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Policing the Police: Accountability, Reform, and the Politics of Public Safety

At this year’s conference of the Association of Local Government Auditors, we hosted a powerful session on police auditing and oversight. I frequently speak at conferences and moderate panels, but I’ve rarely held a session such as this. It offered an incredibly sobering look at the complexity of the problem while also instilling a renewed sense of hope.

This particular ALGA panel that I moderated included four distinguished public servants who each work in very different municipal and political environments, yet they were united by the same difficult question: How do we build police departments that are not only effective but also accountable and trustworthy?

The answer, increasingly, lies in civilian oversight and independent audits.

This isn’t about defunding the police. It’s about reinforcing a constitutional approach to public safety—one grounded in equal justice, transparency, and the commonsense idea that public safety is a common good. It is not enough to say the police work for the community. The police and community must work together.

But there is deep and mutual distrust—and it didn’t come from nowhere. Communities have seen too many examples of abuse, discrimination, and unaccountable behavior. Meanwhile, many police officers feel misunderstood, undervalued, and unfairly vilified, even as they work in high-stress, high-risk environments. Both sides agree that the system is broken, but fixing it is a political hot potato. Still, there are leaders who are willing to grapple with the issue, and oversight initiatives across the country have been quietly evolving, professionalizing, and slowly moving the needle toward reform. As my panel discussed, the work is arduous. But it’s happening!

What Constitutional Policing Really Means

Constitutional policing means more than legal compliance. It means that law enforcement practices must align with our democratic values—protecting civil rights, ensuring equal protection under the law, and operating with transparency and restraint. It’s not a radical idea. It’s just plain good government.

As Michelle Phillips, director of civil rights for the city of Minneapolis, reminded us: “We can’t do the work unless we have all the tools to be successful. … We are practitioners of this work.” Her team publishes synopses of police conduct reviews, because she feels the community deserves to know not only that someone is watching but that someone is explaining.

Likewise, performance auditing—when done right—isn’t a gotcha game. It’s a way to surface problems so they can be fixed, to establish baselines and track progress, and to give all stakeholders—from police officers to elected leaders and residents—a shared understanding of what’s working and what’s not.

Lessons from the Field

Leigh Anderson, Cleveland’s director of police accountability, is confronting a unique challenge: her team must prove within 60 days that the city has implemented enough of its consent decree to justify ending federal oversight. But what comes next? “Consent decrees are judgments,” she said. “Once it’s over, there’s no succession plan. The lights go off, and everybody goes home.”

Steve Flaherty, director of audits in San Francisco’s Department of Police Accountability, emphasized that this is continuous work. His department conducts audits to ensure that reforms prompted by the Department of Justice in 2016 aren’t treated as one-time events. “Sometimes when I talk to officers they say, ‘That was when we were under collaborative reform’—as if that era is over.”

Washington, D.C., Auditor Kathy Patterson shared how codification makes reforms stick. Years after a use-of-force partnership with the DOJ concluded, she brought in the same monitor to evaluate whether best practices had endured. The findings? Some practices had and others hadn’t. However, the lesson was clear: If you want reform to last, write it into law.

And Minneapolis’ Michelle Phillips described the cultural repair that has to happen within oversight bodies themselves. Her office restructured and added a unit for proactive studies. “The community is hungry for information,” she said. “Not numbers—people.”

Moral Purpose, Political Constraints

An audience member at my ALGA panel asked, “What is ‘a good political decision’?” My response: What is moral, ethical, and economically sound is not always politically viable. The best ideas can’t help the community if those ideas are unable to win votes or institutional support.

That’s why effective leaders use what I call the MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Push too far, too fast, and you lose your coalition. Be too cautious, and you lose your purpose (and your mandate).

Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb exemplifies this balancing act. He ran on police accountability and won. Now he must lead the city through a difficult transition while facing relentless pushback from stakeholders. According to Anderson, Bibb is taking the time to understand the issues deeply and surround himself with experts. That’s the right way to manage the politics of the difficult issue of police oversight.

Michelle Phillips offered another example. When she took over in Minneapolis, she made a point of meeting with the police union. She was the first director ever to do so. “We don’t have to be adversarial,” she told us. “We might not get 100 percent of what we want, but 80 percent is pretty darn good.”

Trust is Built, Not Assumed

One of the clearest takeaways from my ALGA panel was that accountability, like safety, is a shared project. Oversight bodies can’t do this work alone. Nor can police departments. Trust must be built across city hall, across the police rank and file, and across the community.

Steve Flaherty spoke about the importance of legitimacy. “Auditing is not just about identifying flaws,” he said. “It’s about validating progress, supporting sound decisions, and building the public trust that law enforcement depends on.”

This means communicating clearly and often. It means leveraging partnerships with city councils, auditors, and civil rights offices. And it means being transparent even when the data is discouraging. As Phillips said: “We have nowhere to go but up. Show people where we started, and how we’re building.”

Police Reform is a Long Game

What happens after the monitor leaves? After the headlines fade? That’s when the real test of reform begins.

As Patterson noted, embedding policies into code allows for ongoing accountability. Her office now uses past audit recommendations as future criteria. And Flaherty’s team in San Francisco is thinking about how administrative mandates and charter amendments can help keep oversight relevant, even as political priorities shift.

In all of this, the message was clear: reform isn’t an event. It’s a culture. It can be cultivated. There are incentives for good behavior and for bad. Oversight and auditing efforts help identify and build up the right incentives.

The Commons of Public Safety

We need to start thinking of public safety as a commons—something we all own, and that only works when we all take care of it. Like clean air or public parks, it can be degraded through neglect, captured by private interests, or misused by bad actors. But when we steward it together, it thrives.

Policing must be constitutional. But it must also be practical and community-anchored. And that makes it political. Politics is the process in which we contend with each other to decide which of our values we make real. Policing oversight is a core part of that process. And as our ALGA panel demonstrated, it’s happening across the country. We just need the will to keep going.