I disagree with a lot of what comes out of California’s legislature. Some of their laws seem to create solutions for problems that don’t necessarily exist. But every now and then, they get something right, and their recently enacted No Robo Bosses Act is one of those occasions. In fact, I think every state should…
I’ve never had a problem with organizations using confidentiality agreements for legitimate purposes. Businesses have information they need to protect, and there are plenty of circumstances where an agreement restricting disclosure makes sense. But I have a problem when those same agreements are used to prevent somebody from talking about sexual abuse. As of October…
A lot of police movies make patrol look like one long emergency. A traffic stop becomes a chase, a disturbance turns into a major investigation, and every routine call seems to connect to something bigger. End of Watch does plenty of movie stuff too. I wouldn’t use it as a training film, and I wouldn’t…
I saw a story about an AI manager at a San Francisco store recommending that an employee be fired. The employee had been late 17 times in 23 shifts, so I’m not going to pretend the attendance problem wasn’t real. A human manager probably should’ve dealt with it long before the AI did. What caught…
The main argument in Extreme Ownership is hard to disagree with. If you’re responsible for a team and your first explanation for every failure is that everybody beneath you screwed up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough at your own part in it. That doesn’t mean every failure belongs to the leader. That’s where I…
Sometimes an officer asks a supervisor what to do because he doesn’t know what to do. Sometimes he asks because the decision isn’t his to make. Those aren’t the same thing. I want officers who can think for themselves. If every traffic stop, report question, complaint, or minor problem has to go through a supervisor,…
One of the easiest ways to lower a standard is to do nothing. I don’t have to change a policy or announce a new rule. I can just see the same problem enough times and keep walking past it. Eventually, everybody figures out that whatever the written rule says, this is what we actually accept….
One of the easiest things for a supervisor to say is, “I treat everybody the same.” I understand why that sounds fair. Nobody wants favoritism, special treatment, or a boss who changes the rules depending on who is standing in front of him. But I don’t think fair treatment requires pretending every employee and every…
When I’m looking at hiring a police officer, the salary is only part of what the department will spend on that person. By the time you add benefits, uniforms, equipment, academy expenses, field training, supervision, and the time other officers spend helping someone learn the job, you’ve made a considerable investment before that new officer…
There’s something interesting about a company being able to tell the public it tests its artificial intelligence for discrimination, while the results of certain tests remain protected from disclosure in a lawsuit alleging that the technology discriminates. That’s the situation in the ongoing case against Workday, whose automated hiring software can determine which applicants ever…