If you’ve been around Irreal at all, you know that I have little tolerance for stupidity on the part of the “suits”. My go to example is Boeing where an essentially ignorant group of finance based suits turned the world’s premier aircraft manufacturer into such a bad joke that knowledgeable people refuse to fly on their planes [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
There are those that believe that at least government is immune to this sort of craziness. It isn’t. The latest example is ICE deploying body cameras on its agents. That sounds like a good idea. After all, ICE agents have been accused of misconduct in the recent past and this is a good way of resolving the issue and exonerating responsible agents while identifying rouge agents. Most importantly it would serve to assure citizens that their government was behaving responsibly.
Time for the suits to weigh in. According the the AP, “ICE will release body camera video only when seen in the agency’s ‘best interests,’ policy says”. You don’t have to be a public policy expert to see the problem. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence will (correctly) conclude that any event where the video is withheld is one where there was misconduct. The result is that the suits have devised a way of automatically reporting when their agents misbehave; a useful mechanism to be sure but certainly not what they intended.
It’s not that this policy is at all unusual. Many, if not most, officials have a similar policy. The difference is that they have enough sense not the say the quiet part out loud. It makes you wonder how these people, who have so little management ability, get to be in charge. I’d tell you but Irreal doesn’t do politics.