Part Two: What is Institutional Drift?
Navigators have long worked by a rule of thumb called the one-in-sixty rule: a ship whose heading is off by a single degree will miss its port by about a mile for every sixty miles it travels. No one aboard notices one degree. The deck feels level. Only an outside fix, a star, a landmark, a satellite, shows how far the ship has strayed.
Institutional drift works the same way. It is the slow separation of an organization’s daily practices from its stated mission and founding values, without anyone ever deciding to change them. It needs no villain. It happens one reasonable decision at a time.
Other professions learned this the hard way
Before the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA engineers had seen damage to its O-ring seals on earlier flights. Each time nothing went wrong, the damage was reclassified as acceptable. The sociologist Diane Vaughan called this the normalization of deviance. NASA reformed, yet in 2003 it lost Columbia to another problem it had learned to tolerate. Investigators concluded that the agency’s culture was as much to blame as the hardware. Good people, doing what seemed reasonable, repeated a tragedy.
Safety scientists call this drift into failure. Organizational researchers call the gap between policy and practice decoupling: the mission statement and the street run on separate tracks. And W. Edwards Deming, whose teaching on quality transformed industry, taught me and others that most problems lie in the system, not in the worker. An organization that stops studying its system slides toward what is comfortable, familiar, and self-protective.
How American policing drifted
After the urban unrest of the 1960s, American policing set a hopeful course: police legitimacy rests on public consent, force as a last resort, officers are guardians of constitutional rights, not enforcing warriors and departments must keep learning from the people they serve. By the 1990s, community policing was the stated philosophy of most departments. Then several currents began pushing them off course.
The legal floor became the professional ceiling. In 1989, in Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court held that police force is judged by whether it was “objectively reasonable.” That standard was written to decide lawsuits. Over time, it became the measure departments used to judge themselves. A shooting found lawful was considered closed, and the question that matters most to a grieving community, did this person have to die?, went unasked. Communities named the result: awful, but lawful.
Fear and militarization. After September 11, military equipment poured into police departments. Officers began to look and think less like neighbors and more like soldiers. Research has since found that militarized policing does not make officers safer or reduce crime, but does lower public regard for police.
Defensibility replaced learning. When a tragedy occurs, the institutional reflex was to defend: policy was followed, the officer acted lawfully, case closed. An organization that reviews its worst outcomes only for liability cannot learn from them.
Internal numbers replaced community bearings. Departments measured arrests and response times, but stopped regularly asking the public how they were treated.
Reputation became a shield. A department with a proud history can assume its good name proves it is still on course. It doesn’t. Some reforms are adopted on paper while daily practice changes little.
The signs of drift
No one sign proves drift, but when several appear together, a city should take notice:
- Fatal shootings are found lawful, and no one asks whether they were necessary or what should change.
- Outside studies and long lists of recommendations come and go, with no public accounting of what was done.
- Oversight has to be imposed from outside because the department did not lead change from within.
- Basic tools of transparency, like body cameras, stall for years.
- Deep racial disparities persist, and the department sees them as someone else’s problem.
- Absenteeism, When the community gathers to confront or grieve, its police leaders are not in the room.
Drift is not a verdict
To say a department has drifted is not to say its officers are bad. Most are doing exactly what their organization has trained, measured, and rewarded them to do. That is precisely the point. The problem is in the system, and so is the solution.
Next: What Should a Leader Say? What a chief can tell the community when he or she recognizes the drift.
