Quote Originally Posted by EvilDMMk3 View Post
I agree with this. One of the biggest problems with the police in almost any country, and very much in the USA, is the fact that they defend each other and cover for the behaviour that makes some people despise them on an institutional level. And its weird because the flagrant abuses are always defended as a few bad apples. A few rotten apples spoil the barrel, so don't nail the barrel lid down to prevent us getting at the bad apples!
This is not unique to police, its a consequence of how public institutions function, especially within the extant US legal framework. Police unions are legally mandated to defend the behavior of their members, no matter how egregious, while at the same time police management is hesitant to punish low-level offenses because it requires a long and complex process to successfully adjudicate events through the administrative process agreed upon with the union and without a profit motive there's little incentive for managers to bother when they can simply use other more convenient executive actions to make the problem go away (such as by transferring the officer in question somewhere else). This failure to enact disciplinary action produces precedent that the union is then legally obligated to use to defend future incidents with a 'if you didn't punish A for X, how can you now punish B for X' argument, which is fairly bulletproof until you have a managerial changeover.

Consequently the ability to 'run a tight ship' within a civic agency - whether it be police, teachers, or a parks & rec department - is dependent upon a manager who's willing to come in, kick a** and take names and be hated by their subordinates over the long term. This is uncommon, for a variety of reasons, and as a result institutional frameworks tend to gradually degrade until circumstances are noticed by some outside oversight group and remedial action is take to restore the balance. Note that large private sector organizations tend to have exactly the same problems, albeit in a slightly different fashion due to the absence of unions, it's just that sufficient inefficiencies have a shorter leash because they impede profits.

The reason to explain all this is that it is very important, when writing stories that heavily feature institutions, to understand the nature of institutional systems and how they shape actions taken within them. Jeph has, so as I know, never worked within government of any kind or for a sufficiently large corporate entity to have a large-scale institutional culture. He simply doesn't understand how these kinds of environments work and it shows. By contrast, he clearly understands how struggling 20-something would-be musicians and baristas go through life. QC is extremely personally referential and when the stories hew strongly to Jeph's life experience they are far stronger than when they expand outside of that zone. Recent plotlines have involved Jeph projecting his personal political opinions onto a setup that he clearly lacks the knowledge to properly contextualize in-universe, and they have suffered for it.