Citizen Complaints as an Accountability Mechanism: Uncovering Patterns Using Topic Modeling

Francisco OLIVOS*, Patricio SAAVEDRA, Lucia DAMMERT

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal PublicationsJournal Article (refereed)peer-review

Abstract

Objectives
Citizen complaints are considered by policing researchers as an indicator of police misconduct, and a proxy of police-community relations. Nevertheless, US and EU-based studies tend to focus on sustained complaints as reported by official agencies and officer-based correlates. Using the case of Carabineros, the Chilean militarized police force, this study examines (a) latent topics contained in a large set of complaints against the police on a digital platform, and (b) the change of those topics across time and (c) by complainants’ educational level.

Methods
We use novel computational natural language processing techniques to identify latent themes across the corpus of complaints (N = 1,623), hosted on an online forum from 2013 to 2020.

Results
Our findings show eight latent themes across the corpus. Among others, these themes were related to police effectiveness, police misbehavior, and a master frame of institutional crisis that has significantly grown over the last year. Additionally, differences in the prevalence of topics by complainants’ educational level were also found.

Conclusions
Thus, the findings contribute to the enterprise of opening the black box of complaints against the police and highlighting opportunities for social accountability in a developing country.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages41
JournalJournal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
Early online date16 May 2022
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 16 May 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2022.

Keywords

  • complaints
  • Topic modeling
  • Police
  • Accountability
  • Chile
  • police
  • topic modeling
  • Complaints
  • accountability

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