Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Encinia: ’Cause 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. It’s why Harry Markopolos holed up in his house, armed to the teeth, waiting for the SEC to come bursting in.

  Renfro: I didn’t ask you this earlier but I will now. When she tells you, “Let’s do this,” you respond, “We’re going to.” What did you mean by that?

  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: Yes, sir.

  Renfro: Why?

  Encinia: She had already swung at me once. There was nothing stopping her from potentially swinging again, potentially disabling me.

  Another of the investigators chimes in.

  Louis Sanchez: Were you scared?

  Encinia: My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time.

  And then:

  Sanchez: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so 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, which was several hours later.

  It was common, in the Bland postmortem, to paint Encinia as an officer without empathy. But that characterization misses the point. Someone without empathy is indifferent to another’s feelings. Encinia is not indifferent to Bland’s feelings. When he approaches her car, one of the first things he says to her is, “What’s wrong?” When he returns to her car after checking her license, he asks again: “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 is sliding into a frightening confrontation with a dangerous woman.

  And what does Tactics for Criminal Patrol instruct the police officer to do under these conditions? “Too many cops today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do. People are allowed to move as they want, to stand where 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 will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.

  Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. He knew all about the visual pat-down and the concealed interrogation. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.

  4.

  On August 9, 2014, one year before Sandra Bland died in her cell in Prairie View, Texas, an eighteen-year-old African American man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown had been a suspect in a robbery at a nearby grocery store. When Darren Wilson—the police officer—confronted him, the two men struggled. Brown reached inside the driver’s window of Wilson’s patrol car and punched him. Wilson ended up shooting him six times. Seventeen days of riots followed. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Officer Wilson.

  Ferguson was the case that began the strange interlude in American life when the conduct of police officers was suddenly front and center. And it should have served as a warning. The U.S. Department of Justice almost immediately sent a team of investigators to Ferguson—and their report, published six months later, is an extraordinary document. One of the leaders of the DOJ team was a lawyer named Chiraag Bains, and Bains says that what struck him, almost immediately, was that the anger in Ferguson wasn’t just about Brown’s death—or even largely about Brown. It was, instead, about a particular style of policing that had been practiced in the city for years. The Ferguson Police Department was the gold standard of Kansas City policing. It was a place where the entire philosophy of law enforcement was to stop as many people as possible for as many reasons as possible.

  “It was very disturbing,” Bains remembers.

  One officer said, “It’s all about the courts.” Another said, “Yeah, every month they’ll put up, our supervisors will put on the wall lists of officers and how many tickets they issued that month.” We understood that productivity was the goal.

  Ferguson had an entire police department full of Brian Encinias. Bains went on:

  They knew that their job was to issue tickets and arrest people who hadn’t paid their fines and fees and that’s what they were going to be evaluated on.

  Bains said one incident shocked him the most. It involved a young black man who had been playing basketball at a playground. Afterward, he was sitting in his car cooling off when a police car pulled up behind him. The officer approached the driver’s window and demanded to see identification, accusing the driver of being a child molester.

  I think [the police officer] said something to the effect like, “There are kids here and you’re at the park, what are you, a pedophile?”…The officer then orders him out of the car and the guy says, “Well, I’m not doing anything. I mean, I have constitutional rights. I’m just sitting here just playing ball.”

  The officer then actually pulls his gun on the guy and threatening him and insisting that he get out of the car. The way the incident ends is that the officer writes him up for eight different tickets including not having a seatbelt on, he was sitting in his car at the park, not having a license, and also having a suspended license. He managed to issue both charges.

  The man even got a ticket for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as “Mike” when it was actually Michael.

  He ends up carrying a lot of charges for quite a while. What happens to him is he gets charged with eight offenses in the Ferguson Municipal Code and tries to fight his case. He ends up, he was arrested on that occasion. He ends up losing his job where he was a contractor for the federal government. That arrest really derailed him.

  Mike’s arrest is a carbon copy of Sandra Bland’s, isn’t it? A police officer approaches a civilian on the flimsiest of pretexts, looking for a needle in a haystack—with the result that so many innocent people are caught up in the wave of suspicion that trust between police and community is obliterated. That’s what was being protested in the streets of Ferguson: years and years of police officers mistaking a basketball player for a pedophile.2

  Is this just about Ferguson, Missouri or Prairie View, Texas? Of course not. Think back to the dramatic increase in traffic stops by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. In seven years they went from 400,000 to 800,000. Now, is that because in that time period the motorists of North Carolina suddenly started running more red lights, drinking more heavily, and breaking the speed limit more often? Of course not. It’s because the state police changed tactics. They started doing far more haystack searches. They instructed their police 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 North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?

  When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun 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,” Sherman 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 to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“
First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “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 intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.”

  That’s why the police officers involved in Sherman’s Kansas City experiment underwent special training. “We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police, and I stressed that repeatedly,” Sherman said.3 Even more crucially, this is why the Kansas City gun experiment was confined to District 144. That’s where the crime was. “We went through the effort of trying to reconstruct where the hot spots were,” Sherman said. In the city’s worst neighborhood, he then drilled down one step further, applying the same fine-grained analysis that he and Weisburd had used in Minneapolis to locate the specific street segments where crime was most concentrated. Patrol officers were then told to focus their energies on those places. 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 or 4 percent of streets where crime is endemic—where there might be as many as 100 or even 200 police calls in a year—coupling theory suggested that the calculus would be different.

  “What happens in hot-spots policing? You tell the police, ‘Go on the ten streets out of the one hundred in that neighborhood, or out of a thousand 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 Brian Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second question is just as important: was he in the right place?

  5.

  Prairie View, Texas, where Sandra Bland was pulled over, is sometimes described as being “outside” Houston, as if it were a suburb. It is not. Houston is fifty miles away. Prairie View is the countryside.

  The town is small: no more than a few thousand people, short streets lined with modest ranch homes. The university sits at one end of the main street, FM 1098, which then borders the west edge of the campus. If you drive around the school on the ring road, there is a small Episcopal Church on the left, the college football stadium on the right, and after that lots of pasture land, populated with the occasional horse or cow. Waller County—where Prairie View is located—is predominantly Republican, white, middle- and working-class.

  Renfro: OK, 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 has made multiple arrests for “warrants, drugs, and numerous weapons, almost [all] within that vicinity.”

  Encinia’s official record, however, shows nothing of the sort. Between October 1, 2014, and the Sandra Bland incident on July 10 of the following year, he stopped twenty-seven motorists on that mile-long stretch of highway. Six of those were speeding tickets. Those were compulsory stops: we can assume that any reasonably vigilant police officer, even in the pre–Kansas City era, would have 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.” Five times he pulled someone over for violating “FMVSS 571.108,” the section of federal vehicle-safety regulations governing turn signals, license-plate lighting, and brake lights. The worst thing on the list are two 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 three 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 sense to me.”

  Sherman is just as horrified. “At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Sandra Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,” he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment—in a neighborhood a hundred times 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. Sandra Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.

  Brian Encinia may have deliberately exaggerated the dangers of that stretch of road to justify his treatment of Sandra Bland. It seems just as likely, though, that it simply never occurred to him to think about crime as something so tightly tied to place. Literary theorists and bridge engineers and police chiefs struggle with coupling. Why would patrol officers be any different?

  So it was that Brian 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 does not know how to talk to strangers.

  6.

  This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they do not 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 are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you were in the room—that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one 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 interrogation of KSM, there were two sides. James Mitchell and his colleague Bruce Jessen 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 spot schemers and frauds, or for any of the rest of us to peer, clairvoyantly, inside the minds of those we do not know. What is 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 fraternity 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.

  I said at the beginning of this book that I was not w
illing to put the death of Sandra Bland aside. I have now watched the videotape of her encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count—and each time I do, 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 on FM 1098 in Prairie View, Texas, was a collective failure. Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart. Somebody else higher up in the chain of command at the Texas 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 Texas 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.

  Renfro: OK. If Bland had been a white female, would the same thing have occurred?

  It’s the end of the deposition. Encinia and his interrogator are still fruitlessly trying to figure out what happened that day.

  Encinia: Color doesn’t matter.…We stop vehicles and people for law infractions, not based on any kind of race or gender at all. We stop for violations.

  “We stop for violations,” may be the most honest thing said in their entire episode. But instead of asking the obvious follow-up—why do we stop for all violations?—Renfro blunders on.

  Renfro: What do you think that someone who’s aggravated is going to do once you ask them, “Are you OK?” And she gives you that type of response, and then you come back with, “Are you done?” I mean, how’s that building on rapport?