A New Policing Model
What's the problem?
Really? Oh dear... Okay, fair question.
Black people get killed by police too often. It's not slowing down.
What's the solution?
Change the model of how we police. Split up the role of the police officer into 3-4 separate roles held by 3-4 seperate people. But first we have to understand how we got here.
Why is this happening?
This is the part that people have to hear with friendly ears. It's because we're all racist. Yep, me too. And even more surprisingly to some, black people are, too. Doesn't make any of it okay.
What? That's nonsense. I'm not a racist! I hear you thinking.
Slavery and the abuse of black people are deeply institutionalized. Even after the first 250 years of full-blown slavery, the last 160 haven't been an uncomplicated walk in the park.
Turns out, slavery is very wrong. How do you support something very wrong for so very long? You institutionalize it. Mixing metaphors, you bake it into the fabric of society, so that when any voice steps up and says:
Excuse me, I think we have a problem here.
There have to be a thousand voices saying:
Well, yes, but that's just how things have to be, because, well, you see...
Without the institutionalized support, things that are "very wrong" go away. There are a lot of good people, and good people stop things that are very wrong. How did we institutionalize slavery? We tolerated it in the constitution, that was also trying to say the opposite at the same time. We added the 3/5th compromise and the electoral college, so we could get most of the power of the black vote, without letting black people vote. We wrote it down, legalized it, and very much made it the way things are. Then we built a nation largely on the economic function of slavery.
Eventually, and I'd argue partly as a result of the beginnings of the industrial revolution that started to devalue and even de-necessitate manual labor, we fixed it. But by then, the fabric of American culture had too many threads supporting slavery, to allow us to change our stripes quickly.
How do you rationalize slavery? You tell yourself, and your children that it's okay because of fundamental differences between white people and black people. After 10-15 generations of slavery, that message is baked in deep. It's part of our subconscious, regardless of whether we're white or black.
Add another 100 years of pre-civil-rights / separate-but-equal institutionalized racism, and we have another 5 generations of parents and grandparents telling their children why white and black people are different.
Even today, we use radically different policing strategies in black neighborhoods, because more of them have more drug offenses, because we have more policing in those neighborhoods. Weed has been legal for white people for decades. It's not just the comedians who have noticed. Racist policy perpetuates racism.
Add it up, and together, we had something like 20 generations of institutionalized and legalized racism holding this country together. By now, we're almost on the second, or maybe even the third generation of post-civil rights Americans. Things are getting better. And things are still baked in deep. Most of know not to behave in a racist way. We know it's not acceptable to do racist things.
Here's another one that we have to hear with friendly ears. Many of us even falsely start to say to ourselves:
It's a good intention. But a more truthful message we should hear in moments like that, is closer to:
Or maybe even:
Unconscious Bias
The Brain
The brain has many levels. Roughly speaking there are reflexes and involuntary responses, and even primitive/selfish/survival emotions that we share with lizards. Touch something hot, and your hand moves before you think about it. See something you want to, well, mate with, and your body responds before your mind. See a threat to you, or even your territory, and again your body responds before you mind. Fear is base, it's low, and it often happens before we know what's happening.
The good news is that mammals added another trick: we started caring for our young, and developed the social emotions of compassion and empathy and love. If you have a dog, you know what I mean. If you have a spouse, you know what I mean. If you have a child, you know what I mean. If you were a child with a parent, you know what I mean. If you were a child seeing some else being loved, you know what I mean.
And the good news on top of that is that humans added another trick with the other two: rational thought based on sequence encodings capable of abstract hierarchical reasoning. On a good day, we can even do metaphor. Darwin looks at the Grand Canyon and sees geologic evolution as a metaphor for biologic evolution, and natural selection (and with it modern biology) is born. Or more directly we come up with a language built on letters, that make words, that make sentences, that make paragraphs that tell stories.
A human has all 3 of these working at the same time. The "reptile stuff," fear and fighting, is fast. The "mammal stuff," love and empathy, is slower. The "human stuff," story telling, is glacial. Most of the time we're mostly focused on the story telling. Evolutionarily, it's our latest trick.
Even so, David Brooks came up with the metaphor that if our conscious brain is a snowball, the other stuff is a glacier. The point is that the part of our brain that we think we know best is tiny compared to the powerful stuff just beneath the surface. Most of the time we're busy telling ourselves stories (in the snowball) that rationalize what's really happening (in the glacier).
Different Time Scales
In a lot of situations, we have time to think things through. We can tell ourselves stories, we can reflect, and see how we feel about the different stories. We can optimize solutions, iterate on our stories to get them right. We ruminate. A lot of us get paid to do things like that.
In those situations, we can take our time to make a rational decision.
But if we always end the same discussions with the same answers, eventually our mind gets bored. We stop doing the rational work to get to the solution, and we trust our gut, and go on instinct. (Even with mathy things!) It's an efficiency, that frees up the creative parts of our brain to work on problems that need novel solutions. Other people might call it wisdom.
More directly, some situations require immediate response. Touch something hot. Detect an immediate threat. There's no time to tell stories, and weigh possibilities. We need to react now, so we do.
Robert Downey Jr, in the fighting scenes in Sherlock Holmes was acting. Real fighters move like other athletes and musicians and dancers: we've practiced so much that our bodies do it by feel. It's no longer immediately obvious how we're doing it at all. We just want something to happen, and it does: a dance move, a musical phrase on an instrument, a fighting sequence, another bite of a sandwich.
So it's adaptive to have the fast lower-level parts of your brain taking care of repetitive and specifically threatening/dangerous things.
Back to Bias
How do we measure it? We put people in situations with a few things going on, and see how long it takes them to separate the tasks. Find the black person and the mean person in the next picture, vs, find the black person and the nice person. Depressingly, we're all a little faster at the first task. Presumably because it takes some conscious story telling to remember, oh yeah, I'm supposed to find "black" and "good" in this exercise, and for some reason that's harder for me to remember...
That's the unconscious bias.
That doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I'm never really under any stopwatch constraint. I can live with that.
Well, except... Your brain is always making shortcuts for efficiency. Thinking through every possibility is way too much work, so we go with feel. We go with our unconscious biases, we trust the glacier, unless we really have to think something through with the snowball.
This is all the rage in corporate America right now. Managers make all kinds of decisions by instinct, and while many of those can be helpful and efficient, many clearly perpetuate generational dysfunction, and of course, can be legally expensive.
How do you measure it in cops? You put them in simulations where they have to make split-second decisions and either kill the suspect holding a gun and a hostage, or not shoot the guy with a cell phone and a girlfriend. And the interesting/depressing part is that both white and black cops kill more black guys with cell phones and a girlfriend, because they think they saw a suspect and a gun and a hostage. I'll need to find the link to the studies. But I'm pretty sure it's been repeated.
The other way to do it, in simulation, is just to measure the amount of time it takes to kill the guy with the gun and the hostage. Sometimes you see a guy and a gun and a hostage, other times you see a guy and a cellphone and a girlfriend. If the guy with the gun is white, both black cops and white cops are slower to shoot. Again, something doesn't feel right, so they take the extra time to think more.
That extra time is key.
So what?
If that's there in everyone, then we can't do much about it. We just have to live with this level of extra and biased killing. Well, actually, we can.
We figured out how to do this in the military. You can't kill efficiently and win battles if you're running around at reptile speed, scared out of your mind, shooting whatever might be a threat (Vietnam, at its worst militarily). You kill surgically, carefully, after endless practice, with extremely well-defined roles, where that's all you're doing (Iraq at its best militarily).
The other way to think about it, is that we're forced into relying on unconscious bias when one of two things happens:
1) We feel a great sense of mortal danger / threat / fear.
2) We're too busy doing too many other things at the same time to slow down and give it much thought. We're multitasking.
With police today, we give them both, all the time. So of course they respond with something that reflects their unconscious bias. And since they likely grew up in a country with 20 generations of racial dysfunction, that unconscious bias is likely to be racist.
So black people die.
Who's fault was it? Ours, because we didn't fix it.
One Solution
There are obviously many possible solutions. Getting rid of guns seems reasonable to me, but we have a lot of baggage there, too. (Thank you again, founding fathers.) Whatever we try, we need to measure carefully and extensively. And to do that, we need to be lenient with police who will otherwise be under subconscious pressure to cover things up. Blaming the police, and holding an individual responsible for 20 generations of dysfunction might feel vindicating, but it's not helpful, and could easily be counter productive.
The obvious solution is to split up the roles of the policeman into 3-4 separate roles held by different people. The first priority is to cut down on the multi-tasking, so that the police officer with the gun isn't distracted, or worse, feeling threatened. Being a policeman today means you need to be a lawyer / judge / father / jury /shrink / brother / friend / detective / executioner all at once. That's too much. Given our biases from our history, the fear inherent to the job, the use of deadly force, and that means black people will die.
So that job has to be over.
Now we have 3-4 people showing up at any police intervention. It's always a team, and never a person alone. Only 1-2 people on the team carry guns, and those two are wearing black, and they don't talk. They're only muscle. They're trained to protect and kill, if necessary, with calm, surgical precision. They always take the time to think through whether or not deadly force is needed, and if so, how best to use it. It's their only job. They're primarily responsible to take care of the other two unarmed people on the team. One of them is more of a lawyer, essentially representing the state's interest in the intervention, and the other is more of psychologist, taking care of the suspect's needs. The lawyer and the shrink aren't armed but have protective vests. Leading and managing a public intervention is tricky business, they will need to be paid well.
Instead of good-cop/bad-cop, we now have the triumvirate of good shrink / hard lawyer / tough muscle.
The hope is that with more defined roles, the muscle stays calm, never feels overtaxed, and never feels triggered by fear. Again, like the military, he (she) is doing exactly what the training was about. And in that mindful state, the muscle stays as more of an observer, and it's more natural to get those few extra seconds to think.
The current system, with a wide-ranging set of roles for one police officer, institutionalizes the exposure of society to the deadly combination of guns and the unconscious bias of anyone who grew up in America's culture of institutionalized racism. If we're not going to get rid of the guns, then we have to come up with a way to minimize the number of roles the person with gun is trying do at the same time.
More Measurement
The hope is that teams where individuals have more distinct roles (lawyer, shrink, muscle) would lead to far fewer people getting killed, and specifically less of a bias toward killing black people. But it would have to be measured with careful control groups. This is like medicine, where we're treating a sick/broken part of our society. And just like in medicine, we have to know whether the change is helping the patient.
Thankfully we've gotten good at the math for these kinds of things. So we can figure out what works. So try it with 20% of the police interventions in one precinct. Do fewer people get killed? And that could be the core of the problem, and why this has persisted for so long.
Local and National
Policing and specifically policing policy is essentially local. Some precincts are more questionable than others, but in general, no one precinct is doing all the unwanted killing. American police collectively have killed at least one black man every week so far this year. But that's happening in a bunch of different precincts.
One unwanted killing alone is of course a tragedy, but for the math, let's assume there are 100 unwanted killings a year. If my local town has 60,000 people, then 5,000 of those towns would be about the population of the United States. If the unwanted killings were distributed evenly (they're not), then we'd have 1/50th of an unwanted killing in my town each year. Again, for the math, let's assume we have to see 10 fewer unwanted killings in a trial, than we saw in the baseline, in order to know that the new system might be working better.
Even if our new proposal were perfect, and even if we were lucky enough to have a local police force willing to try something progressive and new, at the expected rates of unwanted killings, one precinct would have to run the experiment for 500-1000 years.
So instead of 100 unwanted killings, we'd want to measure all killings, and hope/extrapolate that reducing all killings, and particularly all killings of black people, would also reduce unwanted killing of black people. (Yes, I know abhorrent to distinguish unwanted and wanted killings by police.) All police killings means 1,000 killings / year, so now my town would only have to run the experiment for 50-100 years. That's getting closer, but still not in my lifetime.
Obviously the only way to get real numbers on this is to coordinate across more precincts. How many? Assuming it takes some time to get a new policing model in place, and to train people in their new roles, let's assume we'd want the experiment to run for at least 6 months. That's 500 expected killings across all precincts. Let's assume the new model cuts the (overall) rate of killings in half -- it might not, it might increase the rate of killings because the muscle is better at its job. Hopefully the muscle would see more opportunities not to kill. We'd have to run the experiment.
More specifically, today around 22% of police killings are of black people, where we'd expect that to be around 13%. That difference could easily be the weaponized and exposed unconscious bias of police officers growing up in an institutionalized racist culture (and our blind eye to fixing it). Or it could be the over-policing of black neighborhoods. Maybe the right proxy measure is the total number of black people killed by police. Now we're down to 200 black people killed by police, or 100 every 6 months (around 4 per week, or 1 every other day or so).
We'd expect 20 of those killings to go to our experimental group, if 20% of all precincts were running the new experimental system at 100% (we'd never start with a 100% experiment!). We'd expect the same 20 killings in the experimental condition, if 40% were running 50/50 experiments, or more reasonably 80% were running 25/75 experiments. Then in 6 months, hopefully our new trial would kill fewer than 10 black people, and we'd have some early suggestion of success. Then we could run for another 6 months to be more sure, gradually increasing the rate we're using the new model (and training people for the new roles).
Assuming it takes a year to design initial roles for the first new model (experts would decide the separation and definition of the new roles -- lawyer/shrink/muscle), and another year to train all the new teams, and another six months to run the experiment with 80% participation of all precincts in the US, then in 2-3 years, we'd know whether a new model might be saving lives. That's almost reasonable politically.
The point is that to measure and do it well, we need lots of coordination and training across lots of precincts. Otherwise, we won't get the data to know, and we'll be relying on (biased) instincts. Instead of local municipal policing, we'd need a national department of policing, just like the CDC, and the NIH. To get the measurement right, we'd need a new centralized big government solution. And of course, all the re-training and coordination would be expensive.
And if we don't, we're stuck putting police officers in roles where we already know that they will be overtaxed and scared to the point that we'll expose their unconscious bias mixed with their deadly force, and more black people will die. Statistically, it's spread around to all precincts as a low-level probability. So we're asking the police to come in and play a kind of Russian roulette. And they do. It's awful for them, too.
Black lives matter. Do they matter enough to do the real work of careful measurement, experimentation, and redesign of policing? If so, it needs national leadership to coordinate the science. The incident rates are so low already, that you can't even count it well, unless you look at it nationally. And if we don't want to do the work, then we need to be transparent that the incremental black lives don't matter enough to figure it out better.
Again, if we can't afford it, the other option is to get rid of our guns. Other cultures make that work.
If we choose neither, then the depressing and effective message as a society is: the incremental black lives don't matter as much as our guns. Statistically, we'll keep killing another hundred black people, as a natural result of our unconscious bias and overtaxed police officers, to keep our guns.
Sadly, holding individual officers to account doesn't solve anything. While it might feel like vindication and a even a potential deterrent, it's morally suspect (as a society, we put the cop in that position, and statistically, we knew it was going to happen to someone), it doesn't solve the core problem, and so it's not likely to save future lives. More depressingly, it's a distraction that keeps us from doing policing scientifically (in a data-driven manner), and it likely corrupts the measures we'd need to fix things. It might feel like a good start, but metaphorically, it's a misguided shot that's aimed too low.
Fewer Interventions
The police don't need to pull me over to check my license and registration for driving 15 miles an hour over the speed limit in California. Actually, where I live they don't pull people over for speeding, which seems fine to me. But I know it still happens in some places. Oh, it's probably that they don't pull white people over for speeding anymore. Got it.
To me, getting pulled over is an unnecessary intervention. It's a speculative search, that feels legally complicated, at best, and morally questionable at worst. It's a societal invasion that puts police and civilians in an unnecessarily stressful situation.
Send me an email with the ticket. If I disagree, I can fight it in court. Otherwise, if I want to keep my license and eventually my freedom, I can pay the fine. If my wife or kids were driving the car, I still pay the fine. If I'd lent the car to a friend, I still pay the fine, or I go to court, and tell them which friend was driving, and the court follows up with the friend. How often do I drive a friend's car and break the law? If it's a rental, the rental companies make the driver's name available to police by request for each car at each time. You don't need to pull me over for a traffic infraction.
What about obviously drunk driving, or excessive speeding? Sure, intervene when you must, but there's a high societal cost with every intervention. Treat it like that.
True story: I've been going to Manhattan Kansas for 35 years to visit my family. Recently I started renting a car (with out of state plates). On my last two visits, I've been pulled over for "using my blinker late in an intersection" and then again for "passing at an unexpected time going 71 in a 65." Neither resulted in a ticket, and both were an opportunity to peek inside, and see if anything fishy was going on. And yep, both happened with my son in the car. Thankfully we're white, and weren't harassed more, but they were unnecessary societal violations.
Don't do that.
Leniency
Yes, killing is evil. And yes, a societal bias that kills black people is evil.
But even today, consciously racist police would have a hard time existing in most parts of the country. Even if there were pockets of that, the bigger problem now is that all the rest of the consciously non-racist police are being put in situations that kill more black people. My guess is that it's 10s of cops in one group, and millions in the other, leading to few if any killings from the first group, and a black man killed every other day by the second. It's time to fix the second group.
The overtaxed and under-supported police officer has his unconscious bias exposed by an institution that we haven't fixed. And that police officer kills a black person. Morally that's a different killing to me than pre-meditated murder. We, society, put him in that situation, where statistically, we knew it was going to happen to someone. We didn't pull the trigger, but we clearly bare some of the moral responsibility for not fixing the problem. Again, to me, like a drug offense, the police officer would most typically need treatment for the trauma of having killed, and the opportunity to work in a non-violent job while recovering.
More pragmatically, if we morally equate a police killing with premeditated murder, and demand vindication, we'll lose the measurements that we need to fix the system. Police will cover up, even subconsciously, if/when there are obvious punishments, instead of treatments, for their mistakes.
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If you think this idea might help, forward it to a friend.
See something you'd like to discuss more? Something I got wrong? Send me a note:
bpstrope@gmail.com
-Brian Patrick Strope
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