Tulsa Oklahoma Sheriff's Office Failures Essay

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Ethics, Values, and Self-Awareness: What Was Lacking in Tulsa

The deplorable shooting of an unarmed man named Eric Courtney Harris was precipitated by unethical and ineffective leadership practices and policies used in the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office. One of the key issues in this case is that the Tulsa County Sheriff's Office relies on public elections of their sheriffs, inviting potential corruption and preventing law enforcement from being independent from politics. Another issue in this case reflects poorly on almost every other police department in the nation: ineffective training. Finally, the Tulsa case reveals the problems with entrenched organizational cultures that condone violent responses to conflicts rather than inculcating nonviolent conflict resolution strategies. All of the problems in the Tulsa case can be traced to leadership failures, ethical violations, a lack of self-awareness, and a lack of strong values.

Former Tulsa deputy Robert Bates was an insurance salesman who was 74 years of age when he shot Harris. O’Connor (2015) claims that his training was “murky” at best, as during Bates’ trial, even the defense had no tangible proof as to what kind of training the civilian actually had before being let onto the sheriff’s force. In fact, there seems to have been flagrant conflicts of interest, as Bates “led the most recent re-election campaign” of the sheriff (Stanley Glanz) who stepped down after being indicted for misconduct (O’Connor, 2015, p. 1). Bates was not a trained officer of the law, but instead a personal “friend” of the sheriff who had also “donated thousands of dollars to the department in the form of cash, cars, and equipment,” (O’Connor, 2015, p. 1). After the circumstances of the Harris murder were brought to light, there was an independent review of the sheriff’s office, which found, among other things, “the office suffered from a system-wide failure of leadership and supervision’ and that it had been in a "perceptible decline’ for more than a decade,” (“Report,” 2017, p.

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1). Therefore, the problems that emerged in the Bates case were systemic and reflective of a lack of values guiding the organizational culture of the Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s department exhibited poor leadership throughout the Bates conflagration, with the only exception being Sheriff Stanley Glanz’s ultimately stepping down from his post—after he had been indicted for several counts of misconduct. Given that Glanz had initially invited his friend’s campaign contributions, allowing corruption to infiltrate the Sheriff’s office, and then permitted his same friend to receive full badge and weapon without having proper training shows that Glanz had almost zero self-awareness in terms of how his behaviors and self-interested actions would impact the people he had been elected to serve and protect. Leadership ethics were problematic at best, guided not by an ethical code built on solid values but on egotism.

The Leadership Practices Inventory includes modeling the way, inspiring a shared vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act, and encouraging the heart. None of these….....

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