It’s time the public realized that their elected officials and top management in the police department operate on a time honored bureaucratic tradition called Management by Crisis.  It is defined as allowing unexpected events, interruptions, problems, or emergencies to dictate your priorities and actions. 

Crisis management is important in management.  The problem arises when no one can tell the difference between managing a crisis and managing by crisis.  Whenever a crisis occurs and a manager solves the crisis there are accolades and remarks that he or she is the kind of manager people can depend on.  The manager who anticipated problems and solved them before creating a crisis tends to get overlooked as boring and unexciting.  When this tendency of human nature combines with bureaucracy,  management by crisis becomes the accepted norm.  Why spend time managing people and events only to be ignored by superiors while watching the lazy, incompetent manager let things go until they explode and then be lauded as a go to guy.  The strange thing is it doesn’t seem to matter how well the crisis is managed;  you can destroy a division, wreck the organization and still get credit for managing the crisis.

The ugly secret is that many people anticipated the current Tulsa budget crisis.  Lonely voices in city government, the police union and interested by standers have discussed Tulsa reaching the point where growth slowed and sales tax became stagnant.   The only option is to raise taxes or find a new revenue source.  Sales tax only works when growth occurs regularly and dependably. 

In the 70s police officers advanced a plan to find dedicated funding for public safety.  Politicians fought it tooth and nail.   Politicians don’t like dedicated fundin  It tends to make them feel obsolete.  The idea popped up several more times and was soundly relegated to the we can’t do that file.

And yet, over the years Tulsa has passed StormWater management fees for Public Works,  a 911 fee for  Communications, a utility fee for EMSA and is proposing billing insurance companies for Fire Department response.  The Tulsa Police Department is strangely missing from all this dedicated fee stuff.

Tulsa is managed by politicians who run for election bases on the crisis they have solved.  Tulsa has no long range planning because Tulsa has no long range management.  The city is run by politicians who plan on four year cycles.  Municipalities that are successful tend to have city managers.  But that is for another time.