In 2015, President Obama’s 21st Century Task Force published a report designed to reform the criminal justice systems by focusing attention on building relationships between law enforcement and the community. The major flaw in this report was that most of the attention was given to street cops and little attention to relationship building between the law enforcement officers and their leadership. One of the pillars from this report briefly discusses the importance of active listening in matters that affect employees in all law enforcement organizations. It states that law enforcement agencies should establish a culture of transparency and accountability. It also states that before external procedural justice can be promoted in our communities, internal procedural justice must occur, so law enforcement officers feel they are being heard and treated fairly with justice and consistency. In other words, if we expect street cops to be held to high moral, ethical, legal, and professional standards, then we must expect—and in fact demand—that their leaders be held to the same standards. While some police chiefs across the country are highly vocal in taking a stand to abide by these principles, other chiefs spend most of their time doing the opposite; abandoning or targeting hard working officers for issues that they deem to be a political embarrassment to the organization. And when their employees dare to speak-up about potential unfair treatment from organizational leaders, they are persecuted, making their workplaces unbearable until they are ousted by the organization. Guilty until proven innocent is becoming the norm for those law enforcement organizations that, for political reasons, forget that crime reduction comes at a cost. This is the deciding moment when law enforcement officers should realize whether they are working for a true leader or a political puppet following an unsubstantiated narrative that all cops are killers and racists.
GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT
