Talking to Strangers - Malcolm Gladwell Page 0,104

chance the neighborhood will say, ‘Yeah, that intrusion is worthwhile because I don’t want to get shot tomorrow.’”

The first question for Brian Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second question is just as important: was he in the right place?

5.

Prairie View, Texas, where Sandra Bland was pulled over, is sometimes described as being “outside” Houston, as if it were a suburb. It is not. Houston is fifty miles away. Prairie View is the countryside.

The town is small: no more than a few thousand people, short streets lined with modest ranch homes. The university sits at one end of the main street, FM 1098, which then borders the west edge of the campus. If you drive around the school on the ring road, there is a small Episcopal Church on the left, the college football stadium on the right, and after that lots of pasture land, populated with the occasional horse or cow. Waller County—where Prairie View is located—is predominantly Republican, white, middle- and working-class.

Renfro: OK, talk to me about that area. Is it a high-crime area?

Encinia: That portion of FM 1098 is a high-crime, high-drug area. It’s—with my experience in that area, I have, in similar situations, with what I’ve seen, I’ve come across drugs, weapons, and noncompliant individuals.

Encinia then goes on to tell Renfro that he has made multiple arrests for “warrants, drugs, and numerous weapons, almost [all] within that vicinity.”

Encinia’s official record, however, shows nothing of the sort. Between October 1, 2014, and the Sandra Bland incident on July 10 of the following year, he stopped twenty-seven motorists on that mile-long stretch of highway. Six of those were speeding tickets. Those were compulsory stops: we can assume that any reasonably vigilant police officer, even in the pre–Kansas City era, would have done the same. But most of the rest are just Encinia on fishing expeditions. In March 2015 he cited a black male for “failure to drive in a single lane.” Five times he pulled someone over for violating “FMVSS 571.108,” the section of federal vehicle-safety regulations governing turn signals, license-plate lighting, and brake lights. The worst thing on the list are two cases of drunk driving, but let’s keep in mind that this is a road that borders a college campus.

That’s it. FM 1098 is not “a high-crime, high-drug area.” You’d have to go three miles away to Laurie Lane—a half-mile stretch of trailer homes—to find anything in the vicinity that even remotely resembles a hot spot.

“Why are you stopping people in places where there’s no crime?” Weisburd says. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Sherman is just as horrified. “At that hour of the day in that location, stopping [Sandra Bland] for changing lanes is not justifiable,” he said. Even during the initial Kansas City gun experiment—in a neighborhood a hundred times worse than Prairie View—Sherman said that the special police officers made their stops solely at night. That’s the only time of day when the crime rate was high enough to justify aggressive policing. Sandra Bland was pulled over in the middle of the afternoon.

Brian Encinia may have deliberately exaggerated the dangers of that stretch of road to justify his treatment of Sandra Bland. It seems just as likely, though, that it simply never occurred to him to think about crime as something so tightly tied to place. Literary theorists and bridge engineers and police chiefs struggle with coupling. Why would patrol officers be any different?

So it was that Brian Encinia ended up in a place he should never have been, stopping someone who should never have been stopped, drawing conclusions that should never have been drawn. The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

6.

This has been a book about a conundrum. We have no choice but to talk to strangers, especially in our modern, borderless world. We aren’t living in villages anymore. Police officers have to stop people they do not know. Intelligence officers have to deal with deception and uncertainty. Young people want to go to parties explicitly to meet strangers: that’s part of the thrill of romantic discovery. Yet at this most necessary of tasks we are inept. We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t. What should we do?

We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger—even if you