The Battle for Free Speech

I get frustrated by persistent complaints about so-called "cancel culture."

Not that I think it's entirely non-existent. I'm sure it does exist in places.

Not because it tends to be an accusation made by people who generally lean right against people who generally lean left, when it seems clear that left-leaning voices are excluding from conservative media just just as effectively as right-leaning voices are excluded from progressive media.

Not even because it is old news. Censorship, boycotts, tarring and feathering (both literal and figurative) have been part of our political discourse since before the revolutions.

What really irks me, what makes me nuts, is that the real issue has always been having the bravery to speak out in the first place.

We are promised the right to speak and print your views by the constitution, short of directly inciting violence. We are not promised it will be easy, or that we can escape the consequences of our speech. Nor are we promised that public or private resources (e.g., lecture halls in institutions of higher learning) will be allocated to us to speak abhorrent or hateful views. Which of course sets up a very thorny -- but equally valid -- political discussion about what views are deserving of society's support. But just having an idea does not automatically entitle me to public support in broadcasting it.

Of course, to have an effect on public thought requires speaking in a way that others can engage with. Some people go with rage, spite, and condemnation -- these things will get people engaged, but probably just the people who already see things the same way. Some go with deception, exaggeration, and hyperbole -- these things have worked well in Russian, Soviet, and Stasi disinformation campaigns in European experience, and seem to be pretty effective in US social media too.

To me, the battle for free speech is an internal battle for the courage to speak. And the best way to be heard is to speak with all the rationally and courtesy I can muster.

Something Like Normalcy

I was so excited to have something like a normal weekend for like the first time since covid-19 initially surged in Massachusetts.

Went hiking in the blue hills on Saturday, got good and lost on the way back with no map and a stubborn refusal to use my cell phone...but after bushwacking off Hancock Hill found my trail again and all was good.

Ran rock climbing and a bit of high ropes for a patrol of 5 scouts at New England Base Camp on Sunday. I had not realized how much I missed that whole experience - spending time with fellow instructors and seeing young folk try something new and succeed at something they initially thought was impossible.

Due to covid-19, we have to keep to the same small groups throughout the day -- to limit potential for spread, we can't have drop-ins and random intermixing -- which means a lot more time to have meaningful program and see a bit more of the scouts than the weekend programs usually offer. I liked it.

Cats

(Yesterday, I said I was going to talk about kittens today. In fact, I want to talk about grown-up kittens.)

A few days ago, we dropped our youngest son off at college. He's in a small dorm (probably less than 50 people) and they have a cat! That made me happy. We had cats in my dorm during college, and they really helped me deal with the stresses of a challenging academic environment.

Good architecture matters. Dormitories based on long rows of cramped apartments are absurd. We can do better. Living in small settings with other folks who who've just become adults, learning how to cook for yourself and share responsibilities for keeping the kitchen clean, these things just feel so much more healthy. Having pets (and caring for them) seems like part of the same package.

We don't help our youth become adults by continuing to treat them as if they are children.

Policing XII: Conclusion

 Policing in the US has been maligned for its ties to slave patrols and enforcement of Jim Crow laws. But it also has noble roots in the ideas that the forces that ensure civic order and protect the vulnerable are not to be soldiers quartered by external forces in our midst, but are to be civil authorities drawn for the citizenry itself. Seen from this latter perspective, when a significant portion of the law-abiding public fears the police no longer protect or serve the people, that is a sufficient cause for reflection and concern.

It is from this point of view that it seems to me that, notwithstanding all the positive acts of individual officers and department, policing in the US can be improved, and that we have a moral obligation to consider the improvements that can be made. Though we may support institutions like our churches to remind the public of good moral conduct, or serve in youth organizations to help build the citizenry of the future -- these facts do not excuse us from our responsibility to ensure that arm of civil authority we entrust to use force in keeping order should be as close to perfect as humans can manage. Nor can we escape the fact that police are the forces we as a body politic commission, and it is those forces that we maintain that we have a primary responsibility for managing in order to achieve the highest possible degree of protection for all.

In the last 12 days, I have dedicated my reflections to that concern. From those reflections, I suggest the following points:

• Transparency and oversight should be improved through civilian review boards, use of body cameras, and publicly available accounting of complaints and "near misses"
• Training and education should be improved so the time spent learning to de-escalate and peacefully resolve high-stakes situations is commensurate with the time spent learning to use force
• Building wide bridges of trust and familiarity with the community are a critical part of policing in the US; those efforts should be funded and chosen for maximum impact
• Where appropriate, police should be work in tandem with mental health professionals and other experts to address root causes of conflict; at the same time, as a society we must also work to address inequities that fuel conflict
• In choosing the offensive and defensive tools showcased in most situations, the guiding principle of a civilian police force should be the exact opposite of "maximum shock and awe," and efforts to portray policing as being at war, or arm police as if they are at war, are antithetical to efforts to build an inclusive society
• While the degree of actual abuse is debated by some, qualified immunity goes to far in denying the public to bring civil suit, and as the culmination of decades of legislating from the bench, should be subject to legislative clarification.

Most importantly, as a life-and-death concern, policing is too critical to be treated as commodity hourly labor. I suggest we should seek to move to a professional model of employment that draws on patterns in civil engineering and aviation safety, among others. Hallmarks of this switch would include 4-year college level training for police officers, reinforcement and extension of a dedication to ongoing training, diminishing hierarchy and band-of-brother responses so in all cases two or more police officers together are less likely to be involved in violent episodes rather than more, and critical self examination of incidents and near misses with an unflagging goal of no preventable mishaps.

I'm sure not everyone agrees with my conclusions, but I've tried my best to be reasoned and level-headed in my thinking and my rhetoric. What's more, I've learned a lot -- in no small measure due to comments, questions, and challenges from those who took the time to read my reflections. But it was also exhausting. With your permission, I think I'll talk about kittens tomorrow.

Policing XI: Abolish, Defund, or Reform

The problems we face in policing are systemic in the sense the way the system operates will create outcomes we don't want, even if every police officer in the US is of above average goodness. At the present time those outcomes have been cast in sharp relief by the death of several African-Americans in encounters with police. Further, we can expect that police themselves are not perfect, nor is every police officer of unquestionable moral character - they are human like the rest of us. It is against this backdrop that a substantial portion of the US public has come to the conclusion that the flaws in policing are intolerable and we must take action.

When addressing systemic problems, it is fair to ask if the system to be changed should be rebuilt from scratch, substantially reorganized, or subjected to incremental reform.

Advocates of abolishing police point to its history as a tool of oppression - for example, origins in slave-capture in the south, or in efforts to keep new immigrants "in line" in the north. Some may also further assert that we need no police; the people can regulate themselves. I do have some sympathy for that argument; I've lived in a group of more than a hundred dormitory residents with no constituted government and I thought it was generally fine. But that depends on bonds of social connection that, in my opinion at least, do not scale to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people that inhabit a mid-size city. Further, there are vulnerable among us who deserve protection (e.g., from rape, domestic violence, child abuse, and more.) To me it is not permissible to say these vulnerable people must all wait until the slower wheels of mental health services right the world. Nor is it wise to say every threatened person should go out, get a gun, and protect themselves -- indeed, that is not a freedom available to minors or ex-felons, yet they still deserve protection under the law. Therefore, while an individual city may choose to reconstitute their police force from the ground up, I do not see it as a nationally viable plan, nor even a plan that most states should embrace.

The idea of defunding the police is that we change the system by shifting funding from police departments to social services. These services, it is argued, can reduce our need for conventional policing by attacking social ills that combine to create situations that currently demand policing. On the face of it, this is a strategy that shares some common ground with the idea of reducing federal government funding to "starve the beast" and change government priorities. The strength of this position is that it clearly acknowledges reforms can get stalled and co-opted, and puts firm guardrails in place to ensure reform proceeds. I'd be concerned that the social services take longer to create good than proponents like to admit, but the position has a lot of appeal to me: reforms are often derailed. But the mayor of LA pointed out that since police are generally hired by seniority, this policy would cause her department to reverse hard-won progress in making the police force representative of the communities being policed. On balance, considering these two objections, I feel forced to consider reform as the proper way forward.

Reform, as noted, carries the significant drawback that it can get stalled. The systems and cultures in place can be powerful impediments to real change. I'd be lying to suggest that was not a concern. Still, I prefer reform.

To me, one of the best ways to overcome resistance to change is to move from a labor model to a professional model of policing. In particular, as a professional body police should investigate adverse outcomes with the same intensity the commercial airline industry does. To put that in context, there are about 16 million commercial flights in the US each year (for 800 million passengers), compared to 10 million arrests (these are all 2018 numbers). In the years from 2003 to 2009 there were 650 arrest-related deaths in the US each year. In most years, there are no airline deaths (excluding illegal acts); in 2018 there was one. That is the result of a relentless pursuit of perfection. Our response to a death in policing should not be to shrug our shoulders and say these deaths are an unavoidable part of law enforcement. Our governments and our police should look at these events with the same intensity and need for change that characterizes the commercial airline industry. 

As airlines are engineered systems and people are not, we will likely never see a year with no police-related fatalities, but experiences with efforts to improve patient safety in surgical settings (e.g., nearly 40% decline for 10 years for most age groups) indicate the same sorts of deep analysis and commitment to improvement can lead to substantial improvements over time. I believe that in the long run we will only create that sort of change but adopting similar practices of continuous critique and improvement in policing. Until then, the training and oversight reforms in the Massachusetts police reform proposals should yield material improvements in outcomes and help move policing from a labor model to a professional model of service. But absent a deep level of self-examination by communities and their police departments, none of the 3 broad options for change are likely to create sorts of improvements our consciences ought to compel us to seek.

Policing X: Qualified Immunity

Let me start this post on qualified immunity and related matters by stipulating that in order to effectively respond to rapidly evolving situations, police should not need to fear criminal charges for reasonable good-faith actions taken in the course of their work. In support of this goal, qualified immunity is judicial (not legislative) doctrine from the late 1960s that has evolved to bar civil rights suits for unconstitutional conduct unless it had been “clearly established” (i.e., by legal precedent) as being illegal at the time it occurred. The present concern with qualified immunity is that in seeking legal precedent, clear violations of civil rights might be precluded from reaching trial because there did not exist a clear precedent at the time the doctrine of qualified immunity was established, thus the case can never be heard and no legal precedent can ever be established. Opponents further assert that requirements for precedent are being sought on overly narrow grounds in practice, and have had the effect of preventing morally justifiable cases from even being filed.

As this appears to be a situation where an absence of law has caused the courts to effectively "legislate from the bench," we should all welcome legislative clarity. There does seem to be some anecdotal evidence the critics of qualified immunity have a point. And, since few officers are also case law experts, it seems that existence of precedent is a poor basis for making split-second decisions in policing. I am of the opinion that qualified immunity should be more restricted than it is. The proposed Ending Qualified Immunity Act in the US House of Representatives provides no protection for reasonable acts done in good faith. I think it goes too far. I am much more partial to the Massachusetts Senate proposal (the "Reform, Shift + Build Act"), which retains qualified immunity but places the burden on the state to demonstrate qualified immunity applies.

Regardless of the status of qualified immunity, for an officer to be found guilty of an offense in a court of law requires at least a preponderance of evidence (for civil cases) -- and more for criminal cases. It must also generally be the case that internal warnings and disciplinary actions are independent of legal findings of liability, or police departments should be able to act to prevent future misconduct. To the extent that labor agreements and other mechanisms limit the ability of municipalities to act without meeting that high legal standard for burden of proof, they abuse the public trust.

Also, because of qualified immunity and standards of evidence, it it follows that if in aggregate a community is aggrieved by police misconduct, then in order to properly protect accused police officers, some degree of injustice against the aggrieved group will go unpunished and in fact unrecognized. I know of no precedent for addressing such grievances, but it is worth considering that their historical and ongoing weight should be addressed. Perhaps this could be considered as a form of reparations -- as noted, I do not know of a precedent here, but the cumulative sense of injustice ought to be recognized even if individual guilt cannot be proven in a court of law.

These are thorny, detailed questions. But they are critically important and must be addressed. Though no bill will satisfy all parties, I am hopeful that the Massachusetts legislature will be successful in crafting a reform bill before ending the current session.

Policing IX: Arms and Weapons

I think I have just a couple more posts on this overall topic. Today I want to talk a bit about the offensive and defensive weapons police use. This will not be a comprehensive or detailed discussion, but perhaps is an outline of a basis on which such a discussion could proceed.

The process of dumping military-style hardware into community police forces has been discussed by many reporters and commentators across a wide range of political perspectives, so for brevity I will limit my comments. From what I can tell, there is a general consensus this practice is inappropriate and should be curtailed. The problem is, of course, if your tools are all made to quell urban combatants in foreign countries, then the challenges you face in police can appear to look like urban combat. There is some truth in the saying "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

In the contexts of protests like those we have seen across the country in the past months, it is worth mentioning that it is not only offensive weapons that tend to escalate a conflict. Defensive weapons can have that affect also. I can't offer a solution here -- we all have a right to protect ourselves. On the other hand, showing up in full body armor with gas masks and nightsticks does send a message about where you expect the night to go (this applies to protestors as well). In some cases, it seems to me, deploying with overt and excessive defensive gear reinforces an adversarial stance and could even suggest a target for violence -- but this is not a line of thought one should carry too far. I would never suggest police forces should divest themselves of that sort of riot gear, but I would urge them to be thoughtful in its deployment.

In addition to guns, Police also have at their disposal a variety of less-lethal weapons. A few years ago, we called these "non-lethal" -- the change in nomenclature is, I think, useful. In a brief discussion, it's not worth detailing the risks of each type of weapon. Although not every situation can be de-escalated, it should be sufficient to note that choosing a less-lethal weapon is only descalatory if the conflict has already progressed to the level of immediately lethal force. As I've noted a few times, we are in a bad place if every signal we can send is escalatory in nature. (And I should say many police are good at sending these de-escalatory signals, but some are not and these less-lethal tools can enable that more escalatory response)

Lastly, one thought on guns themselves. Sam Harris (and others, I suspect) points out that since police in the US generally carry guns, suspected criminals can reach for the gun and every encounter that police go into carries the seeds of being a lethal encounter. He then adds that, because of the widespread availability of guns in the US, police have no choice but to carry guns. I'm not sure I fully agree with every step in that chain of logic, but for argument let's say that it is true. Though it's a technical band-aid of sorts, there is an obvious solution to the objection in the form of smart guns which would prevent a criminal from easily using an officer's gun against them. Though they are not sold in large numbers and are maybe not as technically mature as other guns, that would almost certainly change rapidly if police forces widely adopted the technology. For that reason, I regard as specious the argument that police must regard every encounter as potentially lethal because of the guns they themselves carry. (Not being a police officer, I cannot say how much this fear influences thinking, I am merely saying if it is a substantial source of concern, it seems fixable and thus should be fixed.)

Policing VIII: Professional Organizations

Doctors are required to take and abide by the Hippocratic oath. If they violate their oath, they may be removed from their professional association, regardless of whether they are found guilty in a court of law. 

Lawyers are held to the standards of their jurisdiction, which are generally based on the ABA model code. If you violate those standards, your license to practice can be taken from you by your state bar association.

Civil engineers operate under the code of ethics of their professional society, and again can lose certification even if they are not found guilty of a crime under law.

Yet police, while police chiefs have a uniform code of ethics, police officers operate under a hodgepodge of oaths administered by their employers. The role of the police union seems to be to protect police officers' employment first, while the integrity of the calling takes a much lower priority.

I am generally not anti-union, and I absolutely recognize that police deserve labor protection in some form. I submit, however, that a group given such power over others, a group that has been given license to use deadly force in the course of their work, should operate under a framework more like the examples above. An alternative might be a military code of conduct, but I do not believe we should be blurring the lines between police and military.

I recognize this entails treating police more like professionals across the board - good pay, for instance should not be dependent on overtime or on traffic detail work. But I think it is consistent with my thoughts yesterday on increasing entry-level training requirements for police.

I recognize this is easier said than done, but I do think there is great value to all in recasting the relationship between police and society as more professional in its focus and less about labor as a commodity. To show I am not the only one who see this as a possible way forward, I'll close with this link from the National Police Foundation: A Hippocratic Oath for policing.

Policing VII: Education

In Germany, minimum standards for police education require two and a half years of education, and often require four years. In some places in the US, you can be a police officer with less than half a year of training.

As things are right now, we expect a lot from our police officers. They are asked to lead the response to a wide variety of complex situations involving domestic violence, mental health, substance abuse, motor vehicle accidents, and more. While I support efforts to bring additional fields of expertise in these situations -- especially when it can be done as a preventative measure -- the truth remains that responding to a mandate as large as this requires a lot of training, as well as a lot of support after the training. From what I can see, we could do better at both in the US.

Given the very wide-ranging mandate we give our police in the US, a four-year post-high-school training period does not seem unreasonable to me. Police officers deal with complex and diverse situations, they should be given a broad range of tools to understand and address those situations. Further, completing a sustained course of specialist study both indicates and develops a degree of self-discipline that I think is an appropriate expectation for the job. On the face of it, good policing is a high-level calling -- there is no reason I can think to expect it should require, for example, a dramatically lower standard of education than we require of public school teachers.

In Germany, one factor that motivates their curriculum is looking at the role policing played in the rise of naziism. As a result, the curriculum includes specific training on empathy for minority and disadvantaged groups. And still they have some problems with holocaust deniers. If the US had a similar longer-term training process, how would we be able to ensure it did not inculcate the very attitudes we seek to diminish over time? It's an important question and, in truth, I don't have a complete answer. I'll touch on some partial ideas tomorrow, but I think it's fair to note that we have the same concern with any educationally-based credentialing system -- doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc., all benefit from successfully addressing this issue. 

It's my point of view, which I recognize I'm asserting without proof, that: 1) we should give police more tools and techniques for resolving conflict without violence; 2) continued progress in drawing police from communities they serve is worthwhile; 3) increasing empathy by police for the community they serve is part of what a good educational system can do. These are high-level goals, and are worth continued investment.

Policing VI: Outreach Programs

Because this series of reflections is an effort to think about ways policing could be improved, it tends to lay a lot on police. As I said at the outset, I have taken that focus only because they are the professionals and they are the people I pay as a taxpayer -- it doesn't mean anything more than that.

Still, it feels like the right time to change up a bit and offer something that is not wholly negative. In team dynamics, sometimes we take an approach of asking what we should stop doing, what we should start doing, and what we should keep doing. It's worth talking about what police should keep doing, and I'll use the Quincy Police Department as an example. QPD runs a variety of public safety campaigns that are not about law enforcement at their core:

Advocacy: Autism Awareness and Pink Patch Project offer commemorative patches that generate funds for the indicated causes. These are causes worth supporting, and I feel fairly confident they generate some good will. There is some risk a cynical observer could see them as a smokescreen behind which deportment shortcomings are camouflaged, but we're not being cynical here. It makes sense to me these are genuine expressions of concern that QPD should keep doing, but take a bit of care to avoid touting them as proof that there are no reforms that could benefit the community.

Safety: QPD offers Basic Boating Safety Courses and Car Seat Installations as in-person services. I think they once offered Bicycle Safety in person, but the web site currently only shows an online course. They also offer a Self Defense Program for women. These programs offer person-to-person contact between the police force and the community, strengthening trusting connections we want to have. These are the sorts of things I'd absolutely like to see more of. For example, imaginatively revitalizing the bicycle safety program could provide an opportunity for police to directly interact with youth in the community.

HELP (Handicapped-Elderly-Lost Persons) and Project Lifesaver / Lojack are similar to one another. They are important services and essential in overall community safety. Kudos.

Domestic Violence Advocacy Program is self-explanatory. Health Imperatives is a broadly similar effort focused on victims of sexual assault. From the website, it seems officers receive some training. And it is good that the QPD partners with advocacy groups in these areas. But I've also heard that some victims of these types of crimes have felt belittled and dismissed by QPD. These are essential services: we need to be sure the commitment to them extends way beyond a link on a website.

CRASE is a program to train organizations in responding to active shooter events. It seems like an innovative program and a good chance to build relationships between the community and the QPD. This might well be a program my church could benefit from. Definitely keep doing.

DARE Program is a well-intentioned effort to address a real problem. But long-term effectiveness is questionable and it's not clear it helps build positive relationships with QPD broadly among our youth. This one might be due for some critical review.

Jail Diversion Program is an effort to work with mental health professionals to ensure mental health events do not become criminal events. There is a recent video taken of QPD officers that provides at least anecdotal evidence this sort of initiative has had some success. But that same video showed some officers were much more willing than others to escalate the situation. I don't have overall statistics, or even a good idea how I'd get them. Nor can I pretend to know the details of that event. So I'll give a qualified thumbs up to what we're doing today, with the suspicion we could do more.

Prescription Drug Disposal is a necessary service, and QPD is a good home for that. Just from a "good governance" perspective, we need to be sure the drugs that are dropped off are well controlled from that point on and do not somehow find their way to the market or to abusers (to be clear, I have no reason to suspect that is a problem at QPD). And related to this, QPD pioneered the use of NARCAN to successfully reverse the effects of overdoses and saved lives by doing so. Let's keep doing stuff like this.

In sum, beyond the narrow mission of law enforcement, QPD has been successful in several important programs and had qualified success in several others. I see these sorts of programs as things that both have direct benefits and can also build connection with the community they serve. While there is opportunity for improvement, these are good investments, and I both commend the QPD for them and encourage city officials to continue supporting this broader view of public safety. At the same time, we need to be sure that having good programs does not blind us to ways we can do better.

Policing V: Tribalism and Dissent

After attending a vigil in Quincy center, I was waiting for a ride home. Not too far away, a group of 3 or 4 police officers stood at a street corner. So I approached and tried to start a conversation - a complicated thing in the time of covid-19, with social distancing and face masks. I was able to get a few words in with one officer who was off to the side. But after a brief acknowledgment, he turned away from me walked over to fully join his fellow officers and talk with them. He wanted to be part of his tribe.

I don't have a source for this, but I've been told that most instances of police misconduct occur when there are groups of police, and almost none occur when police are alone. It is believed that police are more careful when alone, and avoid situations that are at risk of escalation.

And of course, there is the band of brothers effect. We are tribal creatures. When one of our tribe is threatened, we act to protect them. This spirit is taken to its fullest heights among soldiers in war, but is seen in police as well -- and can be a good thing. But it can also make it hard for police officers to intervene to stop bad behavior as well. Even worse, the sense of strength in a group can give power to rogue bands within the police, and can be compounded by authority in the form of rank or experience.

In studies of airline cockpit discussions after commercial airliner accidents, it was found that the authority of the pilot outweighed the possibility of dissent in several cases reviewed. As a result, conscious efforts were made to flatten the structure of an airline cockpit so people other than the pilot felt empowered or obliged to speak up if they saw something concerning.

Similar studies of operating rooms revealed a similar power imbalance, where mistakes made by a surgeon were not questioned effectively by others. Again, a sustained effort was made to change that culture and make questioning and dissent function more reliably.

I think policing might need to undertake a similar process. We need to make it so 4 minds brought to bear in a situation means more creativity for better problem solving and reduced risk of misconduct. Until we are confident that a group of 4 policeman has better judgement than a single policeman, I argue there is work to be done in this aspect of police culture.

Policing IV: Transparency

I'm heavily influenced by open source-software development. In open-source software, every potential bug is reported and addressed. And (through the history in a version control log) can be traced back to an individual that made a code change. This is a level of transparency that changes everything. And, in truth, it's not that much different from how commercial software development proceeds as well. For instance, as a Jira user, it took less than 30 seconds to reach the list of all known Jira bugs.

I think we should expect and require a similar level of transparency from our police. The city or police department web site should have readily accessible process for filing complaints of any kind. Those complaints should be tabulated in more or less real time so decision makers -- whether they be citizens or government officials -- can instantly know not only if certain types of complaints are common, but if certain officers are the source of a majority of complaints.

Certainly, there would need to be a means of providing anonymity for people reporting issues. I'm also open to some degree of anonymity to protect police officers before claims are substantiated. But local policing relies on police and citizen knowing one another, so I possibly police identities do not need to be fully anonymous (see
We’re police officers. You should know our names. That goes for Portland, too for example).

To be fully open about small mistakes and concerns would allow us to address issues before they became big issues. This sort of openness is, of course, scary to police. But to me it seems similar to widely reported studies of apologies in medical settings -- it was scary at first, and the lawyers complained it would lead to an onslaught of litigation. But in hospitals where doctors apologized for adverse events, time to resolve claims decreased by by over 50% and cost of claims dropped by approximately 50%, depending on the measure used. At the same time, patient satisfaction increased.

In my city, the police department web site certainly contains useful information. But in several attempts, I still cannot find any way to report police misconduct, or any accounting of what sorts of misconduct concerns others have raised. In response to questions about misconduct, the departmental response has been more or less a stream of self-congratulatory references to the good programs the department does run. This implied sense of denial diminishes trust rather than increasing it. Rapid and full disclosure provides critical opportunities for learning that we simply do not have under our current system, and provides an opportunity to build trust through rapid and personal response to concerns. I believe we will struggle to change policing until we adopt a significantly more open and introspective system that includes looking at citizen concerns before they become civil rights violations.

Policing III: Body Cameras

If we create some sort of citizen review boards for the police, their effectiveness will depend in part on the availability of accurate data about police-civilian encounters. Perhaps the most cited example is the body camera. Related to the body camera, I'm going to assume many parts of a police station today are covered by surveillance cameras, or if they are not, they can be. Also, I will note that there are significant privacy issues with cameras which I will simply defer to a later conversation.

Possibly the most important thing about cameras is to note that they are not a cure-all. They can only help as part of a throughgoing effort to increase transparency and accountability. I'll also note that cameras have roles in both transparency and accountability--they can provide the public with insight into the challenges associated with police work at the same time that they can be used as evidence to correct abuses. Of course, they can also be used to show that alleged abuses did not occur. In a properly constituted atmosphere of trust, they can benefit everyone. But they can only do any of these thing in the context of many other supports.

As an example of how I think body cameras can work, I'd like to point you to "The worst-case scenario" which describes a situation where police officers were called out to a mental health event where a gun and a knife were already present. There were two mentions of cameras; both jumped out to me:

First quote: "Parker and three other officers stepped into the building hallway in single file, hands near their weapons. The door to the woman’s ground floor apartment was ajar. He could hear a toddler crying and the woman talking to herself about devils. He kept his right hand hovering next to the grip of his gun. He looked down to make sure his body camera was on. Then he took a breath, pushed the door open, and stepped into the darkened apartment."

Second Quote: "During a break at the precinct, he looked back at his body camera video from the first call, on Saturday. He watched Granville’s frustrated attempts to get his attention, and his own quick dismissal of Ivy. He imagined how others might criticize him if the video was made public, as it would have been had the second call ended in a shooting."

I take from the first quote that pausing to check the body camera was a useful interruption here. Before it, the police officers hands were on their guns. But for a moment, there was a break to think about following procedure, about slowing down and thinking, about accountability and a larger perspective. Where so many situations can get out of control so quickly, I think that pause is likely to be a good thing in most cases.

The second quote, I think, is even more important. He reviewed the footage and reconsidered the events. As a rock climbing instructor, we do lessons-learned and near-miss analysis all the time. We seldom leave an event without considering and discussing what we might do differently to be safer and offer a more rewarding experience for our participants. The fact this police officer reviewed the footage and discussed it with fellow officers is to be commended. I suspect it's common to do so, but I don't know. With good problem-solving and introspection, building on this level of self-analysis could be a really powerful tool.

Of course, cameras would have to be used reliably. As a software developer, I would be penalized if I failed to commit code changes to a version control system that gave my peers clear visibility to my work. Similarly, police would have to be required to use cameras and be penalized for subverting that transparency.

In sum, I believe body cameras and related technologies are a important part of improving policing in the US. But, without institutional supports and throughgoing changes, they are just window dressing. Which gives me more to talk about tomorrow.

Policing II: Citizen Review Boards

Many conversations about police reform include some idea of a civilian review board, so I'm going to use that as a reasonable place to starting point. Readers will need to keep in mind this is a vast subject and I am intentionally taking only a very narrow slice each day to see what I can learn, and intentionally managing the scope of my thoughts in order to stay on just that subtopic.

I noted yesterday that the value of increasing trust is a foundational principle for my thinking about policing. At the very least, it seems beyond doubt that a substantial fraction of the youth in our more urban areas do not fundamentally trust their police. It also seems clear that a substantial fraction of many minority communities in the US distrust their police. Regardless of anything else, the protests we have seen since the killing of George Floyd simply would not have occurred if trust in police was pervasive.

For the sake of argument only, let's say there was a simple flaw in policing that mayors and police chiefs identified tomorrow; they changed the flawed policy and fired all the bad people and announced it on the news the next day. Clearly, that would be insufficient to restore trust. There would need to be a sustained confirmation from a trusted watchdog for attitudes to change. So to me it is clear that some sort of civilian review board will be part of the way forward for a lot of cities, both small and large.

This bothers me for a few reasons. First, it adds another party to our city governments, and almost all of us have experienced the ways that increasing the complexity of an organization tends to decrease its agility. Plus, it costs money. But most of all, it means that our ostensibly representative political structures have lost connection with their constituents, or are at least unable to provide the quality of governance we want. And it seems unlikely that simple slogans will rebuild that trust on their own.

So, if I were to outline a plan for a civilian review board, I would probably build in a sunset clause. I would think in terms of something like a 5-year commision, with guaranteed representation for significant minority communities in the city, and with a young adult voice as well. I would add representation from the police force simply because in the course of a 5-year process there almost certainly will be cases where their insight will be necessary. I'm not sure it would be productive to include police union representation, so I'll leave that as an open question. I would also include representation from the existing government, because they are stakeholders too. But I would make sure that ordinary citizens comprised half or more of the board.

I would give them a mission that included four primary components: 1) reviewing police actions that have generated concern in the community, 2) reviewing a random sampling of other interactions to see if there are significant trends to be aware of, 3) working with the police department to correct those things that need to be changed, and 4) making an annual report to the city on how their functions can be re-integrated into normal municipal function at the end of their charter period. It is critically important that protection of citizens rights, and everyone's confidence in those protections, is a central function of regular government. It cannot be a bolted-on afterthought.

State police, at least in Massachusetts, also do not have an unvarnished record. Nor are they universally trusted. I think that a similar process could apply there, but I've not considered what details may differ.

At a smaller scale than our cities and urban areas, I do think many towns have a more personal connection between their police and the citizenry. But being complacent is part of human nature. I am willing to bet there are also many towns that think they are more or less immune to these problems, but are not. As a result, thought the form will vary locally, I think the concerns that current national events raise apply fairly broadly. 

Therefore, for many communities I think some sort of task force that proactively takes a searching look at our police-civilian interaction is a wise investment. Those task forces or citizen review boards should take an honest look at how our police are perceived in the community and foster changes as they are needed, with an eye toward building trust and ensuring that trust is fully deserved.

Of course, that is only one facet of how we can think about a way forward, and relies critically on getting information to review. That will be tomorrow's topic.

Police Reform: I

There's a lot that can be said about policing in the US.

We can start by recognizing that, through effective democratic institutions, putting policing under the control of the people and communities they police is crazy brilliant idea. It's an idea that has changed the world, and a situation I'd love to see as a global norm. We should absolutely do more of that.

We can also recognize that there are many police who do good things every day. Their job can be next to impossible at times. And sometimes things go wrong in the course of their jobs, sometimes horribly wrong. Some of those are unavoidable. Some are not unavoidable, but are made worse by the fact that in addition to straight-out criminal acts, there are a lot of people in the world who do stupid things.

But there are also cases where we - the police and the ordinary citizen both - can do better. Sometimes this is because some officers may be prejudiced against the people they serve. Other times, there may be systemic forces that create poor outcomes even when the individual police officers are good people doing their best. And sometimes, fatigue caused by a poorly functioning system can lead to cynical beliefs that then fuel negative outcomes.

When I think about changing the nature of police-civilian encounters, I am primarily thinking of police reform - because those are the people I pay through my taxes, and those are the people who are the trained professionals. Yes, that does place a higher burden on the police and the civilian governments to which they report. Nor does it let our families and communities off the hook for bad behavior, it's just that I don't pay them. (And, I do encourage everyone to support programs that increase responsible civic engagement, especially among youth...but that is a different topic)

It's my intent to think and write a little bit about policing for the next several days. Though I'll try to be explicit, it seemed worth starting with those caveats. In spite on my best efforts, I may sometimes appear to be singling out police. If it does appear that way, remember it is because they are the professionals, and they are the people I am paying. Still, I will do my best to be fair and open-minded, and as always I welcome your thoughts.

I'll close this first post with one principle I think is foundational: policing outcomes are better and society is more productive for all when trust between police and citizens is firm and universal. We seem to be at a low ebb in that respect, and things that build that trust are in a general sense things we should encourage.

With that, until tomorrow...

A Torrent of Angry and Malignant Passions

On social media these days, some people are share photos of home projects or their latest loaf of sourdough bread. Some show their pets or the parks where they take their morning walks. Or their first driving lesson after getting their learner's permit. It's wonderful.

I've had a facebook profile for 12 years and rarely used it until recently. I am finding that when I make the effort to write a thoughtful post there is a very high likelihood someone will respond with an equally thoughtful reply. I've learned a lot. I've reconnected with friends from school in rich and surprising ways. I've even healed a couple of old wounds.

Then there are the screamers. In Federalist 1, Alexander hamilton said:

"...For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

"And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives..."

In other words, all these angry memes and rabid reposts are like screaming into a hurricane. And the tragedy is, when the hurricane does not answer back, it sometimes seems to fuel a sense that "I was not heard! My voice matters too!" And then more screaming.

So...if you are a friend - from last week or 50 years ago - yes, your voice matters. If you want to discuss the things that frustrate you, I'm all ears. But to me, it is YOUR voice that matters. Not the voice of whoever made that meme/virus you're circulating, and not the voice of that other angry person I don't know and you may or may not know.

Speak to me in your own words, in your own voice. I may not agree, but I am listening. And if there is any civil conversation to be had, I'm in.

No Brakes

I really hoped to be less reactive today...And this is more or less a reprise of a different conversation on facebook. If you've seen that, I apologize for the re-run.

The White House has said that three federal agents in Portland may have suffered permanent loss of vision as a result of being targeted by lasers. If this is true, I condemn it. Period.

Even though I strongly object to the role federal forces seem to be playing in escalating violence, I also strongly object to those among the protesters who are escalating violence. This is literally becoming "an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind." I do not think we should take joy in anyone suffering permanent injury.

I don't particularly trust the White House. But I don't feel like I have enough data to be sure this untrue. And if it is not a lie, I do have have sympathy for people who lose their vision or part of their vision in the course of their jobs. To repeat what I said elsewhere, I think the presence of federal forces is inflaming an already volatile situation, and I fully fault the administration for that. But I do not know the facts of the situation. If the assertion is borne out, I will not celebrate the injury done or dismiss it.

To me, the central problem in Portland at the moment remains that everyone wants to escalate -- Trump because force and deceit seem to be central to how he communicates, and anonymous folks among the protesters that incite violence and are closed to communication because of their anonymity. You wouldn't drive a car that had an accelerator and no brakes, why does it make sense to address public policy issues with no discernable negative feedback/damping mechanism on either side?

At least as far as I can see, the situation in Portland has become a distraction from real police reform and from addressing racial inequity -- but a distraction that is causing real harm. If protesters truly stayed non-violent, did not injure others, and did try to set buildings on fire, then if the feds revealed themselves for the bullies they seem to be -- support for the federal forces would crumble. If the feds and allies gathered around the federal courthouse without arms and body armor and did what the moms in Portland are doing, then public opinion would pretty quickly shift to their side. But they are all chicken-shit -- hiding behind innocent protestors or hiding behind the weight of federal government. It's all the same to me, none of them are likely to bring about a more peaceful society.

We can be better than this. The question is, will we be better than this?

Preserving History

In this ongoing series of posts, I write (mostly) about our democracy from a perspective that prioritizes reason and sympathy. Some posts generate a lot of comments, some a few. My discipline has been and remains to preserve all my comments, and to create a comment highlighting my mistakes if I edit a post to correct a substantive error (this is, anything that is not a typo).

This forces a discipline on me that I'm always conscious of. Everything I write under those constraints needs to be something I can take some measure of pride in, even years down the road. I presume, for instance, that I will change my mind on at least a few topics I discuss. That is what reason and growth requires, and that is what I am committed to. And it if the expected result of learning from any conversations my posts facilitate. So this discipline requires writing with open mindedness even about topics my gut feels certain about - maybe especially about such topics. And it requires taking the time to find a courteous way to express points where my friends and I disagree.

This, to me, at a small scale, is a way of preserving history - we preserve facts with their blemishes, and learn to live with those histories.

On the other hand, our heros can still get replaced. When I was in high school, I loved the Electric Light Orchestra. As I got older, I was exposed to more musical ideas and ELO was moved off their pedestal. It still enjoy a good tune of theirs, but they no longer hold that same place of honor.

Removing statues that are primarily about glorifying the leaders who took half the country to war over the right to enslave others seems more like picking a new style of music to dance to and less like erasing history. Sometimes the old music is stale and needs to be replaced. Changing textbooks to suppress the central role of abolitionist movements in bringing about the Civil War - that is what erasing history looks like. 

Second Amendment

Reading yesterday's post, I guess it would be fair to ask how I feel about the second amendment to the US constitution. The answer is that I am deeply ambivalent in the etymological sense of the word -- I am pulled in different directions by powerful opposing ideas that I think both have validity. I do see the roles that guns play in preserving self-sufficiency and in resisting despotism -- and I think these are both good and necessary things. At the same time, it is clear that owning guns is associated with increased risk of suicide and of domestic violence homicide. It also seems clear that in urban areas where guns are readily available in a context of drug and/or gun violence, their presence fuels the escalation of even minor disputes into deadly events.

So, I don't want to eliminate the second amendment, nor am I happy with the status quo that leads to tens of thousands of easily preventable gun deaths annually.

In that context, it seems to me that the rhetoric -- the culture around guns in the US -- can be part of the problem. First off, it is just not the case that the left is lining up to take away everyone's guns. There's no reason to run out and buy more guns every time the topic of gun violence is raised. Arguably -- with more than one gun in the US for every man, women, or child -- we are somewhere close to saturation, so more guns for everyone does not seem like a pressing need. Even more, I worry more about the rhetoric of framing gun purchases in terms of left-versus-right political debate. It add fuels to a fire that I believe is corrosive to our democratic institutions.

Further, too rapid deployment of the self-defense argument concerns me. If you study most martial arts, you're taught about discipline and conflict resolution. Of course, gun safety training teaches a form of discipline. But my experience on gun ranges has often been one where conflict (again, particularly between the left and the right) has been celebrated. Certainly it is not always celebrated, but enough that I've felt afraid to say the wrong thing because open discussion is just not tolerated on some ranges. I think that the martial arts have it right -- with acquisition of means of force comes a responsibility to proactively manage situations that could lead to use of that force. "Stand your ground" is not always the right thing, and often there are inflection points we should notice and exploit long before face-to-face conflicts arise.

One more area concerns me: when we focus on guns too much; when we make them too available (especially in densely populated areas), I think there is a risk of creating a dynamic like "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." In areas where gang and drug-related violence is pronounced, I think the ready availability of guns in the US and the linkage to macho ideas like "I'm not gonna let them push me around" leads to a place where guns become a primary means of conflict resolution.

I don't have an answer. Focus on mass shootings may well be a red herring -- as tragic as they are, they are a small percentage of annual gun fatalities by most measures I am aware of. As a corollary, focus on removing "military-style" guns (whatever that exactly means) is not likely to make a dramatic difference in annual gun fatalities, though it may reduce the glorification/drama factor. Securing guns from children, on the other hand, will almost certainly make a difference -- and while many gun owners do, there are also many who don't.

Like many things in the US, this is a place where actual dialog could help. It is fairly clear there are many needless gun deaths in the US every year. When manufacturers, lobbyists, political parties, and dogmatic partisans demonize one another, and stymie research and discussion around what changes might be reasonable or effective, that conflict costs lives.

Sowing Conflict

The second amendment establishes militias so states can resist tyranny -- especially that of an overzealous federal government. The Governor of the state of Oregon wants federal forces to leave. The state legislature has not asked for federal troops. The Oregon courts have placed limits on use of force for Portland police, and federal forces appear to disregard these limits.

If every branch of state government wants federal forces to de-escalate, and the US congress has not authorized deployment of federal forces to Oregon, it seems federal activities are dangerously close to being an invasion. If such was the case, wouldn't the Governor be obliged to use the state militia to resist federal encroachment? Fortunately, Governor Brown has been much more measured in her response...but have we really come to this? Do we have no peaceful means available to respond to protests against police misconduct? 

Vandalism and arson are crimes, and I believe they should have no part in these protests. But if any one thing seems likely to increase tension and violent confrontation, it is the presence of federal troops in body armor carrying crowd-control munitions.

We rightly laud the bravery of unarmed civil rights marchers in the 60s who suffered direct physical violence to show the rightness of their cause. If federal presence in Portland has the goal of protecting federal buildings, perhaps the most effective -- and least escalating -- means of doing so would be for unarmed federal agents to form a ring around the buildings. And maybe talk to the protestors. That would be brave. And probably very effective.

But if the presence of military-style federal forces is just more political theater designed to enrage and divide us...that is entirely different. If our leaders only know how to sow conflict, then we might just need to stop looking to them for guidance, and instead look to each other to recognize our shared humanity.

Thoughts on a Comet

Last night, the whole family was together looking at NEOWISE. I can finally say I have seen a comet!

We mused about how utterly freaked out early stargazers must have been to see something like that appear in the sky. And then to have it disappear.

We were able to map a few constellations, thanks to our cell-phone apps -- a modern miracle of human creation. Did people really believe Ursa Major was somehow actually a bear?

We live in amazing times, but perhaps nothing is more amazing than the fact we are here to live in them, with our rich cultures, both shared and distinct, our histories full of human greatness and human folly...

That minds should be in this universe to appreciate its beauty is perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe. And there is nothing like those two things -- a little bit of nature and a little bit of the love of family -- to remind me how fortunate I am.

Non-Violence Starts at Home

Over the last few weeks, I've seen a number of posts suggesting if parents of my generation had used more corporal punishment to raise our kids, protests for equity in the US would be less violent and destructive.

Let me get this straight. At this moment, many people -- both young and old -- are protesting to make the behavior of our policing systems less violent. Most of those people are doing it peacefully, but some are not. And you wish we had more forcefully told our kids how to peacefully change people's behavior...by inflicting violence on our kids. What?

You say police should be more violent in stopping protests. You say parents should be more violent in raising kids. But our young people should learn from that to be more peaceful? How could that possibly make sense?

Psychologists and child development specialists have studied this in detail. If you wish to raise children with the tools to resolve conflict without violence, one of the most powerful ways to do so is to eschew violence in favor of reliable interventions that focus on empathy and understanding. Consistently and predictably making children aware of how their actions hurt others...works. Commensurate intervention that emphasizes taking personal responsibility...works. Demonstrating that "if you are caught you will suffer my wrath" only perpetuates violence and diminishes our ability to self-critically evaluate our own behaviors.

Non-violence is hard. Responding with love is harder than responding with anger. But it is what we are called to do. Martin Luther King said it. Gandhi said it. Jesus said it. Buddha taught it. If we wish to create a less violent society, it will not start by encouraging violence in the home.

Environmental Devastation Is Preventable

Saw this bald eagle yesterday - from about 35 ft away.

In 1963 there were only an estimated 417 breeding pairs of Bald Eagles in the lower 48 states. Without concerted, science-based environmental protection, our national bird would very likely be extinct. More than any other person, we owe that victory to Rachel Carson, the author of "Silent Spring." They accused her of being radical, disloyal, unscientific, and hysterical. But federal regulation of DDT, inspired by "Silent Spring," has been instrumental in saving the species.

When I was growing up, air in many cities in the US was becoming unbreathable (or maybe had become unbreathable). Federal regulation in the form of the Clean Air Act made our cities once again safe for living and commerce, while at the same time reducing our dependence of foreign oil supplies.

Until implementation of the clean water act, fouling our countries waterways with untreated sewage was accepted practice. In Boston, you could not swim in the harbor or the Charles River. My father-in-law commented that growing up they learned the breast stroke first, so they could push the floating turds out of their way. These waterways and many others are now swimmable and fishable due to the success of environmental regulation. This has been the source of massive increases in quality of life and has been a key part of preserving our coastal fisheries.

Leaded gasoline was responsible for about two-thirds of the toxic lead that African-American children in Cleveland ingested or inhaled during the latter two-thirds of the 20th century, and was not exceptional in this regard. Federal action eliminated the use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline in the US, and over the last 40 years interventions to reduce lead exposure may have raised the mean IQ in adults by as much 4.5 points. Imagine what a boon that increased intelligence is to our economy and our civic life.

Global reductions in ozone-depleting emissions are expected to prevent over 2 million skin cancer deaths for people in the United States born in the years 1890–2100, as well as much more dramatic reductions in cataracts and non-fatal skin cancer. As a result of international agreement and cooperation, climate projections indicate that the ozone layer will return to 1980 levels between 2050 and 2070.

The value of a market-based economy is that it allows us to make rational decisions about what we value. But that does not mean common resources we all share should be unprotected. Science, good government, and vibrant economies all play a role in ensuring equity today and preserving vital resources for tomorrow. The environmental movement can rightly claim credit for not only the five continental- and global-scale victories above that saved countless human lives, but for many more smaller victories as well.

The history of environmentalism is replete with examples of stunning success that save lives, benefit the economy, and show the risks of governments that abdicate their responsibility for the common good. Some free-market theorists would seem to have us believe that if a purchaser can be found and a seller can make a buck, the system must be good. Of course, they might acknowledge some moral limits, but history has repeatedly shown that we cannot depend on unregulated capitalism for even the simple measure of not killing its own workers. By all means, consider the costs and the benefits of environmental policy. But I still defend the need for effective regulation, and honor the efforts of innumerable public servants that have made our quality of life possible.

In Memory of John Lewis

In memory of John Lewis, few of his words:

"We are one people with one family. We all live in the same house... and through books, through information, we must find a way to say to people that we must lay down the burden of hate. For hate is too heavy a burden to bear."

"If you ask me whether the election of Barack Obama is the fulfillment of Dr. King's dream, I say, 'No, it's just a down payment.'"

"When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something."

"You must be bold, brave, and courageous and find a way... to get in the way."

"The vote is precious. It's almost sacred, so go out and vote like you never voted before."

Black Lives

Here in the US, it seems we only pay attention to the Black Lives Matter movement when a black man dies. Yet, I'll note, the movement is Black Lives Matter.

Probably the most authoritative presentation of BLM's stated goals is at https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe. Other than an introductory passage that says that their formation was spurred by rage at the death of Trayvon Martin, death and murder are never mentioned. Instead, their principles begin:

Every day, we recommit to healing ourselves and each other, and to co-creating alongside comrades, allies, and family a culture where each person feels seen, heard, and supported.

We acknowledge, respect, and celebrate differences and commonalities.

We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning. In affirming that Black Lives Matter, we need not qualify our position. To love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others.

(I have only listed the first five. While I believe the remainder are consistent with the point I'm making, I also recognize they raise additional topics of conversation; so for clarity I have left it to individual readers to follow up on their own.)

You may not agree with all the principles of of the movement or organization. But nonetheless, I ask you to read their principles with a wide-open mind for a moment -- if only just as an exercise in sympathy. The message of Black Lives Matter is stunningly affirmative. It is remarkable in its focus on lives, and recognizing dignity in living.

We should all seek to end the use of brutality and force in policing. We should all seek to extend economic opportunity and power to communities where opportunity and power are limited or absent. Through their values and actions, BLM aspires to build communities that enable those goals. What could be more American than celebrating individuality, freedom and justice?

A Space for Disagreement

I'm a big advocate of building common ground and solving problems together. But sometimes, even in my own mind, I hear myself saying "We can't just sit around and sing kum-by-ah all the time." It's important for me to be clear - I do not think we can or should agree on all things at all times. Nor do I think we should hesitate to fight injustice (or praise meritorious behavior.)

We should do those things. We should care. We should want to make the world better.

One of the paramount reasons for civility is to create a space where those conversations can happen. Such a space requires building a certain feeling of safety and trust. We lose the required sense of safety when opinion editors feel hounded out of their jobs for having an opinion. But we also lose that sense of safety peaceful protests are disrupted with pepper spray and police in riot gear. Whenever we reduce a human being to a simplistic political or cultural label, we lose part of that space that we need for vibrant dialog.

We have a choice -- we can call each other names, or we can have disagreements where ideas are probed and we get closer to meaningful truths. But we generally cannot do both, and as far as seeking wisdom, name-calling accomplishes precisely nothing.

Psychological Standing

I recently came across the concept of "psychological standing" -- like legal standing, except if you do not have legal standing, the court tells you that you cannot intervene in a case, but with psychological standing you tell yourself that you cannot intervene in or speak out about a situation.

It's an interesting concept, because it is one of those slippery ideas that has some value but can go too far. For instance, I've never given birth and most likely never will, so it seems reasonable to maintain a great deal of humility when speaking about things in that realm. But it would be heartless to let that extend to the point where I was unconcerned by that fact that maternal mortality is rising in the US at the same time it is falling in most other developed countries.

Similarly, when people of color in the US describe the ways in which they've felt impacted by racism, I lack that experience, so when those friends and associates describe things they'd like to see change, I'm not going to turn around and tell them "No, I have a better way to solve the problems you've identified to me." Even that is tricky, because it can be true that people are tired of having to explain an issue at the same time that they want to be given a better chance to express their frustrations.

I am pretty sure we've gone to far when we say "you're an old white male, your opinion doesn't matter." Not because I need some larger platform -- I'm perfectly happy to try speaking for rational thought, democratic mores, and compassionate actions. The chips will fall where they fall. The reason I think it matters is when our efforts to raise up a particular set of voices exclude all others who may be sympathetic, we make it less likely those potential allies will feel they have the psychological standing to speak out against the wrongs we wish to correct.

I don't think there's a formula for exactly the right way to create psychological standing. It varies from one situation to the next. I've noted before that I limit myself to one post a day because I would prefer to spend the time reading thoughtful words from my friends. Whenever I address a specific issue, I do try to include words quoted directly from communities affected -- I could probably do a better job of that at times, but I try. Mostly, for me, it comes back to being motivated by compassion -- it is compassion that causes me to argue we need to do a better job with race issues, health care, policing, etc. It is also compassion that reminds me that on any of these issues I care about, mine is only one small voice, and generally not the most important voice in the room.

Red, White, or Blue?

We don't say "red, white, or blue -- choose one." When we honor the US flag, we say red white and blue.

If we have parented young children, we don't either love them or admonish them to behave better -- we do both.

We don't drive cars with only brakes or gas pedals.

Why then, do we let people suggest that no government or totalitarianism are the only possible end states of political organization?

Why do we let people suggest that pure laissez faire capitalism or minutely planned central control are the only possible economic states we can live in?

When we label people as the 1 percent or as marxists, as tyrants or anarchists, as heartless or blindly naive, we are taking the lazy way out of understanding. It can be true both that people should get to keep what they earn (after paying for services) and that seeing generational and locally entrenched poverty tells us the free market system has failed in some way.

It's common to see mathematical functions that have low values at either end of their range, and a peak somewhere in the middle of their range. We should expect that many real-world situations have the best outcomes when we choose a course that is between two extremes as well.

Breaking Bread Together

It's worth taking a bit of a deeper look at the background to de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America." In his native France, the revolution had become empire under Napoleon, and been defeated at Waterloo. It is fair to say the revolution was struggling. Cromwell's revolution in England a little more than a century earlier had also failed quickly. Why had the American revolution not created the chaos that led to resurgence of authoritarian control as other revolutions had?

Part of de Tocqueville's answer is that non-governmental institutions provided public services to without resorting to governmental solutions. They are part of the whole fabric of and aspiration for minimal government in the US. And, though clearly different people have different ideas of what government priorities should be, I don't know anyone in the US who wants to pay more taxes or wants to be told what to do by the government. We do almost universally share at least some of that world view.

So the question becomes, how do we unite to solve problems without depending on governmental interference?

First, this is like "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." 

Second, we need to identify problems we can work together to solve -- for instance, reduction in in use of force incidents between police and citizens is widely desired, and could be a unifying problem. Or we could dehumanize police and say it is all their fault. Or we could dehumanize citizens and say it is all their fault. Finger-pointing does not give us leverage for change.

Third, we need to be more careful about alienating our potential allies before we start. If I tell you that "you and your kind are destroying the country" -- you're not all that likely to sit down and break bread with me, are you?

Swarming Problems

In "Democracy in America," Alexis de Tocqueville writes that he believes that mores in the US, or "habits of mind," play a prominent role in the protection of freedom. These "habits of mind" include township democracy and civic associations. These associations and political structures, it is argued, bring people together outside of party politics to solve problems.

In "Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems before They Happen," Dan Heath recounts the effort in Newburyport to combat death from domestic violence. He identifies as a specific point of leverage when groups with different responsibilities, powers, and perspectives sat down together to identify women at risk and and how they could be supported. Then someone made the call or did the drive-by to check-in. Prior to their work, there was an average of 1 domestic violence-related death each year. In each the 14 years after there were none.

In the DevOps approach to software development, we talk about swarming the problem -- attacking the problem with all the resources we have. At the same time, instead of blaming people, we view people who make a mistake or identify a problem as messengers that are part of the solution. This is a practice that evolved from "pulling the andon rope" in lean manufacturing. In lean manufacturing, again, the focus is on working as a team to solve a problem and assigning blame is discouraged or forbidden.

What all these have in common is moving from pointing the finger at others to identifying problems. And then enlisting the broadest possible group of people and organizations to help solve the problem in a coordinated and efficient way.

We should do more of that.

Coastal Litter

It does always annoy me to see litter on the trail when hiking. It speaks to a lack of care and concern that actually sort of mystifies me -- it just makes no sense to go to all that effort to enjoy a relatively pristine environment, and then leave it visibly less pristine. But as far as I know, that litter causes relatively little damage to the flora and fauna of the ecosystem. So my sense of annoyance and befuddlement are generally about equal.

It wasn't until I lived in a coastal community that I began to be truly angered by litter. It is estimated that marine littler reduces the value of global marine ecosystem services by $500 to $2500 billion annually, or 1 to 5% of total value [see "Global ecological, social and economic impacts of marine plastic"]. Knowing this, seeing our shoreline littered with single-use water bottles, disposable shopping bags, surgical gloves, face masks, containers from take-out meals, and so on -- well, it just infuriates me. We know where all this litter comes from, and we cannot lay all the blame at the feet of governments and big business.

I do think some public shaming is in order on this one. Maybe not $1000 littering penalties which seem unlikely to be assessed, and seem grossly unfair... I think the general idea that behavior is most readily modified by proportionate and reliable penalties applies here. But realistically, catching non-compliant people is hard to do reliably. A little bit of moral shaming does not seem unwarranted as well. 

Still, if it is hard to catch people in the act, I wonder if there are other incentives that could apply. I did see an initial reduction in cans and bottles as litter when bottle bills were passed here in Massachusetts. However, the value of the deposit has not changed with inflation and there are many classes of container that logically should be included, yet are not. So that dial seems to be creeping back. We should revisit and strengthen the bottle bill, IMHO.

But that only part of our litter problem. Could we offer incentives that are hard to manipulate for cleaning up seaside rubbish? Could we somehow gamify trash pickup to create incentives to remove this trash from our coastal ecosystems? As they say, losing trillion dollars or marine services here, and a trillion dollars there, and all the sudden you're talking about real money.

Why I wear a Mask

A lily pad grows so that each day it doubles its size (area). On the 30th day of its life, it completely covers the pond. How long does it take for the pond to be half covered?

Most of us have seen a variant of this problem and know the answer is 29 days. But most of us can also remember knowing someone who got it wrong or getting it wrong ourselves. 

Exponential growth (and our generally poor intuitive understanding of it) is why, when an area sees a rapid upsurge in Covid-19 cases, we need to resort to heavy-handed measures like partial shutdown of normal services. Parts of the US are currently seeing new cases double every 10 days. Without preventative measures they will quadruple in 20 days.

Market capitalism does a good job of ensuring that we do not keep excess medical capacity available "just in case." So much of that demand, absent regulating elective procedures, would need to be met by increasing capacity. Can you imagine doubling our medical capacity in 10 days? If in Boston we have about 10 major hospitals, it would mean building 10 more in 10 days. And then staffing them with trained professionals. But then it would mean adding 30 more in the 10 days after that. And to meet the demands of 30 days of exponential growth, Boston would need to build and staff 120 new hospitals in the 3rd period of 10 days.

Even allowing that I've made a number of simplifying assumptions, this is clearly ridiculous. We know intuitively that our capacity to build critical infrastructure is more or less linear and can never keep up with exponential growth. 

But it is worse than that. To start with, we cannot train medical staff in 10 days, even if every new facility is a tent hospital. Further, while it might take only 10 days to double the number of new cases, it typically takes 20 or more for a hospitalized patient to be discharged from what I understand. So we cannot even clear our facilities as fast as we fill them.

In our modern, connected and social world, once the virus takes hold in a community this 10-day doubling period seems about typical. Or roughly speaking, we are sure it is not doubling every day and we are sure it doubles much more quickly than every 100 days, again excluding community-wide preventive measures. And because of our connected and social modern world, most communities will eventually see this impact. To respond before the virus takes hold, we would need readily available testing that gives us results in one or two days. And we'd need very good contact tracing. We just do not have either of those capabilities at this point.

Given all that, to prevent spread, we really have two choices if we want to prevent tens or even hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths in the US: masks with social distancing, or quarantine. The first choice allows our economy to reopen, the second does not. I would prefer to see our economy restart; I will wear my mask.

Fairness

When I was in college, I sometimes experimented with trying to bait my dad into oppositional debates about politics. At the time, he was a Reagan/Bush supporter and I was more or less anything but.

One of the big concerns of the time was worry over our trade deficit with Japan in particular and loss of US industrial capacity overall. Also, at that same time, his company was sending him pretty regularly to Mexico to move production lines for Stanley Tools from the US to our southern neighbor. It seemed to me, this was the perfect chance to engage in some gotcha politics.

When I pressed him about how he could support the Reagan/Bush rhetoric on how other countries were eroding our industrial capacity at the same time he was working to move part of our industrial capacity out of the country his reply was something like this: "By now I've spent a lot of time in Mexico. I've seen a lot of poverty -- really heartbreaking poverty. What makes you think that their right to prosperity is any less than yours?"

Well, he was right, of course. The needed changes are not always clear or easy, and we may not always agree on the best course. But it comes down to this: when a person faces economic struggles and/or struggles for justice that are more or less entirely determined by the accident of where they are born or who their parents are, that is unfair. When that unfairness extends across wide demographic groups or persists across generations, I believe we cannot simply ignore it as a problem that will resolve itself.

Confirmation Bias

According to legend, Galileo is said to have dropped two spheres of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their time of descent was the same. In fact, for Galileo, this was (at least initially) a thought experiment. The argument is simple -- imagine you have two balls of different mass. According to Aristotle (and most people's intuition), the heavier ball will fall faster. That will cause the string to pull taut as the lighter object slows the fall of the heavier object. But the system as a whole is heavier than the heavy object alone, and therefore should fall faster. It's a contradiction, and they must fall at the same speed.

Many of us repeated this experiment either by directly dropping weights or by rolling balls down ramps. If thought alone tells us the truth, why do the experiment? Because we tend to dismiss logical arguments on the basis of our preconceptions and ignore arguments and evidence that challenge them. We see things that confirm our prior beliefs and completely miss things that disconfirm them.

This is known as confirmation bias, and none of us are immune. Unchecked, this is even a aspect of a variety of neurotic or psychotic states. If one believes strongly that one is a target of other people's ill will or aggression, one is likely to be able to fit many otherwise unaccounted-for incidents into this view. This confirmation bias helps explain why people of opposing political views will look at the same events and draw very dissimilar conclusions.

What we share as a common frame of reference is what allows us to communicate with one another, and thus to form critical bonds such as families, communities, and nations. That common frame of reference is the observable physical world. So we have an almost immeasurable interest in preserving that common understanding of objects and events in the real world. Confirmation bias attacks that very fabric.

To lessen the force of cognitive bias, we can build some compensatory habits. When we see something that we automatically agree with or disagree with, we can note that some sort of confirmation is happening. We can ask "What if I thought the opposite of those ideas?" We can ask ourselves what actual evidence we have for our beliefs. When we find ourselves disagreeing, we can ask "What evidence might others have for their beliefs?"

If you disagree with the idea of wearing a mask to prevent spread of covid-19, can you open your mind enough to understand why people urge its use? The answers are readily available, and while you may not be inclined to agree, snarky posts ignoring scientific studies or the real pain of people who have lost loved ones is neither compassionate or open-minded.

At the same time, if you believe we must stay in lockdown until the risk of transmission is effectively zero, then you may be missing or refusing to acknowledge the real suffering that economic hardship causes, the many sources of secondary death, and the fragility of our food chain for many millions of people across the globe.

The truth probably includes both the idea that we need to get the economy rolling as quickly as we can, and that the fastest way to rebuild the economy includes a lot of civically-motivated people wearing masks in public. But we will take much longer to rebuild the economy, and many people will needlessly die, if we cannot move past our confirmation bias and see the reality we share.

Reproducibility

We are told that science proceeds by verification. Reproducibility is a requirement that cannot be shirked.

However, my yard is not large enough for another LHC. And I might be a little short of cash at the moment.

Still, perhaps the best present I have ever gotten as an adult was a small telescope, just powerful enough to see the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. And what a sight that was. In the moment I first saw that with my own eye, gained a sense of how Galileo and his contemporaries could have been so changed that they would risk freedom and life itself to tell others what they saw.

In the city where I live, you can go to the beach and get an unobstructed view out of Boston Harbor and into the Atlantic. It should not be hard for me to see the curvature of the earth from here. And still, I have not done it.

Someday soon, I will have a party and invite my rationalist friends to join me at Wollaston Beach for an act of first-hand scientific verification. Maybe my bucket list is a little different than most.

A Missing Idiom

I recently learned of the French idiom "l'esprit d'escalie" -- the wit of the staircase, that glib retort thought of too late as in when leaving the party. It makes me wonder about other states of mind that may be universal or near universal but do not have simple English idioms.

I don't know that it's universal, but I suspect it is -- every now and then some little thing reminds me or I wake from a dream awash in regret for some careless thing I said (or failed to say) years ago. Or maybe some action I took or failed to take. It seems so absurd that we can be subject to storms of self-doubt and self-flagellation for things that took place sometimes many decades before.

I guess some of these events for me have  the common feature that I never apologized for them -- most because didn't even realize my fault until later and I'd lost touch with whoever was affected. A few because I have not had the courage to properly admit my failings and offer a sincere apology.

Whatever the case, I sometimes wish I had a word for that. It would allow me to tell you that if you have those same feelings, you're not alone. On the other hand, maybe we're better off without a simple phrase that allows us to put those feelings in a box, because that lack of resolution may be what gives me to courage to finally offer those apologies that are owed.

Ad Hominum

It is funny how we can look at something over and over again, and not see it for what it is.

I've been trying to figure out how I can best express my frustration with the labeling and "othering" that seems to be central to our social and political relations today. What I had completely missed is this othering is a particularly insidious form of ad hominum attack.

An ad hominum attack is an argument that attacks the person rather than the position. I don't want to call anyone out -- this pattern seems to be pervasive -- so let's say I feel kittens are destroying the fabric of our society. I might say that "Kittens are going to ruin our democracy. The kitten stance is that logic does not matter. The only way a kitten sees to achieve its ends is to manipulate you with cuteness. And worse, kittens will inevitably morph into household cat infestations, houses where the cat owns the couch because they claimed it first, and justice demands that your food must be shared equally with the cats without regard to their contributing nothing to the household income."

At first it seems we are laying out specific arguments against the kitten/cat position. In fact, as we cycle from label to accusation repeatedly, we set up a boogeyman that we tarnish with our first accusation, then we cycle back with our new boogeyman and use that to make our second accusation seem just slightly more sinister than our first. Now our boogeyman is a bit worse by association and we can cycle back and repeat.

We started with accusations and a label and we have iteratively generated an ad hominum argument that allows us to move forward with a fresh sense of outrage that frees us from the need to substantiate or explore our accusations. This is not an honest way to form an argument.

Sometimes when we make a point, we need to be clear about the party to whom the complaint attaches. (Although, trust in our readers suggests we do not always need to be explicit in that regard.) But if your case is made by repeated reference to the other, what you have telegraphed to me is that your logic is too unsupported to stand without a cheap ad hominum attack, and that you have not done the work that entitles you to call your opinion informed or requires of me that I treat your argument seriously.

Independence Day, 2020

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among [People], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Just a couple of thoughts...

"Created equal" is about value. It is not about ability, wealth, or resources.

Years later, some of these some people came together again to build a government that is based on our right to alter it. This (then new) government incorporates our right to change it in annual elections and in numerous other forms. Let's not squander those rights by failing to participate, or fall short of the promise of the founders by discouraging others from participating.

One way people participate in democracy is through assembly and protest. It is noted in The Declaration that experience has shown people often continue to suffer, rather than working to change the forms of government that are failing them. Therefore, if people are willing to subject themselves to tear gassing and potential violence against themselves, it seems likely to me that they truly have some heart-felt grievance that at least needs some sort of voice. If the people expressing that grievance are to be treated as having a value equal to my own, it is on me to listen with an open heart.

Happy Independence Day!