Police Attitudes to Misconduct Oversight: A Survey Experiment on US Police Officers

The topic of police misconduct has featured prominently in the US media for the past decade. Activists, scholars, and policy-makers have proposed ways to prevent misconduct, but there is little research which speaks to what approach is most effective. In this project, we focus on misconduct oversight institutions, bodies that exist to address complaints about police. Importantly, we know very little about how officers themselves feel about institutional oversight and whether it affects their behavior. In the United States, these bodies vary widely across municipalities in terms of how they are designed and staffed. We leverage this variation in a survey experiment of police officers in California which is designed to gain insights into which institutional factors may have a deterrent effect.