By Strong Ma, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
STUDENT VOICES: The views expressed below are those of the student author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Access to Justice Lab.
On January 24, 2025, the California Department of Justice published a Proposed Rule establishing procedures for implementing the 2021 California Law Enforcement Accountability Reform (CLEAR) Act, a statute that requires state law enforcement agencies to investigate police officer involvement in hate groups. The regulations notably exempted such investigations from provisions of California law that establish heightened procedural protections for police officers. By including these exemptions in the regulations, California fired the most recent shot across the bow in the battle over the Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights (LEOBR), a model statute that sets out certain rights for police officers in matters of internal discipline.
One key aspect of this battle concerns whether increased procedural protections for police officers undercut, rather than augment, access to justice. Whether parties have equal access to fair process remains central to the access to justice movement. Do police officers need greater protections during misconduct investigations for such processes to be fair, or do these protections unjustifiably preference police interests over public cries for accountability? After all, as one scholar notes, access to justice concerns should incorporate citizens being able to hold police officers to account for misconduct. This blog post tackles these issues by first, giving a background on the LEOBR; second, briefly canvassing existing research on its impacts; and third, sketching out a potential randomized control (RCT) study for future research.
Background
The LEOBR first passed as a landmark Maryland law in 1973. Soon, police protections directly after the Maryland statute spread across much of the country, either through state legislation or police union contracts. Such protections include a formal waiting period before the commencement of internal officer misconduct investigations and a requirement that the investigators must be fellow law enforcement officers, not civilians. Additional protections cover the mechanics of internal interrogations. For example, there must be (i) a minimum notice period and evidence provided beforehand, (ii) the right to have counsel or other representation present, and (iii) limits to the interrogation’s length, time of day, and number of interrogators.
As of 2025, 19 states have some form of LEOBR laws, which often extend to prison guards as well. Public interest organizations like the NAACP and Everytown argue that the LEOBR gives officers preferential procedural treatment compared to civilians. They contend that the protections “shield[] officers from accountability” by placing barriers that delay and interfere with investigations. On the other hand, LEOBR supporters argue that heightened protections are justified due to police officers’ precarious position in the public eye and the increased potential and damage of false accusations: “[R]ank-and-file police officers are sometimes subjected to abusive and improper procedures’ by internal affairs officers and prosecutors out for blood.” To sift between these contrasting positions, some researchers have attempted to study the actual effect of LEOBRs in the field.
Existing Research
A survey of available materials reveals a mix of research efforts, varying in scope and type, that cast doubt on the LEOBR’s efficacy in protecting officer due process and indicate some harm to accountability and other outcomes.
For example, the LA County Sheriff’s Office performed a small-scale review of how LEOBR procedural protections affected the course of misconduct investigations in its department. The review found that not all investigation subjects took advantage of the LEOBR right to have an attorney or representative present during interrogation. Importantly, there existed no evidence that investigators treated subjects who did not choose to take advantage of such rights differently. The report also found that the presence of a representative (i) resulted in lengthy (up to 9 month) delays in concluding an investigation, and (ii) created pathways for sharing information about an investigation with other employees, potentially decreasing the integrity of the process. Thus, in one office’s experience, LEOBRs had limited positive effects for the intended beneficiaries while bearing out the public interest concerns of delay and investigative interference.
A George Washington Law Review article performed a survey of American law enforcement leaders which largely echoed the LA Sheriff’s Office findings. The article found that 91% of the respondents believed LEOBR protections led to interrogation delays that frequently burdened investigations; 83.3% felt LEOBR protections requiring access to evidence also frequently burdened investigations; and 97% believed that LEOBR protections did not reduce the likelihood of false confessions. Qualitative responses additionally indicated a core concern that delays and evidence sharing allowed accused officers to collude and ‘get their stories straight’ before an interrogation.
What about the LEOBR’s effect on broader public outcomes? One American Economic Association paper studied the link between LEOBRs and the prevalence of police-related civilian fatalities. Using a treatment-timing design, the paper compared civilian fatality data from states pre-and post-enactment of their LEOBR statutes. It found no statistical link between LEOBRs and police-related fatalities for either White or non-White civilians. However, it acknowledged potential confounding factors and did not rule out LEOBR impacts on nonlethal force, police arrests, or crime rates. Another paper examined the differences between states with and without LEOBR statutes. LEOBR states had significantly higher incarceration rates and somewhat higher police budgets. Such states were also overrepresented in (i) police shootings of civilians (in total and for Black and Latino civilians specifically), (ii) criminal charges for officer on-duty shootings, and (iii) police decertifications.
Proposed Randomized Control Study
While the studies above seem to counsel against LEOBR protections as a matter of efficacy, accountability, and substantive outcomes, they have limited empirical weight. Issues like sample size, representativeness, and confounding factors limit how confident we can be in the causal relationships we draw from case studies, surveys, and quasi-experimental designs like treatment-timing. This is why the scientific community has long recognized randomized control trials (RCTs) as the gold standard for researching causal effects. The lack of RCTs on the LEOBR creates an ideal opportunity for researchers to fill this important gap in causal analysis.
This blog post closes by framing what one such RCT would look like, while touching on some important considerations. First, researchers must find a partner police department to host such a trial in a state with no LEOBR so that the department would not be violating the law by randomizing which officers receive heightened procedural protections.
Second, researchers may need to randomize the application of LEOBR alongside warning officers of their randomization condition. The LEOBR cannot influence officer decision-making out in the field (relevant to studying broader public outcomes like police use of force) if officers do not know whether they have its procedural benefits. While informing officers of their differential treatment could raise complaints of inequality, available research indicates the presence of equipoise—that LEOBR protections have uncertain effects on outcomes for police officers under investigation.
Third, researchers should determine the dependent variable. This could mean assessing the effect of the LEOBR on the length of investigations, the rate at which police officers invoke such protections, or whether the investigation concluded in ultimate disciplinary action. Even further down the timeline, researchers might study how LEOBRs affect the rate and success at which civilians sue the police. Finally, one fascinating dependent variable could be perceived fairness, which has become increasingly salient in national conversations on police reform. One could survey citizens whose complaints initiate a police investigation—who would be completely blind to whether the officer received LEOBR protections or not—on the fairness of the investigation’s conclusion. The novel aspect of this research design would be that the complaining citizen would not be surveyed on the perceived fairness of LEOBR itself; being blind to the LEOBR treatment condition, their perceived fairness would instead be a proxy for how the procedural protections impact the actual fairness and legitimacy of the process.
The appropriateness of the LEOBR will continue to be hotly debated, with powerful voices on either side claiming their position advances access to justice. An RCT further examining LEOBR’s actual effects would add an important, measured voice to this growing conversation.
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