The Cost of Police Complaints
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in police complaints investigations. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, attention turned to interactions with police resulting in death, and resulted in a push to adopt the #8cantwait policies to reduce deaths of community residents during police interactions.
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be killed by police officers during interactions, the majority of police-resident interactions do not result in violence. About 1 in 45,000 interactions results in a community resident fatality. But what about those other interactions? What happens when we are unhappy with the police?
Police Complaints and Community Residents
Police services, like other professions, are a service. As cops are only human, not everyone will be happy with the service they receive, from receiving a ticket for having a headlight out to being arrested. While police departments have policies and procedures for receiving and investigating complaints, complaint processes look very different in different departments. Some complaint processes are more complex (see District of Colombia Police Department below) compared to more streamlined processes (see City of Milwaukee Police Department below).
Police departments are provided with guidance from professional policing organizations (IACP and CALEA) for complaints processes. Recommendations often require that agencies become members of the organizations which can strain already underfunded police departments. further, considering that police departments vary in size, leadership, funding, policies, and other factors, complaints processes can look very different in different jurisdictions. Complaining at a department with two part-time officers can look very different than complaining at a large agency.
Varying complaint processes mean that the administrative burdens experienced by community residents during police complaint processes are not easily understood. Administrative burdens are intentional and unintentional learning (time and effort), compliance (materials and paperwork), and psychological costs (stress and stigma) that community residents experience during interactions with the government. These costs are increased by multiple factors such as 1) the use of only English in government processes, 2) complicated language, 3) information availability, 4) identification requirements, 5) paperwork requirements, 6) complex processes with many steps, and, 7) the time taken to engage in the process itself. When coupled with additional factors such as fear of police, and past negative experiences,
How do Complaint Procedures Impact Administrative Burden Experiences?
I examined this research question using a two-step process. First, to understand the burdens in complaint processes and complaint processes themselves, I contacted 300 police departments in North Carolina as a sample (data collected on 181, 60.33% response rate, 95% confidence). Second, once I was able to understand the barriers experienced by community residents, I surveyed 811 diverse individuals (using Prolific) to understand which factors would be most impactful in their decision to submit or not submit a complaint about a police officer.
Results
I discovered that the time taken to engage in the complaint was the most important factor to survey respondents. Participants overwhelmingly were more likely to submit a complaint after an interaction when the complaint process did not take up a lot of their time. Regarding contextual factors, participants with previous negative experiences with police officers were less likely to engage in complaint processes compared to participants with previous positive experiences.
Overall, I found that factors in complaint processes have the ability to dissuade community residents from engaging in police complaint processes. This study also highlights the impact of previous interactions with police officers on complaint submission decisions. The discovery that there are individuals who would never submit a complaint against an officer if they had a cause to do so highlights the importance of providing training for officers to ensure that negative interactions do not happen in the first place.
This article is based on the dissertation, Advancing Social Equity: The Administrative Burden of Police Complaints, which was completed as part of her Ph.D. in Public Administration from North Carolina State University.
