Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,102
things he says to her is, “What’s wrong?” When he returns to her car after checking her license, he asks again: “Are you okay?” He picks up on her emotional discomfort immediately. It’s just that he completely misinterprets what her feelings mean. He becomes convinced that he is sliding into a frightening confrontation with a dangerous woman.
And what does Tactics for Criminal Patrol instruct the police officer to do under these conditions? “Too many cops today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do. People are allowed to move as they want, to stand where they want, and then officers try to adapt to what the suspect does.” Encinia isn’t going to let that happen.
Encinia: Well, you can step on out now…Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.
Brian Encinia’s goal was to go beyond the ticket. He had highly tuned curiosity ticklers. He knew all about the visual pat-down and the concealed interrogation. And when the situation looked as if it might slip out of his control, he stepped in, firmly. If something went awry that day on the street with Sandra Bland, it wasn’t because Brian Encinia didn’t do what he was trained to do. It was the opposite. It was because he did exactly what he was trained to do.
4.
On August 9, 2014, one year before Sandra Bland died in her cell in Prairie View, Texas, an eighteen-year-old African American man named Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown had been a suspect in a robbery at a nearby grocery store. When Darren Wilson—the police officer—confronted him, the two men struggled. Brown reached inside the driver’s window of Wilson’s patrol car and punched him. Wilson ended up shooting him six times. Seventeen days of riots followed. Prosecutors declined to press charges against Officer Wilson.
Ferguson was the case that began the strange interlude in American life when the conduct of police officers was suddenly front and center. And it should have served as a warning. The U.S. Department of Justice almost immediately sent a team of investigators to Ferguson—and their report, published six months later, is an extraordinary document. One of the leaders of the DOJ team was a lawyer named Chiraag Bains, and Bains says that what struck him, almost immediately, was that the anger in Ferguson wasn’t just about Brown’s death—or even largely about Brown. It was, instead, about a particular style of policing that had been practiced in the city for years. The Ferguson Police Department was the gold standard of Kansas City policing. It was a place where the entire philosophy of law enforcement was to stop as many people as possible for as many reasons as possible.
“It was very disturbing,” Bains remembers.
One officer said, “It’s all about the courts.” Another said, “Yeah, every month they’ll put up, our supervisors will put on the wall lists of officers and how many tickets they issued that month.” We understood that productivity was the goal.
Ferguson had an entire police department full of Brian Encinias. Bains went on:
They knew that their job was to issue tickets and arrest people who hadn’t paid their fines and fees and that’s what they were going to be evaluated on.
Bains said one incident shocked him the most. It involved a young black man who had been playing basketball at a playground. Afterward, he was sitting in his car cooling off when a police car pulled up behind him. The officer approached the driver’s window and demanded to see identification, accusing the driver of being a child molester.
I think [the police officer] said something to the effect like, “There are kids here and you’re at the park, what are you, a pedophile?”…The officer then orders him out of the car and the guy says, “Well, I’m not doing anything. I mean, I have constitutional rights. I’m just sitting here just playing ball.”
The officer then actually pulls his gun on the guy and threatening him and insisting that he get out of the car. The way the incident ends is that the officer writes him up for eight different tickets including not having a seatbelt on, he was sitting in his car at the park, not having a license, and also having a suspended license. He managed to issue both charges.
The man even got a ticket for “making a false declaration” because he gave his name as “Mike” when it was actually Michael.