Technically Excellent, Relationally Absent
Throughout the year, our department runs audits across a dozen different systems and areas of operation — database access, use of force, evidence handling, vehicle pursuits, etc. It's routine, necessary work, and no single one of those reports tells you much on its own about the health of your organization. What actually taught me the most over the years wasn't any of that paperwork. It was the ride-alongs, and the one-on-one conversations I've mentioned in earlier issues. Sitting in a patrol car, letting an officer talk about whatever was actually on their mind, turned out to be a different kind of audit — one that never shows up on a spreadsheet. I've written before about what those conversations taught me about morale and retention. What I didn't fully appreciate until later was that they were teaching me something else at the same time: how much distance had quietly grown between some of my supervisors and the people they were supposed to be leading.
That gap has been on my mind again this month, watching the same story repeat itself in agency after agency around the country. A South Carolina lieutenant terminated after an audit turned up more than 2,700 unauthorized searches of a license plate reader system over roughly a year. Five officers in Georgia arrested in a single sweep. A Massachusetts officer facing termination and criminal charges. An Arizona officer who resigned before he could be fired, after investigators found he'd used the system to track his own wife. Different states, different agencies, the same shape every time: months, sometimes years, of activity nobody caught until an audit finally caught it. Every one of those cases is, on paper, a technology story. I think they're something else. They're a preview of what happens in any organization once leadership loses touch with the people it's supposed to be watching over.
I want to be careful here, because this isn't a piece about excusing any of that. Misusing a system built to protect the public is a serious breach, and it deserves serious consequences, every time, without exception. What I keep sitting with isn't whether those consequences were deserved. It's the timeline. An audit is a lagging indicator. It tells you what already happened, usually long after it started. The real question isn't only "how do we audit better," though that matters. It's whether anyone close enough to that person could have noticed something drifting, months before the audit ever ran.
That question sits right next to something I wrote about in Edition 2 — the gap between technical competence and people leadership. We've built entire careers rewarding the first one. A sharp investigator earns a stripe. A strong tactician earns another one. Almost nobody gets asked, before we hand them a rank, whether they know how to lead the people under it. Whether they can read a change in someone before it turns into a headline.
That mismatch isn’t unique to policing. Gallup’s research on management selection found that organizations fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job about 82% of the time. Dr. Bill Dickinson, founder of C3 Leadership, works with senior leaders across policing, healthcare, and municipal government on exactly this problem, and his conclusion is blunt: we promote on one competency and assume the rest arrives with the title. It doesn’t. People-leader capability has to be selected for proactively and developed deliberately once the rank is on the shoulder. The same way we build firearms proficiency or report writing.
A supervisor who actually knows their people isn't running a background check on someone's mood every shift. They notice things because they're paying attention, not because they're looking for anything in particular. They notice when the officer who used to stop and talk before roll call stops doing that. They notice when someone's casework still looks fine, but their affect has changed. None of that proves misconduct is coming, and most of the time it means nothing at all. But that relationship gives a supervisor the standing to ask the question early, in a conversation, instead of finding out the answer later, in an audit.
Here's what I'd ask any leader reading this to sit with. Pull your last personnel report. Instead of asking who's most productive, ask yourself which of your supervisors could tell you, without hesitating, how their people are actually doing right now. If that list is shorter than your org chart, that's not something a policy memo fixes. It's a leadership gap, and it's the same one that's been quietly driving turnover long before it ever shows up in a headline about misuse.
I've been writing about this exact gap for the better part of two years now, in a book I'm finishing called Leadership Culture Under Pressure. If you'd like to know when it's out, you can sign up here to be notified.
What's the earliest sign you've learned to trust that someone on your team needs your attention, before a report ever tells you?
