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With protests raging across the country, many have called for large-scale police reform. Weighing in on that Friday with ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross was former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr.

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“Those of us in law enforcement desperately want to say, ‘Oh, it’s just a bad apple,’ but that’s getting pretty hard to hold up,” Rahr said. “If you put a good apple into a bad barrel, the apple is eventually going to go bad. We do have to bring good people in, but we also have to pay attention to the barrel that we’re putting them in.”

On that front, Rahr sees it coming down to how we view and evaluate law enforcement.

That means moving away from the “tough on crime,” arrest-centric approach, and finding ways to judge officers based on the way they serve their respective communities.

“We have not come up with a good way to measure how successfully you build trust in your community, [or] how successfully you engage the community to work with the police to keep the community safe.”

That being so, it points to the need to reform not just the way we police, but the larger criminal justice system as well.

“It’s not just the police department we need to be looking at,” said Rahr, who now works as the Executive Director for . “We also have massive failures in all of our institutions.”

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She points to a mental health system she labels “a disaster,” as well as “huge problems” with things like income inequality and drug addiction.

That, in turn, puts the onus on police to shoulder the burden for larger systemic failures.

“Law enforcement ends up picking up the mess of that failed system,” she noted. “We have massive institutional failures, and we expect a 25-year-old cop on the street to fix something that all of these systems were not able to address.”

As protesters continue to take to the streets calling for reform, Rahr has some advice.

“Keep raising your voices, but expand it beyond just the police because if they’re only focusing on the police, they’re missing the opportunity to really make systemic change.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.