Article Police Accountability in the USA: Gaining Traction or Spinning Wheels? Carol A. Archbold* Abstract Police accountability has long been a topic of discussion and debate among police practitioners, politi- cians, and scholars. This topic re-emerges every time there is highly publicized police shooting or incident of police misconduct. This article provides an overview of the current state of police accountability in the USA. This overview includes several examples of the ways in which police accountability has been enhanced in recent years at the local, state, and federal levels. Next, several obstacles to the progression of police accountability in the USA are discussed including a lack of ‘buy-in’ by some police personnel; limited research on the efficacy of common police account- ability tools; lack of financial resources; lack of support and guidance by the federal government in recent years; and police unions. Finally, the article concludes with suggestions for overcoming some of the impediments associated with police accountability in the USA. The last 5 years have been marred with violent po- lice–citizen encounters that have resulted in the deaths of many Americans. According to the Washington Post, there have been 5,929 fatal shootings of people by on-duty police officers since 2015, with approximately 1,000 of those shootings occurring in 2020 (Washington Post, 2021). While half of the people shot and killed by the police are White, people of colour are killed by the police at a disproportionately high rate (Washington Post, 2021). Non-lethal acts of police misconduct have also drawn public attention in recent years. In June 2020, USA Today published an article detailing the contents of a national database of approximately 200,000 cases of police misconduct based on records from police agencies, prosecutors’ offices, and other state agencies. While many of the cases involve minor infractions, a portion of the cases involves more serious acts including 22,924 cases of excessive force; 3,145 allegations of rape, child molestation, and other acts of sexual misconduct; and 2,307 cases of domestic violence (Kelly and Nichols, 2020). Even though the previously described police–citizen encounters represent a small fraction of the mil- lions of police–citizen contacts that occur annually in the USA, the actions of police officers during those encounters resulted in serious injuries, death, as well as an unquantifiable amount of diminished trust and legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Many deadly shootings and acts of police misconduct have been recorded by officer body cameras or people using their personal cell phones. *North Dakota State University, Department of Criminal Justice, Dept. 2315 P.O. Box 6050, Fargo, ND 58108–6050. E-mail: carol.archbold@ndsu.edu Policing, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 1665–1683 doi:10.1093/police/paab033 Published by Oxford University Press 2021. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public do- main in the US. 1665 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/policing/article/15/3/1665/6375703 by guest on 29 September 2021