Do civilian complaints against police get punished?

Law enforcement institutions are tasked with a complicated undertaking that involves maintaining community safety and, at times, making arrests while exercising care in their interaction with private citizens. Errors may have dramatic consequences for civilians, police and the criminal justice system. Given limited observability of law enforcement agents’ behavior, one way to mitigate the principal-agent problem is to rely on signals from civilians via complaints. At the same time, civilian complaints may result in reputational and financial losses for the criminal justice institutions. This paper empirically investigates one way in which criminal justice institutions respond to civilian complaints. Namely, criminal prosecutors can upcharge a defendant who files a civil complaint against law enforcement. By upcharging, the prosecutor can increase the likelihood that a defendant will accept a plea deal, thus preventing the defendant from seeking monetary damages in civil court (Heck vs. Humphrey, 1994). Using data on citizen complaints and criminal charge outcomes from Cook County (Illinois), we find a strong causal link between a citizen filing a complaint and the total number of charges filed.