This paper applies the concept of bureaucratic representativeness to the demographic composition of contemporary local police forces to address the following four-part question: What effect does racial representativeness of police departments have on 1) citizens’ satisfaction with their police department, 2) citizens’ sense of public safety, 3) citizens’ satisfaction with their local government overall, and 4) citizens’ trust in government institutions.

Police-community relations in several European countries and the U.S. have been rocked in recent years with several high-profile incidents of citizens claiming police brutality or use of excessive force. Subsequent protests and riots around the country have highlighted increased community tensions between some segments of the communities and their police departments, as well as a general erosion of trust.

This paper measures the extent of this erosion and the extent to which it varies in the U.S. with the racial composition of a city’s police force relative to the racial composition of its population. The theory suggests that more demographically representative agencies may be better able to signal the policy interests of those who share these demographic characteristics.

This paper focuses on service outcomes: citizen satisfaction with police, sense of safety during the day and night, and trust in one’s local government. Trust is critical for citizens to work with police and co-produce their own safety.

The paper presents results from a series of models examining the representativeness of a police department’s uniformed officers on these outcomes, along with a series of individual level covariates. The dataset includes the demographic characteristics of police for all the client communities of Polco, Inc.. In turn, Polco has made available standardized citizen satisfaction data for over 500 cities for whom they have conducted the National Community Survey. The results may suggest actionable personnel changes by police that could improve citizen satisfaction, sense of safety, and trust in local government and police.

Learning Objective 1: Identify the extent of the erosion of trust and satisfaction tied the racial composition of a city’s police force relative to the racial composition of its population.

Learning Objective 2: Understand the connection of representativeness in the police force to a communities' sense of safety.

Learning Objective 3: The results suggest actionable personnel changes and resource reallocations by police that could improve citizen satisfaction, sense of safety, and trust in local government.

Empirical work exploring and explaining learning accountability in public service contexts remains embryonic, especially for pressures brought by individuals through formal accountability channels. This paper seeks to identify and test organizational conditions for learning in the context of English and Welsh policing. I examine workforce diversity as a potential learning condition in particular detail. A qualitative-to-quantitative mixed methods approach draws on 42 semi-structured interviews with police leaders, officers and staff to interpret themes in how organizational learning from public challenges happens or fails to happen, and in responses to questions eliciting perceptions of organizational culture in terms of candor and workplace diversity relations.

A novel learning condition emerges from the data as “lesson salience and integrity”, referring to the gap between organizational action and cognition and the barrier perceived to exist in turning new ‘knowledge’ into action when those who must implement new knowledge –street-level officers– have no or limited involvement in interpretive or institutionalizing processes which mandate a new approach or rule. I argue this condition reflects a fundamental feature of learning accountability, where investigation for misconduct-identifying purposes necessarily drives a wedge between action and cognition. Interpretation of the relationship between workforce social diversity and learning from public challenges develops a picture which is part social-psychological and part-political. Focusing on the political reading, where learning from public challenges has group-based dynamics in internal competition for organizational attention and resources, the quantitative phase tests hypotheses about a range of diversity-related learning conditions using an original panel data set on public complaints against police forces from 2011-2018 about a range of themes, from the racialized and gendered to more ‘universal’ complaint categories.

Statistical results show cautious support for a representative bureaucracy-style argument that police forces with higher shares of black officers and staff and women are likelier to ‘learn’ from complaints about stop and search and discriminatory behavior. Social group fractionalization is found to have a mitigating effect. Concentration of social groups in different parts of the organization was found to increase learning from complaint types disproportionately affecting minorities. Tentative support is found for the notion of organizational learning trade-offs between themes, but also for complementary learning themes. Exploring and offering tentative explanations for learning from public challenges contributes to the public accountability literature, but also to organizational learning. By exploring and testing conditions for learning from a class of pressures which represents contested or ambiguous claims, it enables elaboration of learning theory which has often focused on more ‘objective’ failures as stimuli.

In the context of current challenges to the legitimacy of policing, is seems appropriate to address not just the challenge of improving public trust but the more fundamental question of how to build the ‘trustworthiness’ of policing organisations. This requires the uncomfortable work of examining the organisational conditions that have allowed the trustworthiness of some elements of policing fail. A key process in this uncomfortable work is to look closely at how institutions come to ‘know’ about issues and failures, and yet come to not act on that knowledge in order to prevent the same failures replicating into the future.

A tool for understanding ignorance in organisations is the theory of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ as developed by Steve Raynor (2012). US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld famously spoke of ‘known unknowns’, ‘known knowns’ and ‘unknowns unknowns.’ Raynor notes that this typology leaves out a fourth quadrant comprising of ‘unknown knowns’: “the most intriguing combinations: what we don’t know we know” (ibid: 108). With this challenge, Raynor calls on us to look at those things that institutions ‘know’ to be true, but where that knowledge has either not been smoothly assimilated throughout an organisation, or where it is ignored in daily practical action (where it is known intellectually, but not in practice). In Raynor’s typology, there are four main ways in which organisations avoid uncomfortable knowledge. These are: 1) Denial: an outright inability or refusal to accept information contrary to the organisational narrative; 2) Dismissal: a recognition that there is information available that counteracts the organisational knowledge, whilst reasons are found to downplay or denigrate it; 3) Diversion: the construction of decoy activities, aimed to draw attention away from the uncomfortable subject; and 4) Displacement: where an organisation puts efforts into alternatives to effective action which may appear, on the surface, to address the uncomfortable subject, but are ultimately ineffective.

This research draws together findings from a currently ongoing piece of research that explores the value of the concept of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ in UK policing. We will explore where sites of avoidance of uncomfortable knowledge may be present in UK police forces, such as, for example: where forces engage in trade-offs between urgent operational requirements and longer term operational strategies and priorities; where forces place their middle leaders in a double-bind of contradictory pressures, making them the interface between day-to-day operational priorities and processes from above that are meant to drive change; where forces operate a punitive error culture that depresses mechanisms of change; and where forces engage in displacement activities (what the Casey report (Casey et al., 2023) identifies as “initiativeitis”) at the expense of activities that could fundamentally challenge police culture. Our research will also examine ways in which techniques from the so-called ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ (Boler and Zembylas, 2003; Head, 2020) could be used to help police practitioners to break down barriers between their organisations and the ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ contained therein.

The proposed paper aims at explaining the trend toward parliamentary ombudspersons in Germany. In particular, it sheds light on the policy diffusion of those civilian ombudspersons, who have a certain degree of oversight capabilities over the police. In doing so, the proposed paper analyzes the influence that political parties may have on the policy process and, especially, on the institutional design of such parliamentary ombudspersons.

The provision of public safety is one of the constitutive attributes of the modern state. This feature includes the protection of citizens from police malfeasance. As a matter of fact, over the past few years, police accountability has become an internationally prioritized interest in the societal, political, and academic discourse (Goldsmith and Lewis 2000; Finn 2001; Borgs-Maciejewski 2006; Den Boer and Fernhout 2008; Cooper 2012; Jackson 2012; Aden 2013/2017/2019; Byrne and Priestley 2017; Töpfer 2018; Holmberg 2019a/b). With this development in mind, various German states (“Länder”) have started to implement a certain model of watchdog, striving to enhance the citizen-state relationship (Bosch et al. 2022; Piening et al. 2022; Schröter and Ibrahim-Sauer 2022; Töpfer 2022). In hopes of achieving a high level of institutional independence, the ombudspersons are associated with the state parliament. Their main objective is to review potential misconduct of police officers, as predominantly brought to the ombudspersons’ attention by citizens or other police officers. To carry out that task, these small organizations are equipped with the competency to request pertinent information, convey investigation results to relevant authorities (prosecution, ministry of the interior, or senior police management), and mediate between the accuser and the accused. However, as they have been given no powers to sanction or even enforce their findings and subsequent recommendations, they hold less authority than sports referees.

By now, eight out of the sixteen Länder have decreed to install such positions. Additional states as well as the federal government are expected to follow this trend in the near future. Noticeably, each time the decision was made, liberal political parties–namely, the Green Party and/ or the Social Democratic Party of Germany–shared government responsibility. Furthermore, four incumbent ombudspersons are members of one of these parties. It flows from this that political parties do make a difference in the policy-making process. Hence, the proposed paper examines the policy inputs, conversion, and output (Easton 1957) relevant to the aforementioned type of parliamentary ombudspersons in Germany. Considering the influence of polity, the argument is eventually geared towards assessing the low degree of institutional capacity and impact on the improvement of police conduct.