Transcript of this video is as follows:
Over these last six months, we’ve provided you with a lot of information in these first eight change casts. We’ve talked about our leadership philosophy. We’ve talked about the pace and challenge of change. We’ve talked about roles, missions and functions, both as a law enforcement organization with a regulatory function, and within the Department of Justice. I hope that they have been informational to you about our strategic view of the way forward.
I want to close out this first set by talking about, quite frankly, a less pleasant topic, but one that is critical to the functioning of any organization, particularly one with a public safety mission, like ATF’s, and that’s choices and consequences. And when I’m talking about choices and consequences, I’m talking about a disciplinary process. Our last Changecast, we laid out some clear expectations about organizational discipline. One ATF, everyone working together, exemplifying one of the pieces of our leadership philosophy: that being teamwork. I want to make it clear in this last Changecast, before we start doing specific topics, what my expectation is, as the acting director, when it comes to the disciplinary process.
Choices and consequences simply means that, as an employee of ATF, should you decide not to abide by the standards of conduct or the rules of the road, should you decide that you’re not going to play by the rules, there will be consequences. We spent some time over the last six months reinvigorating our PRB. Katie Torres has worked very diligently to make sure that our Office of Professional Responsibility and our Internal Affairs unit responds quickly to hot spots around the country and in headquarters when they find something wrong.
Choices and consequences means simply that if you make poor choices, that if you don’t abide by the rules, that if you don’t respect the chain of command, if you don’t find the appropriate way to raise your concerns to your leadership, there will be consequences because we cannot tolerate, we cannot tolerate an undisciplined organization. I wanted to make this very clear to everyone as we turn the page with our first set of Changecasts.
The information you provide us on the website is invaluable, and the next time that we talk, we’ll start to grind down on some of the specifics about how we’re going to actually follow through on this accelerated change that we’ve been implementing here at ATF over the last nine months. Thank you for your attention. Keep your comments coming in. And we’ll talk to you again real soon.
