Guarding the Guardians: An Analysis of Investigations against Police

Sandro Cabral and Sérgio G. Lazzarini

No 105, Business and Economics Working Papers from Unidade de Negocios e Economia, Insper

Abstract: Internal affairs divisions are organizations crafted to monitor the behavior of police officers. However, like many other public bureaucracies, the police is plagued with the “who guards the guardians” dilemma, which is a typical organizational design problem that occurs when the agents to be monitored are appointed as monitors. Consequently, there are reasons to believe that investigations will be inherently biased towards of certain police officers and certain types of deviations. In this paper we examine reasons why some complaints against police officers are sustained or not and if these complaints foster or not consequential sanctions. We employ a distinct dataset containing detailed information on investigation processes against police officers performed by the internal affairs division of a police organization in Brazil. We find that while certain organizational procedures adopted by the internal affairs division increase the speed in which the investigation is concluded, certain officer-specific characteristics (such as the status and tenure of the officer) and the nature of the accusation significantly affect the final verdict, thus suggesting potential bias in the overall process.

Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.insper.edu.br/handle/11224/5807 Full text (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aap:wpaper:105

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://repositorio. ... br/handle/11224/5807

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Business and Economics Working Papers from Unidade de Negocios e Economia, Insper Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Biblioteca Telles ().