This teachable moment is not only about race. It includes understanding why the Cambridge MA police department would arrest Skip Gates for breaking into his own home, and then continue to insist after a huge outcry that they did the right thing.
My guess is that Sergeant James Crowley was following an inflexible rule that you arrest anyone who shouts angrily at a cop. This may be a good general rule to identify dangerous persons, and having many such rules allows the department to cope with an enormous policing task with limited staff. The support that Sergeant Crowley attracted from other policeman elsewhere may reflect their sympathy with such rules (although the New York Times found wide variations in the extent to which this particular rule is followed).
All organizations have rules for their staff, whose purposes is saving on costs and staff time by prescribing routine responses to different situations. McDonalds makes a ton of money by having rules that can be implemented on a large scale by a relatively small and unskilled staff. As usual in economics, however, there are tradeoffs. Robotic rules may lead to stupid outcomes, outraging and driving away the customers.
I once had a customer service person insist that I could not return a bookcase because I had already opened the box. She admitted I had a valid reason for returning it — that it was missing a crucial set of screws — which I could only have discovered by opening the box. But no amount of argument could make her depart from the rule against open box returns. (After further persistence, I eventually got the company to give me the missing screws.)
So organizations choose rule policies that find the sweet spot trading off lower costs of inflexible rules against possibly even higher costs of outraging the customers with stupid outcomes. For private firms, the sweet spot is determined by supply and demand – consumers may be willing to put up with a small amount of stupid outcomes from rules that get them a cheaper product. So a rule is not automatically bad because it leads on a few occasions to a stupid result.
Obviously, the police rule in Gates’ case led to a stupid outcome. The question is what is the sweet spot for police departments? Public bureaucracies don’t respond directly to customer demand in finding their sweet spot, it’s politically determined. Since many of the suspect “customers” are poor and powerless, police departments likely choose to err on the side of sticking to the rules and putting up with the outraged suspects. And historically, they were more likely to perpetrate outrages on black suspects than on white suspects.
All of which suggests something more damning than stupid behavior by one policeman – it looks like the Cambridge, Massachusetts police department has chosen a sweet spot very easy on its own officers and very hard on its customers – and perhaps even harder on the black customers. This is morally and politically unacceptable; the Cambridge Police seem more insulated against democratic accountability than they should be.
Of course, there are a lot of parallels in unaccountable aid agencies. This blog has pointed out cases where USAID refuses to change even when outside critics point out egregious misbehavior. They follow the low-effort rule “just keep doing what you are already doing,” because the critics have little political power over them.
So perhaps as Obama, Gates, and Crowley share a Sam Adams, they can move beyond who said what and discuss making public bureaucracies more politically accountable to the citizens.
15 Comments
A lot of rules and zero-tolerance policies originate from concern about lawsuits from people claiming they weren’t treated uniformly. Lawsuits probably do influence police departments; I could imagine them implementing more-than-optimally rigid rules to try to prevent, for example, accusations of racism.
In an ideal world, you would only have quality people working for your organization. You could establish principles, rather than rules, which the skilled people could apply to situations. But quality people are a rare commodity, and robot-like people are easier to come by. I am curious whether people following this blog feel that aid workers tend to be quality or robot-like.
I agree with dWj that micro-managing procedures could be a strategy to avoid liability. The more responsibility people are given, the more responsible (in the sense of ‘liable’) they are for the outcome.
There’s also a freedom of speech issue at play. I argue here that free speech is also an “inflexible rule”, at least in the US, and shouldn’t necessarily be that way.
I don’t mean that Gates shouldn’t have had the right to “talk back”. Probably he should have. I don’t know the case well enough. What I mean is that, as a general rule, freedom of speech in case of abusive speech directed at cops, should be interpreted in a flexible way, i.e. people shouldn’t have the right, in all circumstances, to say whatever they want to police officers.
What has this got to do with AidWatch and it’s original mission? After reading the blog since it’s inception, with high expectations, it’s clear to me that they don’t know who their customers are.
AidWatch is creating a new market for aid accountability to help the poor, and has opened the window for the world to observe and evaluate. We need more successful aid-in-action examples as models to follow and promote to our wider communities. We will support those who do, as well as advocate against those who abuse our private and public dollars. When you create a market, you create competition. I hope AidWatch will continue to be a leader in the market they created. Others will inevitably follow and expand the window, thanks to your original efforts.
Claudia, thanks for the feedback, I take it very seriously.
The blog on police department rules was meant to illustrate a similar issue with aid agencies (as signalled by the penultimate paragraph) — aid bureaucracies follow inflexible rules that could make sense as a way to make their task manageable. However, if the rules generate too many stupid outcomes, this is a sign that they are unaccountable to the beneficiaries and donor publics. A future blog may explore further specific rules in aid that are counterproductive.
However, if this didn’t come through to you in the blog, then obviously I need to do a better job at exposition.
Or as you suggest, maybe we are suffering from mission drift. We will be doing a reader survey sometime soon to get more systematic feedback.
all the best, Bill
Dear Bill,
Continue to publish the stupid outcomes and good aid success stories so that we can follow up on both within our expanding communities. DRI can’t do it alone.
Respectfully,
Claudia McGeary
Founder, Faith in Africa
That “sweet spot” is especially big in assistance because there’s so little effective oversight and no hard budget constraint that prevents mistakes from being repeated.
Here, from today’s USA Today, an IG report comes out in March 2008 showing fraud and waste in a $600 million program but isn’t noticed for more than a year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2009-07-26-usaid-jobs_N.htm
It seems like there’s also a link here to the Civ/Mil discussion in the aid world. We want the military to be the military and to stay out of humanitarian space. Police officers themselves frequently use the language of warfare and combat to describe what they do (“…we’re at war every day…”), yet we continue to place customer service-esque expectations on them in addition to whatever expectations we might have about keeping crime down. I’m not at all defending officer Crowley’s actions, but I do wonder if our expectations of the civil police are entirely internally coherent.
Great post about the benefits and costs of rule based systems.
Generally there is a tendency for people to want publicly funded organizations (such as the police or international development agencies) to be rule based – in order to ensure that money is well spent in terms of efficiency/risk management and that it is distributed fairly (i.e. no subjective and possibly biased judgements). But as this post nicely illustrates – this doesn’t always yield optimal results.
In the international development aid context this can translate into agencies being overly micro-managed by donors, or by individual project officers being overburdened with bureaucratic requirements into how projects are implemented and reported. Rules also are more appropriate when the “right” way to do things is known – but in development contexts the right answers in a given context are not always known and so overgeneralizing things into rules can clearly lead to poor outcomes.
Most of the people I know working in international development are hardworking, smart and trustworthy. I’d argue what is needed are ways to better empower project staff to make their own decisions using their own judgement based on the circumstances they are facing, while ensuring reasonable systems are in place to ensure some degree of sensible risk management and accountability. Easier said than done of course!
Adam Baker asked whether people, aid workers in particular are “robot-like” or “quality” people. I’m not sure this distinction works for me – but would rather stress i) is a person a good match for the job they are in? and ii) does the environment where they work empower them to make the decisions they need to make? Often “quality” people are put in positions where they are not encouraged or even allowed to use their judgement, with predicatable results, as well as wasted abilities.
As an ex-IFAD (UN) staff member, would like to share one of my experiences: we faced the problem which Ian_T addresses: ” being overly micro-managed by donors.” I managed the Small Grants programme at IFAD and found that there were constraints imposed on our team – when the Executive Board met x3/year we had to report- report it all. It was time for show & tell. One Board session, the micro-management issue, carried out by a donor, came into play. We were told by the US rep that we have to add logframes to our grant proposals (probably bec it made it easier for the Rep to report back to the authorities). Quantifiable deliverables, we knew the drill. We found this to be an extremely tedious exercise, in particular for a grant project, but it is what the Board member requested (we did, after all want our 7th Replenishment to go swimmingly well, oh yes). Even though I find IFAD to be one of the most (if not “the” most) fascinating & innovative UN organisations there is out there, we had to adhere to the rules. We had to give in (read: kow tow) to the Board member and do as we were told. There is a pecking order, after all. How these logframes benefit Farmer Field Schools, for eg., I am not sure. Actually, it doesnt benefit them at all, but this is not a forum to discuss logframes, so shall stop here.
qualm-storm, re: the $600m programme in Iraq — come on, in an “aid program” designed to bribe/buy off the Iraqi insurgency until the US can declare victory and leave, fraud and waste was surely a design feature of the program, not a bug in it.
Why is it that everyone only mentions Crowley learning a lesson? Why not Gates? He brought a lot of baggage to that encounter.
On another note, the broader lesson your teaching here was applied to US military warfare techniques a few decades ago. Whereas the historical understanding was rigid rules, US officers on the ground can now make on-the-fly changes. This was first applied during the first US-Iraq war in Kuwait.
Mr. Z – sadly, you’re probably right.
One summary I read noted that the officer asked Gates to come outside so that he could immediately arrest him. Is there a refutation to this somewhere?
Yes NE1, that is refuted by the transcript of the recording of Sgt. Crowley’s transmissions, which clearly show Gates was arguing with him outside the house before the arrest took place, with points such as “Do you know who I am” and so forth. Also, neither ID showed the house as being his address. Given these facts it’s pretty reasonable to make the arrest and sort it out later. If you want to yell at cops and accuse them of racism you can do it all day online (as many people do) or for that matter in front of a police station, so I don’t really see how showing restraint while an officer is there is really even a meaningful limitation of free speech.
Furthermore, one of the arresting officers was in fact black, Sgt. Crowley teaches racial profiling courses and the original caller did not even specify if the suspects were black.
So yeah, please focus on aid issues. I know this post was well intentioned but you didn’t have all the facts and when you do that you are in danger of just confirmiing your own biases.