Page 148 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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.