http://articles.philly.com/2013-12-09/ne...olice-officials"McKenna alleges police subjected him to a form of abuse - a jolting and dangerous ride in a police wagon - that has a long, dishonorable history in Philadelphia.
The practice was entrenched before the department vowed to end it a dozen years ago after an Inquirer investigative series. The articles detailed crippling injuries,
including paralysis, suffered by people placed unrestrained in the vans."
I spent the better part of 30 years working, at least part time, in training software developers at one level or another. It was an axiom within the training community that the most difficult task of all was changing a culture. Management can write all the rules they wish, make pronouncements from on high, single out and severely punish offenders, reward those who adapt to change, but long established cultural norms will persist until the vast majority of those in the culture recognize the advantages of change (or the inevitability) and not only adopt the changes but enforce them on their fellows through social pressure. Another axiom for those involved in effecting cultural change is the
What's in it for me? effect. It is human nature to resist change unless individuals can see either a direct or indirect personal benefit.
Philadelphia may have said the Paddy Wagon ride was outlawed, but until a big enough majority of Philadelphia police recognize there is a
DIRECT BENEFIT to them so they exercise social pressure to change the behavior of the remainder, the
Paddy Wagon ride will continue albeit perhaps clandestinely. Cultural change never happens easily or overnight. In my experience it takes years and the dedicated focus of all levels of management to make real change happen. Unfortunately it is also an axiom that management can seldom maintain focus for more than a year. There has to be an overriding and commonly accepted goal to maintain management focus long enough to truly impact cultural change.
In the case of the company I worked for the focus was provided by an attempt to win the Malcolm Baldrige award. It turned out that it was not the award itself rather management's deep embarrassment over not even making the first cut the first year they tried. They learned it was not enough to
talk the talk or make rules. That embarrasement held their focus for the over five years time and huge cultural changes from the office of CEO all the way down to the janitors mopping and waxing the floors. We had to learn that talk was cheap and real change required actually
walking the talk.
Maybe there needs to be a Malcolm Baldrige award for law enforcement?