Okay, Big C., this is a three part answer.

The first and very likely part of the reason for selecting out of town police chiefs for your police chief, is that you want someone with proven leadership. Municipal governments behave very much like corporations and indeed are incorporated entities with a charge to do public service rather than make stockholder’s profit. Companies actually prefer—based on their culture of mediocrity—to bring in CEOs rather than cultivate them, as their corporate culture discourages all of the positive aspects of leadership. For the same reason why a writer will rarely have his books read by a person that knew him before he wrote, as they harbor a familiarity-based contempt for him, individual members of companies and their owners know that their own culture produces losers and seek to bring in someone who managed to rise from among some other corporate culture despite the disincentives.

Also, in relation to our corporate model, corporations that bring in outside leaders are very often in the process of failing, as virtually all do despite attempts to the contrary, again, because internal corporate culture is corrosive to the people that comprise its working parts.

The second part of the answer is the political incentive to fire police chief’s whose department’s failure was preordained by the policies and agendas of the very same political leadership who fire them. When the Mayor of Baltimore told police officers to stand down and permit looting and burning, this unleashed a momentum that remains ongoing, has smothered the BPD, and for whom multiple police chiefs have been fired by the very mayors whose policies and actions insure that the police will be ineffective. It’s simple scapegoating.

Part three is that it is always easier to scapegoat an outsider than an insider. Leaders with institutional support from former partners and supervisors can be more effective both at addressing public safety issues and at keeping their reputation intact. Outside police chiefs will immediately be character assassinated by the local supervisors who were passed over for his job when it is time for a scapegoat. When that happens, the local man will often rise to an interim post, getting very similar results to his previous boss.

In terms of Baltimore and other towns with notoriously corrupt police departments, an outsider might be a corruption-fighting necessity in cases where the government seeks to keep police hands and the police department image clean. For instance, in Baltimore, last year, I was told by an outgoing BPD cop that a female police supervisor [rank he would not give] who runs a reign of terror among corrupt cops in Baltimore, was actually the “shadow director” of the Guns and Narcotics task force goon squad that has had 7 of its members go up on corruption charges. So right there, on a middle rung in the BPD hierarchy, there is a female thug in uniform with connections in corrections facilities and outside agencies deep enough to order assassinations. Being corrupt crime bosses themselves, big city politicians know these types exist, and if they must employ one they would prefer to at least disconnect that top cop from whatever crime network he might already be a part of while insuring that he was not part of the existing internal police crime syndicate.

Staffing leadership of an organization purpose built for social predation can never be simple, as unleashing dogs on one’s real or scarecrow enemies rarely is.