hands held out just above shoulder height.
“All of it?” I asked.
“All of it,” he replied. “Some of the stuff the officers had before was in pretty poor condition. So I gave them the furnishings from this office and bought my own. The way I figure it, I spend twelve to fourteen hours a day in this building. I might as well be comfortable.”
“It certainly is that,” I was thinking to myself, when I realized I wasn’t thinking it, I was saying it out loud. Chief Dylan flashed me a toothy smile and said, “So what’s on your mind, Alan?”
“Well,” I replied, “one of my employees got into trouble a little while back and ended up in prison. He and I both realize what happened was wrong, and he’s accepted the consequences. But it got me to thinking about this whole criminal justice thing and the impact it has on all of us. That’s why I came to hear you speak the other night. It seems something is terribly wrong, but I don’t know exactly what it is. I thought perhaps you could provide me with some insight and point me in a direction that will help me understand the system better.”
He raised an eyebrow and said, “To tell you the truth, Alan, I’m just as confused as you are. You see, we have so much potential, but we don’t use it. We could do so much if only we’d try. Do you know what potential is?” he asked.
“Of course I do,” I said, “It’s having the power or ability to do some given thing. Basically, it’s an expression of possibility.”
“That’s very good,” he said. “Expression of possibility is the key. Potential, simply put, is nothing more than unused ability. If you have the potential to do something, it’s intimated that you haven’t actually done it yet. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I suppose it does at that… yeah, I agree.”
“Therein lies part of the problem,” he said. “We’re so busy reveling in our high-tech potential that we’ve forgotten to put it to work in the criminal justice arena. We do a good job in the field of medicine, in space exploration and in the development of information systems. But we don’t apply the same energies to the work of policing. What I do is policing, and policing is community building.”
“You said that the other night.”
“I’ve been known to repeat myself on occasion,” he said, grinning. “Forgive me if you’ve heard this before. But, as I was saying, we’ve been entirely too focused on forcing the use of technology in policing and we haven’t spent nearly enough energy developing new processes.
“People aren’t as involved as they should be with the police, and current police conventions are antiquated. Police work can’t be done in a vacuum, Alan. And it can’t be done without thinking about the implications and consequences for the future. We have to be insightful enough to find solutions for next year’s problems today. The difficulties associated with today’s crime and disorder issues require a criminal justice solution that considers its effects on our tomorrows. Remember the Chamber meeting the other night? I told the group that Sir Francis Bacon once said: ‘It would be an unsound fancy and self-contradictory to expect that things which have never yet been done can be except by means which have never yet been tried’?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, if you think about it, you’ll realize that our possibilities are endless, provided we don’t restrain ourselves with arbitrary boundaries predicated on history or convention. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we’ve done with criminal justice and—in particular—policing. If you want a different result, you have to do something different. We’ve tried precious little in policing by comparison to our talents. Instead, we generally allow ourselves to be ruled or controlled by the conventional thinking of the time. We tend to adhere to the predictions of individuals who rely on the past as a precursor for the future. We’ve developed a mindset akin to that of sheep. We allow ourselves to be herded mindlessly in a kind of chauvinistic devotion, having no idea of where we’re going.” Chief Dylan paused for a moment, then he asked, “Have you noticed that there are no pictures of previous police chiefs in my office or the reception area?”
“Sheri pointed that out when I first got here,” I said. “She told me there used to be a lot of pictures and police stuff on the walls and shelves.”
“That’s right. The entire operation was focused on the past. Past practices, past chiefs, past association presidents—all past tense.
“Alan, people have an innate fear and distrust of anything unfamiliar. As a result, we tend to resist change and limit ourselves to activities that we’ve previously undertaken. We seem to have a need to hold on to remnants of the past, to embrace the comfortable and familiar, even to extol it as if it were better because of its familiarity. Tradition guides our predilections, and the willingness by some to transcend tradition provokes disdain in others.
“However, this inexorable need to have such close connections to the past may severely limit our ability to positively affect the future. And our future is likely to be amazingly different than our past. It will undoubtedly engender a whole range of issues and circumstances requiring substantially new levels of thought and understanding.
“An extrapolist would have us believe that the future can be reasonably predicted by analyzing events of the past. But I’m here to tell you that, in light of new technologies, increased personal mobility, and dwindling resources, that perspective is somewhat suspect. The Industrial Age has been succeeded by an age of information, and the models and systems that worked in Industrial Age societies can no longer be counted on as reliable predictors for conditions likely to arise during this millennium. We can no longer afford to isolate ourselves in the past while trying to make predictions about the future.”
“Chief, you’re not suggesting that history isn’t important and that we should somehow attempt to move into the future without the benefits of the past, are you?”
“Of course I’m not,” he said. “What I’m suggesting is that our willingness to ground ourselves in the erroneous beliefs of the past may cause us to miss some wonderful opportunities. For example, the global population generally recalled the many failed attempts at flight and concluded that flight for humans was impossible. Two brothers, however, viewed the various aborted attempts, not as proof of the human inability to fly, but rather as evidence that particular methods were not conducive to flight. They then used the information on how not to fly to assist them in identifying ways more probable to lead to flight.
“On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers managed to fly just a few short feet, staying in the air a mere twelve seconds. Those few feet of flight resulted in a significant global paradigm shift. People, in reality, could fly. Finally freed from the historical obstacle of failure and disbelief, people were now prepared to improve the process. Sixty-six years later we walked on the moon. Just 66 years later! Now, we regularly circumnavigate the planet, docking with satellites from other nations, and return to Earth in reusable aircraft. So, you see, we’ve always had the potential to fly. Remember what I told you about potential? It’s nothing more than unused ability. What we lacked was the knowledge as to how and the belief in ourselves that we could.
“So I’m not suggesting that historic events be discarded as unimportant or irrelevant. I am merely suggesting that we be more discriminating and critical of past circumstances, giving them only that credence that is suitable to a particular situation of the present, in light of its potential for the future. We sometimes view past events as either proving or disproving the things around us. In reality, they should be reflected upon as transient conditions that offer value consistent only with the conclusions drawn from them to future
