exercising coercive force with discretion. One of the ways states address this problem is with police misconduct oversight institutions, which facilitate civilian reporting and state investigation of misconduct. But there is vast variation in the ways democracies design these institutions, and there is no systematic cross-national comparative research which can help us understand how different types of oversight institutions influence citizens’ behavior and attitudes to the state. As a consequence, decision-makers lack the empirical basis necessary for developing informed policy.
VINO studies how institutional design impacts on citizen perceptions of police legitimacy and willingness to file complaints. The project studies these relationships within OECD democracies using a multi-method approach. It has collected new, detailed data on police oversight institutions in 34 countries, as well as the rate of citizen complaints filed. The data include detailed flowcharts of the complaint process – from citizen to outcome – as well as various attributes of oversight institutions, including the independence, transparency, accessibility, efficiency, resourcing, and sanctioning powers of the body. It also records whether complainants can be compensated or whether there are risks associated with filing a complaint (for example, being prosecuted for defamation).
In the second phase of the project, VINO will complement this work with a series of survey experiments designed to understand how people think about police misconduct and its oversight. Finally, five case studies of Denmark, Sweden, Japan, Israel and Spain anchor this effort by grounding and contextualizing the empirics. This research agenda is important because understanding how these oversight institutions are designed and whether they work can provide us with important insights into the foundations of democratic accountability and state respect for the civil rights of its citizens.
