The incident that ends up in litigation almost never comes out of nowhere. It starts as drift - a shortening fuse, a changing tone - that no system was watching. Left unseen, drift becomes an incident; the incident becomes a viral clip; the clip becomes a settlement; and the settlement becomes a recruiting and retention problem that outlasts everyone involved. Every chief knows the sequence. What's rarely put on paper is how the cost compounds at each stage, and how cheap the earliest intervention point is by comparison.
This infographic charts that cascade on a single page, stage by stage, with the price of acting rising as the window to act shrinks. It's built for risk conversations: city attorney meetings, insurance and liability reviews, budget hearings where an early intervention line item needs defending. The argument writes itself - a supervisor coaching conversation triggered by trend data costs almost nothing; every downstream stage costs more than the entire program.
For how trend-based data catches drift before stage one, see Police Early Intervention Systems.
