zlacker

The area of flight safety provides some interesting practices to think about.

You might like some of the mission and stated thinking behind ASAP and ASRS, and that there's interest in encouraging pilots and crew to speak up about mistakes and other safety-related observations, so that everyone can learn and benefit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Action_Program...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_Safety_Reporting_Syst...

Also related is FOQA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu...

I don't know enough about law enforcement to say whether and how any of these practices might be helpful to adapt to different and complicated challenges there.

Regarding admitting a mistake in software development/operations work that brings the site down, it helps to have a culture of trust that everyone can admit making mistakes. In that culture, you'll probably still feel sick and humbled by the mistake, but the first priority is for the team to solve the immediate problem. After that, everyone wants to understand the mistake, to try to learn and avoid problems like that in the future. The professional move is to be upfront with all pertinent information; the unprofessional move would be to attempt to hide information, misdirect efforts understanding the cause, etc. The professional move by everyone else is to expect and respect that professionalism, and to act in the same forthright spirit.