Page 146 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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