In the last decade, multiple high-profile police killings, like that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, inspired nationwide uprisings. Each uprising came with its own set of demands, but one constant was the question of how to actually eliminate police brutality. While calls for outright abolition are becoming increasingly mainstream, reform-based options came up time and time again.
Spend any time reading about police killings and you’ve probably come across the term “civilian review board.” Along with calls for body cameras, it’s one of the more popular reform options that gets brought up. These civilian review boards generally consist of at least three people, but they can fall under different levels of the government depending on how they are created. For example, Minneapolis’s civilian review board is actually a separate agency within the city called the Office of Police Conduct Review, while Los Angeles has a civilian review board at the county level, to oversee the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
