I wrote yesterday about the press battle between the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee’s Police Chief Flynn. Conflicts like this often lead to wagon-circling, a self-defeating response. See, The Predictable, Dead-End Response.
And yet, Flynn is sure to have a second term, something unusual for Milwaukee, but common in most departments. Commonly, police commissions go with what they know: they favor incumbents or internal candidates. The advantage an incumbent or internal candidate has is nearly overwhelming.
If that should be so — and it is — what does that say about open applications processes, and the nature of the chief’s role?
On processes. For open processes, it’s not any given outcome, but the process itself, that matters. That process is a general good, but also has occasional practical benefits. Each and every word of a candidate’s application statements may be used as a standard by which to measure conduct in office after his selection. Did he do what he said he would do? Were those words, instead, all just the rhetoric of the moment, the mere parroting of platitudes and pale promises?
There’s a value in measuring actions against good practices, and another value in measuring words against actions.
On the chief’s role. Flynn’s looking for a second term, and he’ll get one, and he has done so shrewdly. Like him or not, the Journal Sentinel sees that Flynn’s a politically clever, nationally-recognized chief. He didn’t get that way by being obvious or outwardly fawning toward Milwaukee’s police commission.
Flynn knows what small-town pols and bureaucrats can’t quite grasp – that a chief’s authority doesn’t depend on shows of closeness with a police commission, but on the public’s direct and immediate support for community safety. Flynn doesn’t need his hand held, nor does he need to make a show of holding anyone else’s hand.
If anything, a smarmy relationship between commission and chief only reveals conflicts of interest, failures of oversight, and embarrassing neediness. Rather than serving the interests of good policing, it only serves as another avenue of legitimate criticism.
Flynn may have made a dozen mistakes, but he’s not made any of the avoidable mistakes that mediocre, dull leaders make. It’s one of the reasons that, unlike middling leaders, he’s likely to survive (even now!) with his standing mostly intact.