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How Could They Let This Happen? Cover Ups, Complicity, and the Problem of Accountability

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Abstract

Sexual abuse by clergymen, poisoned water, police brutality—these cases each involve two wrongs: the abuse itself and the attempt to avoid responsibility for it. Our focus is this second wrong—the cover up. Cover ups are accountability failures, and they share common strategies for thwarting accountability whatever the abuse and whatever the institution. We find that cover ups often succeed even when accountability mechanisms are in place. Hence, improved institutions will not be sufficient to prevent accountability failures. Accountability mechanisms are tools that people must be willing to use in good faith. They fail when people are complicit. What explains complicity? We identify certain human proclivities and features of modern organizations that lead people to become complicit in the wrongdoing of others. If we focus exclusively on the design of institutions, we will fail to constrain the perpetrators of wrongdoing. Understanding complicity is key to understanding accountability failures.

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Notes

  1. Lepora and Goodin offer a typology of eight practices that can be understood as forms of complicity: connivance, contiguity, collusion, collaboration, condoning, consorting, conspiring, and full joint wrongdoing. For our discussion of cover ups we are concerned with what they call ‘complicity simpliciter’—that is, the forms of complicity that are not themselves constitutive of the principal’s wrongdoing (Lepora and Goodin 2013, pp. 5, 41–51). It is worth noting that there is no entry for ‘cover ups’ in the index of their book.

  2. Others have argued that forms of accountability which focus on incentives can crowd out trust (Baier 1986; Borowiak 2011; Mansbridge 2003). They point to contexts in which we would want a relationship of accountability to allow for greater discretion in the use of power. In such cases, accountability may be best served by focusing on mechanisms other than reward or punishment (Mansbridge 2014; Warren 2014).

  3. Sometimes, there is no identifiable ‘perpetrator’. Consider, for example, the brain damage caused by repetitive concussions in football. The NFL attempted to cover up this threat to safety.

  4. Compare the seven types of accountability mechanisms in international politics identified by Grant and Keohane (2005).

  5. State prosecutors charged 15 state and local officials with crimes related to the water crisis, but most charges were eventually dropped. Rick Snyder, the former Governor of Michigan, has recently been indicted on two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty (Bosman 2021).

  6. Minutes recorded at a meeting noted that ‘legal and medical will likely take the position of total elimination’ of the chemical pollution, but executives at the meeting concluded that the available methods for cutting pollution were not ‘economically attractive’, after which the company increased its production of the chemical and continued its practices of dumping in landfills near the Ohio River (Kelly 2016).

  7. Various industries have worked from the same playbook, using a common set of strategies to downplay wrongdoing or obscure harms to public health, from industrial chemicals to climate change to tobacco smoke (Oreskes and Conway 2010).

  8. For a more nuanced view of the complex factors involved in complicity, see Mihai (2019).

  9. The obedience studies of Stanley Milgram, famous for demonstrating that everyday Americans were essentially capable of the sort of blind obedience that made the Holocaust possible, highlight the malleability of human behavior (Milgram 1963). Milgram ran many variations of the experiment which asked research subjects to administer electric shocks to a ‘learner’ whenever he made mistakes, changing just one variable at a time (Milgram 1965). He showed that while alarmingly high rates of obedience are found under certain circumstances, almost everyone is also capable of resisting authority. Depending on situational variables, compliance rates with the highest levels of electrical shocks could be as high as 90% or less than 10%.

  10. Follow-up studies showed that the pressure to conform starts to become significant in groups of four or more, and that providing an ally whose views support those of the participant will greatly diminish the pressure to conform to majority opinion even after the ally leaves the group (Deutsch and Gerard 1955; Kiesler et al. 1966).

  11. The original story of Kitty Genovese’s murder published by The New York Times was inaccurate in many ways, including its claim that 38 strangers witnessed the attack and did nothing. In fact, it is likely that only two people were fully aware of what was happening—one of whom did nothing. The other witness, we now know from more recent investigation, knew Genovese personally but fled from the scene and only later called the police (Cook 2014; Johnston 2014).

  12. Note the use of this same term in passive bystander studies.

  13. Another comments that the corporate and business environment are potentially ‘criminogenic’ (Punch 1996: 2).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the members of the Coverups and Exposés Faculty Working Group at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University who contributed to our understanding of this subject over the course of several years. Jamie Kalven’s insights on the cover up of the murder of LaQuan McDonald greatly influenced the development of our thinking. We also thank Robert O. Keohane and Alexandra Oprea for their feedback on earlier drafts, and Stephen Grant for helping us think through these issues countless times.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Duke University, 140 Science Drive, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Ruth W. Grant

  2. Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, 201 Science Drive, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    Suzanne Katzenstein

  3. Durham, NC, USA

    Christopher Kennedy

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  1. Ruth W. Grant
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Correspondence to Christopher Kennedy.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 1 and 2.

Appendix 1

Table 1 Accountability failures
Full size table

Appendix 2

Table 2 Cover up strategies
Full size table

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Flint, Michigan Government: Water Poisoning

Chicago Police: LaQuan McDonald Murder

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Grant, R.W., Katzenstein, S. & Kennedy, C. How Could They Let This Happen? Cover Ups, Complicity, and the Problem of Accountability. Res Publica 30, 361–400 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09628-w

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