I say this to clients all the time: Bad structures and bad systems break good people. And broken people break others.
But while we may notice when a person behaves badly, we don’t always perceive the underlying structures and systems that encourage negative behaviors. This is painfully evident in the recent death in Memphis of 29-year-old father, FedEx driver, and amateur photographer Tyre Nichols—yet another innocent Black person murdered by American police, slain by the very people who were hired to protect and serve him and his community.
It’s not merely a mistake when cops pull over an innocent person and then attack and even kill them. The statistics of Black motorists who have been stopped in traffic and murdered demonstrate that such an outcome is neither individual nor personal but is actually systemic.
Violent and racist behaviors are normal within the policing system because policing in this country conceals a racial focus in its very structure: Black neighborhoods and Black drivers are overpoliced as part of the system that assigns and compensates officers. Workplans, areas of responsibility, and incentives are all structural components that drive the behavior of individuals who operate inside organizational systems and yield to their structures—and this is as true in municipal police forces as it is in corporate entities.
Bad Behaviors Arise Out of Bad Systems
In fact, there are often organizational systems and structures in place—in civilian organizations as well as in the police force—that drive ineffective yet persistent bad behavior.
Here’s one example. Years ago, I worked with an organization that was experiencing poor performance and dismal outcomes from a department of analysts. The department’s reports were late and incorrect, its models were inaccurate, and the analysts themselves didn’t seem interested in their internal customers’ actual needs or ongoing distress.
The organization’s leadership team believed that these problems were due to the analysts’ two supervisors, who were cranky, embattled, and unsupportive of both customers and team members. The leadership team blamed the two supervisors for the department’s flaws and brought me in to do an assessment. The leadership team assumed that I would confirm that the supervisors were indeed inadequate, and wanted me to specify the skills and qualities that were necessary to do the job well. The intention was to fire and replace these two individuals with superior candidates.
But as I interviewed the analysts, their supervisors, and their internal customers, it became clear that the issue was not the two difficult supervisors, although they did need significant training and coaching to be better at their jobs. Nor was their bad behavior the primary source of the department’s issues . The real culprit was the department’s inaccurate and unwieldy data management systems and tools, which were ill-suited to generating the desired deliverables. Even if the supervisors had been more congenial and skillful, their work outcomes would still have been wrong and unsatisfactory. Swapping out the two individuals would not improve the quality of the data. Only systems changes—including new data applications and tools—could do that.
Diversity Is Not Enough to Change the System
The five Black officers who killed Tyre Nichols were personal participants in beating, kicking, spraying, tasing, and insulting and degrading him. The racial issue is not that these cops were Black—it’s that Tyre Nichols was. There is a systemic expectation within law enforcement that it’s within the normal course of police work for Black men to be killed savagely in traffic stops. “White drivers are rarely, if ever, pulled from their cars and beaten to death without provocation by police officers of any race,” a Los Angeles Times op-ed notes. “The Memphis video demonstrates merely that Black officers can as easily as their white counterparts become instruments of a brutal law enforcement system that was largely shaped by historical white privilege.”
Yes, the individual cops who killed Tyre Nichols transgressed and should be punished for it. But this tragedy shows that it is not enough to diversify the police force. We need systemic solutions to end racist policing.
Opportunities for Repairing Damaging Work Systems
Although I have no experience with professional policing, I have deep experience with work systems that drive and sustain negative employee behavior. Based on that track record, I offer these four suggestions as potential aspects of a structural solution:
Change work assignments. Police who are given arms are expected to use them—otherwise, why have them—and that’s a structural problem. According to the “Chekhov’s gun” principle, every single element of a story that is introduced, whether a character or a prop, must be necessary to the plot. “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” Chekhov wrote. “It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.” It doesn’t make sense to send armed cops should not be sent into situations where guns are not needed. In Tyre Nichols’s case, the specially designated SCORPION cops were primed to expect high-risk situations and seemed to be always looking for a fight. That’s a bad assignment for normal traffic stops.
Enforce significant consequences for bad actions. Ending the qualified immunity that shields police in cases like this one would impose actual costs on municipalities and potentially on individual cops themselves. When liability costs are too high, it’s clear that the system is out of balance and needs correction.
Invest in skill development. People can only use the skills they have. In a typical workplace example, many customer service reps are more proficient at using their computer systems accurately than they are at being helpful. This is because the majority of their training time is spent on systems practices. Input errors are tracked and corrected assiduously, whereas communications practice is scanty and communication errors are often overlooked.
Similarly, in the most recent data on the basic training of police, 60 hours are spent on firearms training and 51 hours are focused on self-defense, but only eight hours apiece are spent on mediation and conflict resolution, ethics and integrity, and community policing strategy. That’s way out of balance.
Institute mindfulness training. Force is fast, while its opposite, nonviolent de-escalation, takes time and thoughtfulness. Mindfulness training for law enforcement reduces automatic behavior and increases awareness, discretion, and resilience. It can improve decision-making and emotional regulation and diminish implicit bias, burnout, and depression. It permits individuals in stressful situations to focus on justice as well as enforcement.
Work on Systemic Problems from the Outside In
Overall, though, law enforcement exists inside a larger set of societal structures, which means that society itself needs to change. Society’s systems and structures sustain and enforce too much intersection between Blackness and poverty, and the media too often conflates Blackness and crime or Blackness and drugs, so it’s no surprise that some Black people, including police officers driven by their work systems, might see other Black people as less deserving of care and protection.
We would all be better off if there were a societal requirement to learn that every human being has inherent value. Then all people could feel more equal than they do today and could regard everyone else, irrespective of race or any other identifying characteristic, as worthy of fair treatment.
It’s very rare for systemic problems to be solved by the people who operate within the problematic systems. It usually takes some outside authority and expertise to recognize what the larger pressures and impacts are, and to spearhead changes. But it is long past time for change. It is time to start overhauling bad structures and systems rather than focusing on individuals and expecting large-scale improvement.
Onward and upward—
LK