After twenty years commanding investigations for the East Providence Police Department, I’ve learned something that no policy manual teaches: government doesn’t work without trust. Not the flowery kind you read about in civics textbooks. The real kind—the unseen contract that keeps society from flying apart at the seams.
Cops know this in our bones. We walk into situations every day where someone has to decide, in seconds, whether we’re friend or threat. That decision hinges on trust. When a community trusts police, people call us before situations explode. They cooperate. They talk to us. When they don’t, we get ambushed instead of alerted, and everyone bleeds.
But here’s what keeps me up at night: Americans are losing faith in government institutions faster than we’re losing it in police. And they’re related problems.
When I was working cases with the FBI and DEA, I saw firsthand how criminal enterprises thrive in the cracks of distrust. Corrupt officials, hidden agendas, institutions that served themselves instead of the public—these weren’t bugs in the system. They were features that organized crime counted on. The less people trusted government to do right, the easier it was for crooks to operate.
That pattern hasn’t changed. It’s just metastasized.
The irony is brutal: police departments, courts, prosecutors, and regulators—we’re all supposed to be working the same side. But when the public sees government agencies at war with each other, or worse, sees them colluding, trust evaporates. And that’s when the real trouble starts.
I’ve watched Americans tune out of civic life because they’ve concluded the whole thing is rigged anyway. Why vote, report crimes, or cooperate with investigators if the system is designed to protect the powerful and punish everyone else? That cynicism didn’t come out of nowhere.
It’s earned, one broken promise at a time.
The police can’t fix this alone. We can be honest. We can show up. We can actually serve our communities instead of just patrolling them. But if prosecutors are political animals, if judges seem bought, and if regulators wink at the crimes they’re supposed to stop, then even the most upright police department is just a bit player in a larger corruption.
Here’s what trust actually looks like from the inside: It means when a cop says “I’m here to help,” people believe it. It means when a government agency investigates wrongdoing, people think they might actually hold someone accountable. It means when elections happen, people feel like their vote might matter. These aren’t revolutionary concepts. They’re the baseline infrastructure of functioning democracy.
But we’re not operating at baseline anymore.
The fix isn’t complicated, but it’s not easy either. It requires government officials—at every level—to do something radical: actually put the public interest first. Not sometimes. Not when it’s politically convenient. All the time.
That means prosecutors who care more about justice than conviction rates. Judges who can’t be lobbied. Regulators with teeth and the spine to use them. Police who hold themselves accountable instead of circling the wagons. It means government agencies that compete on competence and honesty, not on turf.
Most importantly, it means transparency. Sunlight disinfects. When government operates in shadows, people assume the worst. Usually, they’re right to.
I spent two decades investigating crimes. The hardest cases to crack weren’t the ones with clever criminals. They were the ones where witnesses wouldn’t cooperate because they didn’t believe justice existed. They were right. The system had failed them before.
If we want police who can actually do their jobs—who can build communities instead of just maintaining order—we need government that people trust. Full stop. That starts with government officials remembering they work for the public, not themselves.
The badge means something. But it only means something if the system behind it does too.
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