5min chapter

Making Sense with Sam Harris cover image

#399 — The Politics of Catastrophe

Making Sense with Sam Harris

CHAPTER

Navigating Leadership in Law Enforcement

This chapter examines the critical relationship between political decision-making and effective leadership in policing, illustrated through a personal story of removing an underperforming police chief. It emphasizes the importance of courageous leadership decisions for community safety and the need for reforms to enable proactive policing.

00:00
Speaker 1
I would
Speaker 2
add, though, if you don't mind, I think competence needs to be married with backbone and courage. And one of the things that I've seen, I think we've all seen with elected officials, their real priority is to get reelected. And so a lot of the decisions they make, they make through that lens. That doesn't necessarily get you to the right decision. Usually it doesn't. Sometimes maybe it will. Usually it doesn't. And they have a time horizon over it. Like to make a long-term investment that's expensive. Right.
Speaker 1
Doesn't marry well to your time horizon where it's, you know, two years or four years or six years or whatever you're worried about. You need your soundbite for your campaign. That's right. I
Speaker 2
learned a lot when I was president of the police commission because I had a situation, I inherited a situation where we had a very, very popular chief of police, Bernie Parks, who came out of central casting, looked great, handsome guy, wore the uniform great, been with LAPD years. He was just not the right manager, a bad manager. And he put in policies after Rodney King that became so draconian to the cops in terms of the system for filing any kind of grievance that it basically forced the cops' career to stop until that grievance was adjudicated, which could take a year to two years. So what happened? The cops aren't stupid. They started not policing as proactively because they didn't want to get a complaint. The gangs aren't stupid. They started filing complaints against cops so the cops wouldn't go into the gangs areas. So we had the crime spiking. We had an unhappy workforce. We had cops that were leaving because they didn't want to be part of that system and Parks wouldn't change it. And we had a consent decree, which he didn't want to follow. So me and my fellow commissioners made the tough decision that we're going to fire him, you know, and there's a whole backstory on that. And then my choice and the commission agreed with me and Jim Hahn agreed with me at the time was Bill Bratton. So now I'm going to remove this guy that has been part of the system for a long time, beloved by the city. I literally had my wife would call me and say, you know, Rick, they're burning you an effigy outside of city hall right now. They were marching on the Grove as we were under construction to put pressure on me, stopping construction. It was just insane. And I would say to Tina, I would say, I'm going to be home for dinner. Don't worry about it. We're going to do what's right here. And I called Jim Hahn and I said, I'm going to tell you that I'm going to select Bill Bratton. And he has to approve that as a mayor. And I said, I also want to tell you, you can fire at any time you want, but I'm going to bring you who I think is the best. And that's going to be Bill,
Speaker 1
but
Speaker 2
it's going to be a political hot potato.
Speaker 1
I forget that Bratton come from the NYPD or NYPD.
Speaker 2
So you take this guy, not from LAPD. You take a guy with a Boston accent, doesn't look like, you know, whatever. Brilliant cop, by the way. And to Jim Hahn's credit, he says, just do what you think is right. What I learned from that exercise, it is so liberating when you're in a position to make a decision where you're not worried about the consequence of the decision. You're just worried about, is it the right decision? And that decision did result in crime in LA getting back down to levels not seen since 1950. Leadership matters. Good decisions matter. Backbone matters.
Speaker 1
Also, bad incentives are so corrosive, right? I mean, what you just named there was this, this perverse wheel of essentially stigmatizing policing, right? Where the police don't want to be complained about because it causes consequences for them. Right. Everyone knows this. So you can complain about the police to keep them out of your neighborhood. That's an incentive problem that needs to, I mean, there's probably a hundred of those that need to be recognized. That's right. It's
Speaker 2
also an insanity loop. Yeah. Because you're just creating your own insanity over and over again. Yeah. And we have that now. That's why we're so short of cops, because so many of the cops in Los Angeles are under such constrained rules that they're just, they don't want, they don't feel like they're being police. And I'm not talking about cops that want to go do bad things or take advantage of people. I'm talking about cops that take great pride in being proactive and protecting a community. But the rules that Garcetti has put in when he was mayor that have remained under Bass allow crime to rise because police are not allowed to be proactive.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so how do we change that? I mean, how can we use this moment of rebuilding to solidify some gains in political sanity here?

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