Here’s another article regarding the plight of another grossly mismanaged state agency, CPS. While reading this article, ask yourself…do the problems CPS is experiencing sound familiar?
PHOENIX – Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery says he wants answers and hopes the completion of a Department of Public Safety investigation will lead to permanent reform and change for Child Protective Services.
“I want to go all the way down to the bottom of the cesspool that has been the source of CPS failure and find out what is going on,” said Montgomery.
Montgomery is hoping an administrative investigation will get to the source of what he calls a failing system at CPS.
“The focus needs to be what’s going on with CPS from an administrative, personnel, and policy standpoint. The organizational culture and the management structure at CPS needs to be looked at because that may be the source of the true fault of the child welfare system from the beginning,” said Montgomery.
He hopes focusing on a system wide change will make sure CPS is doing what it is intended to do.
“Set up a system were there really is protection of children first and not the protection of status quo, or the protection of failed system,” said Montgomery.
A system Montgomery says has managed to avoid transparency and ignore reform for years.
“How do you have a government agency, that despite legislation telling them how they do their job, continue doing what they’ve been doing all along and are impervious to efforts of reform?” asked Montgomery.
This sounds very similiar to the situation at ASUPD: waste taxpayer money, have droves of employees quit, have a department unable to engage in police work…but ignore any efforts to try and change the situation within the agency.
The more the abuse the more galvanized the opposition. Police officers aren’t quitters, wimps, pushovers. Just like getting bad service at a business, first address it with the worker, then the manager, the owner, and so on. There are a lot of people in this food chain, its only beginning.
If…when the state, feds, or news comes in force to ASU looking for answers I hope I’m far away from Tempe when it happens. It will be months of meetings, paperwork shuffling, and hassle. Saying something here or there may help, but more often than not you can only shake your head.
If you stop funding a critical agency and gut the staffing while demand remains high you are going to run into a lot of problems. ASUPD internal negative leadership gutted our staffing and convinces their bosses to believe there’s no problem, that the issues are manageable, that they have a plan.
The reason these problems are here are because they never managed problems or had a plan! You really think that’s going to change now with their just get more bodies approach? How about looking at retention, reducing negative leadership, and supporting the tier of people leaving so they don’t leave? The chief complaint has always been leadership.
When people realize that won’t change they start looking at other aspects of the organization, lack of step increases, lack of opportunity for advancement, specialty positions, and the list goes on. Would all the other details come to the forefront if leadership wasn’t such a burning issue? Probably not as often as they do.
The only reason we’re hearing anything about this is because it is so blatantly negligent, a complete disaster, and children are involved.
Again…our department has played the undermanned, under prepared pray nothing happens game forever, so unless something slips past the giant crime bubble maintained by the surrounding police agencies nothing but visionary leaders will identify the problem people and positively change the department for the majority of officers.
Apparently there’s no incentive for them, it’s acceptable to lose employees like loose change year after year, to be in a constant state of hire spending hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars training officers for other agencies. Why should an officer recruit choose ASUPD first? Why not everyone else first? We’ll always be hiring here, no rush.