Tag: police

Quality Profession Needs to Stand for Quality in Public Practices

The Quality profession either stays true to its’ principles and ideals, or it is useless. We either support transparency and driving out fear or we don’t. Then we become the shallow, and dangerous crutch of demagogues and tyrants. One of the reasons Six Sigma has immense problems it still has not successfully grappled stems from how it is centered on the tyranny of Jack Welch.

The ASQ’s Government Division has taken a great step recently by endorsing the adoption of ISO/TS 54001:2019 “Quality management systems — Particular requirements for the application of ISO 9001:2015 for electoral organizations at all levels of government”.

We should be demanding elections built on the foundations of good quality. This should be part of electoral reform requirements at the Federal level. We need to oppose attempts to restrict voting. We need to drive fear out of our electoral system.

The United States is a signatory of international standards of policing. And yet no state follows those standards. Federal law needs to respect our treaty obligations and impose these standards, and we need to hold states and localities accountable.

As a quality professional I spend the day figuring out how to truthfully measure results. Yet an entire party has gleefully adopted lies and disinformation. I strive to democratize leadership, to build a culture of psychological safety. And yet all around us we see demagoguery.

Our workplace cultures are influenced greatly by external factors. We cannot hope to drive lies and fraud out of our systems, to create cultures of safety, to build excellence when all around us is a disregard for those standards. For this reason the quality profession must be political. It must standard for truth, for fair standards applied equitably. For driving out fear.

A Quality Mindset leads to Abolishing the Police

As we watch the closing arguments of the Derek Chauvin trial, it is not difficult to see systemic problems with policing in America. One only need to look at stories like:

  • Patrick Rove, long-time police union president, accused of child abuse and with credible questions of how he was so thoroughly protected by the police hierarchy
  • Baltimore police planting toy guns on people they shot
  • The continued excuses of “human error” and “you need to walk in our shoes”, for example the recent killing of Daunte Wright

Read the Wikipedia entry on United States Police Brutality, which provides an excellent problem statement.

For root cause analysis, read the University of Chicago study that found that America’s biggest police forces lack legality, as they are not answerable to human rights compliant laws authorizing the use of lethal force.

It is impossible not to reach the conclusions that the culture is rotten, there are inherently bad actors, and institutional resistance to change is standing in way of improvement.

Given the continued failures in implementing change, it is time to shift the resistors out of police departments. The only way to effectively do that seems to radically restructure the police, breaking their responsibilities up and sending those responsibilities to organizations better suited for these duties.

This is why I stand for police abolition.