In Colorado Springs, the cops police themselves - and it's no different with most other departments across the country.

But some communities see a fundamental problem with that approach: Without an outside body overseeing the process, how can people be sure that police misconduct is handled properly?

Their answer: They can't.

In Denver, for example, internal investigations by police and the sheriff's department are closely monitored by a special agency outside the chain of command. The six-member Office of the Independent Monitor answers directly to elected leaders. The group reviews the probes, evaluates their findings and recommends appropriate discipline.

Those assessments are made public in the form of quarterly reports summarizing police misconduct.

Some version of Denver's system is used in about a dozen cities across the country, including San Jose, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Boise, Idaho, and proponents believe the model is gaining wider acceptance.

Other cities have created community advisory boards to review completed investigations and offer non-binding input.

In a few places, such as Chicago and New York, municipalities have transferred the responsibility of police oversight to a specially created agency, though such arrangements are generally limited to major cities and those with a history of flagrant abuses and widespread corruption.

But despite a decades-long trend toward bolstering citizen oversight in some regions, most law enforcement agencies conduct internal investigations in secret and seal their findings.

"Confidentiality is the standard. You call, you don't get any information," said Samuel Walker, a retired criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and a published authority on police accountability.

"It undermines public confidence, and it covers up for shortcomings."

In Colorado Springs, there is no public component in the Police Department's internal affairs process, and until recently police misconduct was shielded from view in all but a few instances, such as criminal wrongdoing.

Police relaxed their policies in late May after The Gazette sought documents under the Colorado Open Records Act. It resulted in the public release of file summaries summarizing what police described as some of their worst policy violations from 2007 and most of 2008.

The reports documented procedural slip-ups and assorted misbehavior. There was no hint of criminal activity or corruption.

The Gazette was not allowed to review cases the police deemed were too "minor" to be of public interest, and the material they did release gave little insight into the quality of the internal affairs investigations.

Such barriers make it difficult to determine whether a police department takes misconduct seriously, critics say.

Selectively releasing documents provides a mere glimpse into the process, said Lou Reiter, a former deputy police chief in Los Angeles who now works as an Indianapolis-based police consultant.

Internal Affairs case summaries may recap a supervisor's conclusions, Reiter said, but they leave critical questions unaddressed: Were all of the known witnesses interviewed?

What methods were used and how were the questions asked? Was the officer interviewed, too, or allowed to submit a written statement? Did police sustain the citizen's actual complaint, or a minor procedural error they found along the way?

"Just the case summary itself is not adequate," Reiter said.

Police in Colorado Springs say complaints represent a tiny percentage of their calls - about 1.3 complaints for every 1,000 calls for service. In a five-year period ending in 2007, there were 389 complaints a year, both serious and minor, and police sustained about 19 percent, police figures show.

That's an encouraging result according to one informal benchmark employed by Reiter, who conducts several top-to-bottom evaluations of police agencies every year.

"Very few of the agencies would have more than 10 percent (that are) sustained," he said.

Putting the other numbers into context is more difficult. There are no national standards - every department has different policies about what constitutes a complaint, and when they'll accept them - but police here say they are dedicated to taking complaints seriously, even those submitted anonymously.

"We have a lot of people that are no longer employees here that wouldn't get into trouble in other places," said Lt. Kirk Wilson, a supervisor in the Internal Affairs unit.

And when violations affect the public or involve criminal activity, the department said it moves quickly to make a public announcement.

Wilson said police have discussed the idea of drafting someone from the community to review document requests by the media and assess whether the Police Department's culling process and redactions are appropriate. There are no plans to introduce an additional layer of oversight to the process itself, Wilson said.

In Denver, public questions over back-to-back police shootings led the city to scrap a citizens' advisory board in 2005 in favor of outside auditors with the authority to sit in on internal investigations and report to the public.

Under the system, police officers accused of wrongdoing are assured their cases are being investigated by professionals - the police - and the public is confident that someone is checking to make sure that citizens are given fair representation, said Richard Rosenthal, who directs Denver's audit program.

Mistrust can breed wherever police rely on silence, he said.

"Frankly, that's a natural response to any organization that does not appear to be responsive to community concerns," he said.

"They're going to assume that nothing is being done. They're going to assume that there's a code of silence and that the department is simply sweeping things under the rug."