Officers judging complaints against officers makes official brutality appeals futile
Evidence
Appeals can also be discouraged by the high probability that they will not succeed. Allegations of police brutality are rarely made through official channels because of the conviction that they will not receive a sympathetic hearing from the officers who sit on the hearing boards. In Rochester, for example, where 102 complaints alleging “unnecessary force” were registered in the fiveto seven-year period after 1965, only two were upheld by the police internal inspection office; of the 368 alleging unnecessary force and other improper behavior, forty-six were sustained. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 995
Categorization
- SHARE: Precise Rochester numbers — 2 of 102 unnecessary-force complaints upheld — are the kind of niche statistic worth sending to one person obsessed with police accountability data.
- SEED: Possible essay angle: how self-policing review boards convert measurable complaints into statistically invisible ones, drawing on the Rochester audit years.
- XREF: connects to: Specialized complaint units let ordinary officers and hirers skip changing their attitudes. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1005; Prosecutor charging decisions retroactively endorse biased police conduct. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 548
Broader Connections
- Specialized complaint units let ordinary officers and hirers skip changing their attitudes.
#expands(0.85) — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1005 - Prosecutor charging decisions retroactively endorse biased police conduct.
#expands(0.80) — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 548