Small-town accountability gets personal pretty fast.

There’s a good chance I know the person I’m dealing with. I may know his parents, his kids, where he works, or what he ordered the last time I saw him at lunch. Sometimes I know everybody involved. That’s part of living and working in a small town, and pretending those relationships don’t exist doesn’t make me more objective.

The question for me is whether I can know somebody without letting that relationship become the reason I change the standard.

That doesn’t mean everybody gets the same outcome. Two situations can look similar and still have different facts, histories, risks, or options available. In policing, the law and policy may give me discretion. As a supervisor, I may handle somebody’s first mistake differently from the fifth time we’ve had the same conversation.

Using judgment isn’t favoritism. The problem is when I can’t explain the difference without eventually getting back to who the person is.

If my friend gets a break because he’s my friend, I have a problem. If somebody gets treated worse because he’s criticized me, caused me trouble, or pissed me off before, I have the same problem in the other direction. The outcome doesn’t have to be identical, but I should be able to point to something besides the relationship that explains why it changed.

Knowing people can mess with the facts in quieter ways too. “I know him. He wouldn’t do that” is an easy conclusion to reach when you’ve known somebody for years. So is remembering every problem you’ve ever had with somebody and walking into the next one already convinced you know what happened.

Familiarity gives me context. It doesn’t give me the answer.

I also know people are going to notice the relationships whether they influenced me or not. In a small town, people know who’s related to whom, who eats lunch together, who supported somebody, who argued with somebody, and who has history with somebody else. I can’t stop people from wondering whether those things affected a decision.

What I can do is look at my own decisions hard enough to know whether they did.

One test I use is to mentally change the names. If this were somebody I didn’t know, would I still think this response made sense? What if it were somebody I didn’t like? What if it were somebody I liked a lot? If I keep the facts and change the person and suddenly want a different answer, I probably need to figure out why.

That applies to me too. Rank doesn’t turn my mistake into something else, and accountability doesn’t need to become a public performance just to prove I’m serious. I’m interested in correcting the problem and applying a standard I can explain, not embarrassing somebody for an audience.

I’m never going to eliminate every accusation of favoritism, especially in a place where everybody knows everybody. I’m also not going to use being liked as the standard for whether I got the decision right.

The relationships are real. They’re part of the context. I just don’t want them deciding who gets the benefit of my judgment and who doesn’t.