Many protest marches across the country today and this past week related to policing.
TheETG position statement…….
The purpose of policing is to enforce societal norms.
Societal norms change overtime.

Police unions and police departments are organizations that tend to be static and conservative, attempting to operate in an environment of constant change and liberalization.
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Saying that again…..static and conservative, constant change and liberalization.
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Organizations that have an organizational culture that resist change are organizations that will eventually be waist deep in dysfunction and bad outcomes.

There are no bad apples, just bad organizations created by bad organizational structures, bad organizational cultures, and bad organizational traditions that create or contribute to bad outcomes.
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Police unions.
Changes in public policy driven by the constant liberalization of societal norms violate their traditions of policing and their conservative belief systems.
Resistance to change or being too slow to change on a planet that is in constant change and liberalization of societal norms and public policy creates bad organizational structures, bad organizational cultures, and bad organizational traditions that create or contribute to bad outcomes.
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Among the most guarded organizational traditions of police unions is the “us vs them” mentality. It serves as the valued weapon of choice deployed to maintain the status quo.
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Police departments.
Its the specific instructions and orders given to officers by command structures that setup officers to fail. Those failures produce bad outcomes in their interactions with the public. When officers fail, the command structure that issued the instructions and orders then punishes the officers, adding fuel to the fire of the police union’s “us vs them” mentality.
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Added to all of the above, police departments themselves are setup to fail when police union contracts create or contribute to a situation where a bad hire can’t quickly be a good fire.

A company or organization that can’t, won’t, or doesn’t do well in policing itself isn’t an organization that will have bad apples, its an organization that will be a bad organization due to a bad organizational structure, with a bad organizational culture, bad organizational traditions, that create or contribute to bad outcomes.

City managers, Mayors, and city counsels are obligated to address bad organizational structures, bad organizational cultures, bad organizational traditions. Its their responsibility. The public’s responsibility to hold them accountable rather than continuing to be blindly reactive to individual incidents, leaving the broader organizational issues unaddressed.

Policing is a public policy thing. Communities, not the police, set public policy.
Overtime our country has come to see this as being the other way around.
That would be the first thing to correct.

There’s a public perception that police departments are a stand-alone entity, outside the reach of City Managers, Mayors, City Councils, state legislatures, Congress.
They are not.
I would argue that these folks haven’t been doing their jobs.

Everyday there are companies in corporate America that make massive changes in structure, culture, and tradition.
Elected folks just need to do their jobs.

On the subject of de-funding the police…..when a Fortune 500 company in America finds itself having difficulty competing in their market sector due to their outdated and/or problematic organizational structure, organizational culture, organizational traditions…….they don’t de-fund themselves.They re-structure, change their culture, adopt a better functioning set of traditions.
Yapping about de-funding the police is unwise

Solutions………

1. instruct the city attorney to fix the police union contract.
— Bad hires have to be quick fires.
— suspension of an officer should consider including suspension of their supervisor

2. city manager has to hire a fix-it police chief. A hatchet guy that’s there solely to remove human resistance to change, and redesign the culture at the potential cost of wholesale turnover of personnel.

3. city counsel sets public policy that forbids “aggression” orders. The ones you see being carried out on camera around the county the last couple weeks. Media folks intentionally gassed and shot with rubber bullets, folks on sitting on their porch shot with paint ball rounds, elderly white guys shoved to the ground, etc, etc, etc.

4. non-members of the district attorney’s office have to be the one’s that investigate and charge officer involved incidents. And in every case where an officer is charged with a crime, there must be a charge filed that doesn’t require proof of the officers intent.