What institutional factors lead US citizens to believe that a police officer will be penalized for their use of force?Widespread debates about police misconduct – particularly the inappropriate use of force – have prompted governments to introduce a wide array of policy responses to hold police officers accountable. While the criminological literature on police use of force has focused overwhelmingly on individual and community characteristics, we focus on policy responses designed to mitigate the principal-agent problem. To understand how citizens assess the likelihood that a police officer will be penalised for the use of force, we draw on a vast body of cross-disciplinary literature, hypothesizing that citizens’ assessments of the probability of penalization are in part a function of four factors: (1) the type of sanctions officers can face for misconduct; (2) the type of police misconduct oversight body; and (3) whether police are monitored via body cameras. We also evaluate the extent to which police officers are supported by police unions (4) as an important contextual factor. While these factors are heavily debated in policy and activist communities, claims about their impact on police accountability rest on limited or non-existent empirical foundations. To investigate these factors, we conduct a nationally-representative survey of United States citizens recruited online that includes a conjoint experiment on the use of force. This study brings together disparate literatures on policy responses that are normally siloed within the literature on policing and governance, and provides unique insights into how citizens’ assess accountability in light of different policy responses.