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February 08, 2007
Kevin West: "If you want to build trust, don't lie."
Simply put, Kevin West's blog post on WGOW's Morning Press Blog is fantastic, and should be read by every resident of this city.
If you want to build trust, don't lie.I hope people working in governmental agencies don't really question why we don't trust them. They don't tell us the truth. The gun incident at Brainerd High School is the latest fiasco. The original story was this:
Police got a tip that a male student was going to bring a gun to school. They were there waiting for him, stopped him at the beginning of the day before school started, took him into custody and found the gun he threw away.
That's not how it happened. As Channel 3's David Carroll found out in obtaining the 911 call tape, school had been in session for more than an hour, no uniformed police officers were on campus, and an assistant principal actually spotted the gun, and then apprehended, tackled and restrained the student until police arrived.
Ron Rice is the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department Public Information Officer. He told us the original story. Much to his credit, he got on the air immediately and gave us the story as questions from callers swirled about what was going on.
He didn't know he had incorrect information.
Danielle Clark is the Hamilton County School System Public Information Officer. She told us about the lockdown. She told us about the on-going search inside the school. And she told us classes were not being dismissed. She told us school things. She could not talk about the investigation. That's police work. Police don't want a school system PR-flack talking about police work. The school system doesn't want their well-paid information conduit talking about police work. So she didn't. And won't.
Michelle Michaud is the mayor's Director of Communications. She wasn't at the scene and shouldn't be involved at all but is involved because the Chattanooga Police Department, at the moment, has no Public Information Officer. Now that she is, she has sent me the accurate story of what happened -- matching what David Carroll reported earlier in the week. Maybe she got it from David, I don't know. In a two-and-a-half page summary based on David's Channel 3 Eyewitness News story, she notes correctly that "breaking news is inherently flawed" and then defends why "everyone interviewed" thought it was NOT important to tell the truth about what happened until David did his story. She does not explain why investigators told Ron Rice a story that had nothing to do with what really happened and allowed him to pass it along in good conscience as "fact."
So the question remains: who decided to make up a story and pass it along as fact when it wasn't? Who is that thought it would be okay to hang Ron Rice out to dry? And who was it that decided to continue the "us-versus-them" mentality of distrust that plagues local government in Chattanooga exactly because of situations like this?
I'll probably never know for sure, but I've already got it way narrowed down. And it doesn't help us trust anything police or city hall or the school system says at face value -- makes us have to scrutinize it that much more closely.
Really bad call. If you want to build trust, don't lie.
And if you make a mistake, don't defend it. Correct it.
News | By pulseblogger | 02:48 PM
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