In January 2021, with support from Open Society Foundations, Amnesty International, the University of Essex Human Rights Centre and the Independent Commission of Investigations (INDECOM) hosted a virtual regional conference attended by almost 100 activists, academics, and public officials to share their experiences of what works to hold the police to account. This short paper, based on a longer paper compiled in Spanish, summarizes that learning and in turn sets out five approaches that practitioners from government and civil society alike should keep at the centre of their efforts to re-imagine and re-construct societies where human rights violations by the police are an outlier rather than a trend.