Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  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 from a plastic bag. After a short investigation, Encinia was fired on the grounds that he had violated Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00, of 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 on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, is that when police talk to strangers, they need to be respectful and polite. Case closed. Right?

  Wrong.

  At this point, I think we can do better.

  2.

  A Kansas City traffic stop is a search for a needle in a haystack. A police officer uses a common infraction to search for something rare—guns and drugs. From the very beginning, as the ideas perfected in Kansas City began to spread around the world, it was clear that this kind of policing required a new mentality.

  The person who searches your hand luggage at the airport, for example, is also engaged in a haystack search. And from time to time, the Transportation Security Administration (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 percent of the time, the guns and bombs go undetected. This is not because airport screeners are lazy or incompetent. Rather, it is because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to default to truth. The 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 she remembers that in two 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-on bags, and out of that number finds only a few thousand handguns. That’s a hit rate of .0001 percent—which means the odds are that if she kept doing her job for another 50 years she would never see a gun. So she sees the suspicious object inserted by the TSA’s auditors, and she lets it go.

  For Kansas City traffic stops to work, the police officer could not think that way. He had to suspect the worst of every car he approached. He had to stop defaulting to truth. He had to think like Harry Markopolos.

  The bible for post–Kansas City policing is called Tactics for Criminal Patrol, by Charles Remsberg. It came out in 1995, and it laid out in precise detail what was required of the new, non-defaulting patrol officer. According to Remsberg, the officer had to take the initiative and “go beyond the ticket.” That meant, first of all, picking up on what Remsberg called “curiosity ticklers”—anomalies that raise the possibility of potential wrongdoing. A motorist in a bad neighborhood stops at a red light and looks down intently at something on the seat next to him. What’s that about? An officer spots a little piece of wrapping paper sticking out between two panels of an otherwise spotless car. Might that be the loose end of a hidden package? In the infamous North Carolina case, where the police officer pulled over a driver for a broken brake light—thinking, incorrectly, that this was against North Carolina law—the thing that raised his suspicions was that the driver was “stiff and nervous.” The most savvy of criminals will be careful not to commit any obvious infractions. So traffic cops needed to be creative about what to look for: cracked windshields, lane changes without signaling, following too closely.

  “One officer,” Remsberg writes, “knowing that some of the most popular dope markets in his city are in dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs, just parks there and watches. Often drivers will get close before seeing his squad [car], then stop suddenly (improper stopping in a roadway) or hastily back up (improper backing in a roadway). ‘There’s two offenses,’ he says, ‘before I even pursue the car.’”

  When he approached the stopped car, the new breed of officer had to be alert to the tiniest clues. Drug couriers often use air fresheners—particularly the kind shaped like little fir trees—to cover up the smell of drugs. (Tree air fresheners are known as the “felony forest.”) If there are remains of fast food in the car, that suggests the driver is in a hurry and reluctant to leave his vehicle (and its valuable cargo) unattended. If the drugs or guns are hidden in secret compartments, there might be tools on the back seat. What’s the mileage on the car? Unusually high for a car of that model year? New tires on an old car? A bunch of keys in the ignition, which would be normal—or just one, as if the car was prepared just for the driver? Is there too much luggage for what seems like a short journey? Or too little luggage for what the motorist says is a long journey? The officer in an investigatory stop is instructed to drag things out as long as possible. Where you from? Where are you headed? Chicago? Got family there? Where? He’s looking for stumbles, nervousness, an implausible answer, and whether the driver’s answer matches what he’s seeing. The officer is trying to decide whether to take the next step and search the car.

  Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people with food in their car, air fresheners, high mileage, new tires on an old car, and either too little or too much luggage are not running guns and drugs. But if the police officer is to find that criminal needle in a haystack, he has to fight the rational calculation that most of us make that the world is a pretty honest place.

  So what is Brian Encinia? He’s the police officer who does not default to truth. Here’s a day from Brian Encinia’s career, chosen at random: September 11, 2014.

  3:52 p.m. The beginning of his shift. He stops a truck driver and tickets him for not having the appropriate reflective tape on his trailer.

  4:20 p.m. He stops a woman for an improperly placed license plate.

  4:39 p.m. He stops another woman for a license-plate infraction.

  4:54 p.m. He notices a driver with an expired registration, stops him, and then also cites him for an expired license.

  5:12 p.m. He stops a woman for a minor speeding infraction (that is, less than 10 percent over the speed limit).

  5:58 p.m. He stops someone for a major speeding infraction.

  6:14 p.m. He stops a man for an expired registration, then gives him three more tickets for a license infraction and having an open container of alcohol in his vehicle.

  8:29 p.m. He stops a man for “no/improper ID lamp” and “no/improper clearance lamp.”

  It goes on. Ten minutes later, he stops a woman for noncompliant headlamps, then two more minor speeding tickets over the next half hour. At 10 p.m. a stop for “safety chains,” and then, at the end of his shift, a stop for noncompliant headlamps.

  In that list, there is only one glaring infraction—the 5:58 stop for speeding more than 10 percent over the limit. Any police officer would respond to that. But many of the other things Encinia did that day fall under the category of modern, proactive policing. You pull over a truck driver for improper reflective tape, or someone else for “no/improper clearance lamp,” when you are looking for something else—when you are consciously looking, as Remsberg put it, to “go beyond the ticket.”

  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 pretextual 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 exceptio
n conveniently dusted off in the defendant’s case.”

  That’s exactly what Encinia did. He had day after day like September 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 1,557 tickets. In the twenty-six minutes before he stopped Sandra Bland, he stopped three other people.

  So: Encinia spots Sandra Bland on the afternoon of July 10. In his deposition given during the subsequent investigation by the Inspector General’s office of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Encinia said 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 license plates. That’s the second curiosity tickler. What’s someone from the other end of the country doing in East Texas?

  “I was checking the condition of the vehicle, such as the make, the model, if it had a license plate, any other conditions,” 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 by his interrogator, Cleve Renfro. “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: Title 7, subtitle C, Section 545.104, part (a) of the Texas Transportation Code, which holds that “An operator shall use the signal authorized by Section 545.106 to indicate an intention to turn, change lanes, or start from a parked position.” (In the event that Bland had used her turn signal at the very last moment, just before she changed lanes, Encinia even had a backup option: part (b) of Section 545.104 holds that “An operator intending to turn a vehicle right or left shall signal continuously for not less than the last 100 feet of movement of the vehicle before the turn.” He could have stopped her for not signaling and he could have stopped her for not signaling enough.)1

  Encinia gets out of his squad car and slowly approaches Bland’s Hyundai from the passenger side, leaning in slightly to see if there’s anything of interest in the car. He’s doing the visual pat-down: Anything amiss? Fast-food wrappers on the floor? A felony forest hanging from the rearview mirror? Tools on the back seat? Single key on the key ring? Bland had just driven to Texas from Chicago; of course she had food wrappers on the floor. In the normal course of events, most of us looking in that window would cast our doubts aside. But Brian Encinia is the new breed of police officer. And we have decided that we would 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.

  3.

  Renfro: OK. After you asked Bland for her driver’s 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.”

  In his deposition, Encinia is now being questioned by state investigator Cleve Renfro.

  Renfro: Explain for the recording what you thought was wrong.

  Encinia: …It was an aggressive body language and demeanor. It appeared that she was not okay.

  Brian Encinia believed in transparency—that people’s demeanor is a reliable guide to their emotions and character. This is something we teach one another. More precisely, it is something we teach police officers. The world’s most influential training program for law enforcement, for example, is called the Reid Technique. It is used in something like two-thirds of U.S. state police departments—not to mention the FBI and countless other law-enforcement agencies around the world—and the Reid system is based directly on the idea of transparency: it instructs police officers, when dealing with people they do not know, to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.

  For example, here is what the Reid training manual says about eye contact:

  In Western culture, mutual gaze (maintained eye contact) represents openness, candor, and trust. Deceptive suspects generally do not look directly at the investigator; they look down at the floor, over to the side, or up at the ceiling as if to beseech some divine guidance when answering questions.…

  Truthful suspects, on the other hand, are not defensive in their looks or actions and can easily maintain eye contact with the investigator.

  The post–Kansas City textbook, Tactics for Criminal Patrol, instructs officers in police stops to conduct a “concealed interrogation,” based on what they can gather from their initial observation of the suspect.

  As you silently analyze their stories, their verbal mannerisms, and their body language for deception cues, you’ll be trying to convince them that suspicion is far from your mind.…The longer you can delay their tumbling to the fact that you are actually appraising them, their vehicle, and their reason for being in transit, the more likely they are to unwittingly provide you with incriminating evidence.

  So that is 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 has been in Texas. She says, “Got here just yesterday.” His sense of unease mounts. She has Illinois plates. What is 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 whatnot.

  He returns to his squad car to check her license and registration, and when he looks up and observes Bland through the rear window of 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 otherwise a puzzling fact from the video. Why does Encinia approach Bland’s car from the passenger side the first time around, but from the driver side the second time? It’s because he’s getting worried. As he wrote in his report, “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 for the recording why you would go from “This is a routine traffic stop with an aggravated person that in your opinion is not 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 the training on officers being shot.

  Encinia: OK. 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 possibly 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 are not transparent. But when is this kind of thinking most dangerous? When the people we observe are mismatched: when they do not behave the way we expect them to behave. Amanda Knox was mismatched. At the crime scene, as she put on her protective booties, she swiveled her hips and said, “Ta-dah.” Bernie Madoff was mismatched. He was a sociopath dressed up as a mensch.

  What is Sandra Bland? She is also 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 adu
lt life, including five traffic stops, which had left her with almost $8,000 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 weekly “Sandy Speaks” video posts, just a few months before she left for Texas, Bland alluded to her troubles:

  I apologize. I am sorry, my Kings and Queens. It has been two long weeks. I have been missing in action. But I gotta be honest with you guys. I am suffering from something that some of you all 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 issues, 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 in her life, 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 three days she spent in jail before taking her own life, Sandra Bland was distraught, weeping constantly, making phone call after phone 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 out her cigarette. Why didn’t he just say, “Hey, your cigarette ashes are getting on me”?

  Encinia: I wanted to make sure that 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.