For those of you who haven’t seen it, Trevor Noah has a very thoughtful discussion today about the police killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta this past weekend. While Noah points to what he sees as the ambiguity (as he described it, the “messiness”) of some elements of the incident, he is adamant that nothing about the police encounter with an inebriated man sleeping in his car could justify the lethal end that it ultimately took:
One aspect of Noah’s commentary is particularly worth highlighting. In talking about the specific factors that led police to escalate what self-evidently had been a very calm and low-key discussion between Brooks and police, Noah says this:
Why are armed police the first people who have to go and respond to somebody who is sleeping in their car, who is drunk? Secondly, why do the police — I mean, the man says to them, ‘I will walk home.’ If you are protecting and serving people, what is the true purpose of not wanting people to drive drunk? It’s that you don’t want them killing themselves and other people. In this instance nobody had died because of his driving, and he hadn’t killed himself because of his driving.
And so as a police officer — maybe it’s because I live in a utopian world where the police are truly just trying to protect and serve, not trying to write enough tickets, not trying to get enough people arrested, not trying to fill quotas — no, they’re trying to protect and serve. In that instance, you would hope a policeman would say: ‘Sir, you do not look fit to drive; you said your sister lives around the corner; let’s take you, we’ll take you home.’
What Noah points to here is an aspect of the encounter that, in my view, almost certainly contributed to the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, which is what I would call the structural violence of the “performance metric”: absent the requirement, prevalent in many police departments, that officers achieve a certain threshold of arrests, do we think there is any likelihood that this encounter would even get to the point where police use of force would happen?
In contemporary administrative culture, in contexts ranging from the corporate office, to the big-box retail store, to the Amazon fulfillment center, to the hospital, to the police bureaucracy, the idea of hitting performance metrics — necessary benchmarks or thresholds of adequate or satisfactory job performance — have become an increasingly big part of how those institutions determine that they are achieving tangible goals.
The idea here is that in evaluations of employees or larger administrative units, it is no longer adequate to show, in a qualitative way, that someone is engaged in thoughtful and useful work, that they operate judiciously, that they are creating an environment conducive to good work; now that worker must demonstrate their achievement of a numerically fixed threshold within a given time frame, in order to allow management to point to tangible progress on that metric. Tangible progress here may be a demonstration that a corporation will be able to ship a certain number of units, or complete a number of orders, but it may just as well be a situation where a police department is able to satisfy the municipal government that it is making headway on crime.
At a broader level, this shift to performance metrics is one reason that the contemporary free market economy is such a stressful and miserable place to live and work. For instance, the ease with which an Amazon fulfillment center worker can be fired based on metric underperformance — and their lack of available recourse, given the rigidly automated assessment of worker performance metrics — explains much of the extraordinary stress experienced by this underpaid and exploited workforce.
Another issue here, of course, is that while the numerical specificity of performance metrics gives them a patina of scientific rigor, figures — like anything else — can in some cases be manipulated. Given the considerable pressures imposed by metrics at all levels of the corporate or bureaucratic hierarchy, there are perverse incentives to fudge the numbers, or to find ways to artificially inflate those numbers.
One of the most astute critiques offered by the classic HBO series The Wire — which became, over the course of its five season run, a brutal indictment of the way that deindustrialization, contemporary policing, current school policy, or the failings of modern journalism create the sense that, as David Simon puts it, human life is worth less and less with each passing day — is its assessment of the hierarchy of the police bureaucracy in the Baltimore Police Department, and of the systems of numerical surveillance and assessment that put every cop, from the beat cop on the corner to the police commissioner, under the thumb of performance metrics.
In Season three, the deputy commissioner would regularly hold meetings where he excoriated his precinct captains for their performance on COMSTAT, the centralized statistical database via which every single aspect of police behavior is plugged in. The intense pressure to bring crime within a reasonable range would have a couple of important consequences. From a reporting standpoint, there would be pressure to demonstrate that crime statistics had gone down, and so police departments would often redefine or reclassify those numbers that were on the books. One amazing scene from the next season, focusing on Baltimore public schools, ties together the respective bureaucratic pressures in both the school system and the criminal justice system. The former officer Pryzbylewski, now a grade school teacher, asks his colleague Grace Sampson why they are pursuing the teaching of standardized tests — and of the achievement of a 10% bump in test scores — when this won’t have any meaningful effect on the assessment of their students:
PREZBYLEWSKI: I don’t get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what does that assess in them?
SAMPSON: Nothing. It assesses us. If the test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores say down, they can’t.
PREZBYLEWSKI: Juking the stats.
SAMPSON: Excuse me?
PREZBYLEWSKI: Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and majors become colonels. I’ve been here before.
SAMPSON: Wherever you go…. there you are.
The same pressures that incentivize schools to inflate any potential achievements, so as to provide politically salable results to those further up in the hierarchy, translate in the criminal justice context to soft-pedaling crime statistics.
But at the level of the street cop, similar pressures can work in a different way. In police departments across the country, there is an unstated pressure to make arrests, to issue tickets, to make summonses. Despite official claims that quotas are not a facet of the NYPD’s approach to policing — just to cite one example — a rank-and-file officer came forward to assert the perverse incentive to book citizens for crimes and infractions, as for instance with an implicit expectation of “20 and 1”:
Polanco joined the force in 2005, and pretty quickly, he says, it became clear that his supervisors only cared about two things: tickets and arrests.
"I can tell my supervisors that I took three people to the hospital and I saved their lives. That the child that I helped deliver is healthy," says Polanco. "I can tell them that. But that's not going to cut it."
Polanco says he encountered an unwritten rule that officers are expected to bring in "20 and one." That's 20 tickets and one arrest per month. But it was tough to get anyone outside the department to believe him, because NYPD officials would always deny there were any quotas. They still do.
The attraction for police administrators in pointing to cut-and-dried statistical trends means that the value of numerical quantity of tickets and arrests will always outweigh the quality of police officers’ individual interventions in the community. In such a context, precinct captains will be more likely to have their eyes on large quantities of low-level arrests (say, for minor drug possession charges) rather than pursuing a smaller number of structurally key indictments (which might actually have a measurable long-term effect on the operation of organized crime in a given city).
And, in and alongside all of this, given the longstanding national legacies of white supremacy, the pressure to achieve significant numbers of arrests will be disproportionately levied on communities of color, whose citizens are all in much less of a position to make life politically difficult for the arresting officer, and whose lives are systemically devalued in any one of a number of ways. Think of a program like stop-and-frisk in New York, which overwhelmingly targeted communities of color (rather than the rich white denizens of the Upper East Side), and which presumably provided an excellent pretext for officers to achieve the demonstration of aggressive progress on their quotas. (Beyond the resulting arrests, it’s noteworthy that police were enjoined to meet quotas for numbers of stop-and-frisk encounters, too.)
So how does all this relate to Trevor Noah’s assessment of the Rayshard Brooks killing? As he points out, there were numerous alternative solutions to the instance of finding an inebriated man in a car, and armed police officers didn’t necessarily need to be the ones handling it. After what amounts to a very long period of civil discussion between Brooks and the police, it is the decision to arrest that ultimately escalates the situation, creating an opportunity for a scuffle that presumably (though in my view wrongly) led the officers to decide that use of force was necessary. A necessary prelude to the use of violence was the structural violence of the performance metric, the perverse incentives it provides to charge an individual with something, when a warning (or, God help us, friendly assistance!) would easily suffice.
I am supportive of BLM proposals to defund the police, to redistribute aspects of public safety policy away from armed law enforcement officers and to other kinds of government units and case workers who could intervene in a situation like this in ways that harnessed their expertise, and that at the very least did not use force escalation. But in and alongside funding reallocation, we have to move beyond the numbers game of the performance metric, of its brutal ends-over-means logic and the ways that it helps to legitimize both physical and structural forms of violence.
