Does the type of police oversight influence public opinion about accountability?

Public outcry over police violence has brought the topic of police accountability to the forefront of popular debate. One facet in these discussions concerns police oversight bodies (POBs), which are an institutional mechanism for police accountability. We examine whether the design of POBs impact on citizen perceptions that justice will be rendered for police abuse, focusing on two attributes: whether they are civilian-staffed or police-staffed, and whether they have the power to sanction officers or not. We investigate this topic with a novel, multi-stage survey experiment fielded in Germany. The sequential vignettes describe an event of police violence in two settings: at a protest and in a street encounter. Our findings show that people believe officers are more likely to be punished for abuse and are more approving of punishment when POBs are civilian-staffed, but respondents only believe that sanctioning powers will be associated with punishment in protest settings. The results also show that ideology moderates public opinion in an unexpected manner: institutional features of police oversight only changed evaluations for respondents with centrist and moderate right-leaning positions, which suggests that institutional design has greatest impact for individuals not already ideologically predisposed towards a particular outcome.