The rule of law under permanent pressure and the compensatory role of external accountability: A comparative study of independent police complaints bodies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Even in well-developed rule of law systems such as Canada, Germany, France, Japan or the UK, where public administration is bound to the law and citizens have the option to challenge public action or decisions before the courts, misconduct such as the excessive use of powers occurs in the public sector. This is particularly the case in the areas of core state powers, such as policing, where such misconduct constitutes a permanent challenge for the rule of law. Therefore, many countries have established independent accountability bodies such as ombudsman institutions, the French Défenseur des Droits , the Independent Office for Police Conduct for England and Wales, various Beauftragte in Germany or police complaints bodies in Canada. The paper analyses the relationship between the rule of law and the work of these oversight bodies. From a comparative perspective, it asks to what degree conceptual differences between the rule of law , the État de Droit and the Rechtsstaat influence the role of external accountability bodies, specifically in the case of policing. Building upon empirical data stemming from a research project that has been jointly carried out by several of the authors, it demonstrates that the ‘grey check’ (Brodeur) that politics tend to attribute to police agencies with legal bases that open a broad margin of police discretion may lead, from the perspective of the rule of law, to problematic deficits that external accountability bodies may partly compensate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".