It’s a problem that I’m sure most of us have seen play out at work. Companies tend to be divided into specialized departments, but if any of those departments gain too much influence over the rest of the company, things can go badly. Overly influential sales or security departments are a common thing people like to complain about. But if you end up with a company led by its sales team, it’s not really the sales teams fault, they’re just doing their job and advocating for the interests of the sales team. That failure would be with executive leadership, who’s supposed to listen to the advice/concerns of many different groups, each with their own specialized area of interest, and balance all their needs out according to some sort of over arching strategy.

The same thing happens in public policy. For example, police are always going to advocate giving more power to police, because it helps them do their jobs and achieve the goals of their organization. That by itself is not a problem, because the role of government is to listen to those concerns and then to balance them out with all of society’s other interests. If that doesn’t happen to your satisfaction, it’s a failure of government, not of the police.

It’s also one of the reasons why leadership during a crisis or after a tragedy is so prone to producing bad outcomes. Because those circumstances put one area of interest in the spotlight and make it very easy to forget about everything else. That’s how we ended up with the patriot act.