Top Quotes: “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know” — Malcolm Gladwell
Introduction
“The 16th century’s bloodiest conflict was between Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and Aztec ruler Montezuma II, neither side knowing anything about the other at all.
Cortes landed in Mexico in February 1519 and slowly made his way inland, advancing on the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. When Cortes and his army arrived, they were in awe. Tenochtitlan was an extraordinary sight — far larger and more impressive than any of the cities Cortes and his men would have known back in Spain. It was a city on an island, linked to the mainland with bridges and crossed by canals. It had grand boulevards, elaborate aqueducts, thriving marketplaces, temples built in brilliant white stucco, public gardens, and even a zoo. It was spotlessly clean — which, to someone raised in the filth of medieval European cities, would have seemed almost miraculous.”
“No European had ever set foot in Mexico. No Aztec had ever met a European. Cortes knew nothing about the Aztecs, except to be in awe of their wealth and the extraordinary city they’d built. Montezuma knew nothing of Cortes, except that he had approached the Aztec kingdom with great audacity, armed with strange weapons and large, mysterious animals — horses — that the Aztecs had never seen before.”
“After dinner, Montezuma rejoined Cortes and his men and gave a speech. Immediately, the confusion began. The way the Spanish interpreted Montezuma’s remarks, the Aztec king was making an astonishing concession: he believed Cortes to be a god, the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy that said an exiled deity would one day return from the east. And he was, as a result, surrendering to Cortes. You can imagine Cortes’ reaction: this magnificent city was effectively his.
But is that really what Montezuma meant? Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, had a reverential mode. A royal figure such as Montezuma would speak in a kind of code, according to a cultural tradition in which the powerful projected their status through an elaborate false humility. The word in Nahuatl for a noble is all but identical to the word for child. When a ruler such as Montezuma spoke of himself as small and weak, in other words, he was actually subtly drawing attention to the fact that he was esteemed and powerful.
‘The impossibility of adequately translating such language is obvious,’ Restall writes:
The speaker was often obliged to say the opposite of what was really meant. True meaning was embedded in the use of reverential language. Stripped of these nuances in translation, and distorted through the use of multiple interpreters…not only was it unlikely that a speech such as Montezuma’s would be accurately understood, but it was probable that its meaning would be turned upside down. In that case, Montezuma’s speech wasn’t his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.
Montezuma was taken hostage by Cortes, then murdered. The two sides went to war. As many as 20 million Aztecs perished, either directly at the hands of the Spanish or indirectly from the diseases they’d brought. Tenochtitlan was destroyed. Cortes’ foray into Mexico ushered in the era of catastrophic colonial expansion. And it introduced a new and distinctly modern pattern of social interaction.”
Wrong Impressions
“Hitler was someone he’d only ever read about. Duff Cooper, one of Chamberlain’s cabinet ministers, was equally clear-eyed. He listened with horror to Chamberlain’s account of his meeting with Hitler. Later, he’d resign from Chamberlain’s government in protest. Did Cooper know Hitler? no. Only one person in the upper reaches of the British diplomatic service — Anthony Eden, foreign secretary — had both met Hitler and saw the truth of him. But for everyone else? The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who’d talked with him for hours.
The same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere.”
“In a study conducted by a Harvard economist, three elite computer scientists and a ball expert from the University of Chicago used NYC as their testing ground. They gathered up the records of 555k defendants brought before arraignment hearings in NY from 2008 to 2013. Of those, they found that the human judges of NY released just over 400k.
They then built an AI system, fed it the same info the prosecutors had given judges in those arraignment cases (the defendant’s age and criminal record), and told the computer to go through those 555k cases and make its own list of 400k people to release. Who made the best decisions? Whose list committed the fewest crimes while out on bail and was most likely to show up for their trial date? The results weren’t even close. The people on the computer’s list were 25% less likely to commit a crime while awaiting trial than the 400k people released by the judges of NYC. Machine destroyed man!
To give you just one sense of the mastery of the machine, it flagged 1% of all defendants as ‘high-risk.’ These are the people the computer thought should never be released prior to trial. According to the machine’s calculations, well over half of the people in that high-risk group would commit another crime if let out on bail. When the human judges looked at that same group of bad apples, though, they didn’t identify them as dangerous at all. They released 49% of them!”
“The same person who said, ‘These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all’ turned around and said, of a perfect stranger:
I think this girl is on her period…I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship, according to the words WHORE, SLOT, CHEAT.
The answers go on and on like this. And no one seemed even remotely aware that they’d been trapped in a contradiction.
I guess there’s some relationship…He talks a lot about money and the BANK. A lot more correlation here.
He seems to focus on competitions and winning. This person could be an athlete or someone who’s very competitive.
It seems this individual has a generally positive outlook toward the things he endeavors. Most words, such as WINNER, SCORE, GOAL, indicate some sort of competitiveness, which combined with the jargon, indicate that he has some athletic competitive nature.
If the panel had seen my GLUM, HATER, SCARE, ATTACK, BORE, FLOUT, SLIT, CHEAT, TRAP, and DEFEAT, they would’ve worried for my soul.
Pronin calls this phenomenon the ‘illusion of asymmetric insight.’ She writes:
The conviction that we know others better than they know us — and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa) — leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they’re the ones who’re being misunderstood or judged unfairly.”
“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.
If I can convince you of one thing, let it be this: Strangers aren’t easy.”
“In the early 90s, thousands of Cubans began to flee the regime of Fidel Castro. They cobbled together crude boats — made of inner tubes and metal drums and wooden doors and any number of other stray parts — and set out on a desperate voyage across the 90 miles of the Florida Straits to the US. By one estimate, as many as 24,000 people died attempting the journey. It was a human rights disaster. In response, a group of Cuban emigres in Miami founded Hermanos al Rescate — Brothers to the Rescue. They put together a makeshift air force of single-engine planes and took to the skies, searching for refugees from the air and radioing their coordinates to the Coast Guard. They saved thousands of lives and became heroes.
As time passed, the emigres grew more ambitious. They began flying into Cuban airspace, dropping leaflets on Havana urging the Cuban people to rise up against Castro’s regime. The Cuban government, already embarrassed by the flight of refugees, was outraged. Tensions rose, coming to a head on February 24, 1996. That afternoon 3 Hermanos al Rescate planes took off for the Florida Straits. As they neared the Cuban coastline, two Cuban Air Force jets shot two of the planes out of the sky, killing 4 people aboard.
The response to the attack was immediate. The UN Security Council passed a resolution denouncing the Cuban government. A grave President Clinton held a press conference. The Cuban emigre population in Miami was furious. The two planes had been shot down in international airspace, making the incident tantamount to an act of war.”
Lying
“In one iteration of his experiment, Levine divided his tapes in half: 22 liars and 22 truth-tellers. On average, the people he had watch all 44 videos correctly identified the liars 56% of the time. Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment. The average for all of them? 54%. Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists — even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Why?
Tim Levine’s answer is called the ‘Truth-Default Theory’ (TDT).
Levine’s argument started with an insight that came from one of his grad students — that the 54% deception accuracy figure was averaging across truths and lies,’ Levine said. ‘You come to a very different understanding if you break out…how much people are right on truths, and how much people are right on lies.’
What he meant was this. If I tell you that your accuracy rate on Levine’s videos is right around 50%, the natural assumption is to think that you’re just randomly guessing — that you have no idea what you’re doing. But Park’s observation was that that’s not true. We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth. But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying. We go through all those videos, and we guess’ — ‘true, true, true’ — which means we get most of the truthful interviews right, and most of the liars wrong. We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.”
“‘Sometimes, they catch that the instructor leaving the room might be a setup,’ Levine says. ‘The thing they almost never catch is that their partners are fake…So they think that there might be hidden agendas. They think it might be a setup because experiments are setups, right? But this nice person they’re talking to? Oh no.’ They never question it.
To snap out of truth-default mode requires what Levine calls a ‘trigger.’ A trigger isn’t the same as a suspicion, or the first sliver of doubt. We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”
“You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”
“I saw a lot of theft in the [store I worked in]. And so I became fraud-aware at a formative age, in my teens and early 20s. And I saw what people are capable of doing, because when you run a business, 5–6% of your revenues are going to be lost to theft.”
“The second, crucial part of Levine’s argument is that we can’t all be Holy Fools. That would be a disaster.
Levine argues that over the course of evolution, human beings never developed sophisticated and accurate skills to detect deception as it was happening because there is no advantage to spending your time scrutinizing the words and behavior of those around you. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. As he puts it, the trade-off between truth-default and the risk of deception is
a great deal for us. What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination. The benefits are huge and the costs are trivial in comparison. Sure, we get deceived once in a while. That’s just the cost of doing business.
That sounds callous, because it’s easy to see all the damage done by people like Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff. Because we trust implicitly, spies go undetected, criminals roam free, and lives are damaged. But Levine’s point is that the price of giving up on that strategy is much higher. If everyone on Wall Street behaved like Harry Markopolos and trusted no one, there would be no fraud on Wall Street — but the air would be so thick with suspicion and paranoia that there would also be no Wall Street.”
“Being deceived once in a while is not going to prevent us from passing on our genes or seriously threaten the survival of the species. Efficient communication, on the other hand, has huge implications for our survival. The trade-off just isn’t much of a trade-off.”
Emotions
“100% of the 113 Spanish schoolchildren identified the happiness face as a happiness face. But only 58% of the Trobrianders did, while 23% looked at smiling face and called it ‘neutral.’ And happiness is the emotion where there’s the most agreement between the Trobrianders and the Spanish children. On everything else, the Trobrianders’ idea of what emotion looks like on the outside appears to be totally different from our own.”
“Transparency is a myth — an idea we’ve picked up from watching too much TV and reading too many novels where the hero’s ‘jaw dropped with astonishment’ or ‘eyes went wide with surprise.’ Schutzwohl went on: ‘The participants apparently reasoned that, since they felt surprised, and since surprise is associated with a characteristic facial display, they must have shown this display. In most cases, this inference was erroneous.”
“Surprised people don’t necessarily look surprised. People who have emotional problems don’t always look like they have emotional problems.”
“Whatever these unobserved variables are that cause judges to deviate from the predictions — whether internal states, such as mood, or specific features of the case that are salient and over-weighted, such as the defendant’s appearance — they’re not a source of private info so much as a source of mis-prediction. The unobservables create noise, not signal.
Translation: the advantage the judge has over the computer isn’t an advantage.”
“Levine argues that this is the assumption of transparency in action. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. In a survey of attitudes toward deception conducted a few years ago, which involved thousands of people in 58 countries around the world, 63% of those asked said the cue they most used to spot a liar was ‘gaze aversion.’ We think liars telegraph their internal states with squirming and darting eyes.
This is — to put it mildly — nonsense. Liars don’t look away. But Levine’s point is that our stubborn belief in some set of nonverbal behaviors associated with deception explains the pattern he finds with his lying tapes. The people we all get right are the ones who match — whose level of truthfulness happens to correspond with the way they look. Blushing Sally matches. She acts like our stereotype of how a liar acts. And she also happens to be lying.
When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we’re flummoxed. We’re bad lie detectors in the situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.”
“Madoff was mismatched. He was a liar with a demeanor of an honest man. And Ocrant — who knew, on an intellectual level, that something wasn’t right — was so swayed by meeting Madoff that he dropped the story. Can you blame him? First there’s default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it’s not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.
And why did so many of the British politicians who met with Hitler misread him so badly? Because Hitler was mismatched as well. Remember Chamberlain’s remark about how Hitler greeted him with a double-handed handshake, which Chamberlain believed Hitler reserved for people he liked and trusted? For many of us, a warm handshake does mean that we feel warm about the person we’re meeting. But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts honest.”
“What was Amanda Knox’s problem? She was mismatched. She’s the innocent person who acts guilty.”
“The interview was conducted long after the miscarriage of justice in the Kercher case had become obvious. Knox had just been freed after spending 4 years in an Italian prison for the crime of not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered. Yet what does Diane Sawyer say to her? She scolds her for not behaving the way we think people are supposed to behave after their roommate is murdered.
In the intro to the interview, the news anchor says that Knox’s case remains controversial because, in part, ‘her pleas for innocence seemed to many people more cold and calculating than remorseful’ — which is an even more bizarre thing to say. Why would we expect Knox to be remorseful? She didn’t do anything. But she’s still being criticized for being ‘cold and calculating.’ Ate very turn, Knox cannot escape censure for her weirdness.
Knox: I think everyone’s reaction to something horrible is different.
She’s right! Why can’t someone be angry in response to a murder, rather than sad? If you were Amanda Knox’s friend, none of this would surprise you. You would’ve seen Knox walking down the street like an elephant. But with strangers, we’re intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.”
“The most disturbing of Tim Levine’s findings was when he showed his lying videotapes to a group of seasoned law enforcement agents with 15% years of interrogation experience. He’d previously used as his judges students and adults from ordinary walks of life. They didn’t do well, but perhaps that’s to be expected. If you’re a philosophy major, identifying deception in an interrogation isn’t necessarily something you do every day. But maybe, he thought, people whose job it was to do exactly the kind of thing he was measuring would be better.
In one respect, they were. On ‘matched senders,’ the seasoned interrogators were perfect. You or I would probably come in at 70–75% on that set of tapes. But everyone in Levine’s group of highly experienced experts got every matched sender right. On mismatched senders, however, their performance was abysmal: they got 20% right. And on the sub-category of sincere-acting liars, they came in at 14% — a score so low that it ought to give chills to anyone who ever gets hauled into an interrogation room with an FBI agent.
This is distressing because we don’t need law enforcement officers to help us with matched strangers. We’re all good at knowing when these kinds of people are misleading us or telling us the truth. We need help with mismatched strangers — the difficult cases. A trained interrogator ought to be adept at getting beneath the confusing signals of demeanor, at understanding that when Nervous Nelly overexplains and gets defensive, that’s who she is — someone who overexplains and gets defensive. The police officer ought to be the person who sees the quirky, inappropriate girl in a culture far different from her own say ‘Ta-dah’ and realize that she’s just a quirky girl in a culture far different from her own. But that’s not what we get. Instead, the people charged with making determinations of innocence and guilt seem to be as bad or even worse than the rest of us when it comes to the hardest cases.”
“We all accept the flaws and inaccuracies of institutional judgment when we believe that those mistakes are random. But Tim Levine’s research suggests that they aren’t random — that we’ve built a world that systematically discriminates against a class of people who, through no fault of their own, violate our ridiculous ideas about transparency. The Amanda Knox story deserves to be retold not because it was a once-in-a-life-timetime crime saga. It deserves retelling because it happens all the time.”
Sexual Assault
“An estimated 1 in 5 American female college students say they’ve been the victim of sexual assault.”
“Dwight Heath was an anthropology grad student when he decided to do the fieldwork for his dissertation in Bolivia. He and his wife flew to Lima with their baby boy, then waited 5 hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines. ‘These were planes that the US had dumped after WWII,’ Heath recalls. ‘They weren’t supposed to go above 10,000 ft. But La Paz was at 12,000 ft.’ As they flew into the Andes, his wife says, they looked down and saw the remnants of ‘all the planes where the boosters didn’t work.’
From La Paz they traveled 500 miles into the interior of eastern Bolivia, to a small frontier town called Montero. It was the part of Bolivia where the Amazon Basin meets the Chaco region — vast stretches of jungle and lush prairie. The area was inhabited by the Camba, a mestizo people descended from the indigenous Indian populations and Spanish settlers. The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and 17th-century Andalusian Spanish. ‘It was an empty spot on the map,’ Heath says. ‘There was a railroad coming. There was a highway coming. There was a national government…coming.’
They lived in a tiny house just outside of town. ‘There was no pavement, no sidewalks,’ his wife recalls.
If there was meat in town, they’d throw out the hide in front, so you’d know where it was, and you’d bring banana leaves in your hand, so it was your dish. There were adobe houses with stucco and tile roofs, and the town plaza, with three palm trees. You heard the rumble of oxcarts. The padres had a jeep. Some of the women would serve a big pot of rice and some sauce. That was the restaurant. The guy who did the coffee was German. The year we came to Bolivia, a total of 85 foreigners came into the country. It wasn’t exactly a hot spot.
In Montero, the Heaths engaged in old-fashioned ethnography — ‘vacuuming up everything,’ Dwight says, ‘learning everything.’ They convinced the Camba that they weren’t missionaries by openly smoking cigarettes. They took thousands of photos. They walked around the town and talked to whomever they could. After a year and a half, the Heaths packed up their photos and notes and returned to New Haven. There, Heath sat down to write his dissertation — only to discover that he’d nearly missed what was perhaps the most fascinating fat about the community he’d been studying. ‘Do you realize,’ he told his wife as he looked over his notes, ‘that every weekend we were in Bolivia, we went out drinking?’
Every Saturday night the entire time they were there, the Heaths were invited to drinking parties. The host would buy the first bottle and issue the invitations. A dozen or so people would show up, and the party would proceed — often until everyone went back to work on Monday. The composition of the group was informal: sometimes people passing by would be invited. But the structure of the party was heavily ritualized. The group sat in a circle. Someone might play the drums or a guitar. A bottle of rum from one of the local sugar refineries and a small drinking glass were placed on a table. The host stood, filled the glass with rum, then walked toward someone in the circle. He stood before the ‘toastee,’ nodded, and raised the glass. The toastee smiled and nodded in return. The host then drank half the glass and handed it to the toastee, who finished it. The toastee eventually stood, refilled the glass, and repeated the ritual with someone else in the circle. When people got too tired or too drunk, they curled up on the ground and passed out, rejoining the party when they awoke.
When the Heaths returned to New Haven, they had a bottle of the Camba’s rum analyzed and learned it was 180 proof. It was laboratory alcohol — the concentration that scientists use to preserve tissue. No one drinks lab alcohol. This was the first of the astonishing findings of the Heaths’ research — and, predictably, no one believed it at first.
Here we have a community of people, in a poor and underdeveloped part of the world, who hold drinking parties with 180-proof alcohol every weekend, from Saturday night until Monday morning. The Cambas must’ve paid dearly for their excesses, right? Wrong.
‘There was no social pathology — none,’ Heath said, ‘No arguments, no sexual aggression, no verbal aggression. There was pleasant conversation or silence.’ He went on: ‘The drinking didn’t interfere with work…It didn’t bring in the police. And there was no alcoholism either.’
Heath wrote up his findings in a now-famous Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol article. In the years that followed, countless other anthropologists chimed in to report the same thing. Alcohol sometimes led people to raise their voices and fight and say things they’d otherwise regret. But a lot of other times, it didn’t. The Aztec called pulque — the traditional alcoholic beverage of C. Mexico — ‘400 rabbits’ because of the seemingly infinite variety of behaviors it could create. Anthropologist Mac Marshall traveled to the South Pacific island of Truk and found that, for young men there, drunkenness created aggression and mayhem. But when the islanders reached their mid-30s, it had the opposite effect.
In Oaxaca, the Mixe Indians were known to engage in wild fistfights when drunk. But when anthropologist Ralph Beals started watching their fights, they didn’t seem out of control at all. They seemed as though they all followed the same script:
Although I probably saw several hundred fights, I saw no weapon used, although nearly all men carried machetes and many carried rifles. Most fights start with a drunk quarrel. When the pitch of voices reaches a certain point, everyone expects a fight. The men hold out their weapons to the onlookers, and then begin to fight with their fists, swinging wildly until one falls down, [at which point] the victor helps his opponent to his feet and usually they embrace each other.
None of this makes sense. Alcohol is a powerful drug. It disinhibits. It breaks down the set of constraints that hold our behavior in check. That’s why it doesn’t seem surprising that drunkenness is so overwhelmingly linked with violence, car accidents, and sexual assault.
But if the Camba’s drinking bouts had so few social side effects, and if the Mixe Indians of Mexico seem to be following a script even during their drunken brawls, then our perception of alcohol as a disinhibiting agent can’t be right. It must be something else. The Heaths’ experience in Bolivia set in motion a complete rethinking of our understanding of intoxication. Many of those who study alcohol no longer consider it an agent of disinhibition. They think of it as an agent of myopia.
The myopia theory was first suggested by psychologists Claude Steele and Robert Josephs, and what they meant by myopia is that alcohol’s principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental fields of vision. It creates ‘a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotions.’ Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background less significant. It makes short-term considerations loom large, and many cognitively demanding, longer-term considerations fade away.”
“Drinking puts you at the mercy of your environment. It crowds out everything except the most immediate experiences.
Here’s another example. One of the central observations of myopia theory is that drunkenness has its greatest effect in situations of ‘high conflict’ — when there are two sets of considerations, one near and one far, that are in opposition. So, suppose you’re a successful comedian. The world thinks you’re very funny. You think you’re very funny. If you get drunk, you don’t think of yourself as even funnier. There’s no conflict over your hilariousness that alcohol can resolve. But suppose you think you’re very funny and the world generally doesn’t. In fact, whenever you try to entertain a group with a funny story, a friend pulls you aside the next morning and gently discourages you from ever doing it again. Under normal circumstances, the thought of that awkward conversation with your friend keeps you in check. But when you’re drunk? The alcohol makes the conflict go away. You no longer think about the future corrective feedback regarding your bad jokes. Now it’s possible for you to believe that you’re actually funny. When you’re drunk, your understanding of your true self changes.
This is the crucial implication of drunkenness as myopia. The old disinhibition idea implied that what was revealed when someone got drunk was a kind of stripped-down, distilled version of their sober self — without any of the muddying effects of social nicety and propriety.
But that’s backward. The kinds of conflicts that normally keep our impulses in check are a crucial part of how we form our character. All of us construct our personality by managing the conflict between immediate, near considerations and more complicated, longer-term considerations. That’s what it means to be ethical or productive or responsible. The good parent is someone who’s willing to temper their own immediate selfish needs (to be left alone, to be allowed to sleep) with longer-term goals (to raise a good child). When alcohol peels away those longer-term constraints on our behavior, it obliterates our true self.
So who were the Camba, in reality? Heath says their society was marked by a singular lack of ‘communal expression.’ They were itinerant farmworkers. Kinship ties were weak. Their daily labor tended to be solitary, the hours long. There were few neighborhood or civic groups. The daily demands of their lives made socializing difficult. So on the weekends, they used the transformative power of alcohol to create the ‘communal expression’ so sorely lacking from Monday to Friday. They used the myopia of alcohol to temporarily create a different world for themselves. They gave themselves strict rules: one bottle at a time, an organized series of toasts, all seated around the circle, only on the weekends, never alone. They drank only within a structure, and the structure of those drinking circles in the Bolivian interior was a world of soft music and quiet conversation: order, friendship, predictability, and ritual. This was a new Camba society, manufactured with the assistance of one of the most powerful drugs on earth.
Alcohol isn’t an agent of revelation. It’s an agent of transformation.”
“Alcohol is a drug that reshapes the drinker according to the contours of his immediate environment. In the case of the Camba, that reshaping of personality and behavior was benign. Their immediate environment was carefully and deliberately constructed; they wanted to use alcohol to create a temporary — and in their minds, better — version of themselves. But when young people today drink to excess, they aren’t doing so in a ritualized, predictable environment. They’re doing so in the hypersexualized chaos of frat parties and bars.”
“Under certain very particular circumstances — especially if you drink a lot of alcohol very quickly — something else happens. Alcohol hits the hippocampus — responsible for forming memories about our lives. At a blood-alcohol level of roughly 0.08 — the legal level of intoxication — the hippocampus starts to struggle. When you wake up in the morning after a cocktail party and remember meeting someone but cannot remember their name or the story they told you, that’s because the two shots of whiskey you drank in quick succession reached your hippocampus. Drink a little more and the gaps get larger — to the point where maybe you remember pieces of the evening but other details can be summoned only with the greatest difficulty.
Aaron White of the National Institute of Health is one of the world’s leading experts on blackouts and he says there’s no particular logic to which bits get remembered and which don’t. ‘Emotional salience doesn’t seem to have an imapct on the likelihood that your hippocampus records something, he says. ‘What that means is you might, as a female, go to a party and you might remember having a drink downstairs, but you don’t remember getting raped. But then you do remember getting in the taxi.’ At the next level — roughly around a blood-alcohol level of 0.15 — the hippocampus simply shuts down entirely.”
“The salesman had left the bar in St. Louis, gone to the airport, bought a plane ticket, flown to Vegas, found a hotel, checked in, hung up his suit, shaved, and apparently functioned perfectly well in the world, all while in blackout mode. That’s the way blackouts work. At or around the 0.15 mark, the hippocampus shuts down and memories stop forming, but it’s entirely possible that the frontal lobes, cerebellum, and amygdala of that same drinker — at the same time — can continue to function more or less normally.
‘You can do anything in a blackout that you can do when you’re drunk,’ White said.
You’re just not going to remember it. That could be ordering stuff on Amazon, buying tickets, travel, all kinds of things.”
“Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently survey 700+ Duke students. Of the drinkers, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40% in the previous year, and almost 10% had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.
Second, the consumption gap between men and women, so pronounced a generation gap, has narrowed considerably — particularly among white women.
‘I think it’s an empowerment issue,’ Fromme argues:
I do a lot of consulting work in the military, and it’s easier for me to see it there because in the military the women are really put to the same standards as men in terms of their boot camps and all of that. They’ve worked very hard to try to say, ‘We’re like the men and therefore we can drink like the men.’
For physiological reasons, this trend has put women at greatly increased risk for blackouts. If an American male of average weight has 8 drinks over 4 hours — which would make him a moderate drinker at a typical frat party — he’d end up with a blood-alcohol level of 0.11. That’s too drunk to drive, but well below the 0.15 level typically associated with blackouts. If a woman of average weight has 8 drinks over 4 hours, by contrast, she’s at a blood-alcohol level of 0.17. She’s blacked out.
It gets worse. Women are also increasingly drinking wine and spirits, which raise blood-alcohol levels much faster than beer. ‘Women are also more likely to skip meals when they drink than men,’ White says.
Having a meal in your stomach when you drink reduces your peak blood-alcohol concentration by about a third. In other words, if you drink on an empty stomach you’re going to reach a much higher BAC and you’re going to do it much more quickly, and if you’re drinking spirits and wine while you’re drinking on an empty stomach, again higher BAC much more quickly. And if you’re a woman, less body water [yields] higher BAC much more quickly.
And what’s the consequence of being blacked out? It means that women are put in a position of vulnerability. Our memory, in any interaction with a stranger, is our first line of defense. We talk to someone at a party for half an hour and weigh what we learned. We use our memory to make sense of who the other person is. We collect things they’ve told us, and done, and those shape our response. That’s not an error-free exercise in the best of times. But it’s a necessary exercise, particularly if the issue at hand is whether you’re going to go home with the person. Yet if you can’t remember anything you’ve just learned, you’re not necessarily making the same-quality decision you would have if your hippocampus were still working. You’ve ceded control of the situation.
‘Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice,’ critic Emiliy Yoffe writes in Slate:
But we’re failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them. Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue. The real feminist message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you’ll attract the kinds of people who don’t have your best interest at heart. That’s not blaming the victim; that’s trying to prevent more victims.”
“A version of the same admonition that Emily Yoffe gave to women can also be given to men:
But we’re failing to let men know that when they render themselves myopic; they can do terrible things. Young men are getting a distorted message that drinking to excess is a harmless social exercise. The real message should be that when you lose the ability to be responsible for yourself, you drastically increase the chances that you’ll commit a sexual crime. Acknowledging the role of alcohol isn’t excusing the behavior of perpetrators. It’s trying to prevent more young men from becoming perps.
It’s striking how underrepresented the power of myopia is. In a Washington Post study, students were asked to list the measures they thought would be most effective in reducing sexual assaults. At the top of that list they put harsher punishment for aggressors, self-defense training for victims, and teaching men to respect women more. How many thought it would be ‘very effective’ if they drank less? 33%. How many thought stronger restrictions on alcohol on campus would be very effective? 15%.
These are contradictory positions. Students think it’s a good idea to be trained in self-defense, and not such a good idea to clamp down on drinking. But what good is teaching the techniques of self-defense if you’re blind drunk? Students think it’s a really good idea if men respect women more. But the issue isn’t how men behave around women when they’re sober. It’s how they behave around women when they’re drunk, and have been transformed by alcohol into a person who makes sense of the world around them very differently. Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them. And that’s exactly what the myopia that comes with drunkenness makes it so hard to do.
The lesson of myopia is really quite simple. If you want people to be themselves in a social encounter with a stranger — to represent their own desires honestly and clearly — they cannot be blind drunk. And if they are blind drunk, and therefore at the mercy of their environment, the worst possible place to be is an environment where men and women are grinding on the dancefloor and jumping on the tables.”
Suicide
“Poets die young. That’s not just a cliche. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of ‘emotional disorders’ than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates — as much as 5x higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears to either attract the wounded or to open new wounds — and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.”
“The alternative possibility is that suicide is a behavior coupled to a particular context. Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”
“If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.
So which is it — displacement or coupling? The modernization of British gas is an almost perfect way to test this question. If suicide follows the path of displacement — if the suicidal are so determined that when you block one method, they’ll simply try another — then suicide rates should’ve remained pretty steady over time, fluctuating only with major social events. (Suicides tend to fall in wartimes, for example, and rise in times of economic distress.) If suicide is coupled, on the other hand, then it should vary with the availability of particular methods of committing suicide. When a new and easy method such as town gas arrives on the scene, suicides should rise; when that method is taken away, they should fall. The suicide curve should look like a roller coaster.
And it is a roller coaster. It goes way up when town gas first makes its way into British homes. And it comes plunging down as the changeover to natural gas begins in the late 60s. In that 10-year window, as town gas was being slowly phased out, thousands of deaths were prevented.”
“Cosnider the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge. Since it opened in 1937, it’s been the site of more than 1,500 suicides. No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period.
What does coupling tell us about the Golden Gate? That it would make a big difference if a barrier prevented people from jumping or a net was installed to catch them before they fell. The people prevented from killing themselves on the bridge wouldn’t go on to jump off something else. Their decision to commit suicide is coupled to that particular bridge.
Sure enough, that’s exactly what seems to be the case, according to clever detective work by psychologist Richard Seiden. Seiden followed up on 515 people who had tried to jump from the bridge between 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained. Just 25 of those 515 persisted in killing themselves some other way. Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate only at that given moment.”
“So when did the municipal authority that runs the bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier? In 2018, 80+ years after the bridge opened. In the intervening period, the bridge authority spent millions of dollars in building a traffic barrier to protect cyclists from crossing the bridge, even though no cyclist has ever been killed by a motorist on the Golden Gate. It spent millions building a median to separate north- and southbound traffic, on the grounds of ‘public safety.’ On the southern end of the bridge, the authority put up an 8-foot cyclone fence to prevent garbage from being thrown onto Ft. Baker, a former army installation on the ground below. A protective net was even installed during the initial construction of the bridge — at enormous cost — to prevent workers from falling to their deaths. The net saved 19 lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for 80+ years.
Now, why is this? Is it because people managing the bridge are callous and unfeeling? Not at all. It’s because it’s really hard for us to accept that a behavior can be so closely coupled to a place.”
“In one national survey, 3/4 of Americans predicted that when a barrier is finally put on the Golden Gate, most of those who wanted to take their life on the bridge would simply take their life some other way. But that’s absolutely wrong.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers — the default to truth and the illusion of transparency — has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We don’t understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”
Policing
“Sherman crunches the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3% of the street segments in the city accounted for 50%+ of the police calls.
In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 4% of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: NYC, Seattle, Cincinnati; Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dalas. Any time someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was very concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different — culturally, geographically, economically — and found the same thing in Tel Aviv. Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration. Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiments capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger — because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.”
“There was even a Supreme Court case in which a police officer in NC stopped what he thought was a suspicious driver, using the pretext that one of the car’s brake lights was out. As it turns out, it’s perfectly permissible in NC to drive with one brake light out, so long as the other one works. So what happened after the driver of the car sued, claiming he’d been stopped illegally? The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the officer. It was enough that he thought driving with only one brake light seemed like an infraction. In other words, police officers in the US not only have at their disposal a virtually limitless list of legal reasons to stop a motorist; they’re also free to add any other reasons they might dream up, as long as they seem reasonable. And once they’ve stopped a motorist, police officers are allowed, under the law, to search the car, so long as they have reason to believe the motorist might be armed or dangerous.
Kansas City decided to take advantage of this latitude. Sherman’s proposal was for the police department to detail four officers, in two squad cars. Their beat would be District 144. They were told not to stray outside the area’s 0.6 square miles and freed from all other law enforcement obligations.
The officers took the initiative and stopped anyone they thought suspicious, got out of their cars as much as possible, and went out of their way to look for weapons. Patrol worked if the officers were busy. The stats from the final report on the experiment were eye-opening. Over the 7 months, each patrol car issued an average of 5 traffic citations per shift. They averaged 2 arrests per night. In just 200 days, the 4 officers had done more ‘policing’ than most officers of that era did in their entire careers: 1,090 traffic citations, 948 vehicle stops, 616 arrests, 532 pedestrian checks, and 29 guns seized. That’s one police intervention every 40 minutes. On a given night in the tiny 0.6 square miles of 144, each squad car drove about 27 miles, in constant motion.”
“Police departments around the country followed suit. To give one example, the NC State Highway Patrol went from 400k to 800k traffic stops a year in the space of 7 years.
The DEA used ‘Operation Pipeline’ to teach tens of thousands of local police officers across the US how to use Kansas City-style traffic stops to catch drug couriers. Immigration officials started using police stops to catch undocumented immigrants. Today, police officers in the US make something like 20 million traffic stops a year. That’s 55,000 a day. All over the US, law enforcement has tried to replicate the miracle in District 144. The key word in that sentence is tried. Because in the transition from Kansas City to the rest of the country, something crucial in Sherman’s experiment was lost.”
“What was the principal implication of coupling? That law enforcement didn’t need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused. If criminals operated overwhelmingly in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime-fighting strategies used by police in those areas ought to very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city with virtually no crime at all.
‘If crime is concentrated on a few percent of the city streets,’ Weisburd asked, ‘why the hell are you wasting resources everywhere? If it’s so coupled to those places and doesn’t move easily, even more so.’ The coupling theorists believed they’d solved the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventing patrol. How do you effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring more, or by turning the entire city into a surveillance state. You do it by zeroing in on those few specific places where all the crime is.”
“The lesson the law enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventative patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated.”
“After taking her license, Brian Encinia returned to Sandra Bland’s car.
Encinia: OK, ma’am. You OK?
Bland: I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on you. When’re you going to let me go?
Encinia: I don’t know, you seem very, really irritated.
Bland: I am. I really am. I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over and you stop me. So yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket.
In the any postmortems of the Bland case, this is generally identified as Encinia’s first mistake. Her angry is steadily building. He could’ve tried to diffuse it. Later, during the investigation, it emerged that Encinia never intended to give her a ticket — only a warning. He could’ve told her that. He didn’t. He could’ve explained, carefully, why she should’ve signaled. He could’ve smiled, joked with her. She has something to say and wants to be heard. He could’ve acknowledged that he was listening. Instead, he waits a long, uncomfortable beat.
Encinia: Are you done?
That’s the first missed opportunity. Then comes the second.
Bland: You asked me if something was wrong, now I told you.
Encinia: OK
Bland: So now I’m done, yeah.
She’s done. Bland has said her piece. She’s expressed her irritation. Then she takes out a cigarette and lights it. She’s trying to calm her nerves.
Encinia: You mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don’t midn?
He’s flat, calm, assertive. Mistake Number 2: he should’ve paused, let Bland collect herself.
Bland: I’m in my car. Why do I have to put out my cigarette?
She’s right, of course. A police officer has no authority to tell someone not to smoke. He should’ve said, “Yes. You’re right. But do you mind waiting until after we’ve finished here? I’m not a fan of cigarette smoke.’ Or he could’ve dropped the issue entirely. It’s only a cigarette. But he doesn’t. Something about the tone of her voice gets Encinia’s back up. His authority has been challenged. He snaps. Mistake Number 3.
Encinia: Well, you can step on out now.
Bland: I don’t have to step out of my car.
Encinia: Step out of the car.
Bland: Why am I…
Encinia: Step out of the car!
Bland: No, you don’t have the right. No, you don’t have the right to do that.
Encinia: Step out of the car.
Bland: You don’t have the right. You don’t have the right to do this.
Encinia: I do have the right, now step out or I will remove you.
Bland: I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself. I am getting removed for a failure to signal?
Encinia: Step out or I’ll remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.
On internet bulletin boards frequented by police officers after the case broke, Encinia’s actions were supported by some. But just as many were dumbfounded by this final turn:
Dude, issue the f****n warning and move on. IT’S NOT WORTH IT…we’re yankin females out of vehicles cuz our ego got hurt cuz she wouldn’t tremble and put out the stupid cigarette??? Let’s pose this question — suppose she’d stepped out when he asked her to…THEN WHAT?? YOu were gonna scold her about the cigarette?? What was his plan? What was going to be the purpose of pulling her out?
But Encinia has now given her a lawful order, and she’s defied it.
Encinia: Get out of the car now or I’m going to remove you.
Bland: And I’m calling my lawyer.
Encinia: I’m going to yank you out of here. [Reaches inside the car]
Bland: OK, you’re going to yank me out of my car? OK, all right.
Encinia is now bent over, arms inside Bland’s vehicle, tugging at her.
Bland: Let’s do this.
Encinia: Yeah, we’re going to do. [Grabs for Bland]
On the tape there’s the sound of a slap, and then a cry from Bland, as if she’s been hit.
Bland: Don’t touch me!
Encinia: Get out of the car!
Bland: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest — you don’t have the right to take me out of the car.
Encinia: You’re under arrest.
Bland: I’m under arrest? For what? For what? For what?
Encinia [to dispatch]: 2547 county FM 1098 send me another unit. [To Bland]: Get out of the car! Get out of the car!
Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You’re trying to give me a ticket for failure….
Encinia: I said get out of the car!
Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You just opened my car door…
Encinia: I’m giving you a lawful order. I’m going to drag you out of here.
Bland: So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?
Encinia: Get out of the car!
Bland: And then you’re going to [crosstalk] me?
Encinia: I will light you up! Get out! Now! [Draws stun gun and points it at Bland.]
Bland: Wow. Wow. [Bland exits car]
Encinia: Get out. Now. Get out of the car!
Bland: For a failure to signal? You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?
Encinia: Get over there.
Bland: Right. Yeah, let’s take this to court, let’s do this.
Encinia: Go ahead.
The encounter goes on for several more minutes. Bland becomes increasingly heated. He handcuffs her. The second unit arrives. The yelling and struggling goes on — and on.
Encinia: Stop now! Stop it! If you would stop resisting.
Female officer: Stop resisting, ma’am.
Bland: [Cries.] For a fucking traffic ticket, you’re such a pussy. You’re such a pussy.
Female officer: No, you are. You should not be fighting.
Encinia: Get on the ground!
Bland: For a traffic signal!
Encinia: You’re yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
Bland: Don’t it make you feel real good, don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good, Officer Encinia? You’re a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground. I got epilepsy, you motherfucker.
Encinia: Good. Good.
Bland: Good? Good?
Bland was taken into custody on felony assault charges. Three days later she was found dead in her cell, hanging from a noose fashioned by a plastic bag. After a short investigation, Encinia was fired on the grounds that he had violated the Texas State Trooper General Manual:
An employee of the Department of Public Safety shall be courteous to the public and to other employees. An employee shall be tactful in the performance of duties, shall control behavior, and shall exercise the utmost patience and discretion. An employee shall not engage in argumentative discussions even in the face of extreme provocation.
Brian Encinia was a tone-deaf bully. The lesson of what happened is that when police talk to strangers, they need to be respectful and polite. Case closed. Right?
Wrong.”
“The person who searches your hand luggage the airport, for example, is also engaged in a haystack search. And from time to time, the TSA conducts audits at different airports. They slip a gun or a fake bomb into a piece of luggage. What do they find? That 95% of the time, the guns and bombs go undetected. This isn’t because airport screeners are lazy or incompetent. Rather, it’s because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to the default to rush. he airport screener sees something, and maybe it looks a little suspicious. But she looks up at the line of very ordinary-looking travelers waiting patiently and remembers that in 2 years on the job she’s never seen a real gun. She knows, in fact, that in a typical year the TSA screens 1.7 billion carry-ons, and out of that number finds only a few thousand handguns. That’s a hit rate of .0001% — which means the odds are that if she kept doing her job for another 50 years she’d never see a gun. So she sees the suspicious object inserted by the auditors and lets it go.”
“One of the key pieces of advice given to proactive patrol officers to protect them from accusations of bias or racial profiling is that they should be careful to stop everyone. If you’re going to use trivial, trumped-up reasons for pulling someone over, make sure you act that way all the time. ‘If you’re accused of profiling or perpetual stops, you can bring your daily logbook to court and document that pulling over motorists for ‘stickler’ reasons is part of your customary pattern,’ Remsberg writes, ‘not a glaring exception dusted off in the defendant’s case.’
That’s exactly what Encinia did. He had day after day like Sept 11, 2014. He got people for improper mud flaps and for not wearing a seat belt and for straddling lanes and for obscure violations of vehicle-light regulations. He popped in and out of his car like a Whac-a-Mole. In just under a year on the job, he wrote 1,500 tickets. In the 26 minutes before he stopped Sandra Bland, he’d stopped 3 other people.
So: Encinia stops Sandra Bland on the afternoon of July 10. In his deposition given during the subsequent investigation, Encinia saw he saw Bland run a stop sign as she pulled out of Prairie View University. That’s his curiosity tickler. He can’t pull her over at that point, because the stop sign is on university property. But when she turns onto State Loop 1098, he follows her. He notices she has Illinois plates. That’s the second curiosity tickler. What’s someone from there doing in E. Texas?
‘I was checking the condition of the vehicle,’ Encinia testified. He was looking for an excuse to pull her over. ‘Have you accelerated up on vehicles at that speed in the past, to check their condition?’ Encinia is asked. ‘I have, yes, sir,’ Encinia replies. For him, it’s standard practice.
When Bland sees Encinia in her rearview mirror coming up fast behind her, she moves out of the way to let him pass. But she doesn’t use her turn signal. Bingo! Now Encinia has his justification.
Encinia gets out of his squad car and slowly approaches Bland’s car, leaning in slightly to see if there’s anything of interest in the car. Tools on the back seat? Single key on the key ring? Bland had just driven from Chicago; of course she had food wrappers on the floor. Brian Encinia is the new breed of police officer. And we’ve decided that we’d rather our leaders and guardians pursue their doubts than dismiss them. Encinia leans in the window, tells her why he pulled her over, and — immediately — his suspicions are raised.
Ranfro: OK. After you asked Bland for her license, you then asked her where she was headed and she replied, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ You wrote in your report, ‘I knew at this point based on her demeanor that something was wrong.’
Renfro: Explain what you thought was wrong.
Encinia: It was an aggressive body language and demeanor. It appeared that she wasn’t okay.
Encinia believed in transparency — that people’s demeanor is a reliable guide to their emotions and characters. This is something we we teach police officers — training instructs police officers when dealing with people they don’t know to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.
So that’s exactly what Encinia does. He notices that she’s stomping her feet, moving them back and forth. So he starts to stretch out their interaction. He asks her how long she’s been in Texas. She says, ‘Got here just yesterday.’ His sense of unease mounts. What’s she doing in Texas?
Renfro: Did you have safety concerns at that point?
Encinia: I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know what was wrong. I didn’t know if a crime was being committed, had been committed, or what not.
He returns to his squad car to check her license and registration, and when looks up and observes Bland through her car, he says he sees her ‘making numerous furtive movements including disappearing from view for an amount of time.’ This is a crucial point, and it explains what is an otherwise puzzling fact from the video. Why does Encinia approach Bland’s car from the driver side the second time around? It’s because he’s getting worried. As he wrote, ‘Officer safety training has taught me that it was much easier for a violator to attempt to shoot me on the passenger side of the vehicle.
Renfro: So explain why you’d go from ‘This is a routine traffic stop with an aggravated person that in your opinion isn’t being cooperative or she’s agitated,’ to your thought process that there’s a possibility that you need to make a driver’s-side approach due to that training.
Encinia: Because when I was still inside the patrol car, I had seen numerous movements to the right, to the console, her right side of her body, that area as well as disappearing from sight.
His immediate thought was Is she reaching for a weapon? So now he approaches with caution.
Encinia: She has untinted glass on her windows so I can be able to see if anything could possibily be in her hands, if she had to turn over her shoulder or not. So that’s why I chose that route.
To Encinia’s mind, Bland’s demeanor fits the profile of a potentially dangerous criminal. She’s agitated, jumpy, irritable, confrontational, volatile. He thinks she’s hiding something.
This is dangerously flawed thinking at the best of times. Human beings aren’t transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched.
What is Sandra Bland? She’s mismatched. She looks to Encinia’s eye like a criminal. But she’s not. She’s just upset. In the aftermath of her death, it was revealed that she had had ten previous encounters with police over the course of her adult life, including 5 traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8k in outstanding fines. She had tried to commit suicide the year before, after the loss of a baby. She had numerous cut marks running up and down one of her arms. In one of her ‘Sandy Speaks’ video posts, just a few months before she left for Texas, Bland alluded to her troubles:
I apologize. I’m sorry, my Kings and Queens. It’s been two log weeks. I’ve been MIA. But I gotta be honest with you guys. I’m suffering from something that some of you may be dealing with right now…It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. I’ve been really stressed out these last couple of weeks.
So here we have a troubled person with a history of medical and psychiatric losses, trying to pull her life together. She’s moved to a new town. She’s starting a new job. And just as she arrives to begin this new chapter, she’s pulled over by a police officer — repeating a scenario that has left her deeply in debt. And for what? For failing to signal a lane change when a police car is driving up rapidly behind her. All of a sudden her fragile new beginning is cast into doubt. In the 3 days she spent in jail before taking her own life, Bland was distraught, weeping constantly, making call after call. She was in crisis.
But Encinia, with all of the false confidence that believing in transparency gives us, reads her emotionality and volatility as evidence of something sinister.
Renfro asks about the crucial moment — when Encinia requests that Bland put our her cigarette. Why didn’t he just say, ‘Hey, your cigarette ashes are getting on me?’
Encinia: I wanted to make sure she had it out without throwing it at me or just get it out of her hand.
Renfro then asks why. If that were the case, he didn’t immediately tell her why she was under arrest.
Encinia: Cuz I was trying to defend myself and get her controlled.
He’s terrified of her. And being terrified of a perfectly innocent stranger holding a cigarette is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth.
Renfro: When she tells you, ‘Let’s do this,’ you respond, ‘We’re going to.’ What did you mean?
Encinia: I could tell from her actions of leaning over and just she made her hand to me, even being a non-police officer if I see somebody balling fists, that’s going to be confrontational or potential harm to either myself or to another party.
Renfro: Is there a reason why you just didn’t take her down?
Encinia: She’d already swung at me once. There was nothing stopping her from potentially swinging again, potentially disabling me.
Renfro: Were you scared?
Encinia: My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time.
Renfro: After this occurred, how long was your heart rate up, your adrenaline pumping? When did you calm down after this?
Encinia: Probably on my drive home, several hours later.
It was common to paint Encinia as an officer without empathy. But that characterization misses the point. He’s not indifferent to Bland’s feelings. He says to her near the beginning: ‘What’s wrong?’ and ‘Are you okay?’ He picks up on her emotional discomfort immediately. It’s just that he completely misinterprets what her feelings mean. He becomes convinced that he’s sliding into a dangerous confrontation with a dangerous woman.
And what does police training tell the officer to do under these conditions? ‘Too many copys today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do. People are allowed to move as they want, and then officers try to adapt to what the suspect does.’ Encinia isn’t going to let that happen.
Encinia: Well, you can step on out now…Step out or I’ll remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.
Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. When the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day, it wasn’t because Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.”
“Think back to the dramatic increase in traffic stops by the NC Highway Patrol. In 7 years they went from 400k to 800k because the police changed tactics. They instructed their officers to disregard their natural inclination to default to truth — and start imagining the worst: that young women coming from job interviews might be armed and dangerous, or young men cooling off after a pickup game might be pedophiles.
How many extra guns and drugs did the NC Highway Patrol find with those 400k searches? 17. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 400k Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?
When Sherman designed the Kansas City experiment, he was well aware of this problem. ‘You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,’ he says, ‘You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility toward the police.’ To Sherman, ‘First, do no harm’ applies equally to law enforcement. ‘We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough invasion on liberty and not an inch — not an iota — more.’
That’s why the officers involved in the Kansas City experiment underwent special training. ‘We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police,’ Sherman said. Even more crucially, that’s why the Kansas City gun experiment was confined to District 144. Sherman would never have aggressively looked for guns in a neighborhood that wasn’t a war zone.
In District 144, the ‘Mike and Sandra’ problem didn’t go away. But the point of confining the Kansas City gun experiment to the worst parts of the worst neighborhoods was to make the haystack just a little smaller, and to make the inevitable trade-off between fighting crime and harassing innocent people just a little more manageable. In an ordinary community, for the police to be as aggressive as Sherman wanted them to be would be asking for trouble. On the other hand, to people suffering in the 3–4% of streets where crime is endemic — where there might be as many as 100 or 200 police calls in a year — coupling theory suggested that the calculus would be different.
‘What happens in hot-spot policing? You tell the police, ‘Go on the 10 streets out of the 100 in that neighborhood, and spend your time there.’ That’s where things are happening,’ Weisburd says. ‘And if you do that, there’s a good chance the neighborhood will say, ‘Yeah, that intrusion is worthwhile because I don’t want to get shot tomorrow.’
The first question for Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second is just as important: Was he in the right place?
Waller County — where Prairie View is located — is predominantly Republican, white, middle- and working-class.
Renfro: Talk to me about that area. Is it a high-crime area?
Encinia: That portion of FM 1098 is a high-crime, high-drug area. It’s — with my experience in that area, I have, in similar situations, with what I’ve seen, I’ve come across drugs, weapons, and noncompliant individuals.
Encinia then goes on to tell Renfro that he’s made multiple arrests for ‘warrants, drugs, and numerous weaopns, almost [all] within that vicinity.’
Encinia’s official record, however, shows nothing of the sort. Between October 2014 and the Sandra Bland incident in July 2015, he stopped 27 motorists on that mile-long stretch of highway. 6 were speeding tickets. Those were compulsory stops: we can assume that any officer, even in the pre-Kansas City era, would’ve done the same. But most of the rest are just Encinia on fishing expeditions. In March 2015 he cited a black male for ‘failure to drive in a single lane.’ 5 times he pulled someone over for violating the section of federal vehicle-safety regulations governing turn signals, license-plate lighting, and brake lights. The worst thing on the list are 2 cases of drunk driving but let’s keep in mind that this is a road that borders a college campus.
That’s it. FM 1098 is not ‘a high-crime, high-drug area.’ You’d have to go 3 miles away to Laurie Lane — a half-mile stretch of trailer homes — to find anything in the vicinity that even remotely resembles a hot spot.
‘Why are you stopping people in places where there’s no crime?’ Weisburd says. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
Sherman is just as horrified. ‘At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,’ he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment — in a neighborhood 100x worse than Prairie View — Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing. Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.
Encinia may have deliberately exaggerated the dangers of that stretch of road. It seems just as likely though that it simply never occurred to him think about crime as something so tightly tied to place.
So it was that Encinia ended up in a place he should never have been, stopping someone who should never have been stopped, drawing conclusions that should never have been drawn. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society doesn’t know how to talk to strangers.”
Conclusion
“This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern world. We aren’t living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they don’t know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers: that’s part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice into the familiar and the known, and we can’t. What should we do?
We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you’re a parent whose child was abused by a stranger — even if you were in the room — that doesn’t make you a bad parent. And if you’re a university president and you don’t jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about some of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative — to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception — is worse.
We should also accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. In the KSM interrogation, there were 2 sides. James Mitchell and his colleague Bruce Jensen were driven by the desire to make KSM talk. On the other side, Charles Morgan worried about the cost of forcing people to talk: what if in the act of coercing a prisoner to open up, you damaged his memories and made what he had to say less reliable? Morgan’s more-modest expectations are a good model for the rest of us. There is no perfect mechanism for the CIA to uncover spies in its midst, or for investors to stop schemers and frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we don’t know. What’s required of us is restraint and humility. We can put up barriers on bridges to make it more difficult for that momentary impulse to become permanent. We can instruct young people that the kind of reckless drinking that takes place at a frat party makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.
Each time I watch the Sandra Bland video, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was ‘resolved.’ It was turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young black woman. That’s not what it was. What went wrong that day was a collective failure. Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart. Somebody else in the chain of command at the TX Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood. Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of TX could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast food wrappers. And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us share — and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider.”
Encina: At no point was I ever trying to be discourteous or trying to downplay any of her response. I was just simply asking her if she was done, to make sure she had what she needed out, and that way I could move on with completing the traffic stop and/or identifying what possibly may or may not be in the area.
Renfro: Is it fair to say that she could’ve possibly taken that as being sarcastic?
Encinia: It’s possible, yes, sir. Those were not my intentions.
Oh, so it was her mistake. Apparently, Bland misinterpreted his intonation. If you’re blind to the ideas that underlie our mistakes with strangers — and to the institutions and practices that we construct around those ideas — then all you’re left with is the personal: the credulous Mountain Climber, the sinister Amanda Knox, the doomed Sylvia Plath. And now Sandra Bland somehow becomes the villain of the story.
Renfro: Did you ever reflect back on your training at that point and think about that you may have stopped a subject that just didn’t like police officers? Did that ever occur to you?
Encinia: Yes sir…That is a possibility, that she didn't like police officers.
Because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”
