Bad lieutenants: Off-duty police misconduct and accountability

Abstract

Police officers are granted wide discretionary powers of detention and the use of force. These powers are granted ostensibly out of necessity, so that officers may ensure public safety and maintain law and order. But no other arm of the state bureaucracy elicits as much controversy as the police; frequent revelations of police abuse have prompted long-standing debates about how to identify and mitigate misconduct. There is considerable variation in how states limit and oversee police powers. In this article, I examine one type of variation: the distinction between on-duty vs off-duty misconduct. Some countries restrict police oversight mechanisms to on-duty behavior, whereas oversight in other countries is understood to encompass even off-duty behavior. Although there is a growing literature on police accountability mechanisms, there is no research that addresses whether off-duty abuses of power are covered by these mechanisms. This article addresses this gap by mapping the scope of oversight bodies in 14 economically developed democracies. The data show that approximately 35% of the countries restrict oversight to on-duty activities, whereas 65% of the countries apply a universal approach to oversight by also receiving complaints about off-duty behavior. The article concludes by discussing the implications of off-duty misconduct for how societies understand and regulate abuse of power by the police.