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As I read this today, it struck me as the problem facing our Law Enforcement agencies.


"Science fiction writer <broken link removed>, observing such things, has formulated what he calls the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In every organization there are two kinds of people: those committed to the mission of the organization, and those committed to the organization itself. While the mission-committed people pursue the mission, the organization-committed people take over the organization. Then the mission-committed people tend to become discouraged and leave.

As a result, the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing. That's worth remembering, whenever someone says they've found something else that we should "choose to do together.
"" -- Glenn Reynolds


The Good Cops - being dedicated to the mission - are pushed aside by The Bad Cops - those dedicated to the organization.

How do we get all of them on mission? - To Serve and Protect




Jerry is not just a writer - he is an actual rocket scientist. Was part of the SDI - Star Wars Team and was science adviser for Newt Gingrich back while Jethro was running the country. That is: smart guy.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/
https://www.google.com/#q=pournelle's+iron+law+of+bureaucracy
 
Maybe.

I would say there is also, or maybe rather, a group of people in any organization, that could care less about the organization or its mission, they care about their position in that organization and what power or other benefits they can get from the organization.
 
I'm guessing that for every mission dedicated person there are three organization dedicated and, maybe, two don't give a poo types!
But then, I've become a terrible cynic.
Pournelle certainly is smart and he sure can write!
 
There is truth in what was said. I've seen my share of empire builders that are committed to growing their power base and trying to make themselves a "requirement". A prime example was at Corrections in CA - the leadership over the construction/maintenance side had the requirements for inmate housing levels re-written so that in most cases you can't house a higher level inmate in lower level housing - level 3 can't be housed in level 2, etc. This was done in the name of staff/inmate security but the motive was to grow the empire by forcing the need for more maximum security prisons. What this really did was cause over crowding in the higher level prisons that led to the feds forcing them to release over 5K inmates. Oddly enough, the inmates they released early were minimum security which did nothing to reduce overcrowding in the higher levels. Now that the minimum security inmates are few and far between they are short on inmate fire crews and are having to hire people to fight the wild fires. From what I have heard most recently they aren't building any more max prisons but are trying to figure out how to upgrade some level 2 units to the "new" requirements for level 3 and level 3 units to level 4. If they hadn't changed the requirements in the first place to justify a need for more max prisons and growing the empire the feds never would have forced them to release all those inmates.
 

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