Civil Service Protections

This morning the Police Civil Service Commission had an emergency meeting about Banick's effective dismissal. While we wait for reports of what transpired, I thought I'd share a some thoughts on the whole idea of civil service protections.

I'm no expert on the history of this stuff, but I have a suspicion that a lot of the laws and rules about government employees were put in place precisely to prevent people from getting elected office just to execute personal vendettas. People who had a broader perspective than the narrow, self-interested views of Longrie, Cave and Hjelle, were aware that purges in the ranks and the installation of masses of new loyal toadies (who then would have to be purged again when power shifts hands) would create a cycle of instability and unpredictability, and would steer away a lot of talented people who would wisely not want to get caught up in that kind of mess. And that would not serve the good of the People.

Just as tenure in academic environments was created to give assure thinkers the freedom to express themselves without fear of reprisal, and to pursue threads of research that may not fit the agendas of political, religious, or other institutional authorities or popular wishes (though certainly tenure is an institution with its share of problems and imperfections as well), civil service rules are created to give government employees some security in enforcing the law even-handedly and speaking the truth, even when that is not what their elected bosses or the public mood of the moment might like. There are plenty of imperfections, and the systems can be abused to protect lazy or incompetent individuals. (There are also appropriate ways to respond to such abuses, and it's not by throwing the whole system aside.) However, like many things in our system of governance and law, we have gone down this path not because it is perfect but because its problems are less bad than the problems of alternative approaches. As Churchill famously said, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that we've tried.

The Gang of Three and their supporters are asking for a world where every government employee needs to ask of every fact that should be shared with the public, "Will my bosses fire me for saying this, even though it's true?"; a world where every police officer and government attorney would weigh just application of the law against their own self-interest if the offender is a member or ally of the ruling group, or if following the law might go against the current sentiment of the majority.

If this were Rome versus Galileo, the Gang of Three is on the side of Rome, using whatever inquisatorial tools they can find to project their vision of reality and silence voices that question it.

There are plenty of people today who would still side with Pope Urban VIII, or who long for a world where all victors in war or politics are entitled to pillage and despoil the defeated. I just think that these people are wrong, and I think our society has come a long ways to limit the damage that their way of thinking does to us all -- including the very people who want to bring the world back to the bad old days.