Online Criminal Justice Masters Degree

Using learning as a construct to measure civilian review board impact on the police

Further, the popularity of civilian review boards is related to the community policing movement and its emphasis on police accountability. Integral to this movement is the expanded role of the public and the development of police-community partnerships (Bayley, 1994; Frank et al., 1996; Grinc, 1994; Kelling, 1995; Kerley and Benson, 2000; Maguire and Mastrofski, 2000). Civilian review of complaints involving police misconduct provides a mechanism for consumers of police services to be involved in the oversight of decisions by officers and agencies (Walker, 2001). Through these decisions, civilians may influence future police agency policies and officer behavior on the street.

The Philippines recently instituted a control mechanism that is synonymous to civilian review called the People’s Law Enforcement Board (PLEB). The PLEB is a civilian board that receives, investigates, adjudicates, and decides cases involving members of the Philippine National Police, the national police force of the Philippines. The jurisdiction of each PLEB is local and there is at least one PLEB for each municipality, although the larger cities (i.e. Manila and Quezon) have one PLEB for each legislative district.

Though civilian review boards have become quite popular in both United States and Philippines, only a limited number of systematic evaluations have been conducted of review board operations. This is especially true with assessments of the impact of review boards on police officer behavior and agency policies (de Guzman, 2001). This shortcoming may not necessarily be due to a lack of interest about the subject. Instead, it may more likely be the result of data and methodological difficulties involved in assessing the impact of review boards (Walker, 2001).

More specifically, in a recent review of the US civilian review boards, Walker (2001) identified the shortcomings and pitfalls of traditional methods for assessing the performance of civilian review boards. He noted the complexities, as well as the potential inadequacies, of evaluations that relied solely on official performance indicators such as sustain rates and the number of complaints filed. In particular, he argued that researchers using official data had difficulty with causal interpretations because one could hardly attribute observed changes in police behavior to the existence and performance of the board without other data. Instead, Walker (2001) suggested that Perez’s (1978) methodology using "learning" as a construct for measuring the impact of civilian review boards was an innovative attempt at measuring this elusive construct.

This research endeavors to utilize "learning" as a construct and attempts to introduce a methodology for operationalizing this construct. In the end, it is hoped that this study will shed light on alternative measures for assessing the impact of civilian review boards. In other words, we present a construct that has the potential for more validly assessing the utility of civilian review boards as mechanisms for controlling and changing police misbehavior.