Oversight and accountability in the United States

AnalysisThe two offices are worth putting side by side because they answer different questions, and confusing them is the commonest way to get American oversight wrong. One looks inward at a federal department. The other looks outward at police forces and institutions the federal government has no authority to run. Neither is a national police complaints body, and the United States does not have one.

Office of the Inspector General — inward, and departmental

The office describes itself as “a statutorily created independent entity” within the Department of Justice. Its head is “appointed by the President subject to Senate confirmation” and “reports to the Attorney General and Congress”. Its work is to detect and deter “waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct in the DOJ”, and its reach runs to “DOJ employees, operations, grantees, and contractors”. The dual reporting line is the institutional fact: an office that reported only to the department it examines would be a different kind of office.

Special Litigation Section, Civil Rights Division — outward, and civil

The section states that its work covers “the rights of people in state or local institutions, including: jails, prisons, juvenile detention facilities, and health care facilities for persons with disabilities”, and “the rights of people who interact with state or local police or sheriffs’ departments”. It names as the authorities it works under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (42 U.S.C. § 1997), the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (34 U.S.C. § 12601) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (42 U.S.C. § 2000cc). This is the mechanism by which a federal authority reaches a police department it does not employ, does not fund and cannot command.

AnalysisWhat this page cannot tell a reader is the thing most readers want to know: what happens to a complaint about a particular police officer. In the United States that depends on which of thousands of agencies employs the officer, which state they are in, and whether that city has a review board — and the answer is not federal. Saying so plainly is more useful than assembling a national picture out of the two federal offices that happen to have readable pages.

How this system compares with others on four structural questions about oversight — including how far each arrangement actually reaches — is set out in who watches the justice system, and how far they reach.