Police accountability in America is one of the most challenging and most disputed issues of public life. The case is not simply about misconduct in a case or two but about a system that has more and more insulated officers from real consequences. Unearthing the origins of American policing reveals an history linked to the slave patrols of the South and dispersal of strikes in the North, which created a platform on which police often played the role of an agency of imposing social order by violence. That legacy is continuing to influence policing today, particularly the way in which poor communities are disproportionately treated and seek but cannot easily access justice.
The justice system itself is fearsome to victims of police abuse. There are not many civil rights lawyers, and especially in those neighborhoods where abuse most frequently occurs, there is little hope of obtaining one. When cases do make it to trial, federal judges have broad discretion and often serve as gatekeepers, stopping trials cold. Juries, themselves a byproduct of the extensive public faith in police, will often acquit officers even when there is apparent misconduct.
Legal doctrine places additional protections. Pleading rules are stringent and require specific evidence prior to the initiation of discovery, with numerous causes of action dismissed shortly thereafter. The Fourth Amendment has been interpreted by courts so as to grant great leeway to police and to legitimize even severe harm as “reasonable.”
Qualified immunity raises the bar even higher by giving officers a presumption of immunity unless earlier cases have decided on quite similar conduct. Municipal liability, bound to the Monell standard, makes it uncommon for cities to become liable for systemic failures. And injunctive relief, once great tools of reform, has been curtailed to the extent of virtual uselessness.
Beyond the courtroom, fiscal shields make officers practically never pay personally for their actions. Cities indemnify their officers routinely, so the settlements are paid out of public funds instead of from the officials themselves. The money often is drawn from budgets that harm marginalized communities, whereas police departments themselves are shielded.
Few departments monitor or study past lawsuits, losing a chance to identify and solve underlying issues. The ultimate effect is a system in which wrongdoing is compensated but never really addressed.
Changes such as capping qualified immunity or increasing jury pools are good starting points but face strong political opposition. Police unions are powerful, and the larger culture resists measures that seem to bypass law enforcement power. Overdeterrence arguments — that accountability will deter officers from serving — are raised regularly but rarely supported by facts. If only the recalcitrant are left behind, one wonders if such officers are adequately suited to public safety to begin with.
Alternative activists and thinkers promote fundamental change in the guise of what they term nonreformist reforms, with the goal of discrediting structural impediments to abusive officers. National policy might preclude officers with documented constitutional abuses from rehiring, and policing itself might transition away from high-arrest patrol strategies towards serious crime response. Disarmament efforts for officers in all but exceptional circumstances might curb excessive lethal force use and foster a more conciliatory police-communities relationship.
Others go a step beyond abolitionism and ask if policing in any way is really necessary. Previous regimes of public security have typically been founded on community-based models, ranging from neighbor watches to neighbor cooperation. New experiments in crisis resolution units and community mediators indicate that violence can be diminished and conflict diffused without resorting to armed police. In such a vision, public safety institutions would center on education, health, housing, and equity — addressing the causes, not symptoms, of violence.
The primary argument against abolition is the question of who responds to violent crime. Abolitionists reply that specialized responders, trusted messengers, and community-based units can better address serious incidents than existing systems because police response times are slow and many crimes go unsolved in the existing arrangement. Abolition is imagined as a process, a gradual elimination of harmful structures and replacement with more equitable and effective structures which try to establish safety in a general manner.
Ultimately, the struggle for police accountability is not just about policy or doctrine of law. It’s about deeper questions of whose lives are valued, whose rights are seen, and what policing would look like in a society that aspires to be both safe and just. True progress will demand more than legal and legislative reform; it will demand a rethinking of how Americans think about public safety itself.