Part One: Can a Good Police Department Lose Its Way?
I have spent more than sixty years in and around American policing. I pinned on my first badge in 1960, walked a beat, taught defensive tactics, and served for more than twenty years as a chief of police. In all that time, one question has troubled me more than any other, and lately it will not let me sleep.
How does a good police department lose its way?
I am not talking about departments run by corrupt chiefs or rogue officers. I am talking about departments with proud histories, educated leaders, progressive mission statements, and officers who sincerely want to do right. Departments that once led the nation. How do they end up, years later, facing grieving families, angry crowds, and a community that no longer trusts them?
Consider a city I could describe to you. Over a dozen or so years, its police have shot and killed several people. Each shooting was reviewed, and in each case the officers were found to have acted lawfully. Yet many residents were left asking a question the reviews never answered: Did that person have to die?
After one of those deaths, the city commissioned an outside study of its police. The outside study by a reputable agency produced well over a hundred recommendations for change. The department’s response was largely defensive. Oversight came anyway, imposed from outside: a civilian board and an independent monitor. Simple reforms, like body cameras, stalled for years. All the while, the city’s racial disparities in income, health, education, and arrest remained among the starkest in the nation. And then came another death.
You may recognize this city. You may live in it. The truth is that versions of this story are playing out in police departments across America.
Not bad apples, but drift
The usual explanations, bad apples, hostile critics, budgets, unions, never satisfied me. I have come to believe the real culprit is something quieter and more dangerous: institutional drift. Like a ship that is off course by a single degree, a department can slowly separate from its founding values without anyone ever deciding to change them. No one aboard feels it. Everyone believes the ship is going straight. Only an outside bearing reveals how far it has strayed.
If that is true, it changes everything. It means the problem is not a few people to be punished, but a system to be studied and improved. And it also means the problem can be fixed.
What’s ahead
Over the next three posts, I will explore this idea:
- What Is Institutional Drift? What it is, how American policing came to drift from the course it set for itself, and how to recognize the signs.
- What Should a Leader Say? What a police chief can say to the community when he or she recognizes that the department has drifted, and how to ask for the community’s support.
- Getting Back on Course. What a department, its city’s leaders, and its citizens can do to restore trust and support of their police once it has been lost.
I write as someone who loves this profession and believes in the men and women who serve in it. I invite you to read along, argue with me, and share these posts with others who care about policing in a free society.
