By Chris Satullo

Let’s talk about how grindingly hard it is to revamp the ingrained culture of an organization.

Like a metro police department. This is why even some smart people, along with a lot of emotional, impatient ones, seriously suggest blowing up the police and starting over.

I get where the impulse to raze the blue wall comes from and why some get so profanely impatient with calls for patience. Still, this approach strikes me as unwise.

To get at why, let me tell you a story about another proud, insular, stiff-necked group, one I was part of for 20 years: the Philadelphia Inquirer newsroom. This anecdote will take a few paragraphs to unwind, but I promise it’ll loop back to the police.

Let’s zoom back to the middle years of this century’s first decade. By then, the Inquirer had stacked up quite a pile of Pulitzers and mentions in Time Magazine’s best newspapers list. Some of the young Turks who’d built that glossy rep had left for bigger jobs; others who remained were showing some gray at the temples. But they clung to their office culture’s narrative of self-regard, summed up in a cocky phrase that always made me wince: “best newsroom, pound for pound, in America.”

The rise of the internet had not been kind to these aging journalists. Nor had their distant corporate masters at Knight Ridder – who, for tangled reasons, regarded their chain’s largest and most honored newspaper as the black sheep of the family.

One day in the early aughts, K-R canned the Inquirer’s popular, homegrown editor-in-chief and brought in an outsider from St. Paul (of all places!), with instructions to bring the haughty Inquirer staff to heel.

He was no genius, but not a bad guy, really. He was southern-born, with a cornpone manner that didn’t play well in gritty Philly. And he undercut himself with frequent faux pas such as not knowing the difference between Penn and Penn State.

Most of all, though, his sin was to be the outsider sent in to make us change our ways. Those ways, as the coming years would show, did need radical change. But the newsroom dug in to resist his suggestions with all the stubborn ingenuity it could muster, which was considerable.

One example sticks in memory: One day the new guy wandered over to the national desk and said, “I’m wondering. Why does our front page lead with a story out of Washington that says the same thing I heard on CNN at 2 p.m. yesterday and could have read on the web last night? Shouldn’t we develop the story somehow for our readers, or if we can’t, put something else on page 1?”

The denizens of the national desk were appalled: Doesn’t this yahoo get that the Inky is a “national paper,” not like that local rag he came from. What a yokel. Let’s school him in what a real newspaper does. And if he can’t get it, just ignore him.

But the editor was right, of course, and the best newsroom, pound for pound, was wrong. It reacted with the type of dim, retrograde thinking in the face of digital disruption that has filled many a corporate graveyard.  

Why did they dismiss and resist a guy who was talking sense, sense that could have been their salvation? Well, he was an outsider, not one of them. Most of all, because what he was suggesting was a threat to their sense of identity, of mission, of self-regard.  

It was such a small change he was asking, a matter of reworking a few paragraphs at the top of a story, shifting a page design.  But they immediately perceived it as a Holy Struggle for What Was Right and What Mattered.

Yes, it was a little thing – so much littler than, say, asking police officers to change how they do their jobs on the street. Merely a matter of rejiggering Page 1, not one involving snap decisions on which your own life and the lives of others might ride.

But the insular newsroom culture had come to regard the public as the enemy – If they weren’t so shallow and demanding, we could just do our jobs the way we want – and resisted pleas to alter their work habits so as to serve that public better.

With so much more at stake, then, is it any wonder that when America’s blue, badged tribe feels challenged or threatened, it links arms, hunkers down, and casts the clueless, disrespectful public as the enemy? 

So, wait, doesn’t my tale suggest reform is hopeless and we should applaud the calls to disband police forces, with the millions they now receive doled out to social workers, teachers and drug rehab counselors?

Not actually.

Consider this: Today the Inquirer newsroom – and most others across the lend – is full of journalists who think nothing of posting live updates, with photos and video, from breaking news scenes; who live-tweet accounts of important announcements or meetings; who interact with the public on social media in ways that would have sent many of my colleagues circa 2002 screaming for the exits.

The craft and the people who practice it have evolved. As these changes were happening, they often felt painful; their pace, halting. But today, 15 years on, the scope of the changes in how journalists do their jobs seems astonishing. Not all are changes to be celebrated, but many of them are. 

Another point: As cantankerous as the newsroom old guard could be, many were really good at important things and were right to insist that professional values of imperishable worth should not become casualties in the quest for digital innovation. Many of these staffers didn’t need to be discarded; they needed to feel heard, even as they were brought along by a firm, patient, clever hand. Tribal defensiveness hardens, grows toxic, when it has no outlet but the locker room and water cooler.

So it might be with police forces, as well.

To be clear: There is no excuse, none, for the brutal killings and torture of subdued minority suspects by far too many officers in far too many departments. No doubt that too many cops have come to regard the people they are paid to serve as the enemy and become inclined, by both personal and systemic racism, to resort to violence when the “enemy” shows up sheathed in black skin. No question that blue squads armed for war, not keeping the peace, too readily view what others call “my neighborhood” as their “battlespace.”

And there is no truth, none, to the canard that the problem is merely one of “a few bad apples.” But sadly there is truth to the observation that the silence of the good cops is part of what enables the evil of bad ones.

The malign power of unions to protect criminals in the ranks, the ludicrously tilted civil standards that make it nearly impossible to sue against brutality, the distorted, militarized training…none of these contributing factors to our pandemic of brutality in blue should be tolerated for one second more at any level of government. If you say about these: Action now, no excuses, no extensions, I say: Amen.

And, agreed, never reward bad behavior with money for violent toys and perverse training. Yes, ship that dough to the social workers and teachers.

But I also plead with you to understand that the subtler, harder, necessary changes in culture, training, recruitment, strategy, and composition of the force cannot happen at the snap of a finger, at the speed of an angry tweet. They will take time, even if driven with courage, urgency and rigor. They will happen faster if we listen to and empower the good cops, not insult or fire them.  

Revamp, reimagine, reform – yes, start that now, today, but don’t abandon the effort tomorrow because perfect has not arrived. 

Slow as it will seem, this approach will get us to the place we want – the equal protection of rights and property that communities of color so profoundly deserve and have been so long denied – much faster than reckless paths that in this fervent moment seem so enticing.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.