Transparency, Part Two: The Slippery Slope That Makes It Necessary

In the United States it is rare that entire criminal justice agencies are tilted toward corruption, although high-profile incidences of outrageous corruption do happen: the LAPD Rampart Scandal… the New Orleans Police Department’s brutal corruption in the 1990’s and again after Hurricane Katrina… the occasional tendency toward sodomy, mafia association, and unrestrained gunfire in the direction of unarmed guys who happen to not be white by members of the NYPD.  These incidences linger in the minds of the public long after the perpetrators have been removed from the agencies they have damaged.

Those extreme examples define what most people see as the need for transparency and reform in the criminal justice system.  The real need for transparency is caused by something much more mundane, much more wide-spread, and much more likely to touch the lives of innocent, unsuspecting citizens.

Transparency is necessary to protect the public from the Slippery Slope.

Nobody who gets a promotion thinks, “Great! I can’t wait to discipline people I’ve worked with for 10 years when they screw up!”

So, they let things slide.  After all, it’s just this once, right?  But once you let something go once, it’s easier to do the next time.  And when you let something go for one employee, other employees start crying favoritism, so you have to start cutting everyone breaks.  Then where does it stop?  That’s the Slippery Slope.

Soon, “letting things slide” is the norm.  The people who work next to those who increasingly need to ask their boss to turn a blind eye become resentful, thinking, “Why doesn’t someone do something about this?”  Everybody’s mad that nobody’s doing anything about it, but nobody’s willing to step up and do something about it.  After all, they aren’t the boss.  Morale suffers.

This can go on for years.  If these supervisors won’t write up their subordinates for bad behavior when it happens, do you think these things make it into performance evaluations?

Then one day a team member’s group-sanctioned idiocy takes a turn from being just sloppy to potentially criminal and everyone suddenly realizes that they are all about to be talking into tape recorders in the presence of some very official people about what they know regarding the latest screw up of their dear coworker.  What people know usually ends up becoming very, very foggy.  So nothing is done and everything just keeps rolling along.

Anyone who has had any kind of job for 5 minutes has probably seen this kind of lax oversight in some form, perhaps without the guys with tape recorders and the ability to revoke your fifth amendment rights coming in at the end.  But it is important to understand the impact that this seemingly average management style and equally average reaction from subordinates has when it happens in the criminal justice system.

In DA’s offices, you’ll get Brady violations.  That’s when a prosecutor fails to turn over information to a defense attorney that might prove a defendant’s innocence.  In police departments, officers end up stopping and arresting people without probable cause. In a crime lab, criminalists aren’t properly trained or don’t follow procedures in carrying out analysis of evidence.  In prisons, corrections officers can become anything from lazy babysitters who just let gangs take over to active participants in the trafficking of contraband and information that help run the gangs outside the prison walls.

And that’s just for starters.  Innocent people will go to jail.  And when the patterns of behavior are discovered, guilty people will start to be set free on technicalities.  So, which gives you greater heartburn?  Seeing innocent people go to jail or watching murderers and rapists go free?

This slack approach to a job that impacts the lives and freedoms of the public in such a fundamental way creates a warm and welcome home for the worst of the worst: the occasional sociopath.  Those who will inevitably create those high-profile scandals that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  Those who are so comfortable and obvious and proud in their corruption that they may as well be walking around with the Eye of Sauron blazing over their heads.

The supervisors who hide under their desks and won’t discipline even minor infractions from normal employees won’t dare to engage this new creature in their midst.  Instead of using the system to remove them from the agency, they’ll use the system to get them out of their unit.  Being judicious requires interviews and a spine.  Being expeditious is a lot less uncomfortable.  So that’s the answer: transfer them, promote them, just get them out of my sight.

And so it goes.

Transparency is becoming much more accepted these days within the criminal justice system.  Agencies should be proactive in developing their own plans and in constantly evaluating those plans to make sure that they are working.  Honest mistakes by employees should be allowed and addressed with training.  Everybody makes mistakes and working in the criminal justice system at any level is a stressful thing.  But negative patterns of behavior should be dealt with appropriately and supervisors who allow it should be on the hook for it just as much as employees who commit the bad behavior.