Tuesday, December 2, 2014

More not necessarily better

Back in 1994 when I was first appointed police chief in Lincoln, one of my priorities was to rewrite the department's policy manual, composed of a few hundred General Orders, covering everything from traffic direction to death notifications. The loose-leaf manual issued to every employee was bulging, bloated, and hopelessly inconsistent in style, individual General Orders having been authored by dozens of people over a couple decades, often in stilted, legalistic prose that sometimes seems to infect police work like a bad virus.

In 1995, I finally set to the task, and we rewrote the entire set. The result was a vastly more concise manual, slimmed down to about an inch. For the next 16 years, my operating rule was simple: if a new word went in, another word had to come out elsewhere. I did not want the manual to return to its former corpulence, because I have a strong belief that familiarity and compliance with a policy manual is inversely correlated with its length. It simply isn't reasonable to expect employees to ingest and remember a collection of policies that resembles the unabridged dictionary.

In the past few years, however, both the Lincoln Police Department and Lincoln Fire &Rescue have converted entirely to online policy manuals. While in most ways this is a good thing, one of the unintended side effects is that the swelling is less noticeable. The imperative to keep the manual svelte has to some extent evaporated. No one is sweating over every paragraph quite so much, trying to figure out how more succinct language could prevent page two from spilling over to a third page.

I acquired a great example of the problem several years ago, from another midwest capital city police department that shall remain nameless. It was a seven-page policy entitled "Escape of Zoo Animals." The seven pages included drawings showing the best shot placement, should it become necessary to deal with various large mammals. I can just imagine a police officer, confronted with a rampaging rhinoceros, reaching for the manual and thumbing to page 543 for instruction.

Of course, with an online manual you could just pull over to the curb and enter rhinoceros in the search box--that is, if you can spell rhinoceros. Some discipline will be necessary to keep the policies trim, and ensure that our employees really can be familiar with the most important guidelines they need to know, and to find the relevant content easily when in doubt.

9 comments:

Steve said...

Imagine the dismay of the ordinary person, who with no training or guidance, wants to know how to take some action or complete some task, while keeping things legal. Something as simple as wanting to trim a low-hanging tree branch, or parking one's car on the street, can lead to hours of research that still does not provide a clear or reliable answer as to what is legal, or not. That doesn't even include the dilemma concerning laws that are on the books, but seldom, if ever enforced, like parking in your own driveway in front of your house, or having more than one gallon of gasoline on your property.

Anonymous said...

Search for 'TV' in the online G.O. and see what you get.

Anonymous said...

Life would be a lot simpler if THE GOLDEN RULE was the only law on the books.
GunNut

Steve said...

Isn't that the "Do unto others before they can do unto you" thing?

Tom Casady said...

GunNut,

You've read my speech! If you could get everyone to follow the Golden Rule, you could almost ditch the policy manual entirely!

Steve said...

...and the Ten Commandments could pretty much eliminate the need for any other legislation.

Anonymous said...

If you got everyone to follow the Golden Rule, you could not only get rid of the policy manual, you could get rid of the Police Department, Attorney Offices and the Courts.

Anonymous said...

If you could get rid of drugs, alcohol and cure mental illness, most people would follow the golden rule.

Anonymous said...

Shouldn't Hate be the first to be eliminated?