Nothing Coming Out this Week

I've been working hard on several stories this week, but nothing "jelled" in time to put out. So I've decided to just let you know that I am still working on the blog, but haven't got anything worth reading right now. Baring anything unforeseen, I'll have something out next week. 

Until then, keep healthy and try to enjoy the summer. 

What Would Defunding the Guelph Police Look Like?

The black lives matter protests have raised the idea that society should consider "abolishing" or "defunding" the police. I think readers might find it useful if I worked through some of the different issues involved in understanding this idea---both in general and with regard to the Guelph police department in particular. 

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The first thing to understand is that there are several different ways of doing political organizing.

1. creating political parties and working to win elections
2. lobbying existing governments to change laws
3. working through the courts to either overturn or support existing laws
4. creating social organizations to strengthen or create civil society
5. widening the "Overton window" in order to expand public debate

All of these are important and necessary parts of social transformation, but all require different organizational structures and campaign tactics. 

People rarely understand that there are different political goals that require different tactics, and this creates confusion among the public. For example, the "Occupy Wall Street" protests are often dismissed by people as being "meaningless" because they "didn't accomplish anything" and they "didn't leave behind any organization or leadership to rally around". 

This misses the point that the goal of these demonstrations was to expand the terms of debate allowed within mainstream society (that's the "Overton window"). Before the protests and when they first started you would never hear anyone on a mainstream news show or an elected member of Parliament or Congress talk about wealth stratification. Indeed, at the beginning of the protests I heard many pundits and politicians say that they "couldn't understand what the protesters want" but over the span of one week I noticed that "establishment types" started understanding and talking about "the 1%". That's the exact moment in time when the Overton window expanded. As such, the demonstrations weren't a failure---they were a massive success in terms of the fifth type of political organizing from my list above.

The current Black Lives Matter protests are in the same vein. They have managed to pile-drive into mainstream discourse an idea that was "beyond the pale" and unintelligible to mainstream media and politicians. That's the idea of "defunding" or "abolishing the police". 

Part of the problem with issues that are outside of the Overton window is that there is generally a language problem. That is, society doesn't have a word or phrase that will immediately point towards the issue in a way that everyone immediately understands. Another way of understanding the Overton window is to see everything within it as being "common sense" and everything outside of it as being "hard to understand what you are talking about". 

The phrase that made wealth stratification intelligible to ordinary citizens is "the 1%". But in actual fact, it's just as literally inaccurate as saying that people want to  "defund" or "abolish" the police. That's because the real problem isn't the top 1% of the population having so much more money than everyone else---it's more like the top 20%. To understand this point, consider the fact that if wealth stratification was just about the top 1%, we wouldn't be having a housing crisis in Guelph, because the 1% only needs a few places to live and they generally have mansions in the countryside anyway. The problem with affordability comes from the fact that the 20% number means that developers can make lots of money catering to their needs alone. If 99% of the population were all in the same boat, home builders would be forced to build smaller homes in more dense developments if they expected to make any money. 

But "the 1%" makes for an easily reproduced slogan that most people can understand even if it really doesn't mean just the top 1% and no one else. In the same way, saying "defund" or "abolish" the police doesn't actually mean that people don't want any police or anyone doing the core job of that the police are supposed to do. Instead, they want to get people rethinking policing from the ground up in and asking if the job can be done better and cheaper. 

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If you like reading the "Guelph-Back-Grounder", why not support it? A buck a month would be enough to support local journalism in Guelph if people would just subscribe in the same numbers that people used to during the "salad days" of the "Guelph Mercury". It's easy to do if you use Patreon or Pay Pal.

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This raises a second point. It isn't just people of colour, the mentally ill, etc, who are having a problem with the police. Municipal governments all over North America have seen policing costs skyrocket because they increasingly have very little control over that part of the municipal budget. In 2013 the Public Safety Canada and the Canadian Police Knowledge Network co-hosted the Economics of Policing: Police Education and Learning Summit. One of the presenters, Mark Potter, Director General Policing Policy Directorate for Public Safety Canada, said the following: 

 

---one of the greatest challenges facing policing today is that both the cost and the number of police officers continue to increase while, at the same time, the reported crime rate and the crime severity index continue to decline. In 2012, Canada employed just under 70,000 sworn police officers and just over 28,000 civilian staff. In 2011, Statistics Canada reported that the total cost of policing in Canada was $12.9 billion or $375 per Canadian.

 

Since 1997, the cost of policing in Canada has more than doubled, outpacing the increase in spending by all levels of government. The average salary for police personnel alone has increased by an average of 40% since 2000 while the salary for all employed Canadians has increased on average by 11% in the same time period. In the face of such increases in police expenditures, the reported crime rate continues its downward trend, dropping 3% between 2011 and 2012, reaching its lowest level since 1972. The crime severity index also dropped in 2012 for the ninth consecutive year. In addition, recent polling indicates the majority of Canadians feel satisfied with their personal safety. 

 

Here are a few screen shots of graphs illustrating the same points from a Power Point presentation by Potter while addressing a conference on the costs of policing in Canada's territories. (Please note, these figures are for the entirety of Canada---not just the non-provinces.) 

It would appear from the final graph above that the major increase in policing hasn't come from a massive increase in the number of police officers or other civilian staff. One part of it has to be that 40% increase in police wages between 2000 and 2010 (please remember that this data is dated---that's an artifact of working from published figures.) 

This makes some sense in the Guelph context. If you can believe the website Glassdoor (which, among other things, allows people to anonymously publish their income from various companies to help people negotiate compensation) the average Guelph police constable currently makes $115,000/year. I don't know if this is a believable average, but there were 6 Guelph constables listed on last year's Sunshine List, and their income averaged at $117,500---and that's without adding in their taxable benefits. 

Here's a graph from an AMO (Association of Municipalities Ontario) report that shows the state of police salaries across Ontario between 2003 and 2012. If you extrapolate the salaries for another eight years, the slope of the graph would seem to place police salaries over $100,000/year in 2020.

Please note that what seems to have happened in the above graph was that a lot of people's wage increases had stagnated since the crash of 2008 and hadn't come back by 2012. This didn't happen with police and fire salaries, which makes perfect sense given that their increases were protected by the unique way that they are governed.

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The police in Ontario do not answer to City Council. Instead, they are theoretically governed by a local police board. The majority of the five members are appointed by the city, with two others by the province. Since the city pays for policing through their annual budget and three of the five members of the local board are appointed by Council, there is theoretical input by Council through the local police board. But in actual fact, any time a local police board has refused an increase in the Police budget demanded by the chief, it has been appealed to the Ontario Civilian Commission on Police Services where the chief won. The consensus among the politicians that I've talked to is that the Commission always supports the local police departments. One Guelph Councillor recently told me that "no attempt to limit the budget of a local police force has survived an appeal to the Commission in 20 years". After a while, Councils just give up trying---the same way they did with planning because of the Ontario Municipal Board's historical bias towards developers.

In addition, police departments are considered "essential services", which means that if labour contract negotiations stall they immediately go to binding arbitration instead of lock-out/strike. Again, the consensus is that binding arbitration tends to be much more generous than traditional bargaining, hence the above average pay increases.

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In the USA there are similar problems but for different reasons. Some police forces in America are relatively well-paid. But I think many constables there would be gob-smacked at the salaries of Guelph police. There is still a problem with the cost of policing even if too much money isn't spent on salaries. One part is that if a police department loses a law suit for excessive force, neither the individual police officer nor the department have to pay the damages. Instead, it has to come out of general revenue. For example, according to an article in ChicagoBusiness.com, between 2004 and 2016 the city of Chicago had to pay out a staggering $662 million in settlements and legal fees just to deal with excessive force lawsuits. 

It's important to put that number into a context, however. The Chicago consolidated budget in 2019 came to $10.67 billion. That means that spread over 12 years, these excessive force lawsuits came to $55.2 million/year, or, something like half of 1% of the 2019 budget. But still, it can certainly be said that this is money that can't been spent on other initiatives. Just to put it into context, the entire new library on Baker Street is projected to cost about $50 million in total. If that was averaged over 12 years, it would come to about $4.2 million. The total Guelph operating plus capital budget runs to about $331 million, which means that building a library over 12 years would come to about 1.3% of the budget. So scaling for the size of Guelph, if we had a comparable problem to Chicago's it would be safe to say that the legal costs of excessive use of force by the police would just about pay for the new library---.   

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Beyond the financial issue, there is also the general sense that municipal leaders simply don't have either the administrative authority or political power to "reign in" either policing costs or to control "rogue officers". Some of this has been caused by police unions that seem to exert far too much power, police administrators who have more loyalty to the "police culture" than to democratic governance, and, populist politicians who use "law and order" as a tool to win elections. 

I think that these are results rather than causes. It's important to understand the incredibly influential propaganda campaign that has existed all my life and promotes the idea that policing is a very dangerous job. Because it is so dangerous, the party line goes, we need to give police officers enormous leeway in the pursuit of their calling. 

The first police show I remember seeing on tv was Car 54 Where Are You?

People might find it hard to believe, but policing used to be considered just another job, one that didn't pay particular well but that was secure, had some benefits, and, most-importantly-of-all, had a pension. As such, it was totally fair game as a sitcom. 

Since then, over my lifetime the public view of what a police officer is has morphed into something that is a cross between a combat infantryman and a judge/jury/executioner. While there are a great many shows that promote this meme, probably the most influential is a show that the Fox Network (of course) first put on during a Hollywood writer's strike because it was cheap to do and used scab labour (again, of course). Of course, I'm talking about that bag of steaming crap known as Cops.

I use the phrase "bag of steaming crap" advisedly. I really didn't understand how awful this show was (thankfully, it was finally taken off the air during the recent protests) until I listened to a fascinating series of podcasts titled Running From Cops. 

Dan Taberski, cropped from a promotional photo from Mont Clair Film Festival. 

Image c/o Wiki Media Commons.

The fellow behind this show, Dan Taberski, put in an enormous amount of hard-core investigation to do find evidence to show:

• the insidious relationships that develop between police departments and tv producers to get the OK to ride around in police cars
• how the imperatives to present an exciting, dramatic program totally skew people's perceptions of how much crime, drug abuse, and, violence occur in the life of a police officer
• how the program shows police routinely violating people's rights, thereby "normalizing" this in the public's eyes
• how damaging it can be to appear on the show, and how it never goes back to explain that so-and-so was actually declared innocent during a trial
• how police officers themselves develop a warped view of what policing should be by watching and participating in the show 

Cops is probably the worst of the popular police shows. But it bears repeating that the average crime drama does the following:

• portrays policing as far more dangerous than it really is (it's only the 14th most dangerous job in the USA---after farming, garbage man, travelling salesman, etc)
• shows shoot-outs as being a common part of the job---even though three quarters of police officers (in the USA, mind you) are never called upon to fire their weapon during their entire career
• it shows the police solving almost all the serious crimes that they come across---even though the fact is that something like 40% of all murders in the US never result in an arrest

These very popular forms of entertainment are also very effective propaganda for the idea that policing is a very dangerous, very unique sort of job. And that translates into the idea that the average citizen has no idea of how difficult it is, and, how we should cut officers enormous discretion for the life-and-death situations that they routinely confront. 

Another form of propaganda that presents the idea that policing is especially dangerous are their huge, public funerals. I have raised this point in the past, and generally I get a lot of push back. But I think it really bears repeating even if I get hammered over it. Policing really isn't that dangerous a job. I've seen people get their legs crushed, a pelvis broken, and, a woman almost die from toxic mold---when I worked for 30 years in an academic library. All jobs involve an element of risk, but I don't see the downtown taken over whenever someone in construction falls off a roof, a farmer gets caught in an auger---or a healthcare worker dies of COVID-19 at a long-term care facility, for that matter. 

Constable Jennifer Kovach Funeral in Downtown Guelph.
Image from a CTV story, used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

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So what exactly can cities do to lower the cost of and lessen the danger from their police departments? After all, they can't simply ban all the shows on tv that promote ridiculous notions about the job. But there are some "low hanging fruit" that can be picked when the public is up in arms over the drip, drip, drip of killings recorded on smart phones and security cams. 

First of all, I think it's important to remember that Guelph isn't Minneapolis, Saint Louis, New York, Atlanta---or even Toronto. We shouldn't tar our local people with the brush we could use for others. But having said that, I have heard people talk about problems they've had with the police, so we aren't immune to these sorts of things, either.   

Desmond Cole, picture from 
Ontario Federation of Labour.
Image c/o Wiki Media Commons.

I recently heard Desmond Cole being interviewed on the Toronto Star website. One of the things he mentioned was the experience of having a police officer show up at his door because of a noise complaint. He asked "why does someone with a badge and a gun have to deal with a noise complaint?" 

I immediately thought about the Guelph situation, where that particular bunch of low-hanging grapes was picked years ago. The law was changed in 2014 (I believe) to allow city bylaw officers to enforce noise complaints, and extend their hours of duty to all hours of the day seven days a week. This has the value of increasing responsiveness to noise complaints (I can testify that police didn't like enforcing the noise bylaws because they thought it was a waste of their time), cutting operating costs for the police department, and, reducing the (admittedly very small) possibility of a noise complaint escalating to something violent because a police officer reached for his gun too soon.  

Another low-hanging fruit that Guelph has already picked is that of bringing in social workers to deal with mental health problems. During one of my last years at work we had city police call us to say that a student had phoned from the Library to a friend and said she was contemplating suicide. We found the girl and the police arrived with a psychiatric nurse in tow to talk to her and see that she got the help she needed. 

Yet another example is the safe-injection site we currently have downtown. That allows people to get do their fix while limiting the chance of catching Hepatitis or AIDS from a dirty needle, and, with a medical professional nearby who can administer Naloxone if they suffer an overdose.  

Finally, if memory serves the police department long ago decided to save some money by changing some administrative positions from being filled by uniformed officers to civilians at a lower pay grade. Also, if memory serves, there was some push-back at the time from officers who expected to get a cushy desk job---at a relatively high senior police salary---after years of service, but eventually people accepted the new normal. 

So I think it's only fair to say that the Guelph police are far from the worst service in North America. But I do think that some significant changes could be made that would redirect resources towards areas that need the money more than they do. Here are a few suggestions. 

First of all, what if you could call through 911 about a person who is in a mental

health crisis and specifically say that you don't need a police officer or paramedic? Instead, you'd just  get people with experience with psychiatric disorders and who are taught to de-escalate through talking instead of dominating and controlling through intimidation and force. Well, this has been going on in Eugene Oregon for over thirty years. It's called CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets). 

Another way that Guelph could cut policing costs would be to split the job of policing into several different streams. 

The first part would be to make a certain percentage of constables "peace officers", who's primary duty would be to deal with mundane issues like issuing traffic tickets, dealing with drunks downtown, etc. They would also be able to deal with a variety of paperwork---like recording thefts. This would be considered something of a municipal job just like any other---and paid accordingly. Would this person need a gun? Perhaps not, Great Britain calls these people "Bobbies" and they don't have guns. They could be issued batons, pepper spray, tasers, and, handcuffs, though.

One key part of these people's training, however, would be the use of "de-escalation" techniques and the essential need of police to gain and retain the support of the community. This last part is a key part of a British police officer's training, and is directly in opposition to what many Black Live's Matter activists call the "over-policing" methods that lead to communities feeling like the police are an occupying army. This is a key concept and is based on the idea that there are so many different regulations on the books that just about everyone is breaking one law or another at any given moment. If police are actively seeking minor violations at any given moment, they lose the support of the community. 

To cite a couple practical examples of "over policing" that I've heard about in the USA, consider the following. One community had a recycling contract with a business that complained that they'd based their numbers on a certain number of aluminum cans in the average blue bin. What was happening, however, was that desperately poor people were going through people's blue bins to pull out the aluminum cans so they could sell them to scrap metal dealers for cash. (This happens in Guelph and I often see people walking down my street rooting through the bins---although I suspect that they are looking for alcohol bottles and cans to return for the deposit.) The police were ordered to fine people for doing this. 

One of the problems that led to the explosive anger and demonstrations that put Black Lives Matter on the map was the fact that the Ferguson Missouri police department was tasked with raising so much money through fines that they were supposed to not only pay for themselves but also turn a profit and subsidize other parts of the city apparatus. (Can you imagine what the relationship between Guelph's citizens and it's police department would be like if it did this?) 

The Canadian practice of "carding" would probably be considered a classic example of "over policing" that creates the distance between police and the community and destroys the support they need to do their job well.

The second bit would be the specialist investigators. These would investigate major crimes, with the emphasis on "investigate". From what I understand, being good at investigating a crime is very similar to being a journalist or scientist. You don't have to be Dirty Harry, just curious, tenacious and creative. It might be significantly harder to find good investigators than peace officers, so you might have to pay them a bit more. But again, this wouldn't a dangerous job so they wouldn't need guns either.

The third class would be a small number of guys who really do run risks. They'd have to be very well trained with their weapons. They'd do the "high risk" arrests and be called to back up peace officers and investigators when necessary. This class of officers would be fairly small, however, which would allow the city to get some control over the wages that they are paying out.  

Lest the above seem like crazy "pie-in-the-sky" dreaming, it is my understanding that this is how police are organized in Great Britain. That is to say, only something like 7% of the police are issued weapons and spend their time patrolling in "Armed Response Vehicles" (ARVs). This means that at any time when a Bobby or investigator believes that they need armed back up because their situation seems particularly dangerous, they can call them in with their radios.

It might take a lot of work to do, but I suspect that if the police department wanted to set things up according to the British model it might be theoretically able to do this. Unfortunately, I think that the police union would lose their marbles over this, as it would probably mean most officers would think that they are no longer "real police" anymore. But if we can get 5,000 people on the street in the middle of a pandemic to protest the existing police structure, at least someone should be "thinking big".

Unfortunately, I think that the next two ways in which Guelph could dramatically cut policing costs would be pretty hard to do without buy-in from the Feds and the Province.

The first one would be to end the homelessness problem. Ultimately, that's a political tar baby, IMHO, because the people who already own their homes don't want to make any concession that would be needed to increase the housing stock in the city to the point where rents and mortgages would start to go down to an affordable level. Councilors either genuinely believe that there is nothing that they can do to fix the problem (they want the feds to pay for huge increase in social housing) or they realize that it would be political suicide to actually support new, high-density housing in existing neighbourhoods outside of existing "sacrifice zones" (like the downtown)---so they keep coming up with excuses or blame the problem on the province or the feds. 

Unfortunately, however, until more housing stock gets built, the only option that homeless people have is to break the law through the necessary ways that they live without a legal home---primarily by begging, trespassing, and, petty theft. If we make poverty a crime, we are going to have to have police to continue to control and penalize people who are poor. This is a crappy thing to do to poor folk, and it's also a crappy thing to do to the police too. 

The second thing we could do would be to legalize and regulate addictive drugs like the opioids and crystal meth. The problems that people associate with drug addiction aren't really caused by the addiction itself, they are caused by the implications of making the drug they are addicted to illegal. That's because street drugs are orders of magnitude more expensive than legally-bought ones from a pharmacist. Moreover, the concentration levels of a street drug are totally unknown by users, which means that every time they take a hit they are playing Russian roulette with an overdose. In contrast, legal drugs have a scientifically-defined concentration of active ingredients, which means that there is no risk of accidental overdose. 

One final point to consider. If an addict has to get a doctor to write a script for her, she will have to register with the "system" and this will allow social services---if it wants to and has the funds---to get her into counselling and treatment. Since addicts move heaven-and-earth to get their fixes, tying it to being available for treatment for the underlying reason for their addiction would help. Moreover, if it was done right (which past experience would suggest will only happen after every other possible avenue has already been tried and discarded) the money saved by keeping people out of jails could be used to fund an expansion of the drug treatment system, which I understand is horribly under-funded. (I recently heard on an Ideas podcast that the average cost of keeping someone in a provincial prison is about $85,000/year---treatment has got to be cheaper!) 

If we stop bankrupting drug addicts by forcing them to spend every dime they have on wildly over-priced street drugs, they can keep their homes and life savings. If that happens, they will cease to engage in petty crime and prostitution in order to fund their habit. And if we provide them treatment to stabilize both their addictions and avoid the related lifestyle, they can either become or continue to be productive members of society who work at jobs and pay taxes. 

Moreover, the police could then spend their time dealing with the more core parts of their job instead of constantly dealing with complaints from citizens about petty thefts by addicts and responding to people overdosing on the drugs they bought with the proceeds.

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One last point. It's true that this is a unique moment where rapid change could possibly happen. That's because of the functional alliance between Black Lives Matter sympathizers and mainstream politicians who want to get police departments back under their control. But if we want to get something that actually makes the lives of people better, we are going to have fight tooth and nail to make sure that populist politicians don't hijack the movement and use reductions in police budgets to cut taxes. The money that the police now have control over is desperately needed to fund other social services that have been chronically under-funded since the 1970s. Every other time a social movement has gotten the government to take action to cut funding for some moribund government service---the closure of the provincial mental health hospitals comes to mind---money hasn't been redirected to more efficient alternatives, but was instead channeled towards tax cuts. We need to be ready to fight tooth and nail to see that this doesn't happen if there is some success in getting the police back under public control. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

James Gordon, Part Two: The Administrative Burden of Social Programs

Image provided by Councilor Gordon.
I suspect the painting is by local artist Greg Denton,
one of Guelph's "artistic crown jewels".

In the second part of my conversation with James Gordon we broaden it to deal with larger issues, such as "Why are bureaucracies often so darned hard to navigate?" I sometimes get comments to the effect that I put too much of myself into my interviews. I understand the sentiment, and I will admit that the first question I ask really does this. But in my defense I've found that I often ask questions that politicians seem to have never heard before. This raises what Noam Chomsky calls "the tyranny of conciseness".

That is the observation that when you are saying something in accord with "conventional wisdom" or "the common sense", you don't have to actually explain your terms or give evidence of the phenomenon you are describing. That's because everyone already understands what you are talking about. This means you just have to signal to people that that is what you are talking about instead of having to explain it. In contrast, when you are explaining something totally new to another person you usually have to bring in and define a new term, and then give evidence that supports your claim that this is "actually a thing". In my audio clip with James the new term is "the administrative burden of social programs". 

The personal examples I raise are to illustrate what this phrase means and suggests that it is really a significant problem. I go into real detail with Councilor Gordon because I've found over the years that elected officials generally "tune out" concerns about bureaucracy. I suspect that part of this is because they often have to deal with absolutely furious constituents who have been enraged by the way that they've been treated by front-line staff in various government organizations. No one likes being yelled-at, and many people automatically ignore anyone who vents at them. 

Secondly, a lot of politicians are decent folks who want to support government employees and they see complaints as being profoundly unfair comments about individuals---instead of a statement about the way our government programs are organized. 

Finally, most elected officials come from positions of privilege (even if they don't, specifically because they are in elected office this means that most bureaucrats will treat them differently than if they were just a "nobody") so they don't get the same treatment as the general public---or people who are specifically "under privileged" or routinely discriminated against. As a result, they often simply do not believe that such-and-such a thing is happening---because nothing like that has ever happened to them. (And, of course, if they ask administrative staff about whether or not such-and-such a thing ever happens, they are usually going to get a self-serving defense instead of an objective assessment of what actually happens. Consider how expert the police have been at sweeping incidents of excessive use of force under the carpet--. It's much the same thing.)

I believe that Gordon is a genuinely compassionate, decent man in many different ways. But also I believe that if you listen to the sound file he seems genuinely surprised by the question I'm asking. This isn't because I raised it, but rather because he's never thought about it, and, it has never come up while he has been an Councilor. Again, this isn't on him---it's an aspect of how our society has evolved over long periods of time. We've created a "firewall" between bureaucrats and the politicians so elected officials can't interfere with what works get done, but in the process we've stopped having any democratic oversight of the systems where people interact with the government. I am convinced, however, that this is a real problem and one that we really need to deal with if we want to live in a better world.

Why is the bureaucracy often so hard to navigate? (click on this link to get the sound file)

I was struck by James Gordon's mention of "accessibility" (at about 7:45). I think that most elected officials would be up in arms about a government office that was on the top of a large flight of stairs so no one with mobility issues would be able to apply for something like a disability pension. They might also get hot under the collar if service was only allowed in French---or even German. But it occurred to me that there are a whole class of people who have "invisible disabilities" who have the same sort of barriers placed in front of them. 

I suspect most people have heard of "trigger warnings" without really thinking through what they are or only having heard a negative definition from someone who thinks that they are an example of silly "political correctness". But let me talk a bit about them and explain why I think that the concept might be relevant. 

Years ago I was having lunch in a downtown restaurant with a Mercury reporter. She pointed out a middle-aged man who was walking slowly down the sidewalk across the street. She said that she'd interviewed him and found out the reason he walks like that was because the Ethiopean KGB beat him by whipping the soles of his feet with fine wires. As a result, he had very painful scars on them.

There are a lot of people in our society who walk around with psychological scars, ones that cause real problems for them in certain situations. They are often absolutely consumed by horrific memories that have actually "hard-wired" their brains to react in a way that makes it very hard to function in settings that "normal" people would not find difficult. People with these sorts of problems often follow various types of helpful and dysfunctional ways of forgetting about these memories. (For example, they often abuse alcohol in order to sleep. I understand that Veterans Affairs sends out quite liberal amounts of cannabis to our veterans with PTSD. Obviously stoner vets are a better thing than alcoholic ones---.)

PTSD flashbacks are often portrayed in movies and tv as about people actually thinking that they are in the situation that screwed up their heads. But that's an artistic convention instead of a reality. Instead what they are doing is reliving the feelings and emotions---not the actual experience. (They often have reoccurring nightmares where they do re-experience the event, but that's a different symptom.)

When someone warns a crowd or viewers about potentially "triggering" stuff, they are giving people who suffer from these anxiety disorders an opportunity to change the channel or leave the room. Just to let people "get into the head" of people who have problems with bureaucracies, I'll let people know part of why I have problems with them. I suffer from PTSD because of an abusive childhood. I have all the symptoms---including an absolutely gut-wrenching fear of authority figures. That's because when I was a child I was totally at the mercy of people who were functionally indifferent to how much misery they inflicted on me. Whenever I have to deal with a system where there is no real human being to talk through something, which has tremendous impact on my life, and, where everyone involved obviously no real interest in making the system work for me---I go back to being a scared 12 year old having the crap beaten out of me every time I made a mistake while attempting to do a full-grown man's work.

A lot of people who suffer from the "administrative burden of social programs" are people who have had rough lives, and the stupid paperwork that gets inflicted on them triggers strong emotions. That's not surprising, because it is just another example of people screwing them over because of their sheer indifference for their well-being. Could someone tell why this is so much different from putting that office at the top of flight of stairs or expecting everyone who applies to understand German? 

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Personally, I think that the subject of this article is tremendously important. But it's not really something that people can read about and understand without going into some real detail. And that's something that modern reporters often don't have the time get into. That's why I publish the Back-Grounder. It's feature journalism in a world where most professionals don't have time to do more than get a "sound bite" and a picture. I spent hours and hours on this article---just coming up with the questions to ask James took up several hours. Then I had to find and install an editing suite on my computer and teach myself how to edit the conversation.

I also did an interview with someone else, but unfortunately there was a problem with the recording device and it crapped out. So there's several hours work that you will never see here. And all the links I put into the text are there as the result of reading a lot of complex articles---many from academic publications---so I can make sure that I have the story right.

This is a job. I'm happy to put what I write on line because I know people read it. I also know that some university students use the blog for their research. (I have gotten hits from on-line plagiarism detection services to prove it.) But it is still work, and if people want to learn about what's going on around them, they have to be willing to pay for it. Only a dollar a month is fine---and it's easy to do through Patreon and Paypal. 

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Just to point out that I'm not making this stuff up, here're some links for further reading on this subject with a couple short excerpts. 

• Q&A: Sometimes Bureaucracy Is Intentionally Complex, in The American Prospect. This is a short, easy to read interview with two academics who'd just written a book on the subject. 

How did you come to study this topic?

Herd: It was sort of some personal experiences that instigated this project for us. [Moynihan] grew up in Ireland and he, as someone who actually studies bureaucracies and studies public administration, had a difficult experience trying to navigate the immigration system here [in the U.S.], [given] the complexity of the paperwork. He has a Ph.D. and he really struggled to figure a lot of that out.

We also have a child with a disability and I was trying to navigate [Medicaid]. Even though I had taught for years about Medicaid, I was pretty confounded when I actually tried to navigate it myself. For a period, I gave up on the application process even though I knew she would be eligible.

Moynihan: When we talked with friends, everyone also reported having similar experiences at some point with government. This is the biggest issue that people haven’t heard about. But they intuitively get once you explain it. Everyone has a story—about the nightmare interaction that they’ve had [with government], the inflexibility of the process, and the challenges placed upon them.

We realized there wasn't language or a framework that could help us talk about or explore those experiences. So we set out to build one.

• The Bite of Administrative Burden: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation, from Journal of Public Administration Research And Theory. This is a more academic paper, but it starts out with an extensive literature review which would be useful for people interested in finding out more about this subject.

One predictable and frequent finding in studies that have assessed the costs of administrative burden is that program access (or take up of benefits) is constrained and low. In the United States, take-up rates for a number of important social program interventions hover around 25%, including training and work supports, housing programs, and Medicaid (Currie

2006; Shore-Sheppard 2008; Wallace 2002).

• Both the Ontario and Federal governments have recently brought in programs aimed at reducing the burden of government bureaucracy, but only for businesses. The Red Tape Reduction Action Plan is a government of Canada program and the Ontario government has a "Red Tape Reduction Ministry" that created a web page devoted to this project. This raises the important question "why is the government only interested in reducing red tape for businesses---and not ordinary citizens?"

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I think readers should also consider James' particular reaction to the points I raise. Like most people, he brings my concerns back to his experience. That is, that staff get in the way of him doing his job as a Councilor. In the course of that, however, he raises the concern that this lack of "nimbleness" that he admits City Hall manifests might just be the price of real democracy. Since our talk I've mulled over this idea for quite a while and come to the conclusion it's something else. 

I think that the real problem is that bureaucrats have become incredibly risk averse. They have made our government services---as James says---like a store that refuses to open until there is absolutely no risk of anyone shoplifting. This probably driven by the fact that opposition politicians and the media can build their "brand" by playing "gotcha" when projects don't work out the way they were promoted---or even according to the way that opposition or the media have defined them. Looking back at how things have worked in municipal politics over the past decades, I can understand that no one who is trying to hang in long enough to get a pension wants to be connected to anything with a whiff of controversy. (Consider the District Energy Initiative.) But the end result of refusing to ever let someone try something that might end in failure is to give our city a lobotomy. People have forgotten that the biggest risk anyone can ever take is to refuse to ever take any risks at all. Unfortunately, in many cases the people at risk are marginalized people---not the bureaucrats who have nice jobs with benefits. I wish more politicians would consider this and put some effort into trying to cut through the red tape that seems designed to make people's lives needlessly miserable. 

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

There Are No Racists---Only Racist Behaviour

I suspect that a lot of the rioting going on in the USA has just as much to do with the way the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people of colour as it does with police violence. But having said that, the "triggering" event was the death of George Floyd. 

An brief excerpt from a longer Washington Post video.

Used under the "Fair Dealing" Copyright provision. 

I want to share with readers some of the ideas that flow through my consciousness when I hear about this news story. Primarily, I'm talking about how the ten years of university study I put into getting a Master's degree plus the decades I've spent training under a wide variety of spiritual teachers---Buddhist, Daoist, and, Roman Catholic---have influenced my reactions. 

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The first point I'd like to raise is that almost all the institutions in our nation are based on a flawed understanding of what it means to be a human being. Unfortunately, most people also believe in this system of thought---even though various ancient spiritual traditions, the dominant system of academic philosophy, and, modern science all agree that it is flat-out wrong. 

I'm talking about the idea that human beings exist as isolated, atomic individuals who have individual agency. That is to say, that people have a very high degree of freedom to make individual choices, they do so on the basis of a strong degree of objective understanding of the consequences, and, as a result others should make strong inferences about who other people "are" based on past behaviour. In short, we have "minds" or "souls" that don't change much and we freely choose what we will or will not do. 

In contrast, Buddhists believe in the idea of "anatta", or, "no self". This is the idea that if you go through a process of very disciplined self-analysis---ie: meditation---you will come to the inescapable conclusion that there is no "self". Instead, all you can observe are a series of notions that spring spontaneously into your awareness. These are things like "my knees hurt", "I wonder what is going to be served for lunch", and, "I'm over 60 years old. When are these goofy ideas going to stop dominating my mind?"

David Hume, who is one of the fathers of empiricism---the dominant school of modern philosophy which has had significant influence on science---came to almost exactly the same opinion as the Buddhists. It appears that he did so simply because he went through the same process as the monks and nuns did---he looked deeply within his own consciousness.

More recently, modern neuroscience did some experiments with unfortunate individuals who'd had their tremendously severe forms of epilepsy cured by having their corpus callosum cut. This is the "wiring main trunk" that connects the left and right sides of the brain. What happened after this surgery---other than curing absolutely horrific epilepsy---was that researchers found out that the two brain parts seemed to start to think for themselves. In effect, what happened was two individuals found themselves sharing the same body. 

After the right and left brain are separated, each hemisphere will have its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act. Having two "brains" in one body can create some interesting dilemmas. When one split-brain patient dressed himself, he sometimes pulled his pants up with one hand (that side of his brain wanted to get dressed) and down with the other (this side did not). He also reported to have grabbed his wife with his left hand and shaken her violently, at which point his right hand came to her aid and grabbed the aggressive left hand. However, such conflicts are very rare. If a conflict arises, one hemisphere usually overrides the other. (From the Wikipedia.)

In addition, modern psychology has found out that what we call memory isn't an accurate recording of past experience---like a video file on a computer. Instead, it's a recreation made from a very small amount of actual recorded information. To use a computer analogy, memory goes through a data compression routine that records the major points and which rebuilds the experience using people's imagination. This saves brain capacity from becoming clogged with useless information, but at the expense of creating a lot of very corrupted memories.

So what does this mean about human beings? It suggests that the experience of consciousness is to have momentary, fleeting instances of self-awareness as seemingly random thoughts jump into existence. The continuity that we feel as individuals only comes from our memory of the past---which is tremendously corrupted by the way we access it. Other than that, we have anticipation of the future, which everyone knows is very hard to predict. 

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Beyond the bare machinery of consciousness, another point that we need to understand is that we are also embedded in a social and physical context. Consider, if you will, the teaching of the ancient Celestial Master of Daoism. He taught in his book the Taipingjing that his followers should not be proud of their own ethical behaviour nor judgemental of the failings of others because each of us has been profoundly influenced by our upbringing. This includes not only our family, but also our cultural inheritance: religion, ideology, advertising, propaganda, etc.

Similarly, our psychological state can be dramatically influenced by our physical state. Consider the experience of becoming grumpy or irritable because we are hungry or are suffering from a low-grade headache.

 Two weeks into a low-carbohydrate diet, comedian Jess Fostekew got “hangry”.

“I had a terrible, terrible road rage incident,” she remembers. “The car behind me, which happened to be full of large men, bibbed me for not having gone through a light quickly enough.” After getting out of her car and challenging them to a fight, only to be greeted with laughter, she got back in her car and drove.

“I pulled over and I sobbed – rageful sobs – and then vowed to never ever give up carbs again.” (From the BBC website.)

Let's go one step further and consider the effect that certain drugs have on our consciousness. Consider the relative difference between alcohol and cannabis. I can remember many years ago hearing a police chief on the CBC make the observation about the difference between the two. He said that when people get drunk they often get belligerent, take stupid risks, and, get into fights. In contrast, folks who get high tend to mellow out and order a pizza.

Another thing to consider is the wide variety of different psychological states that govern us. Some people are manic, some people are depressive, some are both. In addition, something like 1% of the human race don't have any empathy for other people at all. (The best they can do is learn to mimic concern from others simply because it seems to make it easier to get what they want from life.) All of these tendencies---and a lot more---exist on a continuum where people manifest more or less of them, from barely noticeable to totally debilitating.

What these things say to me is that it is impossible to separate human decision-making from the environment we were raised in and the physiology we were born with. Moreover, modern biology says that these two things are interlinked. We get born with a certain type of genetic inheritance from out parents, and the way they get expressed comes from the experience that they lived through, the experiences our mother lived through when we were in her womb, and, the experiences we had when we were children and young adults. Which just means that the Celestial Master and modern genetics are in agreement---we shouldn't be proud of the good we do nor judge others harshly for the bad they do. We are all the products of our environment.

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I'll admit that this is an odd bit of an opinion piece. But I do think that unless we discard our ridiculous ideas about human psychology it is impossible to really come to terms with some pretty deep problems in our society. If you find this perspective useful, consider subscribing to the blog. Even a dollar a month makes a difference. It's easy to do through Patreon or Pay Pal.

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What has this got to do with George Floyd's death? Not much with George Floyd, but a lot more with Derek Chauvin---the man who killed him. Common sense and the legal system would tell us that the problem is that a single human being freely chose to put his knee on the neck of another man and choked the life out of him over a 8 minute and 46 second period. But ancient spiritual wisdom, modern philosophy, and, science would say that Floyd died because a complex web of biological imperatives and social structures conditioned Chauvin to kill him, then placed him into a situation where he had the means and opportunity to do so.    

Derek Chauvin. Mug shot, public domain image.

If this sounds like I have some sympathy for Chauvin, it's true that I do. He's a human being and I have sympathy for all of us. But he's still alive and Floyd isn't. And there is a basic competency issue that would suggest that everyone knows you shouldn't kneel on the neck of another human being---especially for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

But in his defense, let's think about some complexities. First of all, the majority of police officers in the US have limited education. According to a 2014 MSNBC News Report:

---according to a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics study, 83% of all U.S. police departments require a high school diploma, but only 8% require a 4-year college degree. But another study, by 2010 Police Quarterly, revealed that officers with some college education are less likely to resort to force (56% of the time) than those who have never attended college (68% of the time).

And one very well-educated NYPD employee talked about a major barrier to entry into the police force - the sheer amount of time it takes to get there. “From the day you take the test, to the day you get into Academy, the average time is about 3.5 years. Very, very few [educated] people are willing to put their career on hold for 3-4 years after graduation.”

Once they get into the academy, according to a Vox Media analysis of a 2006 Department of Justice Report most of the time is generally spent on physical fitness, self-defense, and, fire arms training.

That's right, only 213 hrs is spent training police officers, or, about five and one half weeks. Of that, 28% of the time is spent on fire arms, 24% on self-defense, and, 22% on fitness. I suspect that giving people only 5.5 weeks training is pretty low for people who carry weapons, and, are expected to use them on the citizenry based on a quick assessment of a given situation. 

Let's give some thought to how these things break down. 

I'm not about to suggest that a higher education is for everyone. But I am concerned about taking young men with only a high school education and not much life experience directly into a job that requires a great deal of self-confidence, calm rationality, and, a broad understanding about how the world operates. Of course not every new recruit is young, and after a few years the ones that are become older. But once you are a police officer you have entered a way of life that tends to define who you are. That's why there is this thing called "the blue wall of silence". If a young person comes into this subculture without much experience in the broader world, I suspect that it is very easy to "go along" with job's existing internal culture and stop identifying with the broader society. (Bringing in recruits with a broader set of life experiences was one of the suggestions that the Iacobucci Report made in response to the Sammy Yatin killing in Toronto.)

As for the training that new recruits go through, I suspect that most readers would agree that there should be a bare minimum of firearms training that people need to receive before the state will issue them a gun. I suppose 60 hours might be OK at least for getting safe use out of the way. (That's more than I had to take to get my license to purchase a firearm---but that was forty years ago.) But it is important to realize how incredibly rare it is for a police officer to have to draw and use their gun. 83% of  American citizen believe that the typical police officer has had to fire their weapon at least once in their career. The actual fact is that only 27% of officers say that they have ever had to fire their gun (and don't forget that this includes having to use the weapon to kill vicious dogs and euthanize animals struck by cars). Let that number sink in---over a 20 year career (generally how long you have to work to get a pension), almost three in four people never fire their guns. If this is the case, should an astounding 28% of the training go into firearms?

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I have some understanding of self-defense issues because I've seriously studied martial arts for something like 40 years, have taken courses in non-violent crisis intervention, and, had to intervene in confrontations as part of my work life. I can tell you that 51 hours of self-defense training is not enough to really do anything except teach people the absolute rudiments. 

And the biggest part of self-defense isn't actually "the moves", it's more a question of more theoretical things, like situational awareness, posture, reading another person's body language, the cultural context, etc. It also involves learning to control your fear and understanding the importance of objective analysis of a situation's real risk. Please understand this last point. If someone is prepared for everything, it actually means that they are prepared for nothing at all. That's because part of learning to protect yourself is learning the odds and working within that framework. 

Here's an example of a training video used by one of the larger consulting companies, Calibre Press. 

There is an argument put forward by some academics is that these sorts of videos create the impression among law enforcement officers that their job is tremendously dangerous. The problem is that this simply isn't true. 

If you add up the jobs with the most fatalities, police comes in at 18th. Take a look at what the really dangerous jobs are: 

1. Logger, 140 fatal injuries/100,000 (I have never cut trees as a job, but growing up on a farm I was involved as a child---yeah, it's scary dangerous cutting down trees!)
2. Fisherman, 86 fatal injuries/100,000
3. Aircraft pilot, 56/100,000 (there aren't that many airline crashes---but this includes people who fly things like bush planes too.)
4. Roofer, 48/100,000 (I did work a season as a chimney sweep---roofs are dangerous.)
5. Garbage truck drivers, 34/100,000---mostly being hit by cars while picking up garbage cans.
6. Structural Iron workers, 25/100,000
7. Traveling sales people/ truck drivers, 25/100,000---mostly due to traffic accidents.
8. Farmers 23/100,000. Yup, been there done that, lots of crazy machines to kill you.
9. Five other jobs until you get to number 14. 

Police officers according to this analysis come in as the 14th most dangerous, at 15 fatal injuries/100,000. And of this less than half are caused by "intentional shooting". Unfortunately, the USA Today article doesn't break this number down to account for suicide---which is tremendously common with police officers. According to this study, it accounts for 17 fatalities per 100,000. The average for the general population is 13 per 100,000. This means I don't know if those extra 4 suicides should be subtracted from "intentional shooting" deaths, or added to them. Either way, it appears that more deaths come from something pretty mundane---traffic accidents---than being shot by malefactors. 

What this suggests to me is that people who work for police departments in the USA are being taught to be irrationally afraid of the people that they are supposed to "serve and protect". If you go to work with the paranoid idea that you are surrounded by a disproportionately large number of people who are out to kill you, it is hardly surprising if you get a little "trigger happy". And spread that attitude far enough, and you are going to find examples where people go too far---like Derek Chauvin.

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There is another way of doing policing, one that stems from the beginnings of the job in the 19th century. In 1929 Sir Robert Peel founded the modern London police force and based on a set of very important principles.

Here's a statement of them from the Ottawa Police Force website. 

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.
3. Police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
5. Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to the public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.
7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

I would argue that in the USA (maybe Canada too for that matter---but at least we pay lip service to Peel's principles) the police don't pay enough attention when it comes to numbers 2 through 9---especially with regard to the black community. This isn't because some of the police force have freely chosen to become racist and kill black people at the slightest excuse. Instead, I'd suggest that police officers are just like all the rest of us---we are the products of biological and social factors that push us towards certain types of behaviours. And because our institutions have no understanding of this fact, we have stumbled into a situation where we are often selecting for and training police to be fearful (or indifferent), and this leads to situations like the one where George Floyd got killed. 

This is why I've titled this Op Ed There Are No Racists---Only Racist Behaviour. I don't think it helps us understand the problem by saying that individual police officers are "racist". Instead, I think it's important to understand exactly what is going on in the process of selecting and training them. That's the real culprit in the situation where a police officer would crush a man's neck with his knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, not officer Derek Chauvin. 

In other words, it's the system, not the person.

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Furthermore I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!