It is Genuinely a Good Idea to Never Trust The Police

This post has the kind of title that I think some people see as inflammatory, but those of us who study the police and those of us who have had direct experience with the police see as something so banal that it hardly needs to be stated. But let me illustrate the point with a recent example.

If you follow the sports world this story is well familiar to you, but if not you may have missed the story of what happened to Masai Ujiri, President of the Toronto Raptors, when he tried to access the court to celebrate with his team when they upset the Golden State Warriors in the 2019 NBA Finals.

What happened was initially the subject of some controversy, as despite the profligate number of cameras within the arena, there wasn't really any conclusive footage of what happened when a police officer working the game refused to let Ujiri access the court.

The officer in question, Deputy Alan Strickland, claimed that Ujiri assaulted him. Not just assaulted him, but approached Deputy Strickland with a "violent predisposition" and "hit [Strickland] in the face and chest with both fists” causing such injury to Strickland that he has been on sick leave for over a year while arguing his injuries were so significant as to present the possibility of permanent disability (during this time Strickland has pocketed $224,000 in salary, not including benefits). Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern (Strickland's boss, essentially) requested Ujiri be charged with battery of a peace officer, although the DA declined to press charges. Both Deputy Strickland and his department have stood by this story for well over a year now.

The problem with that story? It's completely made up.

Ujiri's legal team last week released the body camera footage of Deputy Strickland which makes it clear Ujiri did not hit Strickland at all. He actually didn't even touch Strickland, which is probably something that would be necessary to impart enough force to permanently injure someone.

Oh, did I mention Ujiri is Black? Probably completely unrelated to this story, but just thought it might be worth throwing out there.

What really stands out about this is that not only was the Alameda County Sheriff's department fully aware Strickland was lying about both the incident and his nonexistent injuries, they continued to defend him the entire time.

Or rather, what I should say is that what stands out is that we know about the department supporting Strickland's story even though they knew he was lying. 

It's quite likely the only reason we know about this body cam footage is because Ujiri has the resources to hire a good legal team and press the matter (also quite a likely factor in why Ujiri was not legally charged over the incident). Had Ujiri not been in a position of power and had the resources to challenge this but instead been similar to those who most often interact with police, he would have been charged with assault of an officer and his public counsel would have tried to get him the best plea deal possible and it never would have been known that the Deputy was lying the entire time. For a good summation of how that would go, read this great op-ed about what would have happened to George Floyd if he had survived.

This sort of routine lying about these kinds of matters is nothing unusual in the police world; it happens so much that they even have a handy name -- testilying -- for it when they do it under oath. What makes the Ujiri incident so important is specifically because it isn't a major case where there are murky circumstances and much larger issues at play. Much the opposite -- this is the kind of thing where the Sheriff's  department could have easily said "Yeah, that deputy screwed up in the confusion of the moment. Sorry about that." and it's over. 

But they didn't do that. Instead, they continually doubled-down on an obvious lie. Something they knew full well to be a lie. And they didn't just passively promote the lie the Deputy invented about the incident itself, but continued to lie about his health, pretending for over a year that he received significant injuries during an incident in which they fully knew Deputy Strickland was never even touched. This isn't some slight fudging of events, it's creating a serious crime out of thin air.

To make the obvious point -- if this is how they act in minor incidents, how do you think they act when there is anything more on the line?

Given how often we know this kind of lying happens, and given that it assuredly happens far more often than we know due to how rare it is for these kinds of behind-the-scenes machinations to ever be made public, the only realistic conclusion anyone can take away from these sorts of events is that the most prudent course of action is to always assume police are lying until proven otherwise. It's not being hyperbolic, it's simply observing a repeated series of behaviors and drawing an obvious conclusion from them.

Lansing, Minneapolis, and Why "Reform" Ain't Gonna Cut It

Which group of demonstrators do you wager was heavily armed?

Just last week I turned in the final manuscript for a book I'm writing which will be published by the University of California Press in the Spring of 2021 (title TBD because even though I came up with what I thought was a super clever and thoughtful title, it has roundly been deemed terrible by everyone involved in the process and no, I'm not bitter about this in the slightest). The book is about my on-going research i the Kurdish region of Iraq, specifically focusing on the reconstruction of the police force. The central argument fo the book is that how the police are designed to function tells us a great deal about how that state operates.

To make this argument, one I've made throughout my decade or so of published research, I've had to spend a lot of time researching not only ideas about policing and police organization, but about political theory and democratic governance. The vast majority of my research and publications sit at the nexus of these two -- basically, what does a state need to continue existing and how are the police central to those needs?

Not surprisingly, there are a wide variety of arguments regarding the proper answer to this question (to get a great rundown of them, read Chapter 2 of my book!). They run the gamut from the pollyanna-ish of "the state exist to provide sunshine and joy and the police are what it uses to keep everyone safe" to the critical variety of "the state exists to enshrine exploitation and the police are what it uses to keep everyone from rising up and challenging it" and all sorts of other positions that fall somewhere between these two poles. I stick with the most critical view, which is that police exist as a barrier between those within power and those without, and that their actual material purpose is to enforce boundaries of race, class, and other significant social hierarchies. In other words, they exist to protect power, and everything else they do is subsidiary to that function. I reject not only the official pronouncements of police departments themselves as to what their duties are, but also more mainstream variants of sociological and criminological thought which posit the police as filling as meaningful public function.

Yet as is the beauty of Marxist science, you don't actually have to simply accept my argument, you need only compare the arguments of police forces and mainstream academics to the actual behaviors of police officers and departments (reality, of course, having a well-known Marxian bias). Because one central factor every police department and mainstream definition of police have in common is that police exist to prevent and/or react to challenges to the law and the existing order. Witness how the rallying cry of those who "Support the Police" has long been "Law and Order." This is meant both in the narrow sense of the term, as enforcing the written legal code and providing "order maintenance" have been official duties of the police basically since the founding of police as we think of them, as well as in the larger political sense of upholding the Constitution and preventing direct challenges to the state, such as allowing the duly-elected legislature to take up its duties without harassment.

This makes the police response to armed rightwing demonstrators shutting down the Michigan state legislature a few weeks back so telling. Because while I don't have the space or time to summarize every major theoretical view on policing here (buy my book!), every one of them would hold that a group of armed rebels seizing the legislature in an attempt to shut down legitimate government functioning is exactly the kind of thing police are supposed to A) prevent and/or B) end as quickly as possible. By every possible definition of what police are and why they exist, preventing armed insurrection against the legitimately-elected government is right in their wheelhouse. And yet, as so many have pointed out, not only did police neither prevent nor shut down this armed insurrection, they more-or-less just hung out and watched it happen.

If you were to rely on official police pronouncements of their roles and duties or the theories of most mainstream sociologists and criminologists, such a response is impossible to explain. These demonstrators, without masks or maintaining social distancing in the midst of a pandemic, are putting lives in danger and breaking the law. Even without the threat of a global pandemic coloring things, they are a group of people with extremely-dangerous weapons who are either directly breaking the law or threatening to do so, directly threatening both the public and the legislature, and of course, were directly preventing a legitimately-elected government from convening. Again, if you listen to mainstream academics or the police themselves, this is the platonic ideal of a situation that police should be shutting down.

It only becomes possible to understand the police response to the Michigan state house demonstrators if you understand the role of power in policing. In the case of American police, this means understanding the role of white supremacy. Put simply, the police in America don't exist to serve and protect the public, they exist to maintain capitalism and white supremacy. Sure, occasionally this necessitates serving the public, as hegemony is only born of material concession delivered through the state. But the purpose, the function, is and always has been, to ensure capitalistic white supremacy.

This has historically been quite obvious; witness how many early police forces in America were simply slave patrols (here's those notoriously far-left radicals at the National Law Enforcement Museum talking about it) or google any picture from the civil rights movement. But it also shows up in the much more subtle way of continually harassing Black people for things which are either not illegal or which are routinely ignored if they are done by white people.

But here's where I depart from where this post was originally going to go. You see, I had begun drafting this awhile back but shelved it to get to other things. I've dusted it off because it's only become much more relevant following yesterdays murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. More specifically, following the extremely heavy-handed violent response of the Minneapolis PD to the demonstrators who showed up to the site of the murder to demand justice (as shown in the picture above and the millions other available online).

There's really nothing I could have written in my original post that would drive the point home more than reality has (again, reality seems hellbent on proving Marxism correct at every possible juncture). There's no existing mainstream idea or theory of why police exist and what functions they serve that possibly explains their disparate reactions to armed demonstrators taking over a capitol building and forcing the legislature to not convene against unarmed demonstrators gathering on a street corner to protest a murder. I mean this quite genuinely -- using any official pronouncement of what police are or what they do, or any mainstream theoretical account of what police are or what they do, it is very much impossible to explain these two responses. The only possible idea these theories have to offer is that these are isolated incidents of the police failing to do what they theoretically usually do. Yet these theories have exactly zero explanations as to why these isolated events keep happening and the police keep failing what they theoretically usually do. This is important not just to score points for the theoretical school I inhibit, but because if we are to ever move past the current state of affairs, we have to actually understand what is happening.

Because if one accepts the Marxian account of police as existing to preserve and defend enshrined power relations, it suddenly becomes quite easy to explain the differing responses. In the American context, enshrined power relations has always meant white supremacy. So if you understand that the role of the police is to preserve and defend white supremacy, suddenly the differing responses in Lansing and Minneapolis are so obvious as to be banal. The demonstrators in Lansing didn't threaten white supremacy, they were in fact upset that social-distancing regulations still applied to them even though they're white. If anything, their central message was that white supremacy wasn't being defended well enough. Demonstrators in Minneapolis, despite being unarmed, were met with tear gas and rubber bullets because their argument was that white supremacy is bad. It genuinely is that simple.

Understanding the role of police in protecting entrenched power and white supremacy is important not just for understanding why the Lansing protests were met with shrugs and the Minneapolis protests were met with extreme force, but for understanding where we need to go from here. Because in the next few weeks, we'll hear lots of calls for reforms, for more training, for implicit bias awareness, for cultural sensitivity, and all of the many other calls we hear every time this disgustingly common occurrence happens. The fundamental problem with these well-meaning calls for reform is that they are based upon the theories I reject above; that is, calls for reform are based on the idea that the police are a public service organization that exist to serve the citizenry. Their underlying premise is that each of these incidents is an isolated event and it is simply a coincidence that so many keep happening and that the victims (and non-victims) all sharing obvious similarities is another astounding coincidence. But given that such ideas are demonstratively false, they make for an extremely poor basis for future action.

Indeed, with a proper understanding of the police as a force principally concerned with defending white supremacy, it quickly becomes clear why any amount of reform and new kinds of training are bound to fail (and why all such previous efforts have produced minimal changes so far). If an institution is specifically and intentionally designed to defend white supremacy, what kind of reform is going to make it no longer a white supremacist organization?

The unfortunate answer is: none. There are no reforms for this. It's past time for abolition, and any answer short of that is what has me churning out variations of this post with disturbing regularity.

RIP George Floyd.

The Grocery Store is Racist, Capitalism is Stupid, and I Hate Most Everyone

This is going to be a post about a racist old cop at the grocery store. But it's also about why I fucking hate the invocation of need for civility and hearing the "other side" and engaging in dialogue with people who are clearly acting in bad faith and are just shitty people, not misinformed. It should surprise exactly no one who has ever spoken to me that I hate the concept of civility, both in and of itself because civility is a meaningless social construct, and because its invocation is 11 times out of 10 completely racist. Civility is very often evoked to me when I say "fuck X" with X being "Republicans," "Nazis," or any other shitty useless member of society.

Of the many reasons I'm opposed to civility and this kind of "debate," possibly the most central is that people who say and do shitty things are not the kinds of people who will change through civil debate. I wholly endorse every sentence of this piece on whether or not one should punch Nazis (spoiler alert: the answer is always YES), but I want to highlight this bit from the linked piece on "civil debate" with pieces of shit:

Dialogue is for reasonable people acting in good faith. Dialogue is between two acceptable positions. “Taxes need to be raised” vs. “taxes need to be lowered” is grounds for dialogue. “Taxes need to be raised” vs. “Jews should be thrown in ovens” is grounds for a beating.

So my story is not about a Nazi (well, he very well could be a Nazi, but this instance is just plain ol' racism), but the spirit is the same -- anyone willing to act like a Nazi is not going to be swayed by a patient explanation of why it's bad to act like a Nazi. Just like racist dickheads are not going to be persuaded to not be racist dickheads by someone kindly explaining that being a racist dickhead is a bad thing.

Anyway, the short version of what happened this afternoon: I stopped in the grocery store for a few things and was waiting to use the self checkout thing because I hate human interaction and want to keep it to an absolute minimum. In front of me in line were three young Black guys, probably in their late teens or early 20s, all holding boxes of pre-made sandwiches the grocery store sells in those weird little food stalls that make the one part of the grocery store a cafeteria. You know what I'm talking about. We're all just standing in line, those guys are chatting with each other, I'm scrolling mindlessly on my phone, nothing's out of the ordinary.

Then all of a sudden the security guard/cop (I thought he was just store security, turns out he's an actual cop) makes a beeline to the guys in front of me telling them they need to pay and leave. One of them, who miraculously stayed way cooler than I would ever have been able to in this interaction, told him that's exactly what they're trying to do, as they're standing in line holding money in their hands (which one might argue is a pretty traditional sign someone is trying to pay for their merchandise). He then asked why the cop was being so aggressive with them, which caused the cop to spin an amazingly fantastical story about how they weren't actually three people in line to pay for the items they were holding with the money they were also clearly holding, but instead that one was a lookout and the other two were going to rob the place. When another of the three pointed out they were standing in line with money in their hands, he told them they needed to pay right now and leave immediately. Still showing far more restraint than I would in such a situation, the guys set their sandwiches down and told him they didn't want them anymore and left, and the security guy picked up the discarded sandwiches to take them back.

After I paid for my stuff, I tracked the cop down and asked him if I could speak to his supervisor, and he asked me with a big friendly smile what the problem was and what he could do for me. When I told him it was insanely inappropriate the way he was clearly targeting those guys because they were Black, he simply said "Oh please" in an exaggerated manner and walked off (it's worth noting how much his behavior and demeanor changed from when he thought I was just a white person to when he found out I don't care for racism). As I followed him I activated my Clean Cut White Professional Demeanor (TM) and demanded to see his supervisor and he just told me to "go to the front of the store." Being both outraged and a dick, I told him I didn't understand his directions and at least made him shame walk me to a manager.

The manager (also white) dutifully listened to me, but then explained that I didn't know the full story and that the cop had actually been following them around the store for a while. When I loudly interrupted her to tell her that I was not at all surprised he had been following them and that was indeed the exact problem I had, she insisted that I didn't know the full story. But when I asked her for the full story, she was forced to admit she had no idea what happened, either. It was at this point I noted that I had just been walking around the store for about 20 minutes wearing an empty backpack. She didn't seem to understand the point I was making, so I pointed out to her that is suspicious behavior, as that is what people who are actually trying to steal stuff do. Of course, I contrasted this with the completely-normal behavior of the guys who got harassed, and she tried to sputter out a nonsensical explanation of how I wasn't suspicious.

Being tired of the go-around, I finally asked her if it was company policy to harass Black people doing nothing wrong or if that was just this one cop's prerogative, and she assured me in pained corporate speak that the company does not tolerate this sort of thing and that she would review the security tapes to see what happened (spoiler alert: she will absolutely not do this).

But you know what really sticks out in this story? As I walked out of the store, the asshole cop was back on his little cop perch by the registers watching me. And once he noticed I could see him, he got that fucking smirk. You know the exact smirk without even having seen it -- it's the smirk that says "Yeah, I can fuck with Black people all I want and you can't do shit about it hippie."

And he's right. That manager isn't going to do shit. I called the Giant Eagle corporate headquarters to report it and they aren't going to do shit. I called the police precinct that covers the area to report it and you know they aren't going to do shit. Hell, I'm not really going to do shit about it. I mean, I complained to everyone I can think of to complain to about this, but I know it's not going to go anywhere. I could stop shopping there in feeble protest, but that's not going to accomplish anything, and it's the closest grocery store to my house and I'm a profoundly lazy man.

This all put me in a shitty mood as I was walking home, reflecting on how there was nothing I could do that would actually effect this dickhead in any way, and he had just ruined what was otherwise a really great day I was having. And then the solipsism of this hit me and I spent the rest of the walking thinking about how shitty it would have to be to not be able to buy a fucking sandwich without someone treating you like shit for no reason.

But even more than my own hopeless feeling of powerlessness that comes from knowing that prick won't even be mildly inconvenienced for this or the rage I feel for those guys who just wanted some sandwiches is the anger over that fucking smirk. Because even if these young men had done something that called for such a response (though they hadn't, and I strain to think what would justify such a dick move), I would think any normal person who had just been told what they did was blatantly racist would be slightly repentant. Even if they had justification for their actions, I still think most right-thinking people would be at least slightly chastened by the appearance of being a racist dick, even if they weren't.

But not this guy. Nope, he smirked. And he maintained eye contact with me the entire time I walked out to make damn sure I knew he was smirking at me. He smirked because he enjoys this -- he enjoys holding power over people, and he especially enjoys that he gets to put Black people in their place and there's nothing they or I or anyone can do about it. All while he's being paid by the tax dollars of these young men to serve and protect them.

And yet what fucking kills me is how many white people will react to this story the exact way that manager did -- even while admitting they have no idea what happened, they are fully sure that these Black guys deserved to be treated like criminals for having the audacity to stand in line waiting to pay for sandwiches. Plenty of them would roll their eyes just like the asshole himself, because to these people the idea that a Black person wouldn't deserve to be disrespected is simply inconceivable.

These people deserve neither civility nor dialogue. They deserve a fucking two-by-four right into their smug fucking faces, and if you argue otherwise, you're just as big a problem as they are.

If You Don't Like Joe Mauer, Fuck You

Chairman Mauer

Joe Mauer played in what was likely his last professional baseball game last weekend. While the aging star is remaining coy about his future plans, the fact that the Twins sent him out for a ceremonial single pitch back behind the plate indicates they likely think his career is over. Did I cry watching that moment? You bet your sweet ass I did. Mauer's not just one of the most under appreciated Twins of all time, but represents even more to folks in my generation.

It's not just that he's a great ball player, though he was (is?) an amazing ball player. Check out this article and the comments for a sample of his impressive statistical achievements. Or check out this article for a much more sentimental look at his career achievements. Or check out this one. Or follow Aaron Gleeman's twitter account. I could easily provide you a few dozen more links, because God damn, dude could play baseball. While his entire career is pretty great, and we'll always be left to wander what ridiculous heights he could have achieved had not concussions robbed him of both much of his prime and his inhuman batter's eye, his 7 year peak as a catcher is arguably the best 7 years of any catcher ever, and while it's far from guaranteed, it's not too terribly difficult to put together a Hall of Fame argument for him.

In many ways, Mauer's life is like a sappy movie script -- he grew up in St. Paul, got drafted by the hometown team, became an All Star and MVP while playing his whole career for said hometown team. Hell, he even went ahead and had twin daughters just to make sure his life was as on the nose as possible. But what really made him lovable (and oddly hatable to some weird slice of the population) is how peak-Minnesota he is.

His first ubiquitous ad campaign was for milk. I'm pretty sure he genuinely said "golly" on a regular basis. I shit you not, when he was interviewed on-field after the game in which he collected his 2,000th hit, his first words were that it "sure was neat." His career hit spray chart looks like someone programmed a computer to the "solid fundamentals" setting. He says one of his favorite hobbies is mowing the lawn. Granted, there's a delightful symmetry in here in that he echoes Twin great and Hall of Famer Harmon Killebrew who once said washing the dishes was his favorite hobby, but I think it's worth noting that a millionaire sports superstar in his 20s reported mowing the lawn as what he liked to do with his time off. This man is the state of Minnesota granted sentience.

Yet what made him so great was also what made him come across as boring to so many people. Mauer's skills weren't awesome home runs that make highlight reels, but instead opposite-field singles appreciated only by people over 65 who have coached at some point in their lives. I remember after one of his batting titles the Star Tribune published a giant graphic that was just his batting line from every game that season, and what stuck out the most was how ridiculously consistent he was. There weren't big hot streaks or slumps, just constantly one or two hits every single night (or, you know, the exact thing every hitter is trying to do, but only a rare few are capable of).

Weirdly enough, this all seems to have caused a significant and vocal section of the Twins fan base to just hate Mauer, to the point where even national publications are running stories wondering why Twins fans hate the greatest player they've had in a generation. For many of these people it was that Joe was somehow too much of a weakling to shake off a brain injury and just go back out there. For others, it was that he was paid for his work, which as this nice summary points out is incredibly stupid both because A) the family that owns the Twins is worth multiple billions and can easily afford it, and B) at least by FanGraphs valuation, Mauer produced at least $100 million more in value than he was paid by the Twins. For other, even more dumb people, it's because he never single-handedly won a World Series. Which, considering that Mike Trout, the greatest player alive, already by Baseball Reference WAR the 144th best player out of all 19,103 to ever play in the MLB, has only been to the playoffs once and didn't get out of the first round, should put to bed that argument.

I, on the other hand, in addition to remembering the near-decade of Hall of Fame-level play, choose to enjoy the fact that Mauer was actually quite incredibly weird in a fun, goofy way, albeit one hidden behind suffocating layers of Minnesotan reserve. Like the fact that despite being the #1 pick of the team, he shared a house with teammate Justin Morneau, and for many years, when new players were called up from AAA, they would stay in their basement. Although a google search is not turning it up, I swear to all that is Holy that I once read a profile about what it was like inside the Mauer and Morneau house, and it was an adorable baseball version of the odd couple, where the fastidious Mauer has all of his shoes carefully arranged in his closet, and the slovenly Morneau has empty pizza boxes all over his room with his curtains actually just bedsheets he nailed over the windows. Hell, Mauer once had a beat-making lab in his house because he's so into rap music. Seriously, this guy had a studio for making rap music. Tell me that's not funny and endearing.

The funny thing to me about having to defend why people should like Joe Mauer is that I'm not a particularly big fan of his. I actually have his jersey, but it's only because I bought it when I was broke grad student and knew I could only ever afford one nice realistic jersey (though it's definitely still a knock off, I ain't paying clubhouse prices), so I had to go with someone I knew would never leave the team. I don't want to be walking around Target Field with a fucking Boof Bonser jersey on or some shit. And yeah, his style of play can definitely be pretty boring at times. And, of course, he himself seems to be pretty boring most of the time. But he's also a really fucking good baseball player.

A large part of my defensiveness about Mauer, despite the obvious fact that he's arguably a Hall of Famer but many Twins fans think of him as a bum, is that he really represents an era of not only Twins baseball, but of my life. Joe's only a few months younger than I am, and came up to the big league level the same year I moved to Minneapolis, so I've always felt a special affinity for the guy. Moreover, he was central to the scrappy Twins teams of the 2000s that really coincided with me falling back in love with the game of baseball after not really having paid much attention to it since I quit little league.

Even though those teams never won anything of much importance, they were fun as hell to watch. And despite the lack of post season success, I did get to see a Cy Young and two MVPs during the stretch I lived in Minneapolis, and the far lesser impressive but insanely fun rise of The Piranhas, so it's always an era I'll remember fondly. Beyond how the team performed, my affinity for that era is probably due a lot more to the fact that it coincided with the majority of my 20s and my first time living in a major metropolitan area. The Twins of that era, and their incredibly shitty home field, were perfect for a young, broke graduate student. Tickets, which were never expensive, were available for 5 bucks on Wednesday nights, which were also Dollar Dog nights. Someone like me with basically no money could go to a game AND get dinner AND still afford a few overpriced ballpark beers. This era of Twins baseball also coincided with the time that my brother and I both lived in Minneapolis, and much of actually getting to know one another again as adults happened with a Twins loss going on in the background.

In the end, I'd argue that's really where the value of baseball lies. As the late great George Carlin noted, a baseball game is a lot more like a picnic than anything. Even the structure of the season belies how unimportant most games are -- lose tonight and there's a hundred more chances to get it back. Yeah, winning is great, but really baseball is about the experience. I'd probably rather watch a bunch of Twins losses with my friends at the field than I would want to watch the Twins win a World Series by myself in my living room.

So yeah, a lot of this affection has little to do with the team, but there was one constant through it all, and that's Joe Mauer. So I'm probably prone to be a bit overly-protective of the guy and/or inflate his importance. I'm definitely not arguing he's, like, a good person or anything; I don't know the guy and if the past few years have taught us anything, it's that the public face of famous people is often very different than what they're really like.

The point is just that he's undoubtedly one of the best Minnesota Twins ever and yet a lot of Twins fans think he sucks. That's dumb. If you don't like Joe Mauer, fuck you.



Image credit to the dearly-missed blog of Bat Girl

Why I'll Keep Teaching the Stanford Prison Experiment (Even Though It's A LIE!!1!1!!1!)

So there's a new article making the rounds of academic social media (and maybe normal people social media, who knows?) about how the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was bunk. Here's what I believe is the original piece that sums it up as "a sham" while this one calls it "a fraud."  But I would submit it's much less the case that this very famous experiment is a fraud and a lie that academics have been uncritically accepting for decades, and more the case that, as always, science reporting sucks pretty bad.

As far as I can tell, most of the reports suddenly appearing about this decades-old experiment are drawing from the piece linked above to the article written by Ben Blum, who notably has a book he's trying to sell. This is really important, because you don't drum up book sales with nuance, you drum up book sales with splashy headlines about how a famous old study is a FRAUD full of LIES.

The interesting thing about this is that it's almost the inverse of how science reporting typically sucks. How it usually goes is that a study (like all studies!) finds an interesting, but limited, effect of X on Y in a very limited setting, and then reporters blow it out of proportion with headlines like "New study proves X causes Y!" without noting any of the many, many limitations of the study. This one just does the mirror inverse, where it acts as if the SPE was canonical scientific gospel which has been DESTROYED and SHREDDED by new evidence. Like all shitty science reporting, if you actually pay attention to it, there's nothing much here (famous old study has plenty of issues, all of which are well known to pretty much everyone), but it's trumpeted as EXPOSING A LIE!

Really, there's so much wrong with Blum's piece that it truly deserves an FJM-style line-by-line takedown, but ain't nobody got time for that. And yet a lot of otherwise intelligent people are falling for this shoddy writing, so I do feel compelled to hit on some of the major issues with Blum's style of...reporting? Yeah, let's call it reporting.

One big problem is that Blum's critique reeks of anti-intellectual posturing. The whole thing has the distinct tone of "Oh, these nerds think they're so smart, but look at how they were all duped by this fraudulent study!" But...that's just not the case at all. Sure, maybe in the immediate period after study was released academics might have accepted it rather uncritically, but no one currently thinks of it as solid research. I mean, when I first learned of it in undergrad...checks calendar, lets out long defeated sigh...nearly 20 years ago, it was already the go-to example of unethical and shoddy science. Hell, even in Blum's article he has to note "methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted." Swift and widespread. SWIFT. AND WIDESPREAD. That does not sound like uncritical acceptance! Of course, he brushes past that point really quickly, probably because it undermines the entirety of his argument. Even more annoyingly, when he (or any of the other articles I've seen written about this) actually talks to an academic about the SPE, they all pretty much uniformly say something along the lines of "Oh yeah, that study had tons of problems, but it's useful for illustrating some certain points." So again, there's literally no evidence academics are simply uncritically accepting this study, and yet that's the hook of every one of these articles.

This is, of course, to say nothing about the fact that it's one single study. Something people outside of the sciences and/or academia have a hard time grasping is that it's incredibly rare that a single study really amounts to anything. Because no study is perfect, there are always more variables to include, more ideas to consider, etc. Science works by collecting a large number of studies. So even if people were uncritically accepting this as true (which they aren't), it's being disproven (which it isn't) wouldn't really matter, because there's been tons and tons of other research conducted on prisons, the prison environment, the power of authority, etc., many of which come to the generally the same conclusions. Again, one study in isolation is typically pretty useless. That's why we have lots of people studying things lots of different ways. I mean...that's just what science is.

Another major problem is that neither Blum nor any of the other people writing about this at all address the concept of what we call in our fancy-pants social science language "desirability bias." Which is pretty much what it sounds like -- all of us want to present ourselves as good people, consciously or unconsciously. That's why we have all sorts of checks and measures built into survey and interview research, because it's rare that you can just straight-up believe what people say. A classic example of this from political science is asking people who they voted for in prior presidential elections. When you do this, even if your sample is very carefully calibrated to be representative of the US population, you will get significantly more people saying they voted for the winner than actually happened. For some this is a conscious manipulation of the truth (no one likes to be lumped in with the loser, or to have voted "wrong") while for others its subconscious (they don't really remember who they voted for, so their mind fills in the blank with the more memorable winner). But the point is that it doesn't matter at what level it's happening, just that its empirical reality that most people will try to present themselves in what they think is the best light.

How this applies here is that most of Blum's damning expose is based on the fact that several of the principal research participants now say they knew what was happening all along and that they were just playing the roles they thought they were supposed to play. And maybe this is indeed true! But there's zero reason to just accept these guys' word on that. Because you could just as easily argue that if you're someone who's famous for, say, being a sadistic asshole during this world-famous experiment, or freaking out and having a massive panic attack, you have pretty good reason to later say "Oh no, no. None of that was real. I was totally just acting the entire time! I definitely knew what was going on and wasn't tricked in the slightest!" I mean, I sure as hell would. Really, there's no way to actually know, and my point is not that these guys are lying. Rather, the point is that it's just as likely they're inventing a new story to excuse their behavior as it is they had this all figured out from the get-go.

But yet, even if most of the people involved were consciously acting out a part (even though it's obvious not all of them were, such as the fellow who staged a hunger strike), this still stands as a damning condemnation of our prison system. After all, is it not telling that a group of college students told to be prison guards assumed that meant they needed to be abusive assholes?

Furthermore, the training of the guards in this study was not terribly different than the training actual prison guards receive. If you're interested in a great detailed account of prison guard training, I highly recommend Ted Connover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.

For instance, check out this supposedly damning quote from Zimbardo:

"“We cannot physically abuse or torture them,” Zimbardo told them, in recordings first released a decade and a half after the experiment. “We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree… We have total power in the situation. They have none.”"

Yup, that's pretty much what actual prison guards are taught -- what they legally can and cannot do, and then from there are basically told to make it work however they can. Indeed, here's another passage that is somehow supposed to prove the SPE was a fraud:

"In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants."

So sure, this proves Zimbardo oversold his experiment (which, again, is a point so thoroughly established and accepted that it's beyond banal). But it really undermines the whole "SPE was nothing like actual prisons!!!!" argument when you note that the guards' techniques were taken directly from actual prison experience.

Here's another passage that, again, while being marshaled as evidence the SPE was bunk, actually makes the very point the study was trying to make:

"Once the simulation got underway, Jaffe explicitly corrected guards who weren’t acting tough enough, fostering exactly the pathological behavior that Zimbardo would later claim had arisen organically."

Again, read the Connover, book -- this is what happens in actual prisons. Any guard who is being too friendly with the inmates or not enforcing tough rules will have superiors and/or coworkers set them straight right quick. So while again Zimbardo comes off as an ass, it actually reinforces the claims of the study.

But what's probably most frustrating about this poorly-formulated take down is how this dude clearly knows little else about prisons and has obviously read little-to-no social science, in general or about prisons specifically. For instance, take a look at these two quotes:

"According to a 2017 survey conducted by Cullen and his colleagues Teresa Kulig and Travis Pratt, 95% of the many criminology papers that have cited the Stanford prison experiment over the years have accepted its basic message that prisons are inherently inhumane."
"The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves."

These things are both true! Seriously, spend 10 minutes perusing the literature on American prisons and I'll be pretty shocked if you don't come away with the notion that they're inhumane. And the idea that "our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves"? That's more-or-less the basic starting point of all social sciences. Even if the SPE was completely made up and completely bullshit, these things would still be true. In this sense, it's a lot like finding problems with one study of climate change and using that to declare that climate scientists are all dopes who have been duped into believing bullshit.

The reason the Stanford Prison Experiment sticks around in textbooks and lectures is because it's an interesting example with a lot of media produced around it, making it accessible in both the figurative sense of being easy to grasp and the literal sense of having all sorts of videos and interviews and whatnot available. It's in many ways the same as how we teach the scientific method to kids in elementary school. I very distinctly remember learning that 6-stage process of science in the 4th grade. And now, as an actual research scientist, I can tell you it's complete bullshit. No scientific study in the history of scientific studies has ever followed that 6-stage process. But that doesn't mean we're teaching our children lies, it's just a simplified version of a much more complex and nuanced process. The SPE is roughly the same -- I have a hard time believing anyone is teaching it as an example of great science, but rather it's handy for discussing all sorts of methodological and ethical issues, as well as serving as general entry point to studies of the prison as well.

Again, Blum's piece undercuts itself quite directly with this quote, which I think more-or-less reflects how the majority of academics feel about the SPE:

“Even if the science was quirky,” said Kenneth Carter, professor of psychology at Emory University and co-author of the textbook Learn Psychology, “or there was something that was wrong about the way that it was put together, I think at the end of the day, I still want students to be mindful that they may find themselves in powerful situations that could override how they might behave as an individual. That’s the story that’s bigger than the science.”

And that's really the entirely of my problem with Blum's "expose." He writes as if he's blowing the lid off of a conspiracy by pointing out the problems with the SPE, when in reality, academics have been discussing these issues with the study for literal decades.

So really, what we learn from all of this is that A) the SPE has all sorts of problems that have been widely recognized from basically the day it was published, B) Philip Zimbardo is a bit of a publicity hound, C) most of the conclusions/arguments of the SPE have been confirmed by subsequent, much better-designed research, and D) none of this is news to anyone who pays any attention to this stuff.

But those conclusions are not nearly as catchy as calling something a sham, and they sure as hell won't help you sell your book.

Starbucks, Pig Motherfuckers, And When "The Law" Isn't A Great Defense

By now you've surely either seen the video or at least heard about the two guys in Philly who were arrested for SASWB, or Sitting At Starbucks While Black (not the best acronym, I know, but these things are happening faster than our collective ability to make witty shorthand for them). But in case you've been living in a cave on Mars with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears, the gist of the story is that two Black men were sitting at a Starbucks waiting for their friend when the manager told them they needed to leave if they weren't going to buy anything. When they explained they were waiting for their friend, the manager called the police, who showed up and arrested the two, perp-walking them out of the store, before eventually releasing them without charges.

A lot of the reaction to this has been in pointing out the double-standard obviously at play here, pointing out that had these two guys been white, it's laughable to think this would have played out in anywhere near the same way. Indeed, the linked article above frames it as an example of implicit bias, even though I'd argue this seems much more like a case of explicit* bias.

Yet at whatever level the bias was operating, it's pretty clear to everyone who's not being willfully obtuse that this ordeal was clearly the result of racial bias. This is one of those situations where you don't need to see empirical studies or have a broad grasp of the literature on racial hierarchies and racialized order in America or any of that fancy pants book learning stuff, you just need to walk to any Starbucks right now and see how many white people are there who obviously have not purchased anything and who are not being handcuffed and perp walked out of there.

But here's where the people who are being willfully obtuse will point out that technically these men were loitering and that's against the law, so the manager did nothing wrong by calling the police, and the police did nothing wrong by arresting them. Because they were objectively breaking the law! You can't break the law and complain when you get arrested!

Hell, that's pretty much the exact argument made by the PPD Commissioner about it. Check out his official statement:

"They did a service that they were called to do. And if you think about it logically, that if a business calls and they say that someone is here that I no longer wish to be in my business, (officers) now have a legal obligation to carry out their duties. And they did just that. We are committed to fair and unbiased policing and anything less than that will not be tolerated in this department. These officers did absolutely nothing wrong."
-Philadelphia Police Department Commissioner Richard Ross (on the actions of his officers at the 18th & Spruce Starbucks on 4/12/18)

The problem is that we're pretty much all objectively breaking the law, all the time. Mostly because of the gargantuan number of laws we're subject to, and how incredibly broad and vague many of those laws are. Hell, we don't even know how many laws there actually are. But important for this conversation, the Supreme Court has ruled that as long as someone is objectively breaking the law, the subjective motivations of the police don't matter. So even if the police in this case had said "We're arresting you because we don't want Black people in Starbucks" it still would have been a legal arrest, given that in the technical sense the two men were objectively breaking the law by loitering. In the eyes of the courts, it simply doesn't matter at all that this is a law pretty much everyone has broken at some point in time (hell, this is a law I break all the damn time). Hell, it doesn't matter that loitering laws are almost always so vague as to mean that we're pretty much all violating it all the time.

This plethora of poorly-written and vaguely-defined laws creates a scenario in which we live according to two sets of laws. There are Laws, which are passed by congress and signed by a president or governor, and then there are Laws, which are what the police enforce. Now, the two aren't entirely unrelated, but there are a hell of a lot of Laws which are not really Laws, and more than a few Laws which are not actually Laws. But even more importantly, there are a whole mess of Laws that only become Laws depending on who is breaking them. Which is what obviously happened in Philly. I can all but guarantee there were other people in the store at that very moment breaking the Law but because of their appearance were not deemed by the manager or the police to be breaking the Law.

But even though the Starbucks manager and the police were well within their official legal rights to do what they did, it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. The best analogy I can come up with is one I often use to teach my students the difference between Laws and Laws: it is your complete constitutional right (and has been verified as such by the courts) to walk up to a police officer, flip them off, and say "Fuck you, you piece of shit pig motherfucker." As long as you don't touch the officer or interfere in their work, this is 100% the Law and legal for you to do. Yet despite the fact that it's legal for you to do, it's a stupid thing to do for two reasons -- first, that's a rude thing to say. Not really the kind of thing you should go around saying to people for no reason. But second, even if you don't care about the politeness angle, it's dumb because it's pretty likely going to end in that officer whooping your ass and arresting you for some kind of trumped up charge (my guess would be some combination of disturbing the peace, interfering with an official act, and/or assault of an officer). And even though this is full your constitutional right, good luck getting any court in America to prosecute the officer who beat your ass for calling them a pig motherfucker. Because while your right to call them that is a Law it sure as hell isn't a Law.

The Starbucks incident is a case of that manager and those police officers acting similarly stupid for two very similar reasons; the first is the obvious one that racism is bad. You shouldn't treat people differently because of the color of their skin. Duh. But the second is that even if you don't care about racial equality, it's still dumb for Starbucks and the police to do this. All you need to do is look at the fallout -- look how much backlash the company is experiencing, and just think about what this is doing for police-community relations. Because even though it was all perfectly legal, that doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible idea to arrest these men.

So just like you can call a police officer a stupid pig motherfucker, it's not a good idea to do so, if for no other reason than self-preservation, it's similarly not a good idea to arrest people who are doing nothing actually wrong, if for no other reason than it will (rightfully) lead a lot of people to believe the police are biased and harass Black people for no reason.

*I'm not just being a pedantic asshole here, as I think the distinction is really important (though I definitely am a pedantic asshole). Implicit bias is generally best proffered as an explanation for split-second decisions; there is, after all, a reason it's so often invoked in the case of fatal shootings. Implicit bias happens at a subconscious level, so it's most pertinent in events which require immediate reactions which cannot be consciously processed but instead must rely on unthinking reaction. But in a situation like this, when both the Starbucks folks and the police had plenty of time to mull their decisions and think about what they're doing, it sure seems like they were explicitly making the decision to treat these Black men differently, not reacting based on a lifetime of unconscious social conditioning.

Free Speech and Whatnot

"The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence"
 --Louis Brandeis (originally), Asshole White Guy Playing Devil's Advocate (usually)

As you're undoubtedly aware, the US is current mired in a fight for its very political soul, as college kids occasionally interrupt literal Nazis giving speeches. Ok, that might be setting up a bit of a straw man, but it's more-or-less correct. Read pretty much any David Brooks column from the past several years (this is a rhetorical device, under no circumstances should you actually read a David Brooks column) and you'll hear an old white guy ranting and raving about how the kids these days don't accept free speech because they keep interrupting people who are just saying the maybe there's an intellectual case to be made for why Black people are subhuman, or trans people should be beaten up in the streets, or anyone with brown skin should be rounded up and deported en masse. You know, for the sake of argument.

Again, maybe I'm being a bit unfair to the position, but it's so difficult for me to take that position seriously that I can't genuinely write out their arguments, because they're so obviously facile that presenting them with a straight face offers them far more legitimacy than they deserve.

Of course, in an empirical sense, the war on free speech is not happening at all. In fact, actual data demonstrates the vast majority of Americans strongly support free and open speech, and those who show most support for it are...wait for it...the very college students who hack writers love to wring their hands about for the blue-hairs that actually still read newspapers. But let's skip right past this, since the empirical reality of what's happening has very little to do with why people are writing these columns and think pieces and whatnot.

If you do read the link above, you will find that there is one group that Americans of all stripes feel pretty comfortable in denying free speech rights to, and that group is Muslims. Funny that I've yet to see a David Brooks article worrying about the abuse of free speech rights for Muslims, but I'm sure that's just because his cab driver hasn't told him about this yet.

But what makes it most interesting that the same Americans who just ~love~ free speech have no problem with it being denied to Muslims, is that the group most often harmed by their beloved free speech just happens to be Muslims.

A central facet of the argument made by the white guy free speech warriors of today is essentially the old "sticks and stones" bit, in which they note that, sure, sometimes these speeches are pretty caustic and offensive, but at the end of the day, they're just words. And words have never hurt anyone! Why, even the implication that words could harm someone means you're just so juvenile! You should have thick skin, like the rich white guys who write these articles who have, just coincidentally, never been on the receiving end of racial slurs or wide-scale attempts to demonize them. Some even go so far to concede this point, but argue it's a strength that allows them to view these issues rationally and dispassionately, not like all those hot-blooded, irrational coloreds (well, they use a bit more polite coded language to make that point, but that is unmistakably the point they are making).

This is, of course, a very dumb point. Words hurt immensely, as literally thousands of psychological and sociological studies demonstrate. But even if we ignore the mountains of evidence regarding how discourse can harm people at the individual level (which we absolutely shouldn't!), there's plenty of evidence to demonstrate that words hurt in a very substantial and real way on a larger scale.

A recent study by the New America Foundation found that spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes in American happen not after notable terror attacks or other major news stories regarding the supposedly perfidious acts unique to Muslims, but rather that such attacks follow a clear pattern of mimicking the election cycle; that is, people don't attack Muslims because they saw a news story about a terror attack and felt the need to retaliate, they attack Muslims because they listened to a politician speak about how bad Muslims are.

So I ask of the "the only counter to speech is more speech!!1!!1!!1!" crowd -- exactly what speech should these Muslims who were beaten and/or killed by bigots riled up by bigoted speeches have used in their defense? Because I'm willing to bet they tried the counter speech of "Please don't beat me to death!" but that was clearly not effective. Seriously, though -- what speech would have countered this? Because it sure looks like shouting down those speakers before they riled up a crowd of murderous bigots would have had a chance at being successful, but that's an open empirical question. But what is not an open empirical question is if more speech would have prevented these attacks, because there's been a shitload of "more speech" about how Muslims are human beings who do not deserve to be beaten and/or murdered simply for who they are, but that has been emphatically proven to not be effective.

This is not a process limited to the United States. For instance, the preeminent criminologist John Hagan has pretty conclusively demonstrated that rhetoric (a/k/a speech) was integral in laying the groundwork for the genocide in Darfur (particularly these two studies). Once again, many people tried the "more speech" option of arguing against the mass slaughter of human beings, but once again, that was clearly not effective.

Obviously people of good faith can argue about, say, what limits on speech are or are not acceptable, or what utility there is in shouting down individual speakers, and all of that sort of thing. But what is clearly inarguable is that the idea that "more speech" will effectively counter hate speech is simply false. And not "false" in the sense that I disagree with it, but "false" in the sense that all available empirical data demonstrates the "more speech" tactic to be completely ineffective.

But the point, of course, is that the "more speech" crowd is not arguing in good faith. Their central argument is not about the freedom of speech, but about the freedom of bigots and white supremacists to continue being bigots and white supremacists without anyone doing anything about it.