The fourth power. A mapping of police oversight agencies in Europe and Quebec

ABSTRACT

Independent police oversight bodies are advocated by human rights organisations to be the most credible and effective solution to address the misbehaviors and systemic malfunction. They have emerged in parallel with independent regulatory agencies in various economic sectors, thus signalling a new trend in governance interpreted as the rise of a ‘fourth power.’ Still, comparative knowledge is scarce about the nature of delegation of power to police oversight agencies (POAs) and their actions. By analyzing 25 POAs in 20 countries, this article seeks to precisely describe their features in Europe and Quebec (Canada): the timeline of their birth, the scope of delegation (remit, formal independence, powers, resources), and the variations in how they execute their mandate. We unveil a profound heterogeneity across countries. In terms of national patterns, the main divide is between specialised (police only, limited formal independence, more abundant resources) and non-specialised (all public administrations, strong formal independence, limited resources) agencies. The latter tend to act as a public fire alarm to compensate for their lack of resources. Our mapping also contrasts European countries’ oversight mechanisms, which rely on professional agencies that are mostly established at the national or state/regional level, with local civilian oversight boards in the US. And, while our results confirm that the 1990s marked a watershed, they question the notion that agencification in the police sector has been a vector for revolution in its governance, since no POA incorporates all the traits required for them to be the fourth power just yet.

KEYWORDS:

• Agencification
• accountability
• police
• complaints
• independent agencies
• delegation

Acknowledgements

This research is part of the POLDEM project, with Sebastian Roché as PI, which received financial support from the French Defender of Rights and practical support from the Independent Police Complaints Authorities Network (IPCAN) members, as well as additional agencies. We would like to express our thanks to all the participating organisations. Data can be made available on reasonable request. We also want to thank Jacques de Maillard and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 ‘Review’ is limited to reviewing the complaint processing undertaken by the police, ‘investigation’ denotes the capacity of the agency to gather evidence by itself or through other bodies, and ‘audit’ refers to more systemic analysis of a process (for ex. of the complaint process in general, or the use of weapons), generally assorted of corrective recommendations

2 Independent bodies that are limited to inspecting police detention facilities (e.g., in Austria) are not considered in this study as their remit is too narrow. It limited to monitoring the ‘deprivation of freedom’ premises (police detention facilities).

3 Note however that excluding Quebec from the analyses does not alter our results and overall typology.

4 Home Secretary Suella Braverman explained the government decision to ask for a termination of the mandate of the head of IOPC as such: ‘The head of the police watchdog has been forced to resign after becoming the subject of a police investigation’. The head of IOPC, on his part, said that he was resigning for "personal and domestic reasons", according to the BBC. It appears that the government had sufficient influence over the POA to ask its head to be replaced, and that the decision was not challenged by the head of IOPC. (see https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-63848998 and https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/03/police-watchdog-head-resigns-for-personal-and-domestic-reasons).

5 To investigate is understood to mean that an incident or allegation of an incident is examined to establish its plausibility.

6 Staff size appears to be a reliable measure of resources; indeed, the results of a Spearman correlation indicate that the total number of staff is positively and significantly correlated with the agency's budget in euros (ρ = .679, p < .001, N = 23).

7 Dispute between a citizen and the administration over the appropriate character of the behavior of an agent which is not a penal crime (for example unruly behavior) can be brought to a mediation. Mediation aims at finding a solution accepted by citizens regarding their claim.

8 It is worth noting that one additional way in which POAs may directly interact with police forces is during police officer training sessions. Our survey did not measure the precise number of sessions carried out by POAs. However, we asked them whether they had carried out training sessions during the previous year. Out of 25 POAs, 13 indicated that they had. Those POAs were, on average, more involved in working sessions with the police (on average, 14.46 sessions against 1.83 for POAs not involved in training), although the relationship is only marginally significant: t = 1.683, p = 0.117, N = 25.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Défenseur des Droits (Defender of Rights, France).