Everybody likes transparency when the answer makes the department look good. It’s easy to talk about accomplishments, successful investigations, improved response times, or something the department has done particularly well.

The harder part comes when I have to acknowledge that something inside my own organization isn’t working the way it should, especially when admitting it might raise questions about the department’s leadership or the decisions I’ve made myself.

I don’t believe being transparent means publicly airing every personnel problem or turning every mistake into a press conference. There are things I can’t responsibly discuss, and sometimes I don’t have enough information to reach a conclusion. But if I know supervision has been inadequate, a policy hasn’t been followed, or a problem has been allowed to continue because nobody wanted to deal with it, I’m not going to pretend everything is fine simply because acknowledging the problem might embarrass the department.

One of the realities of becoming a police chief is that you can inherit problems you had absolutely nothing to do with creating. Poor decisions, neglected responsibilities, questionable practices, and organizational habits can develop over years.

I don’t believe accepting the position makes me personally responsible for everything that happened before I got there, and I’m comfortable explaining that difference when it’s necessary.

What changes when I take the job is my responsibility for what happens next. I can’t spend the next three years explaining why something was broken when I arrived and use that explanation as an excuse for leaving it that way. I may have limited control over the budget, decisions made by elected officials, state law, or circumstances that existed before I became chief.

But I still have an obligation to recognize what needs attention, determine what I can reasonably do about it, and use the authority I have to address it. Responsibility for fixing something isn’t necessarily the same as responsibility for causing it.

I also think organizations become pretty good at finding language that makes uncomfortable problems sound less serious than they really are. Weak supervision becomes a training issue. A failure to enforce policy becomes an opportunity for improvement. A problem that’s been obvious to everybody inside the building for months gets described as a process under review.

Sometimes those descriptions are appropriate, particularly when the facts haven’t been fully established. Other times, they’re simply a more comfortable way of avoiding what everybody already knows.

If supervision failed, I’d rather acknowledge that failure and explain what we’re doing to correct it. If an officer violated policy, I want to know what happened, why it happened, and whether the department responded appropriately. And if leadership knew there was a problem but failed to address it, I don’t believe that responsibility disappears simply because the people involved hold supervisory positions.

Acknowledging a failure doesn’t mean condemning an entire department or every officer who works there. In fact, I think failing to distinguish between the people responsible and those who had nothing to do with it can be just as unfair.

Transparency still has limits

There are legitimate reasons a police chief can’t discuss everything happening inside a department. Personnel matters, active investigations, privacy, protected records, and due process all have to be considered. I don’t believe an officer should have his career or reputation destroyed through public accusations before the facts have been established, and I certainly don’t believe conducting an internal investigation in front of a camera on social media makes the process any more credible.

What I try to distinguish is the information I can’t responsibly release from the information I simply don’t want to discuss. I may not be able to explain the evidence against a particular employee or disclose protected personnel information.

Depending on the circumstances, I may still be able to explain how the department handles those allegations, whether an investigation is underway, or why certain information can’t be released yet. That’s part of why police sometimes can’t tell you everything, even when the public has a legitimate interest in knowing what happened.

What I don’t want is for phrases like “personnel matter” or “ongoing investigation” to become convenient answers whenever the truth might make somebody uncomfortable. Those explanations should reflect an actual limitation, not serve as protection against embarrassment.

Loyalty is another area where I think police leadership can get this wrong. I put a lot of value on loyalty, particularly in a profession where people depend on one another in situations that can become dangerous without much warning. Officers need to know that the people working beside them will do their jobs, support them when they’re right, and not abandon them simply because defending them has become inconvenient. That’s one reason the partnership in End of Watch works for me as a leadership story.

But loyalty doesn’t mean protecting an officer who clearly did something wrong. It also doesn’t mean sacrificing an officer who did the right thing because City Hall, social media, or somebody with a camera doesn’t like how the situation looks. I don’t see much difference in the underlying failure when a chief knowingly protects misconduct to spare the department embarrassment. In either case, he’s allowing his own interests to interfere with a fair assessment of what happened.

And when leadership protects somebody who should have been corrected, disciplined, or removed, the consequences don’t stop with that employee. The rest of the department ends up carrying some of the damage. The public generally doesn’t know which officers raised concerns internally, which supervisors tried to address the problem, or who made the decision to let it continue.

They see the uniform, the badge, and the department name. Good officers can spend years doing their jobs properly and still find themselves defending an organization that leadership hasn’t been willing to hold accountable.

I expect officers to be truthful in their reports, in court, during investigations, and when their own conduct is being reviewed. I don’t think those expectations should suddenly become negotiable when the uncomfortable facts involve a supervisor or the chief himself. If honesty is a condition of wearing the badge, I have a difficult time explaining why the person running the department should operate under a different standard.

The pressure doesn’t always come from inside the department

A police chief also works within a municipal government, and there are people outside the department who have legitimate interests in how internal problems are handled. Mayors, councils, city managers, attorneys, and insurers may have concerns about lawsuits, personnel decisions, financial exposure, public confidence, and the city’s reputation. Those aren’t automatically improper concerns, and I’d be foolish to ignore them simply because I’m responsible for police operations.

I can listen to those concerns and consider the consequences without allowing political convenience to determine what is true. There may be a perfectly legitimate reason to delay a public explanation, limit what can be disclosed, or address a problem internally without holding a press conference. But if a city expects its police chief to correct a serious organizational problem, it can’t reasonably expect meaningful accountability while insisting that everybody publicly pretend the problem never existed.

That doesn’t mean the chief gets to say whatever he wants, either. An explanation can be accurate without being unnecessarily damaging. It can be measured, limited to established facts, and respectful of the people involved. Sometimes the responsible decision is to say that the matter is still being examined and that I’m not prepared to reach a conclusion. What I shouldn’t do is offer an explanation I know to be misleading because an accurate one might create political discomfort.

There’s another side to transparency that I think deserves just as much attention. A new chief can walk into a department, describe everything he inherited as a disaster, blame the previous administration for every problem he encounters, and then portray every routine improvement as evidence that he’s rescuing the organization. That might look like accountability from the outside, but it can be just another form of protecting your own image.

I’ve learned that there can be reasons behind decisions that aren’t immediately obvious. Something that looks poorly managed during my first week may make more sense once I understand the history. An employee everybody complains about may turn out to have followed policy. A procedure that seems unnecessary may exist because of a problem the department encountered years earlier.

If I start announcing failures before understanding what happened, I’m not being particularly transparent. I’m simply telling the version of the story that makes me look better than the people who came before me.

I want enough information to support what I’m saying, whether that information reflects poorly on a former chief, one of my officers, or me. I don’t have to defend a bad decision simply because it was made by somebody I like, and I don’t have to criticize a good decision simply because it was made by somebody I disagree with. The facts should receive the same consideration regardless of who’s involved.

That’s where I think the real test of transparency comes. It’s one thing to acknowledge a problem when the person responsible is unpopular, the solution is obvious, and everybody agrees something needs to change. It’s another when the officer involved is well-liked, the mistake is embarrassing, City Hall would rather move on, or the facts raise uncomfortable questions about something I personally approved.

A police chief doesn’t owe the public every internal detail, and there are times when protecting the integrity of an investigation or the rights of an employee requires saying less than people might want to hear. But I do believe I owe people an honest account of what I can responsibly say, including the part that might make the department or me look bad.

If the facts establish that we got something wrong, I’d rather spend my time deciding what we’re going to do about it than figuring out how to make the answer sound better.