Mediation of complaints against police: Program implementation in the denver police department

Civilians lodge complaints against the police because they believe they have been wronged. Equally, police officers become hardened by the public negativity that goes with the job, yet rarely have an opportunity to voice their perspective. Historically, the most common method of dealing with complaints against police has been a departmental police-conducted process. However, research has found widespread stakeholder dissatisfaction with this mechanism. Some police jurisdictions have implemented an independent complaints mediation program as an alternate, non-adversarial and potentially restorative option. Complainants and police officers have the opportunity for open and frank discussion and to reach a mutual understanding on the incident that led to the conflict. Denver has been seen as a model program on some criteria, such as high participant satisfaction rates and program longevity. This paper examines the Denver civilian-police complaints mediation program to determine the reasons for and the challenges faced in implementation and the strengths that underpin its continuity. This has been done through a qualitative analysis of publicly available documents and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, including the Denver Police Department, the Office of the Independent Monitor and Community Mediation Concepts. The findings indicate that civilian-police complaints mediation programs are most effective when well supported at the highest levels of governance and specifically designed for the locality. These findings add to the growing body of literature on mediation of police complaints and provide lessons for police services considering implementation.