A Victoria Police joke: 'Why do police show their badges when they walk into a police station? So they don't get treated like everyone else.' Many a true word said in jest.
Having worked in closed organisational systems like Victoria Police and various government departments, I have often reflected on how and at what point organisations and their employees become comfortable with the belief that their ideas and attitudes are better informed than those of the general populous — and that their survival is more important.
Once comfortable with that idea — what's next?
A very stark example of this are the recent court decisions relating to the Hillsborough Stadium disaster in 1989, where 96 people were killed.
The Liverpool Football club song assures its supporters they'll 'never walk alone' though their 'dreams be tossed and blown'.
The South Yorkshire Police motto is Justice with Courage.
After the Hillsborough disaster members of the South Yorkshire Police — some very senior — decided that blaming the victims and Liverpool football fans for the disaster and deaths, and harassing their families to secure their own personal and organisational safety, was the preferred path to take.
For 27 long years the parents, brothers and sisters of the deceased victims, the blameless, were forced to walk alone, and be subjected to attacks and harassment from the police, who actually were to blame, and who were employed to protect those who were fatally injured.
"Many such organisations pride themselves on what they see as their specific knowledge. They function with an unquestioning view of the world, holding their own truths to be self-evident."
More recently, in Australia, the Royal Commission into Family Violence and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have asked of us as individuals and members of certain groups and organisations to try to understand how it is that we seemingly comfortably turn away from those in need of our help and protection.
A theory of group dynamics holds that all groups are formed for a stated and agreed primary purpose, to achieve a certain goal; but that it is not too long before the unstated purpose becomes the protection of the group itself, and the accepted behaviours within the group become those that ensure its survival.
It partly explains the disturbing situation where organisations such as police, religious groups, churches, schools and government departments who call into question the behaviour of others, demonstrate so little ability to critically reflect