Policies and directives from headquarters regarding the management of persons from various cultural backgrounds are often not understood by frontline officers; they are resisted or ignored by local police and thus have a limited impact on local police/community relations. Both external and internal monitoring should be conducted, yet suitable indicators and auditing mechanisms are rarely built into programs and policies. Community consultative committees, as presently constituted, lack the expertise, the power, and the resources to monitor local police practices effectively. Instead of discouraging complaints and discrediting complainants, police organizations would do better to encourage feedback and take complaints as a barometer of community feelings and a valuable source of information on areas of community discontent, unprofessional practices, administrative deficiencies, training inadequacies, or communication failures. Ethnic minorities should have as much access to a credible and effective complaints system as to a fair and efficient police service. 28 references