Brian O’Hara has seen, from the inside, what a department looks like when the contract between police and public has been torn apart and what it takes to stitch it back together. The work is slower than most officials want to admit, more personal than most policy frameworks account for, and more dependent on institutional humility than most organizations are prepared to demonstrate.
When a department comes out of a moment of high-profile crisis the path back to public trust begins with the daily, unglamorous decisions that either confirm or contradict the promises leadership has made. Restoring that trust is among the most consequential challenges in contemporary American law enforcement.
Significant variables include department culture, political climate, demographic composition, union dynamics, and the severity and visibility of the precipitating crisis all shape the terrain. Still, certain principles hold. Accountability must be structural, engagement sustained and in no way performative. Leadership must be willing to hear the hard things.
Why Crisis Accelerates the Need for Reform
A crisis rarely creates a department’s problems, but it can expose them. Long-standing grievances about use of force or inadequate oversight suddenly become undeniable, and departments that treat community anger as a public relations obstacle almost universally deepen the damage. Those that recover treat the crisis as an inflection point, conducting honest after-action reviews and acknowledging what failed. O’Hara is direct about the difficulty of that posture.
“The first step is to have an honest conversation internally about what led to the crisis,” O’Hara said. “Having honest conversations that lay out what happened, what was supposed to happen, and why there is a gap between the two is critical to organizational learning and correctly the problem.”
The Architecture of Accountability
Accountability in law enforcement is most durable when it is embedded in systems. A culture that rewards honesty about failure is harder to dismantle than a policy directive. Building that culture requires deliberate institutional design which must include mechanisms that function independently of whoever holds leadership at a given moment.
One of the structural tools O’Hara champions is the use of internal inspection and compliance units that monitor departmental adherence to its own stated policies. In contrast to internal affairs investigations in the traditional sense, they are proactive audits that assess if officers, supervisors, and units are operating in alignment with reforms the department has publicly committed to. When gaps are identified, they are addressed operationally.
“Accountability isn’t punishment,” O’Hara notes. “Think about it as a system that catches drift before drift becomes a disaster.”
Weekly leadership accountability meetings create a rhythm of internal scrutiny that prevents problems from accumulating unseen. When commanders are required, on a regular basis, to account for trends in their units, they develop a different relationship to data. They stop treating statistics as a performance review and start treating them as a diagnostic tool.
Community Engagement That Actually Engages
The language of community policing has been in circulation long enough that it has, in many jurisdictions, lost its meaning. Departments announce community policing initiatives without meaningfully restructuring how officers are deployed, evaluated, or trained. Town halls are scheduled, attended sparsely, and forgotten. Advisory boards are formed, meet infrequently, and carry no genuine authority.
What substantive community engagement actually requires is specificity of commitment. It means officers assigned to geographic areas long enough to develop real familiarity with the people who live there. It means civilian oversight structures with access to real information and real authority to act on what they find. O’Hara asserts that the nature of engagement matters as much as its frequency.
“Showing up is necessary but not sufficient. Communities can tell the difference between a department that’s listening and one that’s managing the optics of listening. You earn trust through what happens after the meeting, not during it,” he says.
Reform Under Pressure: Managing Internal Resistance
No conversation about police reform is complete without acknowledging that the resistance to change often comes from within the department itself. Friction can come from officers who feel blamed for systemic failures, unions that perceive reform as an attack on members, or mid-level supervisors who were promoted under a different set of expectations. Any one of these can slow or reverse progress if left unaddressed.
Effective leaders navigate such tension without capitulating to it. Vilifying rank-and-file officers, most of whom are doing their jobs conscientiously within the systems they inherited, is never the goal. The priority is to change the systems, and that distinction matters in how reform is communicated internally.
When officers understand that accountability structures protect good officers as much as they constrain errant ones by reducing ambiguity and defending departments against unfounded accusations, resistance can soften.
Sustained reform also requires political durability. Chiefs serve at the pleasure of mayors and city councils, and reform agendas are vulnerable to shifts in political will. Building coalitions that included power beyond that of elected officials creates a broader base of support that outlasts electoral cycles. These groups can include community organizations, faith institutions, and business leaders who have a stake in public safety.
The Long Timeline of Trust
Trust between law enforcement and the community must be rebuilt gradually. The realistic horizon is years, and even progress is rarely linear. Communities remember what happened to them, and institutions that expect gratitude for reforms that should have existed all along misunderstand the nature of the relationship they are trying to repair.
What departments can do is demonstrate, repeatedly, that the change is real. Every incident handled with transparency, every officer held accountable without exception, every community complaint taken seriously as opposed to deflected becomes a deposit into an account that was long overdrawn.
The work of rebuilding police-community trust after a crisis is ultimately a test of institutional character. Departments that pass it do not do so through communications strategy or ceremonial gestures. They do so through the sustained, sometimes uncomfortable practice of being the kind of institution they claimed, in the heat of crisis, that they intended to become.
Brian O’Hara is a law enforcement consultant with more than two decades of experience across two major U.S. police departments, including service as Newark’s Director of Public Safety and as Minneapolis Police Chief. He specializes in crisis response, organizational reform, and consent decree implementation. O’Hara holds a graduate certificate in criminal justice from the University of Virginia and is the father of two sons.
The information presented in this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional, legal, or expert advice. Views expressed are those of the contributor and should not be relied upon as guidance for specific situations.
