The nightly cable news outrage mills have been full of the lavish GSA convention in Las Vegas and the not-so-lavish carousing by Secret Service agents in Cartagena. Generally speaking, to land a supervisory job in either agency, you have to have a brain – so we’re left with the proverbial question, “What were they thinking?”
Many may be shocked at the notion that Secret Service agents, who have the reputation of being the best of the best when it comes to law enforcement, would be caught partying with prostitutes (apparently legal in parts of Colombia). But what exactly gave it all away? It wasn’t about lust – it was about being cheap: one of the agents, or so the story goes, refused to pay one of the women the agreed-on fee. He had been drunk, he said, when he agreed to it earlier.
So now we have members of Congress on TV railing about whether the “culture” in the Secret Service allows all this behavior (we could easily discuss pots calling kettles black at this point, but I won’t go there).
From what little I know of law enforcement, some of these folks party pretty hard, and considering the stresses of those jobs, who would begrudge them a little fun? But it’s a minority who take it to extremes, and it’s usually off the clock. Most Secret Service agents are pretty close to what we expect them to be. At the very, very least, what happened in Cartagena should have been “secret service!”
I don’t have a problem with the concept of GSA people having a convention at a resort. Fox News can complain all day about why they didn’t just sit around a table at a Motel 6. Such events, in the private sector, are part education, part team-building, part reward and part winding down for “mental health.” But $800,000-plus?
Maybe it’s about, “What WEREN’T they thinking?” It’s really about proportion and balance, and asking the question, “How would the folks out there feel if they knew about this?”
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