The problem with many police & healthcare systems

There is clearly a major problem with regards to various systems being 'fit for purpose' when it comes to 'what the public expects that system to deliver', and what the same system is actually designed to accomplish.

A police system - according to the public who fund it - should maintain safety, law and order in a community. Police are meant to protect a society from itself.

A healthcare system too is also supposed to promote and maintain levels of community health.

Funded by taxpayers, healthcare systems are meant to serve the best interests of the long-term wellbeing of a society; so that members of that society can be active and productive contributors to that society.

But in reality, in many parts of the world, police and healthcare systems are not fit for these purposes, but are rather fit for other purposes less aligned to the public interest.

Whether these systems were ever designed to actually serve the public interest, or if they have become corrupted over the years by powerful influencers is almost besides the point. What can however be agreed, if recent news headlines are anything to go by, is that their current ways of being are clearly no longer tolerable.

Firing a few people, pressing charges against individuals and making public statements isn't going to be good enough.

What really needs to happen is that these mechanisms of society need an entire redesign from scratch so that these systems can actually deliver on the mandate that people expect from them.

Not only that, but these systems are nested and work within other corrupt and broken institutional systems that are also not delivering effectively on their supposed public good.  

Police, healthcare, justice, financial, trade, environmental and educational systems around the world are all serving interests other than the ones that they are primarily meant to be working for.

The interconnected nature of our modern world is highlighting, for all of us, the brokenness of all of these systems.

But don't hold your breath for the needed change to happen quickly.

These old mechanisms are old and the tentacles of their influence run deeper than we know. Change will not happen quickly and old power structures will not fall easily or quietly.

Transformational progress on this level will be slow and painful, but there is a lot of evidence that the urgency for the change is building.