This is about the system protecting abusers.

This is a quotation from the upcoming movie about Harvey Weinstein. The system generally covers up wrongdoing by miscreants within the system. A common reason is that revealing severe misconduct within their ranks is bad marketing for organizations trying to make money . So I will return to points I have made before:

1. Approximately 5% of individuals in any particular group are criminals, Catholic priests, police, lawyers, doctors.

2. why people do bad things is that they can get away with it.

3. supervisors have to be held fully responsible, because the 5% of criminals are always going to try to get away with bad things.

The main way available in a democracy to manage all of this is actually quite simple::

Transparency and Accountability.

There are a number of criminal activities that have gone on in recent times, and I have wanted to treat them individually, but they are so numerous that it is impossible to do this.

We have learned more about Uwalde school shootings... as a parent there is no worse thing that can happen than your young child being murdered.... especially when there was a very high likelihood they would not have been killed if the police acted properly.. The bottom line in this, as in most of the stories of miscreants and supervisors doing nothing: they were too scared to go in and try to kill the shooter (ironically the large number of police early to the scene contributed to their inactivity, I think everyone wanting/expecting someone else to go in- I do though have a big problem with the singling out of the young female officer with a small child herself) , even though small children were actively being killed. It is unimaginable that this could happen, but it did.

Womens National Soccer teams and sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and rape. One female player was reported in the news to say: no one is taking responsibility... I think I will expand on this subject in the future.

The worst health care misconduct in US history, the nurse Charles Cullen, hospital administrators in the 5 or so hospitals he worked at were aware there were problems, unexpected deaths, he was dismissed but in a number of circumstances given positive reviews to new hospitals he was applying to. This I will also expand on in future blogs.

The answer is quite clear: there is little that can be done about the miscreant perpetrators if they are psychopaths, like Charles Cullen, but most of these criminals are just sociopaths/ narcissists / or drunks, and some of these will respond to the knowledge that there is strong oversight .... if there is strong oversight.

But the hidden complicit individuals, who should be treated as co-conspirators are supervisors who ignored/ covered it up. This would change very quickly if the supervisors were directly held responsible.

So the coach of national womens soccer who forced players to have sex with him should be charged for however many rapes he committed 5, 10 whatever the number, and sentenced appropriately to 300 years or more in prison, like Larry Nassar. But the owners/managers who kept a blind eye to this are co-conspirators and they should also be spending decades in prison. Their names should be made public; they should be fired/ lose their ownership; they should be sued by the victims and families; and they should go to prison. Do you think that this kind of misconduct would keep going on if there was true justice meted out to the supervisors? No, it would stop right away after one such tough and appropriate legal rectification.

The same true for hospital administrators who did not investigate the murderer Charles Cullen at their center, but worse still said nothing and did nothing and let him go to other centers, often with positive reviews. They are accessories to murder to all his future murders and should be treated as such.... and I am not opposed to the death penalty.... Very quickly at all hospital centers this kind of unthinkable misconduct by supervisors would no longer occur.

Returning to the line from the Harvey Weinstein movie: This is about the system protecting the abuser.

Hold supervisors to the full extent of responsibility: they are accessories to the crimes. Punishment should be swift and sure.

Ofcourse the problem is few people have the courage to do this. I however do: to go after the supervisors who ignored/ covered up gross misconduct.

Richard Semelka, MD