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 0.64 square miles. They were freed from all other law-enforcement obligations. They didn’t have to answer radio calls or rush to accident scenes. Their instructions were clear: watch out for what you think are suspicious-looking drivers. Use whatever pretext you can find in the traffic code to pull them over. If you’re still suspicious, search the car and confiscate any weapon you find. The officers worked every night from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week, for 200 consecutive days. And what happened? Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever. But inside 144? All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half.
Remember, the police had all but given up by that point. Hotline? Nobody calls it. Concealed-weapons detection? A crew from 20/20 comes down and twice goes home empty-handed. Lee Brown, up in New York City, was mourning the powerlessness of the police to do anything serious about violent crime. Everyone remembered the previous Kansas City experiment, which had plunged the law-enforcement community into twenty years of despair. But now the same city had come back, and this time they were declaring victory. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us to really focus on guns,” the Kansas City police chief said after the results came in. He was as stunned as everyone else at what just two extra patrol cars had accomplished. “We usually focus on getting the bad guys after a crime. Maybe going after guns was too simplistic for us.”
The first Kansas City experiment said that preventive patrol was useless, that having more police cars driving around made no difference. The second Kansas City experiment amended that position. Actually, extra patrol cars did make a difference—so long as 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 statistics from the final report on the experiment were eye-opening. Over the seven months, each patrol car issued an average of 5.45 traffic citations per shift. They averaged 2.23 arrests per night. In just 200 days, the four 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 forty minutes. On a given night in the tiny 0.64 square miles of 144, each squad car drove about twenty-seven miles. The officers weren’t parked on a street corner, eating doughnuts. They were in constant motion.
Police officers are no different from the rest of us. They want to feel that their efforts are important, that what they do matters, that their hard work will be rewarded. What happened in District 144 provided exactly what the profession of law enforcement had been searching for: validation.
“Officers who recovered a firearm received favorable notoriety from their peers, almost to the point that recovery of a firearm came to be a measure of success,” Shaw wrote in his account of the program. “Officers could frequently be heard making statements such as ‘I’ve just got to get a gun tonight,’ or ‘I haven’t gotten a gun yet; tonight will be the night!’”
In 1991 the New York Times ran a front-page story on the miracle in Kansas City. Larry Sherman says that over the next few days his phone rang off the hook: 300 police departments around the country bombarded him with requests for information on how he had done it. One by one, police departments around the country followed suit. To give one example, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol went from 400,000 to 800,000 traffic stops a year in the space of seven years.
The Drug Enforcement Agency used “Operation Pipeline” to teach tens of thousands of local police officers across the United States 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 United States make something like twenty million traffic stops a year. That’s 55,000 a day. All over the United States, 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 Lawrence Sherman’s experiment was lost.
4.
The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers, where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.
And 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 be 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 coupled to those places and doesn’t move easily, even more so.” The coupling theorists believed they had solved the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventive patrol. How do you effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring more police officers, 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.
But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive 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. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.
Weisburd and Sherman say they have trotted out their maps and numbers, trying to convince their peers of the Law of Crime Concentration, to little effect. Back in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn where he began his work, after a long day roaming the neighborhood, Weisburd would turn to the police officers he had been walking with and say, “Isn’t it strange how we’re returning again and again to the same blocks?” They would look at him blankly.
“I was in a meeting with the deputy commissioner [of police] in Israel,” Weisburd recalls.
Someone at the meeting said, “Well, David finds that crime doesn’t just move around the corner. And that would suggest that you ought to become more focused.” This guy turned around and he said, “My experience tells me that that’s just not true. I don’t believe that.” That was the end of that.3
Is something wrong with Israel’s deputy commissioner of police? Not at all. Because his reaction is no different from the behavior of the highway patrol in North Carolina, or the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, or the literary scholars who speak confidently of Sylvia Plath’s doomed genius. There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.
So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency?
You get Sandra B
land.
1 Wilson first experimented with preventive patrol when he was the chief of police in Wichita, Kansas. He would later hold the same post in Chicago.
2 To deal with that hurdle, for example, Gallagher developed all kinds of tricks. He and his partner would approach someone they thought was carrying a gun. They’d corner him, so he was feeling a little defensive. Then Gallagher would identify himself: I’m a police officer.
“When you stop a man with a gun, 99 out of 100 times he’s going to do the same thing,” Gallagher told a reporter years ago. “He’s going to turn the side that the gun’s on away from you—either several inches, just a quick turn of the hip, or halfway around. And the hand and arm are going to come naturally in the direction of the gun,” in an instinctive protective motion. “At that point you don’t have to wait to see if he goes under the shirt for the gun or if he’s just going to keep it covered,” he said. “At that point you have all the right in the world to do a frisk.”
3 One of Weisburd’s former students, Barak Ariel, went so far as to test resistance to the coupling idea in the Derry region of Northern Ireland. Law-enforcement officers in Derry are asked to identify specific troubled areas of their beats that they think are going to require additional police presence. Their predictions are called “waymarkers.” Ariel wondered: how closely do the police officers’ waymarkers match up with the hot spots where crime actually happens in Derry? I think you can guess. “The majority of streets included in ‘Waymarkers’ were neither ‘hot’ nor ‘harmful,’ resulting in a false positive rate of over 97 percent,” Ariel concluded. This means that 97 percent of the blocks identified by police officers as being dangerous and violent were not dangerous and violent at all. The officers who drew these waymarkers were not sitting behind a desk, remote from the direct experience of the streets. This was their turf. These were crimes they investigated and criminals they arrested. Yet somehow they could not see a fundamental pattern in the location of the strangers they were arresting.
Chapter Twelve
Sandra Bland
1.
At 4:27 on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was pulled over by a Texas State Trooper on FM 1098 in Waller County, Texas. She was driving a silver Hyundai Azera with Illinois license plates. She was twenty-eight years old and had just come from her hometown of Chicago to start a new job at Prairie View University. The name of the officer was Brian Encinia. He parked behind her, then approached Bland’s Hyundai slowly along the curbside, leaning in to speak to her through the open passenger window.
Brian Encinia: Hello, ma’am. We’re the Texas Highway Patrol, and the reason for your stop is because you failed to signal the lane change. Do you have your driver’s license and registration with you? What’s wrong? How long have you been in Texas?
Sandra Bland: Got here just yesterday.
Encinia: OK. Do you have a driver’s license? [Pause.] OK, where you headed to now? Give me a few minutes.
Encinia takes her license with him to his patrol car. A few minutes pass. Then he returns, this time approaching Bland’s car from the driver side.
Brian Encinia: OK, ma’am. [Pause.] 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, so [inaudible] ticket.
In the many postmortems of the Bland case, this is generally identified as Encinia’s first mistake. Her anger is steadily building. He could have tried to diffuse it. Later, during the investigation, it emerged that Encinia never intended to give her a ticket—only a warning. He could have told her that. He didn’t. He could have explained, carefully, why she should have signaled. He could have smiled, joked with her. Oh, ma’am. You don’t think I’m going to give you a ticket for that, do you? She has something to say and wants to be heard. He could have 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 what 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. In the video we can’t see any of this, because the camera is on the dashboard of Encinia’s squad car; we see just the back of her car and Encinia, standing by her door. If you stopped the tape there and showed it to 100 people, 99 would guess that’s where it ends.
But it doesn’t.
Encinia: You mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don’t mind?
He’s flat, calm, assertive. Would you mind, said with an edge.
Mistake Number Two: he should have 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 have 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 have 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 Three.
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 do not have the right. You do not 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. [crosstalk] I am getting removed for a failure to signal?
Encinia: Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.
On the 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 cause our ego got hurt cause she wouldn’t tremble and put out the stupid cigarette????? Let’s pose this question—suppose she had 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 has 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. [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 are under arrest!
Bland: I’m under arrest? For what? For what? For what?
Encinia [To dispatch]: 2547 county FM 1098 [inaudible] send me another unit. [To Bland]: Get out of the car! Get out of the car now!
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 are such a pussy. You are 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 are yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
Talking to Strangers Page 24
