It is possible for institutions to increase visibility without improving public understanding of effectiveness. Increased exposure to institutional failure is not transparency.
Modern oversight systems:
- disproportionately expose the public to exceptional failures
- provide little exposure to routine competence
- rarely contextualize policing complexity
- concentrate public attention on breakdown rather than function
Result:
The public becomes increasingly familiar with policing failures while remaining unfamiliar with policing effectiveness.
Oversight Committees
Police oversight committees, such as citizen review boards, are tasked with increasing community trust in law enforcement agencies through independent review practices that aim to counteract bias and promote transparency.
These were created in response to a prevailing belief that agencies do not hold their officers accountable for illegal or unethical behavior (ie, both agencies and individual officers cannot be trusted).
Their primary activity to this end is independent review of citizen complaints and high-stakes investigations (i.e., officer-involved shootings, in-custody deaths, etc.).
This limited exposure to law enforcement through a very specific and negative filter only further exacerbates the lack of public trust:
- People who participate in citizen review boards are typically already of the belief that law enforcement can’t be trusted.
- Repeated exposure to complaints about officers feeds into the perception that officers are not trustworthy.