Law Enforcement and the Virtuous Questions of Zero Defect Standards
We haven't had a commercial airliner crash in 12 years.
In 2015 we had 50 million police interactions with the American public. That’s 911 calls, traffic stops, arrests or other activities. 990 people were killed during those interactions. I’m using 2015 because I had some old research I used for an old essay handy. 990 is pretty close to the norm in America though so for the sake of this discussion, consider it current.
If there were a manufacturing company that had 990 defects out of 50 million, that would actually be considered high. When you take into consideration that an actual killing of a human is the end of something where multiple things went wrong along the way, then the defect rate of our police interactions is much, much higher.
Upstream of those interactions, I’m not sure what the opportunity for improvement is. 50 million interactions sounds high. But the data shows us that when police stop engaging with the population, crime goes up. Police related violence goes down. But violence between the rest of us goes up. The broad call to defund or stop policing isn’t really supported by a reality that makes people safer at the margin. Most of the folks I know that live in high crime areas don’t want the cops to go away. They have to live in what’s left behind. It doesn’t mean that we just live with the churn of hundreds of Americans killed by the government (cops=government) each year though.
The FAA handles 10 million passenger flights a year in America. We haven’t had one of them crash in 12 years. You read that right. Not one. Zero. There have been mishaps and close calls. But the absolute failure of a smoking hole in the ground has been avoided to an incredible degree.
It’s a good analogy to police shootings/deaths because the orders of magnitude of incidents are similar. So we can think a bit about why zero is the standard in one group and something less than zero is for the other. It doesn’t matter that the nature of the activities are different. In fact, it’s the difference that gives us the insight.
The first thing that comes to mind is that one may be much easier than the other. But that thought quickly reveals something crazy if you say it out loud. Is it easier to fly a commercial aircraft than it is to not shoot someone you are arresting? To the extent where you can do one thing for a dozen years without a single defect and another we have 3 defects every day of every year?
My instinct is to just chalk it up to the selection process for pilots, the training they require and the near irrational standards of regulation and execution required by the FAA. And so that’s not scalable for a police force. But that’s revealing too. Because the data doesn’t support differences in scale. There are more cops. And more arrests. But not exponentially so. There’s about 150K airline pilots that fly 10 million flights a year. And they NEVER crash. We have 700K cops that have 50 million engagements a year. And they kill 900-1100 Americans. Some (all?) of them unnecessarily.
One thought that starts to unlock some interesting follow on thoughts is that there’s no way to separate the pilot outcomes from the passenger outcomes in airline failure. A pilot doesn’t walk out the door in the morning with the task of devaluing someone else’s life in order to make sure another’s takes priority. And if that sounds overly harsh towards cops, it’s literally what we ask them to do. It’s a “good shooting” if they kill someone that was going to kill them or someone else. I don’t say that to challenge the justification. Just to say out loud what the calculus actually is that we ask of police officers who like every one of us, have deep incentives to over value their own lives when in doubt. This is also where racists and sadists and incompetence rear their ugliest impacts. The results are norms of policing that dictate behaviors you won’t find anywhere else.
I carried a gun professionally for a long time. For one prolonged period I carried a concealed 9MM pistol in a foreign country. During that time I had a few instances where I thought someone was about to do something that could have put my life in danger. I never pulled out my weapon. Because the norm in the line of work I was in was to only point a weapon at something you intended to shoot. And I really would have put myself in a pickle if I shot someone over there on that particular mission.
In contrast, I’m always a little surprised at how far up the decision tree unholstering a weapon is for police in America. Maybe it’s the right thing to do. Maybe it isn’t. The why behind it is another good thing to think through. They do it because they want to eliminate any doubt that they’ll have the drop on someone who wants to hurt them. Which opens us up to the next question. If zero defect (no one gets killed) were the standard, how often would we put people in positions where they’re likely to end up having their guns pointed at another person in order to guarantee their own safety? And how important to the betterment of society are those situations?
A speeding ticket? Serving a warrant for unpaid child support…which will lead to it never getting paid?
These are the sorts of questions we at least get to explore with a zero defect approach to police shootings. But you have to ask the questions. The reason we don’t really ask them though is because we don’t have a zero defect aspiration. And the reason we don’t is the elephant in the room.
I don’t know exactly when the idea gained prevalence. One thought is after 9/11. I don’t know I wasn’t thinking enough about it before then because I was a kid . But there’s a notion that the military and first responders are the same sort of thing. And that thing that they are a part of is this thin line of defense between good and evil. And I think spending some time on that is worth it if we care about police violence as a solvable problem.
First, the military is a thing that’s built for war. It is unique in that regard. And the people that serve in it generally spend a short time in it and leave. 85% are not lifers. Because healthy societies don’t have an abundance of people who love to go and fight wars and decide to do that forever. They have ones that will go for a little while because someone has to and the benefits make it worth their while. And if you start believing that these folks are directly protecting your way of life, you’ll tolerate some stupid wars and terrible behavior to that end. And if you expand that to law enforcement, some version of that problem persists.
Police officers are not the military. They are not charged with making war on anyone. They are public servants that are here to enforce the laws. This is not an insult. This is a tremendous honor with which to be trusted. It demands the best of us. Our finest. And it’s one of the reasons there are amazing public servants doing that job everywhere. If we view law enforcement to be a thin line protecting good and evil, we can tolerate quite a many bad means to achieve that end. If we view law enforcement as servants of the public, to protect and serve, we can’t.
The thin line ideology doesn’t allow us to inherently view shooting an American dead in the street as a defect. And we should. Apolitically and forever.
There are many lines, some not so thin, that hold back the forces of good and evil. One of them is that we are not base function killers. And that we value life. And we view its premature end as a tragedy. In any circumstance.