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Mike’s arrest is a carbon copy of Sandra Bland’s, isn’t it? A police officer approaches a civilian on the flimsiest of pretexts, looking for a needle in a haystack—with the result that so many innocent people are caught up in the wave of suspicion that trust between police and community is obliterated. That’s what was being protested in the streets of Ferguson: years and years of police officers mistaking a basketball player for a pedophile.2 Is this just about Ferguson, Missouri or Prairie View, Texas? Of course not. Think back to the dramatic increase in traffic stops by the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. In seven years they went from 400,000 to 800,000. Now, is that because in that time period the motorists of North Carolina suddenly started running more red lights, drinking more heavily, and breaking the speed limit more often? Of course not. It’s because the state police changed tactics. They started doing far more haystack searches. They instructed their police officers to disregard their natural inclination to default to truth—and start imagining the worst: that young women coming from job interviews might be armed and dangerous, or young men cooling off after a pickup game might be pedophiles. How many extra guns and drugs did the North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those 400,000 searches? Seventeen. Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples? When Larry Sherman designed the Kansas City gun experiment, he was well aware of this problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.”
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell
pioneers such as Galen of Pergamon (second century AD) propagated treatments like bloodletting and the use of mercury as an elixir. These treatments were devised with the best of intentions, and in line with the best knowledge available at the time. But many were ineffective, and some highly damaging. Bloodletting, in particular, weakened patients when they were at their most vulnerable. The doctors didn’t know this for a simple but profound reason: they never subjected the treatment to a proper test – and so they never detected failure. If a patient recovered, the doctor would say: ‘Bloodletting cured him!’ And if a patient died, the doctor would say: ‘He must have been very ill indeed because not even the wonder cure of bloodletting was able to save him!’
Black Box Thinking
Matthew Syed
Si l’on commence à remettre en cause les droits de propriété acquis dans le passé et leur inégalité, au nom d’une conception de la justice sociale certes respectable, mais qui inévitablement sera toujours imparfaitement définie et acceptée, et ne pourra jamais faire totalement consensus, ne risque-t-on pas de ne pas savoir où arrêter ce dangereux processus ? Ne risque-t-on pas d’aller tout droit vers l’instabilité politique et le chaos permanent, ce qui finira par se retourner contre les plus modestes ? La réponse propriétariste intransigeante est qu’il ne faut pas courir un tel risque, et que cette boîte de Pandore de la redistribution des propriétés ne doit jamais être ouverte.
Capital Et Idéologie
Thomas Piketty
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