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Impact of Police Violence on Mental Health: A Theoretical Framework

J. DeVylder wrote the original draft of the article. L. Fedina and B. Link contributed substantially to the editing and revision of subsequent drafts of the article. All authors participated in the conceptual development and final editing of the article.

Police violence has increasingly been recognized as a public health concern in the United States, and accumulating evidence has shown police violence exposure to be linked to a broad range of health and mental health outcomes. These associations appear to extend beyond the typical associations between violence and mental health, and to be independent of the effects of co-occurring forms of trauma and violence exposure. However, there is no existing theoretical framework within which we may understand the unique contributions of police violence to mental health and illness.

This article aims to identify potential factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence and trauma exposure, and to explore the possibility that this unique combination of factors distinguishes police violence from related risk exposures. We identify 8 factors that may alter this relationship, including those that increase the likelihood of overall exposure, increase the psychological impact of police violence, and impede the possibility of coping or recovery from such exposures.

On the basis of these factors, we propose a theoretical framework for the further study of police violence from a public mental health perspective.

A new public narrative around the prevalence and effects of police violence has emerged over the past several years in the United States, accompanied recently by a dramatic shift in public opinion following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, and the related national civil uprising and protests. Although Black, Latinx, Native American, and sexual and gender minority communities have long perceived a culture of inequitable treatment, it is only with the widespread adaptation of smartphone technology and real-time dissemination of footage through social media that this has become part of the national consciousness. 1 Media attention has primarily focused on individual incidents of police killings rather than on broader population-level health effects and implications. Although death is certainly the most severe health outcome, it is just as certainly not the most common. The mental health effects of police violence may be less visible yet much more pervasive and, potentially, more impactful when considered across an entire community or population.

In this article, we place the emerging literature on the mental health correlates of police violence within the broader context of research on violence, and explore whether the “police” in “police violence” bestows a specific meaning that extends beyond violence itself—is police violence a form of violence just like any other? By describing potential factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence and trauma exposure—either as factors that are unique to police violence or that vary in degree between police violence and other forms of violence—we propose a theoretical framework for the further study of police violence from a public mental health perspective.

RELEVANCE OF POLICE VIOLENCE TO MENTAL HEALTH

Stress has pervasive effects on one’s psychological well-being, straining one’s sense of role or purpose and affecting concepts of self-esteem and mastery, which contributes in turn to mental health difficulties. 2 Although there is not a single unifying theory linking stressful or traumatic social exposures to mental health symptoms, these factors play a prominent etiological role in leading theories on a broad range of disparate mental health conditions, such as the social signal transduction theory of depression 3 or the social defeat theory of psychosis. 4 Although the often-siloed research of each psychological outcome has led to uniquely labeled theories, these theories all point to a pathway in which trauma spurs biological or psychological changes that manifest over time as psychiatric symptoms, particularly when the trauma is sexually or physically violent. 5 Further, although theoretical work on stressful life events has attempted to provide a broader framework for how stress may translate to psychopathology, focusing particularly on the role of uncontrollable stressful events that affect one’s usual activities, goals, and values, this framework has not been directly applied toward understanding police violence. 6

We therefore explore the construct of police violence as a potential etiological factor for mental health conditions, based on the assumptions that (1) violence and trauma are associated with elevated risk for a broad range of mental health symptoms and (2) the contribution to risk may vary not only by severity of exposure, but also by type of exposure. Specifically, we explore whether police violence possesses a unique pattern of characteristics and mechanisms that distinguish it from other forms of violence exposure in its association with mental health symptoms.

For the purposes of this article, we refer generally to “police violence” and “mental health” because there is not yet sufficient research to confidently link specific subtypes of police violence to specific mental health outcomes. We therefore define police violence as acute events of physical, sexual, psychological, or neglectful violence, following the World Health Organization’s guidelines on defining violence and earlier work on the phenomenology of police violence exposure. 7 Mental health is intended to be inclusive of behaviors and psychological symptoms that would be considered indicators of clinical psychopathology, including but not limited to general psychological distress, posttraumatic stress symptoms, suicidal ideation and behavior, psychosis-like experiences, and depression. These definitions may need to be expanded as this literature develops, as currently it typically focuses on acute violent events (rather than chronic or vicarious exposures) and a psychopathology-oriented view of mental health (rather than a focus on functioning or quality of life), but they are being used here as a reflection of the variables typically employed in the literature at this point in time.

MENTAL HEALTH CORRELATES OF POLICE VIOLENCE

Recent public attention directed toward police violence has spurred an emerging literature on the health significance of police violence exposure, 1,8,9 addressing a long-unheeded call to conceptualize police violence as a public health issue in the United States. 7 Cross-sectional studies have consistently found clinically and statistically significant associations between police violence exposure and a range of mental health outcomes, 10-16 and community-level data have likewise demonstrated higher rates of mental health symptoms in neighborhoods or cities in which police abuse (e.g., “stop and frisk” practices, which are primarily used in neighborhoods predominantly composed of people of color) and killings of unarmed civilians are more common. 17,18 These associations have generally been found to remain statistically significant (and of sufficient effect sizes to support public health significance) even with adjustment for closely related forms of violence exposure, such as interpersonal violence or lifetime abuse exposure. 10,14 For example, exposure to assaultive forms of police violence (i.e., physical or sexual) has been found to be associated with 4- to 11-fold greater odds for a suicide attempt among adults across racial/ethnic groups, even with conservative adjustments. 12,14 Although most of this research has been conducted with adults, recent analyses suggest that this problem extends into adolescence as well. 19 A selective overview of recent work on this topic is provided in Table 1 , and has recently been reviewed elsewhere. 21

TABLE 1—

Selective Overview of Recent Studies of Police Violence and Mental Health: United States

Note. DSM-IV  =  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association; 1994); PTSD = posttraumatic stress disorder.

WHY IS POLICE VIOLENCE DIFFERENT?

Overall, accumulated evidence consistently identifies moderate to strong associations between self-reported exposure to police violence and measures of mental health. Additionally, some evidence indicates that these effects operate independently of exposure to other forms of violence. It was this accumulation of evidence that led us to ask whether and to what extent police violence has unique features that lead it to be so impactful for mental health outcomes. Here, we propose 8 factors that may distinguish police violence from other forms of violence, some of which are unique to police violence and others that may vary by degree. Given the complexity of the issue, we see our conceptualization as a step toward a more complete understanding of this important issue, recognizing that it will need further development in the time ahead.

Police Violence Is State Sanctioned

A long tradition in social science theory suggests that the police play a critical role in disciplining the public, not just in terms of offenses and punishments but in the construction and maintenance of an established social order favoring dominant groups. In light of the use of the police in this regard, it follows that exposure to violence emanating from their actions would have distinct and pernicious features. 22,23 Police organizations in the United States are thus authoritative institutions legitimized to apply force—and potentially fatal force—to maintain a particular social and political order. 24 In interactions with civilians, police officers are in positions of relatively greater power because of both the symbolic and state-sanctioned status of their profession, and their immediate legal availability of means (e.g., guns, batons, tasers) to wield force, threat of force, and coercion, at their discretion. This distinguishes police violence from interpersonal forms of violence that are perpetrated by people who are not sanctioned to enact violence, such as caregivers, peers, or intimate partners.

This distinction is made not to downplay the seriousness of other forms of violence—such as child abuse, intimate partner violence, or sexual assault—but to assert that modern-day police violence is embedded in historical state-enforced practices that permitted cruel, unusual, and dehumanizing punishment of individuals deemed to be from threatening or “dangerous classes,” 25 particularly Blacks. Communities of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities have been historically subjected to racially motivated, discriminatory state-sponsored laws (e.g., Jim Crow laws, sodomy laws) enforced by police that permitted harassment, discrimination, and excessive and fatal force against individuals from these communities. As such, the processes and contexts in which police violence has been historically perpetuated are uniquely distinct from the perpetuation of interpersonal forms of violence by others. Furthermore, police violence is sanctioned not only by institutions in the United States but also by the American public, and is intentionally designed to uphold White supremacy. 26 Members of the dominant society thus contribute to police violence and the lack of police accountability.

The Police Are a Pervasive Presence

A core characteristic of many people’s reaction to violence is avoidance of reminders and triggers—especially of the perpetrators themselves. This common and adaptive response to a harmful situation is not available to people who have been exposed to police violence. It is simply not possible to avoid a system that inflicts racially motivated violence while staying within the country, even if one manages to avoid the specific offending officer, and the stress of this police avoidance has been shown to be directly related to severity of depressive symptoms among adult Black men. 20 Much in the same way that police violence by one officer generalizes to fear of all officers even if most officers do not perpetrate violence, intimate partner violence often generalizes to fear of all romantic partners, particularly of a given gender. However, this process may be exacerbated for victims of police violence and is in some ways different from what transpires when people are exposed to other forms of violence. For example, although victims of intimate partner violence and sexual assault who seek help and legal recourse face enormous barriers and challenges, the US justice system can separate victims from perpetrators through legal protection or restraining orders or through incarceration of the perpetrator. In the case of police violence, the presence of law enforcement in the US context is pervasive, and victims have few or no options to seek help and legal recourse, or to entirely avoid police officers in public places.

There Are Limited Options for Recourse

Victims of police violence have little legal recourse or opportunities for seeking help in the criminal justice system. The police have legal sanction to intervene in other crimes of violence (e.g., sexual assault, physical assault), making it much more difficult to prove that the violence was unjustly or excessively delivered. Additionally, the people reviewing disputed cases are often also police officers, and indicted police officers are tried by prosecutors who must otherwise work with police officers. These and other circumstances make contesting the perpetration of violence extremely difficult. Victims of other forms of violence, particularly intimate partner violence, indeed face enormous barriers in seeking help and legal recourse, including stigma in reporting intimate partner violence, poverty and other economic barriers, and other sociocultural and contextual factors. 27 Victims of police violence face many of these same barriers; because they have few if any options for reporting an incident, for legal recourse, or for advocacy services and referrals to mental health treatment, any mental health symptoms they have may worsen over time. 28

Police Culture Deters Internal Accountability

Police violence occurs within a larger, institutional context that is shaped by the organization’s culture. An organizational culture that upholds a “code of silence” surrounding police officers’ abusive behaviors toward civilians allows for the perpetuation of police abuse of power and can prevent police officers, particularly those from lower ranks, from reporting such abuses to their superiors. 29

Given that violence perpetuated through institutions (rather than interpersonal relationships) is supported by an organizational culture condoning harmful behaviors (e.g., harassment, coercion, psychological abuse, physical assault), particularly against those from historically marginalized and disadvantaged communities, experiencing abuse at the hands of police officers who wield such power and authority over civilians may lead to exacerbated mental health consequences. Past research suggests that exposure to sexual assault while serving in the military is associated with psychiatric disorders above and beyond symptoms associated with civilian sexual assault. 30 This suggests that contextual factors related to violence, particularly contexts defined by substantial power and authoritative differentials, may influence associations with mental health symptoms.

Police Violence Alters Deeply Held Beliefs

People feel more secure if they feel safe and protected in their day-to-day activities. Assumptive World Theory proposes that people’s deeply held beliefs about the world and themselves can be shaken by an event that forcefully disconfirms such beliefs. 31 Police violence is particularly likely to provide such disconfirming evidence in that the police represent a societal institution that many, though not all, have come to rely on deeply and implicitly for help when a threat emerges. When police perpetrate violence, this belief is shattered as the police are no longer protectors but rather the central threat that needs to be addressed. Additionally, police violence is normative, rather than an acute or singular event, which has led to the erosion of public trust in the police and favorable views of police seen as protective.

Theories of police legitimacy, which refers to the public’s perceptions and views of police as a legitimate authority that is trustworthy and upholds public safety, propose that legitimacy is in part formed through individual police–citizen interactions. 32 As such, it is plausible that individual and group experiences with police violence influence individual views and beliefs that police are not trustworthy sources of protection and safety. Of course, this sundering of assumptions occurs with other types of violence, such as when a believed-to-be-loving spouse hits a partner or a thought-to-be-protective parent engages in child abuse. However, the police have been described as a “last resort” for people when other remedies have been tried and failed. 33 A spouse might call the police as a last resort when other efforts to stop an abusive partner have failed, or a neighbor might make such a call if polite efforts to address enduring abuse of a child have failed. But to the extent that exposure to police violence intrudes, the “last resort” is gone and one may feel stuck in a brutal and frightening world with no recourse.

Racial and Economic Disparities in Exposure

Because police violence is disproportionately directed toward people of color, many of whom are poor, it can underscore a sense of diminished value within the US racial and class hierarchies. Accordingly, the media narrative around police violence has focused on incidents directed toward Black people, and has at times framed these incidents within the context of the legacy of racism and White supremacy in the United States. Data from the first and second Survey of Police–Public Encounters studies have confirmed that—at least in Baltimore, Maryland; New York City; the District of Columbia; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—police violence is more likely to be directed toward people of color, although it is notable that these studies have found Latinx groups to be at approximately the same level of risk as non-Latinx Blacks. 11,14 Although White respondents were also at some risk of exposure to police violence, the racial disparities were significant, even after adjustment for crime involvement and income. Similarly, the prevalence of police-inflicted shootings is approximately 3.5-fold greater among non-Latinx Black than non-Latinx White residents of the United States. 34 Perceptions of racism have been shown to magnify, and perhaps even overshadow, the effects of violent acts. 35 Given that police violence is perceived to be racially motivated in many cases, 34 it is likely that these same effects carry over to many victims of this form of violence.

Notably, there is insufficient prior data to allow a thorough discussion of police violence and mental health among indigenous populations, although the rate of police killings is extremely high among this group. Other potentially high-risk groups likely include people who identify as sexual or gender minorities, people who are homeless, or those who have a severe mental illness diagnosis, among others. Future research should focus on understudied sociodemographic groups that are disproportionately subject to police violence (e.g., indigenous populations, trans individuals), and the conceptual framework presented in this article will require modification as more data become available.

Police Violence Is Stigmatizing

Victims of violent incidents, such as intimate partner violence and community violence, often seek informal support from friends, family, and other social contacts, which has been shown to have a beneficial impact on mental health. 36 However, exposure to police violence carries the potential of inducing harmful stigma. Although stigma may be mitigated in some circumstances in which people distrust the police, a person may nonetheless face judgments from dominant groups who carry the power to discriminate in critical life domains such as educational opportunities, jobs, and housing. This stigma may in turn limit help-seeking behaviors if mental health problems emerge and if there is a perception that treatment providers may not be able to sufficiently understand the circumstances that led to the mental health problems. 37

The police are highly respected in some US communities, sometimes to the point of exaltation, and are supported by a labor union of more than 100 000 workers as well as significant and well-funded public image and advocacy groups such as Blue Lives Matter (which arose as a countermovement to Black Lives Matter and consequently contributes to rather than alleviates concerns of racism and lack of accountability around police violence). As such, there may be substantial stigma around reporting incidents of police violence to family members, friends, and acquaintances, some of whom may have some personal or ideological connection to the police force. Further, when there are major social movements or protests following prominent incidents of police violence, many in the public, particularly those who benefit from the dominant social order that the police help to maintain, take a “blaming the victim” mentality and highlight infractions by the victim that may have justified their injury or death (e.g., the alleged theft of cigarillos by Michael Brown cited as justification for excessive and fatal force). On a broader societal level, protests in Ferguson, Missouri were blamed for a subsequent supposed “war on cops” in which the rate of civilians killing police officers purportedly increased, although there is no actual evidence for any such increase. 38

Police Are Typically Armed

Unlike front-line police officers in some other countries, police officers patrolling neighborhoods in the United States are typically armed, which makes civilians’ interactions with the police potentially more threatening. As a result of several landmark Supreme Court decisions, police officers in the United States have a great deal of legal latitude in determining when to use force, and even fatal force. Additionally, the militarization of police in the United States, largely as a result of “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror” policies, has equipped police departments with firearms and military-grade equipment and expanded their capacity to use force if officers believe their lives or the lives of others are in danger. 39 Thus, the perceived threat of police victimization in civilians’ interactions with police may lead to unique mental health implications for communities most affected by police violence. Further, in addition to the threat of immediate violence through the use of weapons, police encounters also can lead to a more sustained form of exposure to violence and coercion through imprisonment. This threat may be compounded in geographical (e.g., low-income urban areas) and demographic communities (e.g., Black, Latinx, and Native American) with high rates of incarceration.

PROPOSED CONCEPTUAL MODEL

Figure A (available as a supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org ) portrays a conceptual model illustrating points at which the influence of police violence on mental health may be different from processes that produce associations between other types of violence exposure and mental health. Specifically, we highlight the 8 potentially influential factors that were described in the previous section, which provides a valuable starting point from which the construct of police violence can be further explored from a public health standpoint. The assumption that police violence is violence like any other would require that the net effect of all of these 8 factors would sum to zero (i.e., have no total effect on mental health). This assumption is highly unlikely, particularly since some of these pathways are now supported by epidemiological evidence (e.g., stress of police avoidance has been recently linked to depressive symptoms). 20 Many (but not all) of these features are present in other forms of violence, although the unique intersection of these features may make police violence a specific type of violence and one worthy of study as a separate construct, similar to the intersection of common and specific elements as determinants of the health impact of other life events. 6 In fact, the literature on stressful life events may provide a useful framework for determining the potential mental health salience of these various features of police violence. Table 2 outlines the primary dimensions of stressful life events based on work by Dohrenwend, 6 a widely used framework for understanding and interpreting the relationship between uncontrollable stressors and mental health outcomes, and it applies these dimensions to our model of police violence.

TABLE 2—

Police Violence Within the Life Events Dimensions Proposed by Dohrenwend

Source. Dohrenwend. 6

To provide a preliminary framework for subsequent work, we have also developed a more complex hypothetical model that illustrates potential mechanisms through which the discussed factors may influence the pathways from police violence to mental health (Figure B, available as a supplement to the online version of this article at http://www.ajph.org ). Although it is speculative because of the limited prior empirical research, we are proposing this model to provide potential conceptual pathways that can be tested in future research. Specifically, 4 of the factors (i.e., access to a weapon, state-sanctioned violence, perceived racial and class biases, and risk of incarceration) are likely to increase the immediate impact of violent incidents and therefore may have the most direct effects on mental health, as they are characteristics of the acute incident itself. Three of the factors (i.e., pervasive presence, lack of recourse, and stigma of reporting police violence) pertain more to the time following an exposure to violence, and therefore may have an effect on mental health by impeding coping and recovery. Finally, police culture, in combination with the proliferation of firearms in the US general population and the American legacy of racism, 24 may have an impact on the overall likelihood or prevalence of police violence. 40 Future studies can confirm whether these pathways provide a feasible explanation for the link between police violence and mental health. It is our intention that this preliminary framework may be modified and updated as research evidence accumulates that may confirm or disconfirm these proposed pathways.

CONCLUSIONS AND NEXT STEPS

In this article, we aimed to determine whether it is reasonable to consider police violence exposure to be a unique risk factor for mental distress, independent and conceptually separable from other forms of violence, or whether such a distinction is unjustified and insufficiently parsimonious. We highlighted several features of police violence that may conceptually distinguish it from other forms of violence. For police violence to be considered effectively similar to other forms of violence exposure, regarding its impact on health, the net effect of these distinguishing features would need to sum to zero, or at least have a clinically insignificant effect. Albeit speculatively, we are confident in stating that this seems highly unlikely. There is now substantial and growing evidence that police violence exposure is associated with a broad range of mental health outcomes, independent of other forms of violence and stress exposure. To test the proposed model, subsequent studies will need to examine the mechanisms underlying this risk and map those mechanisms onto these proposed features of police violence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Leslie Salas-Hernández for contributing to the selective overview of recent studies on the mental health implications of police violence.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

HUMAN PARTICIPANT PROTECTION

Institutional approval was not required for this conceptual article, which did not directly involve human participants.

See also Alang, p. 1597 .

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Update 26 May 2021 : On 20 April 2021, Derek Chauvin was convicted of causing the death of George Floyd. The text has been modified to include updated information on how long Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

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Police, Violence, and Social Justice:

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Introduction

• Police, Violence, and Social Justice: A Call for Research and Introduction to the Special Issue Tricia Bent-Goodley, Christopher St. Vil, Carlos A. Cuevas, and Antonia Abbey
• Police–Community Relations, Excessive Force, and Community Stress: Evidence From a Community Survey Richard Stansfield
• Police Brutality, Heightened Vigilance, and the Mental Health of Black Adults Sirry Alang, Cortney VanHook, Jessica Judson, Adalia Ikiroma, and Paris B. Adkins-Jackson
• “Runs in the Family”: Fear of Police Violence and Separation Among Black Families in Central Alabama Lolita L. Kincade and Curtis A. Fox
• “Their Help Is Not Helping”: Policing as a Tool of Structural Violence Against Black Communities Monica L. Wendel, Gaberiel Jones Jr., Maury Nation, Tanisha Howard, Trinidad Jackson, Aishia A. Brown, Jelani Kerr, Monique Williams, Nicole Ford, and Ryan Combs
• “They Treat Us Like We Are Not Human”: Asylum Seekers and “La Migra’s” Violence Daniela G. Domínguez, Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, Monica A. Noriega, Dellanira García, and David A. Martínez
• Trauma Exposure and Trauma Symptoms as Predictors of Police Perceptions in Latinx Youths Amanda Venta, Germán Cadenas, Alfonso Mercado, Luz M. Garcini, and Melanie M. Domenech Rodríguez
• The College Shield: Examining the Role of Officer Education in Violent Police Encounters Thaddeus L. Johnson, Natasha N. Johnson, and Eric L. Sevigny
• Improving Relations Between Police and African American Neighborhoods: A Positive Deviance Approach Betty L. Wilson and Terry A. Wolfer
• White Americans’ Belief in Systemic Racial Injustice and In-Group Identification Affect Reactions to (Peaceful vs. Destructive) “Black Lives Matter” Protest Cátia P. Teixeira, Colin Wayne Leach, and Russell Spears
• Where Do Black Lives Matter? Coloniality, Police Violence, and Epistemic Injustices During the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Africa and the U.S. Suntosh Rathanam Pillay
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Protecting Against Police Brutality and Official Misconduct

Amendments to the criminal civil rights law could provide the federal government with a powerful tool to pursue law enforcement accountability.

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The protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing last year has forced a nationwide reckoning with a wide range of deep-rooted racial inequities — in our economy, in health care, in education, and even in our democracy — that undermine the American promise of freedom and justice for all. That tragic incident provoked widespread demonstrations and stirred strong emotions from people across our nation.

While our state and local governments wrestle with how to reimagine relationships between police and the communities they serve, the Justice Department has long been hamstrung in its ability to mete out justice when people’s civil rights are violated.

The Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction made it a federal crime to deprive someone of their constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity, a provision now known as Section 242. Today, when state or local law enforcement are accused of misconduct, the federal government is often seen as the best avenue for justice — to conduct a neutral investigation and to serve as a backstop when state or local investigations falter. I’m proud that the Justice Department pursued more Section 242 cases under my leadership than under any other attorney general before or since.

But due to Section 242’s vague wording and a series of Supreme Court decisions that raised the standard of proof needed for a civil rights violation, it’s often difficult for federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement accountable using this statute.

This timely report outlines changes to Section 242 that would clarify its scope, making it easier to bring cases and win convictions for civil rights violations of these kinds. Changing the law would allow for charges in cases where prosecutors might currently conclude that the standard of proof cannot be met. Perhaps more important, it attempts to deter potential future misconduct by acting as a nationwide reminder to law enforcement and other public officials of the constitutional limits on their authority.

The statutory changes recommended in this proposal are carefully designed to better protect civil rights that are already recognized. And because Black, Latino, and Native Americans are disproportionately victimized by the kinds of official misconduct the proposal addresses, these changes would advance racial justice.

This proposal would also help ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. I have immense regard for the vital role that police play in all of America’s communities and for the sacrifices that they and their families are too often called to make on behalf of their country. It is in great part for their sake — and for their safety — that we must seek to build trust in all communities.

We need to send a clear message that the Constitution and laws of the United States prohibit public officials from engaging in excessive force, sexual misconduct, and deprivation of needed medical care. This proposal will better allow the Justice Department to pursue justice in every appropriate case, across the country.

Eric H. Holder Jr. Eighty-Second Attorney General of the United States

Introduction

Excessive use of force by law enforcement, sexual abuse by public officials and others in positions of authority, and the denial of needed medical care to people in police or correctional custody undermine the rule of law, our government, and our systems of justice.

When public officials engage in misconduct, people expect justice, often in the form of a federal investigation and criminal prosecution. In 2020 alone, instances of police violence, including the killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake, led to demands for increased police accountability and federal civil rights investigations. footnote1_y31Hwtza1aNz 1 See Rashawn Ray, “How Can We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States?,” in Policy 2020 , Brookings Institution, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-can-we-enhance-police-accountability-in-the-united-states/ [ https://perma.cc/8Z9S-GRCU ]; and Elliot C. McLaughlin, “Breonna Taylor Investigations Are Far from Over as Demands for Transparency Mount,” CNN, September 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/24/us/breonna-taylor-investigations-remaining/index.html [ https://perma.cc/4SR6-FG85 ]. See also, e.g., U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, “Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement Statement on the Death of George Floyd and Riots,” press release, May 31, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/federal-state-and-local-law-enforcement-statement-death-george-floyd-and-riots [ https://perma.cc/V69J-49JR ]; and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, “Statement Regarding Federal Civil Rights Investigation into Shooting of Mr. Jacob Blake,” press release, January 5, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edwi/pr/statement-regarding-federal-civil-rights-investigation-shooting-mr-jacob-blake [ https://perma.cc/5GCM-WJ7H ].

For almost all incidents involving violence by law enforcement, there is one federal criminal law that applies: 18 U.S.C. § 242. Unlike nearly all other criminal laws, the statute does not clearly define what conduct is a criminal act. It describes the circumstances under which a person, acting with the authority of government, can be held criminally responsible for violating someone’s constitutional rights, but it does not make clear to officials what particular actions they cannot take. footnote2_uUaQ6ECgdPYd 2 Throughout this report, people who could be charged under § 242 are most often referred to as “public officials” or “law enforcement.” The Supreme Court has held, however, that § 242 may also be used to prosecute private actors whose authority to act in a given situation is derived from the state, such as a guard at a privately run prison. United States v. Price, 383 U.S. 787, 794 (1966), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/383/787.html [ https://perma.cc/V6FU-ZQR6 ] (“To act ‘under color’ of law does not require that the accused be an officer of the State. It is enough that he is a willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents.”).

It need not be this way. The federal government must renew our national commitment to civil rights by enacting a criminal statutory framework that protects the fundamental constitutional rights of people who come into contact with public officials, including those who are being arrested or are in custody. footnote3_gXES4XXoHHj1 3 This report proposes changes to federal criminal civil rights laws that would apply to any public official who is acting with governmental authority, including police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officials, and more. Even though the law would apply to any public official who violated it, this report frequently uses the term “law enforcement” or “police” instead of “public officials” in discussions of violence and use of force since law enforcement officers — including police, correctional officials, sheriffs and their deputies, and federal agents — are the public officials most frequently involved in these incidents.

Recent instances of racialized police violence have made this matter all the more urgent. In 2020 alone, police killed more than 1,100 people. footnote4_zPIRz2FUAVVR 4 Mapping Police Violence, last accessed February 5, 2021, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ . Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans and nearly twice as likely to be killed as Latino Americans. footnote5_i5d7Ubk4lQ90 5 Mapping Police Violence. See also Timothy Williams, “Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks,” New York Times , July 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/study-supports-suspicion-that-police-use-of-force-is-more-likely-for-blacks.html (“African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.”). Police killing is a leading cause of death for Black men in the United States — one in every 1,000 Black men will die at the hands of police. footnote6_b51y93v8DkNc 6 Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no.34 (2019): 16793, 16794, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/34/16793.full.pdf [ https://perma.cc/8W88-XWR9 ]. In 2019, Black people represented 24 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population, and although Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by the police than white people, they are 1.3 times more likely than whites to be unarmed in such incidents. footnote7_xrQ1WKnVBaIt 7 Mapping Police Violence. These disparities have led unprecedented numbers of Americans to demand justice for victims of police violence and changes to our criminal justice system. footnote8_taYDLfkwZGhx 8 Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “Widespread Desire for Policing and Criminal Justice Reform,” June 15, 2020, https://apnorc.org/projects/widespread-desire-for-policing-and-criminal-justice-reform/ [ https://perma.cc/HYU2–8J9R ].

In addition to law enforcement brutality, other types of official misconduct shock the conscience. These include sexual misconduct by public officials; officials’ failure to provide medical treatment to people who are under arrest or in jail or prison; and pervasive violence by correctional officers in jails and prisons, where excessive force against incarcerated people is often shielded from public view. footnote9_dJTzkFnKKAkV 9 Lauren Brooke-Eisen, “The Violence Against People Behind Bars That We Don’t See,” Time , September 1, 2020, https://time.com/5884104/prison-violence-dont-see/ [ https://perma.cc/GLP4-Y9XP ]. The “shocks the conscience” standard is the long-established test for a Fourteenth Amendment violation under Rochin v. California , 342 U.S. 165 (1952), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/342/165 [ https://perma.cc/ZJ6S-UEDZ ]. Yet cases are rarely prosecuted under § 242. footnote10_dXjtpIkOuMZh 10 TRAC Reports, “Police Officers Rarely Charged for Excessive Use of Force in Federal Court,” June 17, 2020, https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/615/ [ https://perma.cc/9LTD-VN9N ] (reporting that “between 1990 and 2019, federal prosecutors filed § 242 charges about 41 times per year on average, with as few as 19 times (2005) and as many as 67 times in one year”). See also U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Highlights: 2009–2017 , January 2017, 32–34, https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/923096/download [ https://perma.cc/Q3Y3-FQCB ] (reporting that the Civil Rights Division prosecuted 580 law enforcement officials for committing willful violations of civil rights and related crimes between 2009 and 2016); Brian R. Johnson and Phillip B. Bridgmon, “Depriving Civil Rights: An Exploration of 18 U.S.C. 242 Criminal Prosecutions 2001–2006,” Criminal Justice Law Review 34, no. 2 (2009), 196, 204 (observing that prosecutions under § 242 are a relatively rare event, and identifying a very small number of sexual misconduct cases); and Paul J. Watford, “ Screws v. United States and the Birth of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement,” Marquette Law Review 98, no. 1 (2014), 465, 483, https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5229&context=mulr [ https://perma.cc/737F-XGW4 ].

Congress should make structural changes to our laws to help protect the civil rights of all people. If passed, the legislation recommended in this report would impact how law enforcement, corrections, and other public officials operate nationwide. By more specifically defining what actions violate civil rights, the law would put officials on clearer notice of what is forbidden. In addition, the proposed statute would specifically codify the authority to prosecute fellow officers or supervisors who know a civil rights violation is occurring but fail to intervene something the law already allows. footnote11_nafUMUfCNmPL 11 See U.S. Department of Justice, “Law Enforcement Misconduct,” updated July 6, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/crt/law-enforcement-misconduct [ https://perma.cc/LW5V-HZ8G ] (“An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim’s Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation. To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so. This charge is often appropriate for supervisory officers who observe uses of excessive force without stopping them, or who actively encourage uses of excessive force but do not directly participate in them.”). These changes to § 242 should result in modifications to police and law enforcement training across the country and also deter civil rights violations. footnote12_yOifeDp4YQf4 12 Local law enforcement policies often provide vague, imprecise direction on use of force. These policies may focus on the extent of what is legally permitted rather than on best practices. Police Executive Research Forum, Guiding Principles on Use of Force , 2016, 15–16, https://www.policeforum.org/assets/30%20guiding%20principles.pdf [ https://perma.cc/AQ5S-3Q5F ]. For those public officials and law enforcement officers who do deprive someone of his or her civil rights, these changes would lower some of the barriers to federal prosecutions and civil lawsuits. footnote13_qDu7qiHtK3rW 13 The amendments proposed herein could also be made to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, although the specifics of § 1983 are beyond the scope of this report. In either event, a clarification of the civil rights protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States would make more plain which rights are “clearly established” in the context of civil lawsuits. See discussion of qualified immunity below at notes 47–49 and in accompanying text.

What It’s Going to Take to Fix Policing

The former director of President Obama’s community oriented policing strategies office warns that incremental reforms will not be enough.

Biden’s Budget Steps up Spending for Criminal Justice Reform

The administration is leveraging Justice Department grants to state and local governments to try to improve outcomes.

What the Federal Government Can Do to Help Fix Policing in America

Policing is local, but the need for change is so vast that it is a national project.

Informed citizens are democracy’s best defense

Police Institutions and Police Abuse: Evidence from the US

148 Pages Posted: 6 Oct 2018 Last revised: 11 Jan 2019

University of Oxford

Date Written: April 23, 2018

What can explain variation in police abuse across America’s largest enforcement agencies? This question is salient given the media attention and the investigations conducted by the US Department of Justice finding problems of accountability and transparency in America’s policing apparatus. Situating itself on the intersection between public-sector union, special interest group, American politics, and criminology literature, this thesis argues that police union mechanisms, specifically police protections, can explain variation in police abuse. The study employs an originally constructed index of police protections comprised of police union contract and Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights (LEOBR) provisions. First, I find a positive and significant relationship between police abuse and police protections. Second, while local-level ideology has no influence on the ability of unions to create police protections, state-level ideology vis-à-vis state labour laws hinder the ability of unions to create police protections. Finally, to address alternative explanations for continued abuse, I present a paired, qualitative case study of Chicago, IL, and Dallas, TX. I demonstrate the importance of labour histories and minority law enforcement unions for creating better policing outcomes.

Keywords: criminology, American politics, public-sector union, special interest group, policing, criminal justice

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Abdul Rad (Contact Author)

Oxford United Kingdom

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Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

• An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

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This paper explores racial differences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force –officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

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Transforming Police Reform: Global Experiences through a Multidisciplinary Lens

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Tessa Diphoorn, Brianne McGonigle Leyh, Luuk Slooter, Transforming Police Reform: Global Experiences through a Multidisciplinary Lens, Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice , Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2021, Pages 340–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/police/paab009

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‘We demand real transformation now. Transformation that will hold law enforcement accountable for the violence they inflict, transformation of this racist system that breeds corruption, and transformation that ensures our people are not left behind’ ( Black Lives Matter, 2020 ).

Weekly news reports from around the world tell of unrest between individuals, communities, and police officers. Although such hostile interactions are not a new phenomenon, recent events have heightened their public awareness and global presence. This is largely due to the scope and impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a social movement founded in 2013 as a response to the death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager ( Bonilla and Jonathan, 2015 ; Chernega, 2016 ; Crusto, 2020 ; Parsons et al. , 2021 ). The BLM-protests gained further momentum after George Floyd’s death in May 2020, yet another unarmed Black male killed by the police. A video showed four police officers detaining him, while he was handcuffed and pinned on the ground, face down and begging for his life and telling the cops: ‘I can’t breathe’. The footage went viral and resulted in (non)violent protests across the USA and spread to cities around the world, making it the most broad-based civil rights movement in US history ( Ralph, 2020 ; Parsons et al. , 2021 ).

In addition to shining a light on the disproportionate use of force against people of colour, the BLM movement has highlighted the institutional and structural racism shaping such acts, thereby reaffirming existing understandings that police behaviour and practices are shaped mainly by larger societal structures and conditions. As the quote above demonstrates, this has prompted a rethinking of the role of the police in society from the ground up and has resulted in many demands to defund, dismantle, or abolish police departments (see McDowell and Fernandez, 2018 ; Ralph, 2020 ; Rushin and Roger, 2020 ). For some, abolitionism entails the literal end of traditional police institutions—with its funding withdrawn and infrastructures dissolved. For others, it serves as an aspirational vision, involving a possibility to think of public safety outside of punitive security logics and apparatuses. Instead of technocratic fixes of policy experts, ‘defund’ and ‘abolish’ calls centre on demands of grassroots activists and social movements, and essentially, are about devolving responsibility for public safety to local communities. Calls for ‘de-funding’ have been further problematized by counter-voices, such as grassroots activists and social movements” ( Akarsu 2020 ), and essentially, are about devolving responsibility for public safety to local communities. Calls for ‘defunding’ have been further problematized by counter-voices, such as ‘Blue Lives Matter’ and ‘All Lives Matter’ (see Lynch, 2018 ; Solomon and Martin, 2019 ; Mason, 2020 ), further testifying the multiplicity of perspectives on what policing should and can be.

In this special issue, which draws on papers largely written before the 2020 events, we argue that policing practices should be studied critically and that reform needs to be considered through a transformative lens that employs a multi-agency and long-term approach. As the global experiences touched upon in this special issue show, the quest towards better policing (and whatever that may be) is a difficult and confrontational challenge, but one that needs to be faced. Although demands for transformative police reform has grown, the responses aimed at true transformation remain limited.

The urgent need to better understand and address policing is further evidenced by the wide array of academic disciplines and fields of scholarship tackling the subject. From anthropology to conflict studies to law and beyond, scholars and practitioners are continuously trying to analyse and bring about positive change in relationships between police and citizens. Yet despite the diversity of interdisciplinary insights into police reform initiatives across the globe, the question of how to establish effective, legitimate, and accountable, policing remains elusive. It is this question that this issue primarily addresses.

In many police reform initiatives, the emphasis is often placed upon top-down institutional changes. This is particularly so for post-conflict settings, where institutional changes are prioritized, often through revamping former institutions or creating entirely new ones, as a way of breaking with the ‘old’ and creating something ‘new’ ( Bayley, 2005 ; Goldsmith, 2005 ; Glebbeek, 2009 ; Hornberger, 2011 ; Ellison and Nathan, 2012 ; Brunger, 2012 ; Parsons et al. , 2021 ). Although such efforts are crucial, research also validates that institutional reform is not sufficient in transforming particular structural dimensions and that many efforts implemented ‘from above’ do not necessarily trickle down into the communities that are policed. Rather, a combined approach, which aims to fuse both top-down and bottom-up efforts, is now considered important in transforming mind-sets. Yet, this dual approach is much more difficult to implement and translate into tangible policies ( Marks and Sklansky, 2012 ).

A similar concern has been identified in the fields of peacebuilding and transitional justice, where research has shown that judicial and legal changes at the state level do not suffice in bringing about justice to victims of violence, facilitating sustainable reform, or ensuring guarantees of non-recurrence of violence ( Mihr, 2014 ). As a result, several scholars from these fields begun arguing for transformative justice following a conflict, emphasizing a combined approach that is more inclusive, community-based, and that aims to address the causes and structures of violence and not just the symptoms ( Lambourne, 2008 ; Gready and Robins, 2014 ). While these underlying principles of transformation have been broadly embraced within the fields of peacebuilding and transitional justice ( Special Rapporteur Report, 2017 ), more empirical research on specific areas of transformative reform are needed.

We therefore decided to align these two rather distinctive strands of research—police reform and transformative justice—and investigate whether and how the underlying notions of transformative justice can help to analyse police reform efforts more generally. Intrigued by the developments taking part in each other’s fields, we set about bringing together experts from around the world who work on issues of police violence, transformation, guarantees of non-repetition, and police reform, from both a theoretical and more practical, case-based approach. In November 2018, we organized an expert seminar in Utrecht (the Netherlands) on these topics and this special issue is the result of the discussions held.

Combined, all of the papers in this special issue highlight the problematic nature of police reform, both conceptually and practically. They discuss and reveal the disturbing relationships between citizens and the police across the globe. Empirically, they draw on a very diverse set of case-studies, including France, Kenya, South Africa, the South Pacific, Trinidad and Tobago, and the USA. Our objective for this special issue, however, is not to arrive at a global model or a universal blueprint for transformative police reform. We are well aware of the fact that policing in one society may be very different from policing in another society; and that transformative police reform in one context may require a radically different approach from police reforms in another context. In fact, as argued by some of the authors, the portability of concepts and the exporting of ‘models of policing’ from the ‘Global North’ to the ‘South’ may be one of the fundamental problems in our thinking about and implementation of police reforms. Nevertheless, by combining and integrating theoretical perspectives from various disciplines (on transformative justice and police reforms) and by comparing and contrasting a wide range of empirical case studies across the globe, we argue that we can identify a number of analytical and practical insights to arrive at a better understanding and ways to improve the troubled relationship between police and citizens.

Transforming our understanding of reform

We have identified three important and interrelated shifts that define our transformative police reform agenda. The first two are analytical shifts. The first concerns a focus from police to policing , thereby foregrounding police practices as well as the multiplicity of involved actors and the power relations between them. In relation to this, the second analytical shift entails moving towards a more holistic/systemic approach, paying attention to the interplay between structural forms of violence, police violence, and (violent) contestation by individuals. The third shift is more normative of nature and involves moving towards longer term transformative policing goals. This shift includes the main aspects of transformative theories more generally, namely a combined top-down/bottom-up approach, that is more inclusive and community-oriented, and that focuses on eradicating the structural causes of violence.

The first shift from police to policing entails incorporating a processual and multiagency approach to policing. Within the policing literature (largely criminology and sociology-based and driven), a sort of consensus has established that policing is ‘a social process that is executed by a range of actors in order to maintain a particular social order’ ( Diphoorn, 2016 , p. 13). This entails that policing consists of a range of everyday practices: it is thus not a static or isolated event, but is performed habitually and shaped by a range of social forces. Moreover, policing is not an activity reserved for the state police, as has often traditionally been defined. Rather, a range of actors are engaged in maintaining social order and policing is thus best analysed as a myriad of actors that constitute a ‘policing web’ ( Brodeur, 2010 ). In fact, in many parts of the world, non-state actors, such as citizen-based groups, private security firms, and NGOs, play a more decisive role in shaping everyday security, whether by choice or by force (see Jones and Newburn, 2006 ; Baker, 2010 ; Albrecht and Kyed, 2015 ; Diphoorn and Grassiani, 2019 ).

For police reform efforts, this shift explicitly employs a multiagency approach that includes these various actors, rather than exclude them. Although this has been identified in many reform efforts, police reform programmes tend to rely or fall back on state-centric approaches ( Albrecht and Buur, 2009 ). As a result, complex power dynamics among security providers are overlooked or disregarded and this obstructs any meaningful discussion of policing transformation, and this clearly emerges in this issue’s contributions provided by Julie Berg and Tessa Diphoorn and Naomi van Stapele.

The second shift centres around the importance of employing a holistic approach that addresses larger structures of violence. In thinking about transformative police reform, it is crucial not only to focus on a variety of policing actors and their practices, but also to zoom out and critically study how problematic policing actors and practices are ingrained in larger undemocratic, unequal, or violent structures in society. It means to take account of the context in which policing unfolds, to analyse how these contexts contribute to the (re)production of certain forms of policing, and enable certain roles for both police officers and victims of police brutality. It would be too simplistic to ‘just’ blame a police officer (or the police in general) for what happened to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, and many others in the USA. The foundations of the problematic, hostile, and sometimes violent relationship between citizens and police across the globe are multi-layered and are deeply rooted within societies. They go beyond a single ‘sadist’ police officer and idea of the ‘rotten apple’ and the structures of a malfunctioning police organization or security sector alone. Such a holistic approach also reveals why certain political, socio-economic, and cultural contexts hamper, obstruct, or limit well-intended police reform initiatives. This may also mean that some of the transformations that are needed for more effective, legitimate, and accountable policing are well beyond the scope of reformers within police organizations. Nevertheless, it is important to study how their efforts fit in a larger diagnosis of the problem. While all of the contributions in this special issue, in one way or another, share this holistic and context-sensitive approach, it is most explicitly addressed in the contributions by Sinclair Dinnen and Danielle Watson, Padraig McAuliffe, and Luuk Slooter.

Importantly, the first two shifts predominantly focus on the analysis of the phenomenon (diagnosis: what is the problem? why is reform needed?) and contribute to new analytical vocabularies to understand and explain the troubled relationships between citizens and policing actors across the globe. The third shift has a more normative character and contributes to effective, accountable, and context-sensitive models of policing (solutions: what needs to be done/changed and how should this be done?). It centres around a long-term approach, one that emphasizes that transformative policing requires a shift towards longer term goals and objectives, rather than small incremental positive changes (which can easily go backward). Reform policies are not static, but are constantly in flux and need to consistently be revisited. Practically, this may mean that a short-term reform programme, with no follow up, will not suffice to ensure effective, legitimate, and accountable policing. This means that a one-off training programme or one-time accountability process will not meet the demands that transformative policing requires. Rather, efforts must be much more long-term focused and emphasize sustainable initiatives and this clearly surfaces in the contributions by Kami Chavis, Brianne McGonigle Leyh, and Nathan Pino.

However, as the articles in this special issue show, immediate and short-term prevention strategies and reforms are often not only demanded by local communities, but they are regularly the only types of actions that get political support. This is because, politically, longer-term planning remains problematic, yet are crucial in order to address structural forms of violence, injustice, and inequalities. The challenge lies with finding a balance between the implementation of instantaneous strategies to enhance (perceptions of) safety for individuals, and to simultaneously tackle societal, political, and economic structures that set the foundation for conflict and contestation between police officers and individuals. The authors in this special issue all note the challenges of sustaining political will to support transformative reforms and working together with affected communities to implement shared visions of reform.

Combined, this special issue aims to posit a perspective that rather than solely thinking about transformative policing, we perhaps need to transform our ideas of police reform and policing more broadly. This supports much of the thinking proposed by Alex Vitale (2017) in his provocative book The End of Policing , wherein he argues that police trainings, methods, or formations are not the problem, but that, ‘the problem is policing itself’ and that we need to reconfigure our ideas of what policing actually is and who is responsible for it. The author calls for a change of culture of the police: ‘so that it is no longer obsessed with the use of threats and violence to control the poor and socially marginal’ (p. 205).

We concur with the need to both conceptually think differently about what policing is, and practically, to further discuss how this can shape police reform efforts. In this issue, we do not promise to provide final answers to this fundamental shift in how we see policing, yet each of the contributions does highlight how and where we need to transform our ideas on police reform.

The first two articles included in this special edition are written by legal scholars from the peacebuilding and transitional justice fields. They examine how the theories behind transformative justice/reform and actions seen as guarantees of non-repetition can be useful, or not, when approaching police and security sector reform.

Despite the compelling call of transformative police reform, Padraig McAuliffe emphasizes the ‘tremendous idealism’ reflected in scholarship around transformative theories. McAuliffe outlines a conceptual–contextual gap in policebuilding, pin-pointing three main barriers to transformation: (i) the necessary preoccupation with and diversion of resources to technical reform, (ii) the need to deal with immediate post-conflict security needs, and (iii) a political economy that does not support the type of responsive, socially democratic culture where transformative policebuilding becomes feasible. Each of these barriers touch upon the shifts mentioned above and combined, he calls for a much-needed realistic understanding that takes political considerations into account.

Primarily focusing on the third-shift above, Brianne McGonigle Leyh provides a normative and theoretical framework through which police and other actors can view and carry out reform efforts. She demonstrates how the frame of ‘guarantees of non-repetition’ could offer the possibility of shifting the rhetoric to focus on state obligations to victims and society. Because guarantees of non-repetition are based on international human rights standards and designed, operationally, to promote and protect human rights, states are seen as duty-bearers obliged to ensure that individual rights are respected and remedied if there is a violation. Under this framework, states must exercise their due diligence to respect, protect, and fulfil human rights. The due diligence obligations require states to take actions to address specific risk factors associated with police violence identified through cooperative networks. This frame of attaching obligations with actions to states has the potential to underpin transformative reforms; ones that address structural causes of police violence or inaction.

The remaining articles in the special issue each tackle an empirical case study, exploring the three shifts identified above. The first case-study takes us to Trinidad and Tobago, where Nathan Pino explores the numerous challenges the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service face, despite multiple evaluations and efforts at reform. In addition to economic and political problems, the police service, in some ways, maintains its traditional colonial style and is rife with systemic corruption, excessive use of force, and resistance to oversight. Local NGOs have been largely left out of police reform processes, in spite of their local knowledge and social capital. Pino portrays that transformative police reforms will only sustain with long-term and serious commitment to reform that is led by local actors that initiate local solutions democratically while ensuring the genuine involvement of local CBOs, women, and other traditionally marginalized groups.

Making similar claims based on a different region, Sinclair Dinnen and Danielle Watson show how the dialogue on reform in Pacific island countries (PICs) centres around organizational transformation, capacity development, and contextual appropriation. Through their analysis of police reform in various PICs, the authors highlight the realities specific to small island territories that are often overlooked when transposing first-world policy philosophies and solutions. They identify various misbalances between internal and external transformation agendas and thereby stress that the contrasting views often held between those who are being policed versus those who design and create policing agendas and programmes. In doing so, they highlight that all police reform efforts need to demonstrate flexibility, reflexivity, and adaptability and recognize that there are different understandings and expectations of what policing is.

The existence of various understandings of policing also clearly emerges in the case study of Kenya provided by Tessa Diphoorn and Naomi van Stapele. In this contribution, they focus on the Kenyan state’s attempts to transform towards ‘people-centred policing’ in order to (re)establish confidence and legitimacy in policing and foster relationships of trust between police and communities. The authors discuss the prevalence of community policing practices in Kenya and argue that many of these initiatives have largely failed to act as a vehicle for transformation due to three interconnected problems of diversity, representation, and ownership. By drawing from a case in Likoni, Mombasa, the authors show how community policing, and other efforts at reform, operates within a state-centric framework that hinders any progress towards transforming the police.

This state-centric framework is also addressed in Julie Berg’s critical analysis of the challenges of police reform in South Africa. Berg explores how legitimacy is constituted among state and non-state actors in a highly pluralized context of limited statehood and the implications that this has for policing reform. In particular, Berg explores the means by which the legitimacy of the state and non-state is relational, co-produced, and co-dependent by focusing on two components of legitimacy: effectiveness and accountability. By doing so, she urges for an alternative framing that takes on a more pluralized approach.

In addition to recognizing plurality, the following article by Kami Chavis focuses on the role of technological advancements in law enforcement in the USA. Chavis discusses the implementation of various technological advances, such as predictive policing, gunshot fire detection systems (ShotSpotter), and body-worn police cameras, and how they were intended to enhance police accountability and public safety. Yet, despite these good intentions, many of these technological tools have created a new set of issues and unintended consequences, such as communities experiencing this as increased surveillance and control, thereby furthering deteriorating trust between police officers and citizens and the legitimacy of the state police. Taken together, her paper highlights that changes, whether based on the introduction of new tools or the implementation of new programmes, must be centred around both community consent and participation.

The centrality of community consent is also imperative to Luuk Slooter’s analysis of urban uprisings in Paris (2005), London (2011), and Ferguson (2014). While these episodes are often portrayed as ‘apolitical’ and ‘criminal’ in media and political debates, they are in the academic literature predominantly seen as (unarticulated) forms of political protests against structural inequalities. Building on this political perspective, Slooter argues that the interplay between structural, police, and ‘private’ violence is at the core of these urban uprisings. Moreover, Slooter identifies four ingredients that, when combined, often lead to the eruption of collective urban violence. These include (1) an emotive and symbolically significant incident, often with a young inhabitant of a marginalized neighbourhood as protagonist; (2) police involvement; (3) unclarity and pre-violence rumours; and (4) pre-existing us-them divides. In the conclusion, he points to some of the crucial aspects in police reforms and important steps on the pathway towards guarantees of non-recurrence.

Through both theoretical and empirical contributions, we hope that this special issue triggers important conversations about transforming the problematic relationship between citizens and policing actors around the globe. In these times, full of insecurities, it is important to look ahead, whatever the future holds. The need to better understand the troubled relationship between police and individuals will contribute to the ongoing process of police reform. Perhaps it is useful to remember that the institutionalized idea of a police body, as we currently know it, is a recent development ( Chazkel et al. , 2020 , p. 3). Yet for many of us, it is nearly unthinkable to imagine a world without police. However, the recent developments call for the need to re-look at police reform projects, which are more pressing than ever. As the recent debates highlight: it is not only imperative that we transform policing, but that we ourselves need to transform some of our assumptions about what and who the police are.

We would like to thank Utrecht University’s Culture, Citizenship, and Human Rights (CCHR) Focus Area and Centre for Global Challenges for their financial support. This funding allowed us to organise an expert seminar on transformative policing in Utrecht in November 2018. This seminar set the foundation for this Special Issue. We are grateful to all of the participants for their contributions. We also want to thank our research assistant Javina Bijl for her work on this introduction.

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Diverse Intimate Partner Violence Survivors' Experiences Seeking Help from the Police: A Qualitative Research Synthesis

Affiliations.

• 1 Boise State University, ID, USA.
• 2 Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA.
• 3 University of Houston-Downtown, TX, USA.
• 4 Department of the Air Force, Washington, D.C, USA.
• PMID: 39150320
• DOI: 10.1177/15248380241270083

Intimate partner violence (IPV), inclusive of all forms of abuse, is an ongoing public health and criminal-legal issue that transcends social boundaries. However, there is a lack of equitable representation of diverse populations who experience IPV in the literature. To garner a holistic knowledge of diverse IPV survivor populations' experiences with seeking help from the police, the current review utilized a qualitative research synthesis methodology to explore police interactions among six IPV survivor populations that are underrepresented in the current literature: women with substance use issues, immigrant women, women in rural localities, heterosexual men, racially/ethnically minoritized women, and sexual minority women. Seven electronic databases were searched to identify peer-reviewed articles on IPV survivors' narrative descriptions (qualitative or mixed-methods) of their encounters with law enforcement. The final analysis included 28 studies that were then coded with an iterative coding strategy. The analysis uncovered the following themes: (a) revictimization by the police, (b) police negligence, (c) discrimination, (d) cultural differences, and (e) positive experiences. These themes demonstrated that while some experiences with law enforcement were shared between under-researched survivor groups, some experiences were explicitly tied to some aspects of survivors' identities. Recognizing the potential law enforcement has to support survivors, the findings of the current review reiterate the need for ongoing efforts to improve law enforcement knowledge and overall response to IPV, especially for diverse populations of IPV survivors.

Keywords: diverse populations; domestic violence; help-seeking; intimate partner violence; police response; qualitative synthesis; survivor experiences.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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