tisiwoota

There’s a thought-provoking piece by Malcolm Gladwell up at the New Yorker which argues that they key to solving some seemingly intransigent societal problems– namely homelessness, car emissions, and the L.A.P.D.’s “bad cop problem”– is recognizing that they conform to a power law distribution (with a few really bad cases wreaking a disproportionately high share of the damage) rather than a bell curve.

I’d like to highlight one small part:

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We want sweeping reforms. But what was the commission’s most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a known history of doing things like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a performance review from his superior stating that he “usually conducts himself in a manner that inspires respect for the law and instills public confidence.” This is what you say about an officer when you haven’t actually read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission’s report was that the L.A.P.D. might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to read the files of their officers. The L.A.P.D.’s problem was a matter not of policy but of compliance. The department needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that’s not what a public hungry for institutional transformation wants to hear.
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An important insight– but I have a quibbling thought about the characterization of this as a “matter not of policy but of compliance.” At the most literal level, that distinction is true. But I think lack of compliance can also be framed as a policy issue– i.e., the existing department policies didn’t adequately incentivize adherance to the rules (specifically, the requirement that captains should do the things necessary to be effective supervisors). One solution to this specific situation might be to institute a policy of randomly auditing the captains’ knowledge about the files of their inferiors. Quiz them. Penalize ignorance with a tangible, immediate personal consequence. The right policy at the right level can incentivise a culture of compliance– and quick.

And of course this isn’t uniquely a “police culture” problem either– the same patterns, I’m sure, emerge in management of any human institution (With the consequences, in corporations, being just as damaging yet far less visible).