In Police Reform, Time is Our Side

• Jim Jordan

In the world of policing, what do waiting for nature to call to a drunken — and disruptive — Red Sox fan, taking a measured approach to car stops, and calmly engaging with someone illegally selling loose cigarettes all have in common? They use the resource of time to achieve a desired outcome with the lowest chance of a situation spiraling into unnecessary violence or, at worst, fatal tragedy. 

The police service in Massachusetts and around the country should take a hard look at using time as a tactical resource. Slowing down would make many operations more likely to achieve the objectives of the preservation of human life, the preservation of evidence, and the restoration of order.

The late Boston Police Commissioner Mickey Roache once described his deployment of time, behavior, and physiology to address drunken rowdiness in the 1970’s in the bleachers at Fenway.   The Sox’s policy was to hire big, tough ushers/bouncers, such as Boston College linemen, to wade in and remove the most obnoxious.  This typically led to wider chaos, as the targets’ drinking companions started swinging at the bouncers.  Then-Sergeant Roache had a better idea.  He asked the ushers to point out the worst offenders.  Since drunks frequently must get more alcohol and must pee, Mickey would have a few officers waiting just out of sight on the ramp.  The belligerent went down the ramp and up one step into the wagon, done for the night.  The good sergeant prevented a lot of mayhem without having to get any noses broken. Every effective police officer I have known has used time and creativity to resolve situations.  The officers give people the time and space to do what the officers want them to do. These same principles can be applied to urgent situations as well as chronic disorder problems.  

Many situations to which police apply rapid interventions would come to better outcomes if police got there fast and then slowed down, using time as a resource and using time to devise lawful, customized solutions.  Some situations, such as when lives are in danger, demand swift police action.  But 85% or more of the situations to which police respond are less than life-threatening emergencies or serious crimes in progress.  Urgent situations such as the execution of search and arrest warrants; responding to individuals threatening to harm themselves; trying to calm a mentally ill person in crisis; and reacting to people who resist police in motor vehicle-related stops could be brought to better outcomes through the application of time. Chronic disorder problems, too, would benefit from the mix of time and tailored solutions. And humans are far better equipped to speed things up as necessary than to slow down action that is in full steam.

The value of time seems to have gotten trampled by what police scholar George L. Kelling called a “a culture of hurrying.”  One can identify three powerful forces that shaped beliefs and practices. It started with the reinvention of US policing in the Progressive Era.  Reformers were deeply influenced by the industrial efficiency ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor (the Academy of Management voted his book, The Principles of Scientific Management, the most influential management book of the twentieth century). Taylor believed among many things that all work could be routinized.  Reforming police chiefs bought in, believing that police work could be reduced to a set of routine activities.  Since one of their main objectives was to reduce corruption by cutting close ties to the community, Taylorism appealed to them. History has discredited the routinization idea – police work is marbled with variety and discretion — but the thinking hangs on as the ideological bulwark of patrol strategy.  

When 9-1-1 became in the 1970’s the principal way for the public to summon the police, efficiency replaced effectiveness as the ideal.  As the public embraced the three-digit system, calls were always waiting. Indeed, radio protocols required that officers identify as “off” when responding to people in need and “on” when driving around and available for the next call.  Police personnel learned from the culture that a good response is a fast and brief response. A proper response is also a take-no-shit response.

These forces contributed to a police identity as rapid-action crime warriors.  How fast one resolves a situation became an unspoken aspect of what makes a “real cop.” As a consequence, to use assistance is a signal of weakness. Toxic masculinity also contributes. Real men have the manly skills to handle what’s in front of them and to handle it quickly.  Resistance of any kind is too soon met with physical force. People of all sexes, genders, and sexual identities are subject to the masculine norm in the police service.

When we think of some of the tragedies in Massachusetts and especially nationally, we can begin to see how the tincture of time could have yielded better outcomes.  In January of this year, members of a specialized police street crime unit in Memphis pulled over 29-year-old Tyre Nichols for reported reckless driving. Within minutes of the stop Mr. Nichols was fatally wounded beneath a frenzy of kicks and blows from the officers. In my opinion, the answer lies in the context for murder and for reckless disregard for human life created by a culture of hurrying and the twisted sense of what it means to take command of a scene. It is the ultimate tragedy to which the take-no-time, take-no-shit mind set can lead.  

It’s extremely unlikely that the murder of Tyre Nichols represents the first time the specialized Memphis unit rode roughshod over the subject of a stop, a pursuit, or an arrest. Most larger cities including Boston (see The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide by Dick Lehr) have a story to tell about an out-of-control specialized unit or precinct. Details vary but the basic tale is the same. A pattern of behavior goes unchecked and a norm forms; more and more morally corrupt behavior becomes acceptable.  A trail strewn with civil rights violations and abuse of force ends in homicide.

What if they had fostered and enforced a norm that officers slow down once they have motor vehicles blocked by police cars?  What difference might it have made if the Memphis Police had in place a policy and practice that emphasized restraint and the taking of more time?  What if ripping Mr. Nichols from the driver’s seat as the officers’ first action, before even speaking to him, was seen not just as a procedural violation but as abnormal behavior? What if that behavior, like any abnormal behavior with an in-group, earned you a shunning? Why wasn’t the fact of multiple officers reportedly screaming contradictory orders at a frightened man seen as bizarre and abnormal? What if the culture made it abnormal NOT to use time to back off and re-group, and to relieve the officers who first laid hands on Mr. Nichols?  

Many readers will recall the death of Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Officers were attempting to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes What was the rush in getting Eric Garner in custody?  If handled using time as a resource, the incidents today might be never-remembered, one-line summaries in police digital archives.  Instead, Mr. Nichols and Mr. Garner were killed, indictments and lost careers followed, and we still remember the incidents. 

In the death of Eric Garner, officials in the aftermath focused on the use of a chokehold by now-former Officer Daniel Pantaleo.  But two other big questions went unaddressed. Mr. Garner appears from all accounts to have been a chronic nuisance on Bay Street in the Tompkinsville section of Staten Island.  The report from the judge in Mr. Pantaleo’s civilian complaint case states that officers from the local precinct had responded several times to complaints about Mr. Garner.  The first big question is, why not take time to learn more about what made Mr. Garner tick, to try something new, after doing the same thing so many times?  What additional levers and strings were available to modify the cigarette seller’s behavior? 

The two first responders could have been directed to stand down after having to put up with Mr. Garner’s badgering and yelling at them, to be relieved by the arriving officers. Again, if their department had a standing protocol for such relief, the young men could have given way without losing face. The officers chose to put hands on Mr. Garner at the very moment they heard a siren approaching, signaling the arrival of assistance. Why?  I suspect it was that learned instinct about demonstrating one’s manhood; it was about saving face. 

Better use of time requires a change in how police and public understand power.  The assertion of power based on authority, rather than physical force, does not come with a play clock. When the police arrive, the game for the suspect or subject is effectively over.  It may take five minutes or five hours, but the presence of the police signals the situation will be resolved.

Time could obviate use of physical force. Departments should study this question and develop procedural guidelines that encourage slowing down.

-end-

Time for Sports Owners to Own Civil Rights at the Game

• Jim Jordan

Haven’t we had enough racist behavior in the seats of Boston’s pro sports venues?  

Segregationist management practices and racial animus in the stands are as old as pro sports in our city.  From avowed segregationist owners like George Preston Marshall (Boston Braves-cum-Washington Commanders) and Thomas A. Yawkey (Red Sox) to the second balcony in the old Garden being known to all as “N-word Heaven,” to Bill Russell and his family being left on their own to face racial attacks, it starts to feel woven into the fabric. As recently as this summer, Lebron James was the latest Black athlete to remind us of this tradition, when he described Boston fans as “racist as f—.”

Much deserved attention has focused on the experience of Black athletes in our big-league stadia.   Too little has focused on what racist behavior does to Black fans considering catching a game at the Garden, Fenway or Gillette. Isn’t it past time we thought about whether racist behavior in the seats and in the executive suites intimidates Black fans and amounts to the violation of their civil rights?  

Let’s try a new solution. Why not use the Commonwealth’s civil rights laws to prosecute racist fan behavior? The idea may sound like folly in the context of the conventional approach to criminal investigations and prosecutions under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act.  Objections would include concerns about First Amendment free speech rights and Constitutional concerns about identifying a clear victim of what is on its face mere speech.  To the first objection, one argues that history has weaponized the n-word.  It is a word like no other in the English language.  The Attorney General’s web site says, “Along with the impact on individual victims, hate crimes send a message to members of groups that they do not belong, or will be hurt because they are perceived as different. Our response to hate crimes can send a powerful message that these crimes will not be tolerated.”  I am not aware of any comprehensive review into whether the n-word has intimidated specific Black fans into feeling “they do not belong.”  We do not know if specific management practices make specific Black people feel “they do not belong,” because we never have investigated. But we can just look around our stadia and see that Black fans are not there. If we look in earnest, one suspects we would find at least some Black fans who would testify that racialized treatment kept them at home. That is, it’s hard to believe we would not find at least some civil rights victimizations that have gone unreported.  The owners of the venues and the teams have evaded full responsibility for ensuring that their stadia are safe environments for all people.

According to a publication of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, “Your rights may have been violated if: 

• “The perpetrator targeted you because of your race, national origin, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability or protected activity (for example, the right to vote or the right to associate). 
• “The perpetrator interfered with your civil rights, including your right to use public parks, walk on public streets, attend school, or live peacefully in your home. 
• “The perpetrator used verbal slurs while threatening or intimidating you.”

Sports owners can’t change the minds of committed racists.  But experience and research show they can change fan behavior.  They simply have to develop the will to do so.  We have examples.  Remember the drunken brawling and gambling in the bleachers and far right field grandstand at Fenway?  Remember smoking?  Remember 2005, when a Massachusetts Court upheld Bob Kraft’s revocation of a company’s season tickets, when a guy using the seats peed in an empty women’s room at Gillette? The guest claimed he was in a long line for the gents and suffered from a urological condition. It may seem hardline to revoke a privilege under such circumstances, but the action sent an unmistakable message: such disorder will not be tolerated. Surely, racist behavior is at least as onerous as peeing in the wrong restroom.

We are in new days in Boston sports. The four major sports clubs and the soccer team feature owners with professed progressive values.  Lebron James is an influential part-owner of the Red Sox and a leading voice for racial equity.  Mayor Wu is one of the nation’s most thoughtful municipal progressives. Let’s ask them to pool their power and come together on protecting the civil rights of Black fans. 

The owners could jump start a civil rights initiative with a “summit conference” on the issues. Can you imagine the impact if John Henry, Bob Kraft, Jeremy Jacobs, and Wic Grousbeck, along with James, decided they’d had enough?  Likely Attorney General-elect Andrea Campbell and likely DA-elect Kevin Hayden, son of a prominent historian of the Black experience in Boston, would at least listen closely. John Henry was offended sufficiently by the Yawkey legacy to pressure the City to change the name of Yawkey Way back to the original Jersey Street. It would be most meaningful if the Red Sox and the Celtics took the lead on this.  We can even name the summit conference for two great leaders on this issue: Bill Russell and Izzy Muchnick, the Mattapan city councilor who led a fight against the Red Sox and the baseball color line in the mid-1940’s.

Even if an exhaustive, comprehensive investigation into whether Black fans are deterred by racist behavior somehow turned up zero victims, the effort would be worth it.  Through the instrumentality of the law and the morals of influential institutional stewards, i.e., Boston club owners, we could wield a powerful deterrent force. 

Mass.: Getting It Right on Use of Deadly Force

• Jim Jordan

Police in Massachusetts rarely shoot anyone. According to the latest Washington Post analysis, Massachusetts is virtually tied for the lowest rate of officer-involved shootings in the US – six per million in population.  (Rhode Island has the fewest at four per million; New York also experiences officer-involved shoots at the annual rate of six shootings per million).  Massachusetts officers face the same complicated encounters faced by personnel in other states. They face the same risks, real and potential. But the encounters just don’t end in the same rate of deaths of civilians as they do in many other states.  When one contemplates how many Bay Staters with access to a gun are deranged right now on alcohol and drugs, six in a million is a remarkable rate. As Massachusetts residents advocate for police reform, that fact should not be lost. 

What is different about use of deadly force in Massachusetts? Decades of observation and study lead me to conclude that the reasons for fewer police shootings are cultural.  Even with a history of many genuine controversies and a few foofaraws, most Massachusetts departments have maintained a connection to the community.  In general, officers maintain an identification with the people in the communities they serve.  They see themselves for the most part as stakeholders, rather than outsiders.  The downside to this phenomenon is that a history of residential segregation in Massachusetts means most departments continue to be disproportionately white.  We can have diverse police departments and that sustain a stake in the health and safety of the community.

Strong identification with the community does not exist everywhere.  Anecdotally, I remember a visit to Boston in the 1990’s from a well-regarded police supervisor from California. He asked, quite casually, what the Boston Police “kill ratio” was.  I suspected we did not use this macabre metric: the rate at which police kill people at whom they shoot.  I did an informal poll of top department leaders.  Such a thing was unknown to all.  History and culture again explain the difference between how officers on opposite coasts conceive of using deadly force..

California embraced a style of policing – stressing clinical detachment and technical excellence — that actually came to be known as “California Professionalism.”  Technical excellence meant firing when the rules say fire. A one-over-one “kill ratio” was the clinical standard.   The champions of this style of policing used popular entertainment like television to promote it. In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the TV shows “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” were both created by Jack Webb. Webb was an actor, producer, and right-wing ideologue who promoted a particularly authoritarian version of California Professionalism. The ideology was adopted widely in the US.  The police in the Northeast generally did not embrace it.

Boston police clung to walking beats into the latter 1960’s despite pressure from professional associations like the International Association of Chiefs of Police to detach, get into cars, and police by random, motorized patrol.  Officers knew they were more effective when they were seen as part of the neighborhood mosaic. The relationships certainly have been fraught, especially with the Black community and other communities of color. The “relationship” with the LGBTQ community once consisted entirely of repression. Thus, while the  connective apparatus between community and police has sustained many dents, scratches and a few ruptures that required repair in the past 50 years, it has not given way.

The stories that local officers tell are clues to a second cultural basis for fewer shootings.  Listen to almost any veteran officer tell their story. You will hear about the time they used some sixth sense – informed by compassion and wiliness – to bring a confrontation to the preferred outcome: everyone lives, arrests are made. These stories are told in the guardrooms and they inform the legacy passed down the generations.  Police in this region pride themselves on relying on their wits, rather than force multipliers, to get the compliance they need in hairy encounters.  You can read this, too, in some great memoirs and nonfiction by and about police in Massachusetts and the Northeast.  In Tracy Kidder’s book, Home Town, you can read about an officer in Northampton, MA who feels shaken but good about the showdown with an armed teenager that he ended with no injures to anyone.  In Bill Bratton’s autobiographical Turnaround, he shares an anecdote about when as a Boston sergeant he confronted a hostage taker while unarmed. He uses his wit to gain release of the hostage from the armed man.  In Blue Blood, former New York City patrol officer Edward Conlon offers a lode of stories in which he used professional discretion to give people the room to do what he wanted them to do. 

The police service everywhere has work to do to catch up with the new learning and expanding consciousness about systemic racism.  We have evidence that says bias results in disparate treatment when the subject is a person of color. Local departments cannot look at the killings of George Floyd, Daunte Wright and many others and not examine their own decision-making. The more we learn, the more police in Massachusetts must be open to the new questions and to embrace learning.  If leaders can avoid defensiveness in the face of new evidence, the Commonwealth’s police culture can provide fertile ground for improvement.  The overwhelming majority of officers in the commonwealth are right to object to being lumped in with departments that are much quicker to pull the trigger.  That is less a reason to step out of the reform movement and more a promising foundation on which to build new, non-racialized systems and practices.

Docs and Cops and Burnout

Policing and medicine analogize in many ways.  One similarity is the effect of the work on the people who do it for a living.

Check out this piece from WBUR.  It’s reporting on a study of burnout effects on MDs.  In many places, substitute ‘police officer’ for ‘doctor’ and the story still works.

Boston Medical Center takes a step in the right direction with appointment of a high-level wellness officer and program.  Police and other CJ agencies should be looking at the same thing.

Burnout Among Doctors Is A Public Health Crisis, Report Says

Increasing burnout among physicians is a dire public health crisis, new research out of Harvard says.

The paper cites research that nearly half of American doctors experience symptoms of professional burnout. And a 2018 survey found that 78 percent of over 8,000 physicians polled reported feeling burned out at least sometimes.

“At some point, you can’t go much higher, or you’re going to hit 100,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of global strategy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an author on the new study. “We’ve got to start addressing this.”

But according to Dr. Elisabeth Poorman, a primary care physician in Everett, part of the problem with treating symptoms of burnout is that there’s no exact definition for what burnout is.

Jha and his fellow authors say “professional burnout” is typically manifested by three main symptoms: emotional exhaustion; a sense of depersonalization and disconnection from work; and feeling a lack of efficiency at work.

Poorman, who has written for WBURabout her experience with clinical depression as an intern, agrees. But she also says that the lack of consensus on what constitutes burnout leads to a mischaracterization of the problem.

Specifically, she says it lets the medical education system off the hook as the main culprit in making such issues the norm.

“I feel that it recasts a systemic problem as an individual one,” Poorman said. “Starting in medical school and continuing throughout our lives, we [physicians] are discouraged from seeking mental health care. And I think that it’s what allowed this toxic and dysfunctional culture to proliferate without any real pushback.”

Furthermore, Poorman suggested affected doctors often misdiagnose serious mental health disorders as simply being “burned out.”

“We’re supposed to be invulnerable,” she said.

Jha echoed Poorman’s assertion about the medical community’s culpability in perpetuating stigmas about doctors’ mental well-being. He says a cultural change is needed.

“It’s really important to separate out somebody who’s so dysfunctional and incapable of taking care of patients that they are a danger to patients,” Jha said, “and having a mechanism where people can just come forward and talk about these feelings and issues and symptoms and get them addressed. Right now we conflate these things. And I think it’s made the problem much worse.”

Improvements to mental health treatment are prominent among the Harvard paper’s suggestions for solutions to the growing problem.

For starters, the authors challenge medical institutions and officials to “facilitate appropriate treatment and support without stigma or unnecessary constraints on physicians’ ability to practice.” And they suggest that health care organizations add a chief wellness officer charged with studying and seeking to reduce burnout.

Also, the authors point out a need for improving the electronic health records system. The paper asserts that the computer-based system used by many health providers requires physicians to spend two hours doing computer work for every one hour spent in face-to-face interaction with a patient. That also often means many late-night hours in the office.

Jha and his co-authors highlight that patients are less likely to be satisfied with care from doctors who are experiencing symptoms of burnout. Furthermore, research implicates symptoms of burnout with increases in physician error.

If these burnout factors are not meaningfully addressed, the issue could have drastic long-term ramifications for health care throughout the country, the paper says. The authors say physicians experiencing burnout are more at risk for ending their practices or leaving medicine altogether. 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has predicted a nationwide shortage of up to 90,000 physicians by 2025. In addition to the lack of health care access that would create, recruiting new physicians or replacing departed ones can cost employers anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million.

Jha’s own experience with burnout has left him at times feeling “thwarted” rather than aided by the medical system in his quest to help patients. That toll, he says, is a challenge for any physician to bear.

“You get home and you say, ‘Am I doing good here? Am I actually doing what the patient needs?’ ” Jha said. “It is distressing. It is at times incredibly demoralizing. I think all of us feel those kinds of dysfunctions.”

 

 

 

Looking at Urban History in Stationhouse Architecture

We learned about this piece from Gary Cordner. https://urbanomnibus.net/2018/03/beacon-bunker/

The article is a photo report on the history of architecture of police precinct houses in NYC.  One can can see the evolution of how city authorities viewed the community.  Many 19th century and early 20th century houses look like courthouses and municipal administration buildings.  The design says that the police are an important democratic institution in a stable society.  Things were never so stable as the designs suggest — at the same time we were building armories as fortresses for militias to put down labor struggles–  but one can see the main tendency: Romanesque and renaissance facades communicating dignity.

By the mid-20th century, one sees the emergence of the bunker architecture, the us against them design.  The buildings look like fortresses.  The design is a response to the deeply-felt threats of massive increases in urban crime and violent rioting as well as social unrest, as many formerly excluded peoples asserted themselves.

In my city, Boston, one can compare the late 19th century District 14 building in Brighton with the 1960’s stations in Dudley Square and on New Sudbury Street in Government Center (formerly the West End).  District 1 on New Sudbury is complete with embrasures (loop holes) to facilitate fire at invaders.  Compare these fortified positions with some of the re-purposed 19th and early 20th Boston houses like 28 Seaverns Avenue (old Division 13) in Jamaica Plain, the old Station Nine on Dudley Street near St. Patrick’s Church and the old Division 16 in the Back Bay.

Then look at the buildings opened since the 1990’s.  No more bunkers; we are back to civic institutions placed in prominent settings, like the jazzy new house in Staten Island in this article or the new Boston houses in the South End (District 4) and in Dudley Square (2).

https://urbanomnibus.net/2018/03/beacon-bunker/

Houston police focus on choking in prevention of domestic violence homicides

The HPD has adopted an investigative tactic that progressive departments across the US are using in DV cases.  Research and the experiences of victims and officers long have established the personal and extreme nature of violence in assaults on intimate partners.  Evidence of choking is not always easy to spot.  It takes the extra care HPD is exercising.

By Brian Rogers, Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2018

Houston police commanders who are targeting domestic violence in an effort to prevent homicides implemented a new policy Wednesday, and will now send a supervisor to crime scenes where there are allegations of domestic violence but no arrests have been made.

The change is an effort to increase awareness among law enforcement and prosecutors that victims of domestic violence, specifically those who are strangled and survive, are eight times more likely to be killed by the abuser within a year, according to studies.

 

At a press conference Wednesday where they were flanked by more than a dozen senior police officers and prosecutors, HPD Chief Art Acevedo and Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced the new policy. It requires supervisors to go to domestic violence calls where there is not an arrest to double check whether charges should be filed. HPD officers are also being trained to look for signs of strangulation that may not be readily apparent, such as victims who say they saw stars or exhibited raspiness in their voice.

Preventing

“We know that too often, domestic violence leads to homicides,” Acevedo said. “We want to put perpetrators on notice that the Houston Police Department will be putting you in jail if you commit acts of domestic violence.”

Acevedo said Houston recorded 43 domestic violence homicides last year.

Acevedo also encouraged immigrants in Houston without documentation to report crime, especially domestic violence.

 

“We’re not interested in somebody’s immigration status,” he said. “If a person is a victim of a crime or a witness to a crime, we want them to understand that this department, this DA, our mayor, our community, stands with victims and witnesses of crime.”

 

In April, Acevedo said a police department analysis found the number of Hispanics reporting rape was down 42.8 percent from last year, and those reporting other violent crimes had registered a 13 percent drop. He blamed the drop on fear about deportation among immigrants, and said fewer people reporting crime affects the safety of the entire community.

 

On Wednesday, law enforcement officials said they hope collecting evidence of strangulation early in the process will mean they can file more serious charges and prosecute them more aggressively.

 

The policy adds to an ongoing initiative by the DA’s office, called the strangulation task force, to increase communication between police called to the scene of domestic violence and prosecutors who sign off on charges being filed.

 

“The solutions are not that difficult,” Ogg said. “Train our lawyers, train our officers and make more appeals that are evidence-based to our judges when setting bail.”

The initiative was applauded by domestic violence experts, including officials with the Houston Area Women’s Center, who said they hope it prevents the escalation of violence that leads to fatal confrontations.

 

“Domestic violence is very prevalent in our community.” said Sonia Corrales, the interim president of HAWC. “Domestic violence is a preventable crime. We know what it is, and we know what to do about it. The only way to do it, is by working together.”

brian.rogers@chron.com

twitter.com/brianjrogers

 

Cognitive Bias Loses the Game

This piece from the NY Times, co-written by Dr. Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize last year for research on these questions, demonstrates that a cognitive bias common to all brains — aversion to loss — can distort our decisions.  This piece is reproduced in this blog because criminal justice practitioners can benefit from better management of their brains.  The conclusions seem “counter-intuitive” but are really just counter-cognitive bias.

Force Overtime? Or Go for the Win?

By JESSE WALKER, JANE L. RISEN, THOMAS GILOVICH and RICHARD THALER, NY Times Feb. 4, 2018

“The Packers had fallen prey to a common fallacy: When facing decisions like this, people are often myopic, focusing too much on the possibility of an immediate loss. They avoid the risk of instant defeat, even when taking that risk offers the best path to victory.”

On Jan. 16, 2016, with time expiring in the fourth quarter of a playoff game between the Green Bay Packers and the Arizona Cardinals, the Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers completed an improbable Hail Mary touchdown pass to bring the Packers within 1 point of the Cardinals.

The Packers then had a choice to make. They could kick an extra point, which would send the game into overtime. Or they could go for a 2-point conversion, which though more difficult would win the game.

Ultimately, the Packers chose to tie the game with an extra point. Then their fans watched in dismay as the Cardinals promptly scored a touchdown in overtime and won the game.

The Packers had fallen prey to a common fallacy: When facing decisions like this, people are often myopic, focusing too much on the possibility of an immediate loss. They avoid the risk of instant defeat, even when taking that risk offers the best path to victory.

Most other National Football League teams behave this way, too. In research to be published in the forthcoming issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, we examined every instance over a recent 10-year period in which N.F.L. teams faced a choice in the final minutes between kicking an extra point to tie the game or going for a 2-point conversion to win. The teams overwhelmingly chose to avoid the risk of immediate defeat: Of the 47 times teams faced this situation, they opted to kick the extra point 42 times (89 percent).

This bias can be costly. Teams that chose to avoid the 2-point conversion won the game only 40 percent of the time, which is well below the average rate of successful 2-point conversions (about 50 percent). Surely some of those teams should have known they were underdogs if the game went into overtime, and mistakenly avoided a risk they should have taken.

This error is not limited to the N.F.L. We also looked at all instances in the past five years in which teams in the National Basketball Association trailed by 2 points with less than 24 seconds to play. In this situation, a team can attempt a 2-point shot that would send the game to overtime or try a (more difficult) 3-point shot that would win the game immediately.

Again, a clear bias emerged: Of the 772 instances in which teams faced this situation, they avoided the 3-point shot 71.1 percent of the time.

This bias appears to be costly in the N.B.A. as well. The teams that attempted the 3-point shot won the game more often (17.3 percent) than those that attempted the 2-point shot (14.5 percent).

Basketball fans in a laboratory environment make this same mistake. In one study, we asked participants to imagine that they were the coach of an N.B.A. team that was down by 2 points in the final seconds. Just as N.B.A. teams did, our participants avoided the superior strategy, opting for the 2-point shot 81 percent of the time.

Why do people make this error? Part of the explanation lies in our tendency to treat problems in isolation rather than as part of a larger whole. Just as investors often mistakenly evaluate stocks individually rather than as part of a portfolio, coaches and fans often evaluate decisions in terms of their immediate impact and give less consideration to how those decisions fit in the larger context of the game.

In our laboratory study, we found that whether participants opted for the 2-point or 3-point shot was unrelated to their beliefs about how the team would perform in overtime. They made their decision by focusing almost entirely on the prospect of losing immediately, neglecting how the future was likely to play out.

But there is more to the story than myopia. People also seem to be unnecessarily wary of risks that they feel they are choosing to take (as opposed to risks they feel they are forced to take).

In a study that highlights this point, we asked football fans to imagine that a team had scored a touchdown in the final seconds of a game. Then we told half the fans that the team trailed by 1 point and the other half that the team trailed by 2 points. We then told all the fans that the team was going to attempt a 2-point conversion.

Those who were told the team was down by 1 point (and thus had the viable option of kicking the extra point to force overtime) thought the 2-point conversion was more likely to fail than did those whose team had to attempt a 2-point conversion just to force a tie. That is, the same decision was thought to be riskier when it was seen as optional than when it was seen as unavoidable.

“Live to fight another day” is often a good rule of thumb, but it is not always the best strategy to pursue. Good judgment, in sports and elsewhere, sometimes requires the presence of mind to take the risk of an immediate setback to achieve lasting success.

 

Jesse Walker is a graduate student and Thomas Gilovich is a professor in the psychology department at Cornell. Jane L. Risen and Richard Thaler are professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

 

Cops, Docs and Choices

Policing and medicine analogize pretty closely. Cops and docs could learn a lot about decision-making from one another.  They make consequential choices with fragmented information and within constraints of time, fatigue and biological stress.  One can manage one’s brain to improve one’s decision-making ability.  Here is one doc’s late-career reflection.

“The Conscience of a Brain Surgeon”

“The difficulty of neurosurgery lies not so much in the operating as in the decision-making. Surgeons must balance the risks and benefits of surgery against the risks and benefits of not operating. These are probabilities, not certainties, and they are easy to misjudge.”

By Henry Marsh, MD, Sept. 29, 2017 Wall Street Journal

I fell in love with neurosurgery at first sight, almost 40 years ago, when I first saw an aneurysm operation.

Aneurysms are fragile blowouts only a few millimeters wide, growing off the major cerebral arteries. They can rupture without warning, causing death or a major stroke. The surgeon puts a microscopic clip across the aneurysm to prevent such a rupture. But if the surgeon bursts the aneurysm while trying to clip it—a small but very real risk—the patient can die or suffer a catastrophic stroke, causing the very harm that you are trying to prevent. The operation combined exquisitely difficult, microscopic surgery with all the excitement of bomb-disposal work, without any risk to the surgeon.

A career in neurosurgery appealed to my competitive, alpha-male nature, as well as to my deep intellectual fascination with the brain. What could be more glorious than being a brain surgeon? I signed up for the specialty more or less the next day

Now, facing retirement, I am still in love with neurosurgery, but my view of it has changed profoundly. I soon came to understand that brain surgery is very crude relative to the microscopic intricacy of the brain. Our main tool is a small sucker, two millimeters in diameter, 50 times as large as the average brain cell—a low-tech device in the face of such complexity.

Worse, the brain has only a limited capacity to recover; it doesn’t heal like bone, muscle or other tissues. So brain surgery is particularly dangerous, risking not only death, paralysis or blindness but also changes to our intellect and personality—our very being.

The difficulty of neurosurgery lies not so much in the operating as in the decision-making. Surgeons must balance the risks and benefits of surgery against the risks and benefits of not operating. These are probabilities, not certainties, and they are easy to misjudge.

Overtreatment is a major problem in modern medicine, especially in the U.S. The patient may be perfectly well after an operation that was actually a mistake—one in which a less biased or emotional assessment would have shown that the probable risks of not operating were less than the probable risks of operating. My worst mistakes—the times patients came to harm at my hands—have almost always stemmed from bad decision-making on my part.

Other people are always better at seeing our blunders than we are. Only toward the end of my career did I fully grasp the importance of having good colleagues willing and able to criticize me.

In a safe surgical department, the senior surgeons get on well and don’t feel threatened by each other. This often doesn’t happen. Surgical egos are large. One cannot carry out high-risk surgery if one suffers from low self-esteem. Teamwork doesn’t—and to some extent shouldn’t—come naturally to surgeons.

‘It is dangerously easy to become corrupted by your patients’ gratitude.’

It is also dangerously easy to become corrupted by your patients’ gratitude, which can often verge on adulation (although it is, of course, grounded in fear). You can be rude with patients, but if their operation goes well, they will still think you are wonderful. And if the patient “does badly,” we have many ways of exculpating ourselves. We can blame the pathology, the anesthetist, the equipment or the postoperative care, all of which lets us continue to see ourselves as the infallible, Godlike creature that our poor, frightened patients want us to be.

As the French surgeon René Leriche put it, all surgeons carry within themselves an inner cemetery containing the headstones of the patients who came to harm at our hands. The triumphs are triumphant only because disasters also occur.

Complacency, I have learned, is the worst of all surgical sins. All doctors face the central challenge of balancing professional detachment with painful compassion. You can care too much for your patients and become overwhelmed—because however skillful and diligent you are, some of your patients will suffer and die.

But if you fail to suffer with them to at least some extent, you will have lost not only your humanity but also your drive to do better. I still love the struggle to find this balance—and to justify the respect and confidence that our patients have little choice but to place in us.

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Dr. Marsh is the author, most recently, of “Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon,” which was published by St. Martin’s on Oct. 3, 2017.