Opinion: Five years after Floyd, civilian police oversight is dying on the vine

"Civilian oversight of law enforcement is dying. Not in statute, not in mission - but in impact, in execution, in public faith. What began as a bold democratic intervention into the secretive world of policing has become, in too many jurisdictions, a hollow performance. Oversight bodies meet, they vote, they issue recommendations. They no longer wield power. They no longer compel compliance. They are tolerated, not respected. Just ghosts at the table."

"Oversight today occupies a space of liminality - the threshold between legitimacy and irrelevance, between promise and abandonment. In sociology and the social sciences, liminality describes the in‑between state when old structures are unraveling but new ones have not yet taken hold. Civilian oversight is caught in that in‑between: no longer entirely trusted, not yet entirely dismantled and increasingly susceptible to manipulation or inertia."

"But there is something more insidious at play here: legal violence - that is, the normalized but cumulatively harmful effects of laws and their implementation that undermine well-being. This is not just the violence of batons or bullets, but the quieter devastation inflicted by law through denial, deferral or bureaucratic neglect. When city attorneys block oversight boards from accessing police records, that is legal violence."

Civilian oversight of law enforcement no longer exerts meaningful influence, existing more as formal procedure than a force for accountability. Oversight bodies often meet, vote, and issue recommendations without power to compel compliance, eroding public faith. Oversight occupies a liminal space between legitimacy and irrelevance as older structures unravel and new mechanisms fail to coalesce. Legal violence—harm caused by laws and their implementation—permeates oversight through obstruction, underfunding, statutory restrictions, and performative reforms. Examples include city attorneys blocking records access, boards created without resources or staff, and state legislatures limiting oversight for political reasons. Oversight weakens and withers under these pressures.

Read at The Mercury News