By Oscar A. Martinez
We in law enforcement need to admit something: We have not always done a good job explaining ourselves.
For years, we have asked communities to trust us while too often waiting until something goes wrong to explain what we do. A controversial use of force occurs, and suddenly we are explaining the law governing force. An arrest generates outrage, and we begin explaining probable cause. A new policy is proposed, and only after the debate is well underway do police leaders begin talking about what that policy might mean for officers on the street.
By then, we are no longer leading the conversation. We are reacting to it. And police leadership bears responsibility for allowing that to happen.
I have spent much of my adult life in law enforcement, and experience has changed how I think about leadership. Early in my career, I thought our work would speak for itself. Do the job professionally, treat people fairly, make good decisions, and the public will understand what you are trying to accomplish. I no longer believe that is enough.
Policing is too complicated, and the authority entrusted to police officers is too significant, for us to expect the public to simply understand it. We have a responsibility to explain what we do, why we do it, what the law allows us to do and, just as importantly, what it does not allow us to do. That explanation should not begin after a crisis. It should have begun years before it.
When police leaders stop explaining
For too long, some police leaders failed at that responsibility. We became very good at managing organizations. We managed budgets, staffing, compliance, risk, training, lawsuits and the crisis of the day. We became careful about what we said and increasingly comfortable allowing public information offices, attorneys and prepared statements to speak for us.
In the process, too many leaders stopped doing one of the most basic things leaders are supposed to do: explain the mission. That silence created a vacuum, and others understandably filled it.
Community activists, elected officials, civilian oversight bodies, academics, journalists and civil rights organizations became increasingly influential in conversations about policing. Many brought legitimate concerns. Some exposed failures that law enforcement needed to confront. Some reforms made us better. We should be willing to say that.
But police leaders should also be willing to admit that when outside voices became the dominant voices explaining policing, we could not simply blame them. We had surrendered too much of the conversation ourselves. If we were absent from the table, we should not have been surprised when decisions were made without our perspective. That is a leadership failure.
Listening does not require surrendering professional expertise.
Accountability and expertise can coexist
The public should have a voice in policing. In a free society, it must. Police officers exercise extraordinary government authority, and that authority should always be subject to law, oversight and public accountability. But professional experience belongs in that conversation too.
There are consequences to policy decisions that may not be obvious outside a patrol car, a dispatch center, a detective bureau or a command post. A policy that sounds reasonable in a meeting can look very different at 2 a.m. when an officer has seconds to make a decision. A change intended to solve one problem can create another somewhere else in the public safety system.
Police leaders have an obligation to explain those consequences honestly. Too often, however, leaders have taken the safer route. Rather than challenge assumptions, explain unintended consequences or publicly articulate what their officers were experiencing, some remained quiet and implemented whatever came next. That may be management. It is not leadership.
Leadership does not mean police executives always get their way. They shouldn’t. Elected officials make laws. Courts interpret them. Communities establish priorities. Civilian oversight has a legitimate place in democratic policing. Leadership means bringing professional knowledge into those decisions before they are made.
A chief or sheriff should be willing to tell a community: Here is what this proposal will accomplish. Here is what it will cost. Here is what experience tells us could happen next. Here are the risks to officers, victims and the public. Here is what our officers are seeing on the street. And here is what we recommend.
The ultimate decision may belong to someone else. The responsibility to provide candid professional counsel does not. That is not resistance to accountability. That is leadership.
And this responsibility cannot be delegated to a public information officer. PIOs perform an essential role, but they cannot carry the voice of an entire profession. Chiefs, sheriffs and command staff must communicate before the crisis. They need to talk about force before the viral video, explain enforcement priorities before the controversy and discuss the limitations of police authority before people become frustrated by what officers cannot legally do.
Police leadership must also look inward.
We cannot ask the public to trust us if our own officers do not understand where their leaders are taking them. Officers notice when policy changes arrive with little explanation. They notice when their leaders disappear during controversy. They notice when political pressure seems to produce immediate changes. And they notice when leaders will publicly acknowledge misconduct but hesitate to publicly defend good police work. Leadership requires both.
Credibility requires honesty
We also must acknowledge where policing itself has failed. American policing has made mistakes, at times serious ones. There have been officers who betrayed the badge, leaders who failed to hold them accountable and policies that needed to change. We should not minimize those failures or become defensive whenever someone raises them.
If we expect the public to listen when we defend good police work, we must be equally willing to speak when police work falls short of our standards. Credibility cannot work only when it is convenient. But neither should our failures become the only story we tell about ourselves.
Every day across this country, officers walk into homes where people are experiencing the worst moments of their lives. They search for missing children, intervene in domestic violence, confront dangerous suspects, comfort victims, investigate deaths, administer lifesaving aid and make thousands of decisions that will never appear on the evening news. Most of those encounters end without controversy.
That is ordinary policing, and perhaps we have taken ordinary policing for granted for too long.
The public deserves to understand the profession in its entirety: our successes and failures, our authority and its limitations, the difficult decisions officers make and the accountability that should follow those decisions. But understanding is a two-way responsibility.
Police leaders need to stop waiting for the public to understand us and start doing a better job helping the public understand us. That means showing up before the crisis. It means listening to people who disagree with us. It means acknowledging when our profession gets something wrong. It also means having the courage to say when a proposed policy may have consequences the public has not considered.
It means explaining instead of complaining. It means leading instead of reacting. And it means accepting that if others have come to define our profession for us, some of the responsibility belongs to those of us who remained silent while it happened.
The public should scrutinize its police. People should expect constitutional policing, professionalism, transparency and accountability from those entrusted with authority to take someone’s freedom and, in extraordinary circumstances, use force.
They should also expect police leaders to tell them the truth about policing, even when that truth is complicated, inconvenient or unpopular.
For too long, too many of us waited for someone else to explain our profession. That needs to change. The answer is not for police leaders to become louder, defensive or political. It is for us to become more present, more transparent and more willing to explain the profession we have spent our lives serving.
We have a responsibility to listen to the public. We have a responsibility to learn from our failures. And we have a responsibility to lead.
This time, we cannot surrender that responsibility to someone else.
About the author
Oscar A. Martinez is a law enforcement professional serving with a law enforcement agency in California. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Homeland Security, a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice, and a Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership. He is a graduate of the Sherman Block Supervisory Leadership Institute, the Los Angeles Police Department Leadership Program, and the California POST Command College.
