Who do we serve?

When I think of the Police the first concept that comes to mind is: To Serve and Protect. This thought did not just appear in my mind. It comes from my own cultural conditioning around the Police - from the police and crime dramas that my parents watched, police stories in the media, and talking about police in school and life. I learned today that “To Serve and Protect”  is also the official motto of the Los Angeles Police Department, adopted in 1963. 

You might think that this is a post about all of the ways the Police fail to live up to this motto. Given the current public discourse on Police Departments across America this would be a logical thought. But I am more interested in just thinking about this moral value we call service. A search for “servant leadership” brings up about 500 books that specifically address the topic. So, there is a widely held belief that a Service is a vital aspect of quality leadership… and a good way to sell books! 

I highly value servant leadership. A question that comes to mind is who do we serve? To serve means that we have a master. So who is that master: God, Humanity, the Community, the Government? When we say we serve God or Humanity, do we mean a specific God or specific segments of Humanity? Serving a higher purpose is lofty aspiration. In practice or in daily life we may find ourselves unconsciously narrowing down who we serve. Because while we can hold those abstract notions of God and Country in our mind; our actions are concrete and by nature more limiting than our loftiest of aspirations.

So how can we bring our values into our daily lived experience? I think we have to talk, or write, and maybe most importantly listen to what living into the value of service means in our everyday life. We do serve higher purposes - sometimes with success and many times we fall short of meeting our aspirations. That is human. We can still strive to connect our shared values to our actions. Most police officers I know desire to uphold the promise to Serve and Protect. So how can we help our local police departments to live into the values to which they aspire?