Sorry for my absence from the thread yesterday. I was called to deal with "peaceful" protesters that were kicking in windshields of police cars, throwing rocks, and tackling cops. Every media outlet in the area described it as "peaceful" with "beautiful" chants.
Yeah...welcome to the glamorous profession of law enforcement. Hopefully none of your officers were seriously injured. We had some festivities in Miami too, but nothing we couldn't handle.
I'm 100% certain this is not the first time you've experienced slanted news coverage, and it won't be the last.
It's hard to turn around a department due to the fact these conditions manifest over years and years.
Yes, change is difficult in any organization, and the larger the organization the more difficult it is to bring the change to the point where it permeates the entire organization. And police departments are historically very resistant to change.
But we can't just say that and think the statements ends the discussion.
One key problem is the relaxing of hire standards to get different demographics hired. It's all about percentages on a spreadsheet when it comes to hiring. My department through the late 90s and 2000s resisted this. Eventually political pressure leads to promoting people who don't need to be in command. This is the start of the downward slope that you mentioned above with supervisor and managers holding officers accountable. The relaxing of the hiring standards or making exceptions for one or a few demographics hurt agencies more than you think. But it's the leadership that has been put into place due to these political requirements that actually hurts police agencies more.
Right, those are all legitimate challenges to turning any organization around. But leadership gets paid the big bucks to overcome challenges. We faced all of those challenges and more, and many years later our successors are still working on improving the results. Difficult is difficult, not undoable.
If you have to relax hiring standards (and we did), first you try not to relax them TOO much. Then, you monitor things closely and try to weed out mistakes (and there will be mistakes). Weeding out mistakes will not always be allowed, and you have to deal with that -- but most of the time you'll be successful. And, as time goes on, you gradually raise the standards without adversely affecting your diversity.
One other thing we did was avoid much of the "us vs. them" mentality that affirmative action programs often spawn. We did that by including
everyone in our affirmative action plan. We created leadership training programs (including command staff positions) at several levels for blacks...and Hispanics...
and whites...
and women. When we created those positions, we created them 7 at a time: 2 black, 2 Hispanic, 2 white, and 1 woman. The ethnic positions could be either male or female, and we made sure there was legitimate representation. That was effective in diffusing some of the resistance.
If you promote people who are not ready for prime time (and you will have to), you prop them up. I was a propper-upper the last 7 years of my career -- I was specifically placed in positions to shoulder the load my boss couldn't handle, and a lot of my work was training upward. One of my efforts was very successful (although he didn't really need that much help), one was sorta successful, and the other was an abysmal failure -- but we all knew that one would be a carrying operation until he finally retired.
Nobody ever said it would be easy, and it's not. But leaders don't get paid to do the easy work.
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