Police officers are the wardens of our society, they are tasked with a duty that weighs on them like Atlas. The average man cannot not match this burden and even some police officers cannot reach the standards of their fellows. So, what happen when a police office is found to be corrupted? Having his fellow police officers collecting a case against him would make the whole situation bias and the corrupted cop could easily get away; this in peculiar has been a major problem in American police since 1900’s. A new method of dealing with police corruption has been adopted in liberal states like California, Washington, and New York, Civilian oversight. Civilian oversight in the regards of police is an “established to provide monitoring of police practices and the misconduct complaint process, along with review of police agency policy …show more content…
(Attard and Olson p. 1) Therefore, citizens and police officers work together to judge convicted cops and see if they are truly guilty. Civilian oversight has been adopted in various states for the beneficial effects of the oversight against police corruption. One has to remember that Policing in the U.S. is mostly done at the state and county levels, this means that generally the mayor and a political appointed police commissioner. Since, the police commissioner were elective instead of promoted, most of the time the commissioner was focusing most of his effort on keeping his job, this “ineffective behavior did not provide the necessity oversight, therefore police departments were not accountable to anyone and there was an increase in abuse of power by the police” (p. 2) Which is why the state, municipality, and county started to adopt a different approached with citizen oversight with the success of Citizens Review Board (CRB) in the District of Columbia. There are three main approaches to oversight: conducting investigations,