What Will Justice Look Like?

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Now that former officer Chauvin has been convicted of murdering George Floyd, many have started to wonder what justice for our communities of color might look like. Surely it would be more than just accountability for such a brutal, prolonged murder, perpetrated in broad daylight on a public street, with police and citizen bystanders watching, filming or futilely objecting. If that kind of badge-wearing killer can’t be brought to justice, who can?

It struck me that Floyd was stopped initially for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill. Let’s unpack that a bit. Unless you are actually making the counterfeit bills, you can’t be punished for passing them—whether under federal or Minnesota law—unless you have “intent to defraud.” That means you have to know what you’re doing.

But the most likely reason for passing a single counterfeit bill is that you don’t know what you’re doing. You just didn’t notice the counterfeit when you got it or when you passed it on. George Floyd, nabbed for passing the bum bill, probably wasn’t aware he might have done anything wrong until after he was arrested. He may still have been confused when he died.

Now let’s switch gears, to another city, another time and another man. You may have read the recent obituary of Vartan Gregorian. He was a prominent white intellectual, of Armenian descent. When he died, he had been a president of universities, a member of New York City’s philanthropic glitterati, and the savior of the City’s famous public library.

But Gregorian wasn’t always prominent and privileged. When he first arrived in the US, he was a refugee, with a place reserved for him at Stanford University and a poor command of English. As he passed through New York City’s airport, he lost his ticket to California. He feared he might lose his place at Stanford if he didn’t arrive on time.

Gregorian explained his problem to a ticket agent. Claiming he had never done anything similar, the agent stamped the ticket envelope and instructed Gregorian to keep it closed and not to get off the plane at an intermediate stop. In short, the ticket clerk gave a break to this dejected refugee, a complete stranger. The result was a distinguished career that earned a full-page obituary in the New York Times.

Now suppose—just suppose—that Officer Chauvin had seen in Floyd a spark of the kind of man that his family saw. Suppose Chavin had wanted to give Floyd a break, just enough to try to determine whether Floyd was guilty of deliberately passing bum bills or only a hapless victim himself.

What would that hypothetical Officer Chauvin have done? Wouldn’t he have asked Floyd some questions about where he got the counterfeit $20 bill? Might he have allowed Floyd to make the complaining merchant whole by giving him a real twenty, and let him go? Might he have avoided an arrest and a murder, and made a friend in the community?

What would have been the harm in trying? Chavin could always arrest Floyd if he thought he was lying or his story didn’t jibe. And if our hypothetical Chauvin didn’t do this, he might be wasting his own time and the time of all the investigators and prosecutors who would have to interview Floyd and investigate him, perhaps only to find there was no case against him.

This, to me, is what “protect and serve” ought to look like. Sure, there are real bad actors in any community, let alone ones that require above-average policing. But doesn’t justice require discretionary judgment—human judgment of the human being accused—before a cop becomes, at least temporarily, the prosecutor, judge, jury and (as in this case) executioner?

Then take Adam Toledo, the thirteen-year old Mexican-American kid gunned down in Chicago, apparently after tossing a gun aside and raising his empty hands? Sure, the cop might have been in the process of drawing his weapon for fear of being shot first. But shouldn’t he, after having seen the kid’s youth (probably not a trained sharpshooter!) and the empty hands, have repressed the reflex to shoot? And isn’t a cop like that the kind that anyone would want protecting his community?

There is, of course, another model of policing. It treats every law as sacrosanct and every infraction as deserving of arrest and punishment. While mayor, Rudy Giuliani claimed to have lowered New York’s crime rate with his “broken windows” or “get tough” approach to law enforcement. But it also led to over-policing and racial profiling, not to mention greater percentage increases in arrests than reported reductions in crimes.

In the military, they have a name for leaders like that. They call them “martinets.” Captain Bligh—a real historical figure portrayed in the film Mutiny on the Bounty—was a good example.

Do we really want to run our cities as Captain Bligh ran his doomed ship? In America? Do we want our neighborhood police to act like an invading army putting down an insurrection? Isn’t that the duty of our National Guard?

When all is said and done, the thing that stands out from the many cases of Black and Brown people who died in police custody is the triviality of what they were arrested for. It’s not just George Floyd and his alleged $20 bum bill. It’s Eric Garner and allegedly selling cigarettes individually. It’s Freddie Gray and allegedly possessing an illegal switchblade—which turned out not to be illegal. It’s Sandra Bland, pulled over for failing to signal a lane change and apparently infuriating the officer by using her cell-phone to record the encounter. It’s Tamir Rice, shot down for carrying a toy gun, after a caller-informant warned that the person seen carrying a gun was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably a fake.”

Couldn’t a simple exercise of good human judgment have avoided all these killings and perhaps most of the arrests? And shouldn’t officers be retained, evaluated and promoted based on the quality of their judgment, not the quickness of their draw?

There are many more cases like these. But of these four, only two—Gray’s and Rice’s—presented even a plausible danger to the public. Why couldn’t Floyd’s and Bland’s cases, and many others, be handled by looking over an ID and writing a ticket requiring a later court appearance or the payment of a fine? Should allegedly passing a single counterfeit bill be treated more seriously than a speeding violation that could endanger the driver and others?

So what will justice look like? As some have observed, it will involve a complete transformation of policing in American cities. First, officers will not physically arrest people for minor offenses. Instead, they will write them tickets, like those for speeding, which require them to appear voluntarily and defend the charges against them. (If they don’t appear, they can be arrested later.) Second, the martinet theory of policing will yield to a humane one. This is America: even if we could, we don’t want to lower the crime rate by resembling the old Soviet Union.

Third and most important, we will encourage cops to use their intelligence, human judgment and contact with people to weed out the truly bad actors, and to leave cases of harmless carelessness and mental illness to unarmed specialists, if need be with armed police standing by. We might even bring walking beat cops back, if only in high-crime areas.

The transformation will be substantial. There will be fewer arrests for trivia. There will be more experts in social work, psychology and mental illness. The will be more written tickets to appear and fewer physical arrests. There will be more discretion and judgment on the parts of individual officers and fewer quotas for arrests, fines and prosecutions.

Maybe officers will be judged by community satisfaction or reductions in the numbers of reported crimes on their beats, rather than the volume of arrests they make or tickets they write. That is, maybe they’ll be judged by outcomes, rather than facile but false measures of “productivity.”

Maybe officers will be encouraged to give the people they serve occasional breaks, and to exercise their human judgment in so doing, taking the risk that some pol with an agenda might later ding them for it. Maybe, if all these things happen, everyone and every community—not just communities of color—will heave a huge sigh of relief.

Permalink to this post

Vaccination “Passports”: Cause and Effect

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Let’s pretend. Let’s pretend that we Americans were a practical people, as we have been throughout most of our history. Let’s pretend that we thought in terms of cause and effect, not vague abstractions or political ideology. Let’s pretend that we didn’t have social media whose algorithms reward us—and advertisers—for circulating and promoting the most shocking and bizarre lies. Let’s pretend that we didn’t have so many scoundrels for politicians, who win elections by promoting those lies.

If all that were true, how would we react to the concept of vaccination passports, i.e., simple cards, apps or documents that verify reliably that a person has been fully vaccinated against Covid-19. How would they work as a means to “get back to normal” as quickly as possible? Read on.

First of all, we wouldn’t even ask government to mandate vaccination passports or enforce their use. We’re way past that now. Government at both the federal and state levels has already missed the boats on mandates for masking, social distancing, testing and quarantining, and effective supply chains for and distribution of PPE.

If a government mandated vaccine passports for access to restaurants, for example, we wouldn’t have widespread compliance. Instead, we would have a new political wedge issue, massive resistance, and maybe a revolution. At the very least, we would have demagogues decrying the “assault on freedom” and maybe insurrections like the one on January 6.

But suppose we used a little psychological jiu jitsu against the libertarians who insist that everyone has God-given rights to do what they please regardless of any impact on others and public health.

Suppose we gave every business in America, large and small, absolute freedom to determine when, whether, and how it would require customers to show valid vaccination passports for access. Suppose we let businesses decide for themselves what passports would look like and who would issue them.

Then suppose we made falsifying any passport a felony. Suppose that the Justice Department and prosecutors in our fifty states made that felony a priority, with multiple early and public incarcerations. Finally, suppose they also made a point of defending any business sued for requiring valid vaccination passports of its customers. What would happen then?

Well, as of the date of this posting, 70.7 million Americans are fully vaccinated. Most of them are seniors, because that’s whom the authorities—for valid medical reasons—have prioritized for vaccination.

Now I happen to know how most of those seniors have been living, because I am one. I and all my friends have been mostly sitting at home, watching our retirement income flow into our bank accounts and spending little or nothing, except maybe on home improvement.

And what about the rest of the already vaccinated? What do you think people who’ve been mostly sitting on their income for a year or more are going to do if offered the chance to go to restaurants, stores, and even theaters and sports events—or to fly on planes—where everyone is fully vaccinated? They’re going to stampede to spend. They’re going to make the stimulus of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 look puny.

What will happen then? Well, the businesses that put in place effective vaccination passports and thus attracted massive patronage by risk averse customers are going to rebound so hard they might quickly eclipse their pre-pandemic success. They will probably have to turn customers away.

This trend will have two further effects. First, it will encourage more businesses to do likewise. Vaccination passports will become a business trend—not for reasons of public health, although they will certainly improve that. Passports will spread because they break the dams of public fear and let businesses rebound faster.

The second effect will be indirect. As younger people see businesses opening up to the vaccinated, they will want to be vaccinated, too. Maybe they don’t fear the virus, and maybe they are skeptical of the vaccine. But in our mostly safe and self-indulgent culture, the fear of missing out is among the strongest fear many of us will ever feel. It’s so ubiquitous it even has an acronym, “FOMO.”

So if you want to see a surge of demand for vaccinations, just encourage businesses to require it as a condition of entry. All this will happen without government intervention, except maybe for helping defend useless lawsuits by extreme libertarians and vaccine skeptics.

As far as we know now, the only way to get back to “normal” for real is through herd immunity. That means getting 60%-70% of us vaccinated. We know now that vaccination provides the best kind of immunity, likely surpassing the questionable and shorter-lived immunity of those who’ve been infected and recovered [Search linked source for “immunity”.] And the best way to make sure that everyone gets vaccinated is to exploit natural human incentives, not scolding them or trying to teach science to know-nothings.

We’ve missed the boats on masking, testing and quarantining, social distancing, and lockdowns. But we can catch the wave of vaccination. Just use the natural incentives of businesses to attract customers, and would-be customers’ own native FOMO, to get folks to do what comes naturally. Then the scientists and harassed health workers and can watch from the sidelines, take some breaks, and smile for the first time in over a year.

Endnote: How vaccines work to get us back to normal. Getting everyone vaccinated is the quickest and most reliable way to get back to normal. Flouting public health guidelines, or letting all decide for themselves whether and how to follow them, is not.

The proof is in the pudding or, in this case, the shots in the arms. Mutant virus variants are real threats to individuals’ health and lives. But insofar as we know now, there is no evidence of anyone dying of, or even having been hospitalized with, any variant of Covid-19 after having been fully vaccinated with a vaccine approved for use in the United States. With 70.7 million people vaccinated and counting, and with mutant viral variants spreading rapidly among our fifty states, that’s a promising record.

Furthermore, although the science is not yet complete, evidence is rising that: (1) fully vaccinated people are less likely to carry the disease to others than those who catch the disease but have no symptoms; and (2) getting vaccinated can even make some Covid “long haulers” feel better.

All this stands to reason because vaccines are designed purposefully not to cause disease. Instead, they provoke our immune systems to build up robust immunity without subjecting us to any contact with the parts of the virus that self-replicate and actually cause disease.

The trouble is, we have two competing miracles. The first is the most rapid and effective development of vaccines in human history. It includes the novel mRNA vaccines (Moderna’s and Pfizer’s), which get our immune systems to target only the protein that the virus uses as a lock picker to invade our cells (but not later to reproduce). That’s like disabling a burglar when he’s still outside your home, not inside with crowbar and gun drawn.

But there’s also another miracle, one of human stupidity. In our collective zeal to differ about ideology, we’ve anthropomorphized and politicized a virus that is neither alive or intelligent. It’s a little submicroscopic biological machine that nature and evolution designed by accident, which makes us sick and miserable and a whole lot of us dead.

In record time, our biological scientists designed vaccines to get our immune systems to fight that machine effectively. Their vaccines do so in a matter of six weeks—four weeks (the longest) for the two Moderna shots, plus two more for immunity to mature.

So if everyone got vaccinated, we could get back to normal by year-end, maybe by the end of summer. That’s not just the shortest path to normalcy: it’s also the most reliable. Any other path involves hundreds of thousands more deaths, overwhelmed hospitals and care givers, and yet more disruption of businesses, schools, our economy and our national life. Encouraging vaccination with passports for the fully vaccinated can accelerate our return to normalcy more than any other single thing we can do.

It doesn’t matter what the passports look like, or who issues them, as long as they are genuine and there are stiff penalties for, and zealous enforcement against, falsifying them. After my wife and I got our second Moderna shots, we saved the CDC’s little cardboard cards our vaccinators gave us—the ones recording the type and dates of our two shots. We made copies of them and had the copies laminated in plastic. If everyone fully vaccinated did the same, and if businesses accepted the card copies (and if we had laws heavily penalizing falsifying them), we could have useful vaccine passports virtually overnight.

Coda: A Few Words on Airplanes. I recently wrote a much-lauded post on why airplanes are humanity’s most effective and efficient disease vectors. They still are, especially now with all the Covid-19 variants floating around. God only knows how much they’ll boost future pandemics.

So I haven’t flown for over thirteen months. My wife, who’s more adventurous and has more remote family, recently flew four legs, two out in late March and two back in early April. On one flight, two passengers were wearing their masks below their noses, although the airline tried to corral them, after boarding, with a threatening PA announcement. On another leg, and despite promises of social distancing, my wife was seated right next to another passenger on the two-seat side of a 1-2 small regional jet. As far as I know, that record, on American Airlines, is typical of the precision and care that airlines generally have devoted to keeping their passengers safe from Covid-19.

Before the pandemic, I regularly flew about a dozen times per year, including a few transcontinental and even intercontinental flights. What would it take to get me back on board? Private airlines, in their economic “freedom” and infinite commercial wisdom, would have to act as if they took the pandemic seriously, as more than a speed bump on the way to greater profit. They would have to mandate masks worn properly and social distancing on all flights, accept only fully vaccinated passengers, or preferably both.

Requiring all passengers and crew to be fully vaccinated would probably do it for me all by itself. Why? Because a fully vaccinated passenger is one who took Covid-19 seriously, at least once, if only to get access to perks. The last thing I want to be doing is sitting for hours right next to some bozo who’s wearing a mask under his nose, or takes it off frequently, who thinks he knows more than Drs. Walensky and Fauci and their colleagues at the CDC, and is going to get unruly and yell at me, or worse, if I say anything.

It’s not as if the idea of vaccination passports is a bizarre fantasy. As of April 5, at least three river-cruise lines—American Queen Steamboat, Avalon Cruises, and Victory Cruises—and nine ocean cruise lines—Celebrity, Crystal, Lindblad, Norwegian, Oceania, Regent, Royal Caribbean, Virgin Voyages and Windstar—reportedly required vaccinations (or soon would) before letting passengers board. If pleasure-travel firms can do the right thing, why not the firms that transport the vast bulk of both business and leisure travelers?

So I’m still waiting for the bosses of at least one airline to stop staring dejectedly at their bottom line, stop taking poorly enforced half-measures, get smart, and start thinking about real passenger safety and cause and effect. When just one airline wakes up, I’ll start flying again, and that airline will earn my fierce loyalty, mileage perks or no.

The same applies, of course, to restaurants and grocery stores. I used to shop regularly at Trader Joe’s before the pandemic. I stopped after concluding that its management, notwithstanding its famously narrow aisles and crowded outlets, was treating Covid-19 as a speed bump. Vaccination passports, if well enforced, would get me back right away.

Permalink to this post