Citizens’ engagement with police serves as a valuable resource. One particular form of citizen engagement—civil complaints—can impose a serious cost to the targeted police officer as well as the police department. To try to reduce the potential negative effects of a citizen complaint against law enforcement agents, other criminal justice actors could act to re-frame the encounter such that the optics look unfavorably on the complaining citizen. Since a defendant cannot seek monetary damages in civil court unless his/her conviction or sentence was declared invalid, prosecutors may increase the number or the severity of charges that the defendant faces to propel the defendant toward accepting a plea deal, which would prevent the defendant from seeking further financial reparations. In a new paper, Do Civilian Complaints Against Police Get Punished?, DeAngelo (Claremont Colleges) et al. pursue this question empirically.
To do so, the authors examine arrest, complaint and charging data from Cook County (Illinois). The results indicate that a positive, causal link between citizen complaints and an increased number of total charges filed against a defendant exists. The paper also notes that a civilian complaint yields a larger plea discount, likely to induce a plea agreement. Notably, the main findings are entirely driven by charges filed directly by the prosecutor’s office rather than directly by the police. Given that prosecutors are likely filing charges after civilian complaints have been filed against law enforcement, it appears that prosecutor behavior is leading to upcharging in response to civilian complaints and not police decisions. An excerpted abstract follows.
“… This paper empirically investigates one way in which criminal justice institutions respond to civilian complaints. Namely, criminal prosecutors can upcharge a defendant who files a civil complaint against law enforcement. By upcharging, the prosecutor can increase the likelihood that a defendant will accept a plea deal, thus preventing the defendant from seeking monetary damages in civil court (Heck vs. Humphrey, 1994). Using data on citizen complaints and criminal charge outcomes from Cook County (Illinois), we find a strong causal link between a citizen filing a complaint and the total number of charges filed.”
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