Randy Russell on Lean in Law Enforcement: Lessons from Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (Pt 1)

Podcast Episode #51 is the first part of a two-parter (listen to part 2 here) with retired Lt. Randy Russell of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, an innovator in the use of Lean methods for improving law enforcement. Starting in 2004, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office began using Lean as a continuous improvement program.

Randy shares how the program began under Sheriff John Rutherford, including the pivotal discovery of wasteful practices and the decision to create a dedicated continuous improvement unit.

Russell explains how Lean principles–so often associated with manufacturing–proved just as relevant in law enforcement. One early project cut unnecessary copying of reports, saving over 52,000 staff hours annually. More importantly, Lean helped shift officers' time from paperwork back to community policing. The story highlights why Lean isn't about isolated tools but about solving real problems that free up resources and improve outcomes.

The conversation also covers cross-pollination of ideas across industries, including lessons drawn from utilities, manufacturing, the military, and even dentistry. Randy reflects on overcoming skepticism within the ranks, adapting training to make Lean concepts relevant to policing, and the importance of leadership support. By shifting responsibility for improvement from a small unit to operational commands, the Sheriff's Office was able to scale efforts across the organization.

Listeners will hear why Randy views Lean as a potential “game-changer” for law enforcement, comparable to how CompStat reshaped policing in New York City. His experiences provide lessons for leaders in any sector: start with frontline pain points, prove results through action, and make continuous improvement everyone's responsibility.

Randy's company, Hyperformance Enterprises, LLC, operates a Lean consulting and training division. Randy's interests include waste identification and elimination, process improvement, transactional systems, and strategic alignment. His hands-on experience with Lean in a broad array of settings as the former Chairman of the (47+ member) Jacksonville Lean Consortium and his two-decade career as a law enforcement commander and lead security planner for a Super Bowl provides valuable added experience and insights when it comes to dealing with sensitive and complex projects.

For earlier episodes, visit the main Podcast page, which includes information on how to subscribe via RSS or via Apple Podcasts.

Transcript:

Announcer:

Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. Now, here's your host, Mark Graban.

Mark Graban:

Hi, this is Mark Graban. You're listening to episode number 51 of the Lean Blog Podcast for October 13, 2008. I have a really special guest today. He is retired Lieutenant Randy Russell from the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department in Jacksonville, Florida. He's going to be talking about their efforts starting back in 2004 to use Lean methods, Lean thinking, and continuous process improvement to improve law enforcement. I know that may seem like an unlikely place to use Lean, but I think you'll learn a lot from listening to Randy in both this part and what will be part two, coming in future weeks. As always, thanks for listening.

Again, our guest today on the Lean Blog Podcast is Randy Russell. Thanks for joining us.

Randy Russell:

Thanks, Mark. Glad to be here.

Mark Graban:

I was wondering if you could basically just start off by telling us your story with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Department, how the department got started with Lean, and how you got involved with it personally.

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Lean in Law Enforcement: The Beginning

Randy Russell:

Mark, thanks. Those are great questions. As you're aware, law enforcement is just now becoming exposed to Lean, and it's really kind of exciting to be in the beginning of that. How all this worked out was John Rutherford was elected sheriff in Duval County in 2003 and asked our city auditors to take a look at all the processes, particularly the ones that involved financial streams. During this, they got to a unit called the Forfeiture Unit, and they found a situation where an officer who didn't have a lot of supervision had squirreled away half a million dollars in cash in a filing cabinet.

This guy is an unlucky individual because he had just finalized a divorce, he had travel plans to leave the country, was retiring the next week, and no doubt planned to take that money. Anyway, he's a prisoner now. The sheriff realized that he needed to start fresh with having the processes run as effectively and as efficiently as possible. Maxine Pearson, who was our auditor at the time, told the sheriff that the Jacksonville Electric Authority was having some good luck using Lean. JEA is our quasi-governmental utility company here.

So we started a continuous improvement unit in '04. Maxine and Renee Chandler were the initial continuous improvement unit, but on top of that, they still had their auditor duties, so they really couldn't go full-time with it. It was becoming clear that the results coming out of this were pretty positive. One of the initial successes they had was just doing a voice of the customer and leaning up a copy center function. We were making 89,000 copies of General Offense reports a week, and they were distributed to different units. Not everybody needed all of these reports. In fact, frequently what they were finding out was two-thirds or more were going in the garbage.

Mark Graban:

They were overproducing reports, I guess you could say.

Randy Russell:

Exactly. A classic case of overproduction. You can imagine all the back-end waste that drives. Well, they went through the event, and at the end of it, wound up saving 3.1 million copies a year. We're a good-sized agency, but that was a big number. Later on, I did a little bit of figuring on that, and that's about $12,000 worth of paper. That's substantial, but in contrast to a third of a billion-dollar budget, it's not a world-stopper. But here's the most important thing: that 34% reduction in copies resulted in a 3.15 million copy-a-year reduction. If we only spent one minute handling each one of those pieces of paper–from the time we order it, receive it, copy it, distribute it, people get it, carry it, look at it, then throw it away, haul it off–if we only spent one minute on each one, which is probably conservative, we just saved 52,000 man-hours.

Mark Graban:

So the time was the biggest factor, then, it seems.

Randy Russell:

52,000 hours is 25 full-time employees. That is a big number. So just in the recovered labor, we're talking seven-figure money on that one little deal. Well, things like that told the sheriff, “We need to make this full-time.” So in '05, I was coming off of being the lead planner for Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville. Undersheriff Frank McAfee gave me a CD and said, “Look at this.” Well, it was the training material for the “Introduction to Continuous Improvement” class. I said, “You know, man, this just makes sense. This makes perfect sense.” And he asked if I wanted to be involved. “Absolutely, I want to be involved in this. Why do we do these things that don't make sense?”

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Cross-Pollination and Spreading Ideas

Mark Graban:

I'm curious. So you have this video about Lean continuous improvement. I assume it was manufacturing-based. And there was also exposure to an electric company. It's kind of fascinating to see this spread of ideas across different industries. What was behind the openness to look outside of traditional law enforcement practices?

Randy Russell:

Wow. Well, you're asking great questions. Absolutely, it was a cross-pollination of ideas. The CD at the time that I looked at actually was the training material from the Jacksonville Lean Consortium. The Lean Consortium right now is about 47 companies and government organizations that are all kind of pooling their resources to share Lean best practices. It's really going well here in Jacksonville, and I was fortunate enough to be the chairman until just recently when I retired.

The training material came from a wide variety of things. We had not only the electric company but manufacturing companies here in town, the Navy, and others in a collaborative effort. Now, we since took that and made it very law enforcement-specific because our officers asked us to, and we were responding to our customer. That was a wise choice, and it's worked out very well.

Mark Graban:

And speaking of Jacksonville, was our good friend, the Lean dentist, Dr. Bouri, involved in that effort also at that point?

Randy Russell:

Dr. Bouri, my dentist? Yes, yes. In fact, I chose him because I was in the consortium at the time and got to meet Sammy and realized what a bright fellow he was. I went to his office, and this guy is absolutely Lean. Having come from another practice where you would sit and wait two hours to get 20 minutes worth of work done, to go somewhere where you don't even sit down until you're in the chair–it's amazing. If you want to go to a Lean dentist, you'll never go to another one.

Mark Graban:

I think it's hard finding a Lean dentist. I wish I could here in Texas.

Randy Russell:

True that.

Mark Graban:

So it sounds like there was some at least initial openness from a leadership perspective and then a process of trying to adapt that for the police force. Is that fair to say?

Randy Russell:

Yeah, that's absolutely fair to say, and it's probably the biggest challenge. We're fortunate in that there were some visionary people involved in the beginning here because it isn't a direct translation, and it takes a little bit of being able to see the application across industries. Now, I think that Lean is widely enjoying that phenomenon where people are seeing this is not just a manufacturing thing. This applies well, in fact, maybe even better, to administrative processes, to service industry processes.

In the beginning, we recognized that we had a lot of opportunities that we could apply this to and were willing to try it out. They were great fits, and that continued. I'm just going to confess this to the audience: I was a conventionally trained MBA, and when I was first exposed to this, I don't know that I was believing it sounded too good to be true. I had spent 20 years in the government. I was used to things that gave 1 and 2% improvements. Things that were supposed to be giving me 75% and 90% improvements, I really needed to see that. For about the first four to five months I'm involved in this, doing these things and getting these phenomenal improvements, I'm wondering, “Wow, is this real?” But the more you do, the more you realize this really is working. These are absolutely verifiable results.

We didn't go into this with this Pollyanna attitude that this is going to save the world. It was like, “Prove it.” And you know what? Lean proved it over and over again to the point where I can remember being in my office thinking, “This is a game-changer. This is going to be to law enforcement what CompStat was to law enforcement.” CompStat was when New York City started using very fresh, computerized statistics to go after crime in a focused way, and they completely changed their crime dynamic there. When I saw the effects that were happening with this, I knew this was a deal-changer.

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Overcoming Skepticism and Building Momentum

Mark Graban:

And there's nothing wrong with wanting to have that proof that Lean works rather than having it be a faith-based exercise. I'm guessing you must have faced a lot of skepticism amongst the officers.

Randy Russell:

Oh, still do.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. How do you get past that barrier? Because I think that's a very common change management issue, whether it's in healthcare or different non-automotive parts of manufacturing. People say, “We're different,” right?

Randy Russell:

Yeah, “we're different just like everybody else.” And police are the same way. So there's a couple of ways of dealing with that, and this could benefit your audience a lot. I've been exposed to everything from mom-and-pop machine shops to multinational healthcare providers to police departments and the military. Everybody's got the same problems. Here's how we dealt with it initially: find out what's causing them pain. What's causing the troops pain? Because I have a theory that headquarters likes to take care of itself. But go find out what's causing pain in the rank and file and apply an event to that problem and clear it up. Now you've taken away their pain. They're happy, they like you, you solved a problem for them. So this isn't just something now that management is doing to them because it's good for management. No, it's actually good for them.

I used to tell folks that I was running a pain management practice and an epidemiology practice. I would hear what's causing them pain on one hand, and then how bad is it, how widespread is it? Well, if it's painful and widespread, those are great things to start on. Go after those things, and now what happens is you win a bunch of fans that will help pull it from you. That's a much better problem to have than trying to push it out onto people who are resisting you.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, I think that's a great general lesson about not going out and saying, “Okay, we're implementing Lean,” but to go out instead and help solve people's problems.

Randy Russell:

Yeah, because at the end of the day, that's really what you're doing.

Mark Graban:

Now, did you do training or use any of the Lean terminology? Did you talk about waste, or did you try to keep away from some of those terms?

Randy Russell:

Okay. Early on, the training material that we had inherited through our membership in the consortium was very manufacturing-specific, and we did get a lot of advice on making it a little bit more law enforcement-oriented. We listened and we did. But I don't think you can talk about Lean without talking about waste, because to me, it's really one and the same.

We were giving everybody eight hours of “Introduction to Continuous Improvement” training initially. But we were realizing that there were some really painful parts in the afternoon on metrics that were difficult for the instructors and for the students. So we cut it down to four hours. We went through it and said, “Okay, what do they really need to know?” We got it to four hours with some simulations, and that has been very successful. It is our policy to train everyone.

We made a decision that we were going to use the minimum amount of, in particular, Japanese terminology, and at the same time avoid using very law enforcement-specific jargon. Those things where there is no commonly accepted English translation, we left the Japanese term in place because that's what they're going to run into when they talk to people outside of the agency. We wanted our people to be conversant outside of the agency but without having to keep a Japanese-English dictionary in their pocket.

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Shifting Responsibility and Scaling Up

Mark Graban:

Okay, that's fine. I was wondering if we could go back to the timeline a little bit. You had said 2004 was some of the initial thought, 2005 it was made a full-time program. What's the progression been over the last three, four years?

Randy Russell:

Okay, great question. In '05, we went full-time, and in '06, it was really kind of doing the pain management, and there were some management-dictated events that weren't necessarily connected to the larger strategies for the organization. So in '06, we were kind of doing just a random collection of stuff, learning what to do and at the same time kind of learning what not to do.

So then in early '07, I went to the sheriff and the undersheriff and said, “You know, there are 3,200 people in this organization and there are only a few people who are doing this full-time. We're not going to get to everybody.” I said, “Right now we've got a pyramid and it's upside down. We've got all the stones resting on a few, and that's just not a very functional way to get this out to the masses.”

Mark Graban:

Was that team running Kaizen events? Was that one of the limiting factors then?

Randy Russell:

Well, that would be one of the limiting factors. We just didn't have enough percentage of people properly trained and actively doing it. The critical issue was, “Where did the responsibility for doing continuous improvement rest?” At that point, it rested with the continuous improvement unit. For these dozens and dozens of middle managers, upper and middle, and even first-line managers, it's not on their to-do list.

Mark Graban:

And that's not uncommon.

Randy Russell:

No, it's not uncommon, but it's a critical concept to getting this into the larger organization. So the sheriff saw the wisdom in that, and we needed to invert the pyramid and have everybody doing this. The responsibility shifted to the operational commands. What's on somebody's to-do list or somebody's boss's to-do list gets done. I said, “Look, this has got to be on management's to-do list.” That was the thing that changed the game for us because now the horsepower in the agency is applied across the organization, instead of having this kind of boutique situation where you've got this very highly placed but small little salon doing continuous improvement.

So, the pregnant moment was when the undersheriff said, “So what's your plan?” I realized I was staring at a bunch of legal paper with handwritten notes, and I didn't have one. I went and looked for good plans and I found an extraordinarily well-done plan that really translates well into organizations of almost any size. And that is the Department of Defense's guidebook for continuous improvement. That is a phenomenally well-done document. I think it is a seminal document on how to do continuous improvement in organizations. One of the things that I am proudest of is recognizing the value of that thing and making some adaptations to law enforcement and getting our administration to sign off on using that as our guidebook.

Mark Graban:

Is that DoD document a public document people could go look at online?

Randy Russell:

It is. “Department of Defense Continuous Process Improvement Guidebook.” The one that we had was dated May of '06.

Mark Graban:

Okay. I'm sure I'll post a link to that on my site.

Randy Russell:

Okay. And I'll tie back to two other points. One was everybody saying that we're different, and police very much feel like they're different. So one of the things I would ask them is, “Do we have more vernacular than the military?” The answer to that would be no. “Do we do things that are more unique than the military?” Again, no. “Do we have a longer, more storied history than the military?” No, again. So if the military, for all its uniqueness, can do this and do it quite well and be way ahead of where we are now, then troops, you're different like everybody else. Come on, get with it.

So that applies to everybody else, whether you're holding a scalpel, a pistol, or a soldering iron. It is about doing Lean, not just in law enforcement or in healthcare, or in education, or in manufacturing. It applies everywhere. The concepts are so generic that really it's up to us to make them more specific.

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