Talking to Strangers

1. Brian Encinia pulls over Sandra Bland at 4:27 p.m. on July 10, 2015. Gladwell conveys much of the encounter through a transcription from the scene recorded on Encinia’s body camera. Initially, Encinia and Bland are polite to each other. Encinia takes Bland’s license back to his patrol car. When he returns a few minutes later, he thinks that Bland looks “very, really irritated” and asks her what is wrong. She replies honestly: she’s annoyed about the ticket. Most people consider this to be Encinia’s first mistake: in asking Bland to explain or justify her irritation, he escalates rather than deescalates the situation. 

Next, prompted by Encinia, Bland announces that she’s “done” voicing her frustrations. She lights a cigarette to relax. If everything played out as it should have, Encinia and Bland’s interaction would have ended here. But Encinia decides to escalate the situation once more, aggressively demanding that Bland put out her cigarette. She (correctly) states that Encinia has no right to make her do this. Encinia balks at Bland’s challenge to his authority and escalates the situation yet again, demanding that Bland exit her car. They argue back and forth until Encinia literally threatens to “remove” Bland from the vehicle. He gives her a “lawful order” to exit on her own. Then, he reaches his hand inside the car to remove Bland. She orders him not to touch her. He tells her she’s under arrest.

Bland and Encinia’s struggle continues as Encinia tries to remove Bland from her car. Eventually, Encinia handcuffs Bland. Encinia’s backup arrives, and tensions continue to build. A female officer orders Bland to stop resisting. Eventually, they take her into custody and charge her with felony assault. Three days later, she dies by suicide in her cell. Encinia is fired for having violated Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00 of the Texas State Trooper General Manual which, among other guidelines, requires officers to “be courteous to the public,” and to “exercise the utmost patience and discretion.” One takeaway from the incident is that Encinia is a “bully” who should have been more courteous with Bland. But Gladwell thinks there’s more to it than this.

2. Gladwell describes a Kansas City traffic stop as “a search for a needle in a haystack,” since they use the common infraction of a traffic stop “to search for something rare—guns and drugs.” The same principle applies to hand luggage security checks at the airport. For every 1.7 billion bags the TSA screens each year, they only find a few thousand guns, which equates to a hit rate of roughly 0.0001 percent. When the TSA conducts audits by slipping a fake gun or bomb into a piece of luggage, the weapon goes undetected 95 percent of the time. Gladwell attributes this low detection rate to humanity’s “tendency to default to truth.” Because guns are so rare, the average airport screener assumes that a mildly suspicious-looking object is likely nothing to worry about and moves on without further inspecting the luggage. Kansas City-style policing, in contrast, takes an opposite approach.

The unofficial guide to Kansas City-style policing is Tactics for Criminal Patrol by Charles Remsberg (1995). Remsberg calls for officers to “go beyond the ticket,” meaning they should pursue “curiosity ticklers,” or “anomalies that raise the possibility of protentional wrongdoing.” For instance, a motorist who stops at a red light in a bad part of town and looks down at the passenger seat could, in theory, be looking at a gun. As such, their actions warrant a traffic stop.

Once an officer stops a motorist, the officer needs to be on high alert for subtle clues that imply discretion. For instance, drug couriers often use air fresheners to conceal the scent of drugs. Another tactic involves engaging the motorist in conversation to prolong the incident as long as possible, giving the officer ample time to detect nervousness in the motorist. While many of these supposed signs of illegal activity are totally normal, the officer searching for a “criminal needle in the haystack” has to assume guilt, not innocence.

Gladwell returns his focus to Brian Encinia, selecting a random day in Encinia’s career, September 11, 2014, to see how the officer applies Remsberg’s methods to his policing. Predictably, much of Encinia’s day consists of pulling people over for minor infractions: an improperly placed license plate, a lack of reflective tape on a trailer, driving with expired registration, driving with “no/improper ID lamp.” Only one of Encinia’s stops—one at 5:58 for driving more than 10 percent over the speed limit—could count as a serious infraction. For the most part, Encinia’s day is a case study in “modern, proactive policing.” 

Remsberg advises proactive patrol officers to pull over everyone to avoid being accused of racial profiling. If an officer is accused of bias, then, they need only bring their logbook to court to show the myriad of minor infractions for which they chose to initiate traffic stops. It’s this logic that initiates Bland’s traffic stop. Encinia sees her Illinois license plates and considers them to be a “curiosity tickler.” When Bland spots Encinia pulling up fast behind her, she moves over to let him pass, giving Encinia his in to initiate a traffic stop. When he walks up to her car and looks inside, he sees fast-food wrappers scattered on the floor. For Bland, who has just driven from Illinois to Texas for her job interview, the wrappers are entirely excusable. But for Encinia, “the new breed of police officer” trained to cast suspicion on everything, the wrappers indicate that something is amiss.

3. In his deposition with state investigator Cleve Renfro, Encinia states that he found Bland’s “aggressive body language and demeanor” suspicious. Gladwell interprets this as Encinia’s “belie[f] in transparency,” of believing that people’s external appearance can reliably help us understand their inner character. In fact, most training programs for law enforcement believe in transparency, too. The Reid Technique is a system that teaches law enforcement “to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.” For example, Reid training states that a refusal to maintain eye contact indicates deception. So, Encinia sees Bland appearing restless and decides that something is wrong.

As Encinia returns to his patrol car to check Bland’s license, he observes her through her rear window and watches her “disappear[ing] from view for an amount of time,” which indicated the possible presence of a gun in the car. This explains why Encinia approaches Bland’s driver’s side window when he next approaches the car: training teaches officers that it’s more difficult for suspects to shoot someone standing outside the driver’s side.

And so, Encinia’s training leads him to believe that Bland poses a threat to him. Gladwell considers this thinking “dangerously flawed” under normal circumstances, and even more so when we apply it to “mismatched” people. And Sandra Bland is mismatched: she is an innocent person who Encinia believes is guilty. Besides this, her record reveals a history of numerous encounters with the police, $8,000 in outstanding fines, and a suicide attempt in the recent past. To Gladwell, Bland was a woman in crisis: she has a troubled past of debt, hardship, and mental illness. She’s just moved to a new town for a fresh start, and now a minor traffic violation has threatened to upend all her hopes for the future. Because Encinia is a stranger who knows nothing about Bland, however, he mistakes her despair for malice.

When Renfro asks Encinia about his order for Bland to extinguish her cigarette—the moment the altercation took a turn for the worse—Encinia claims that he wanted to ensure that Bland didn’t throw it at him. Gladwell interprets this as evidence that Encinia is “terrified of her,” which “is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth.” As Renfro’s interrogation continues, Encinia continues to assert his belief that Bland posed a threat to him. States Encinia, “My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time.”

Gladwell criticizes the common portrayal of Encinia as an unfeeling bully “without empathy.” He believes that Encinia wasn’t “indifferent” to Bland’s feelings—he simply misread them. To illustrate his point, Gladwell highlights the couple times Encinia asked Bland if she was “okay.” He ends with the conclusion that Encinia’s incident with Bland didn’t go awry because Encinia disregarded his training—it went awry “because he did exactly what he was trained to do.”

4. In 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown. Wilson had approached Brown on suspicion of robbing a grocery store, Brown reached inside Wilson’s patrol and punched him, and Wilson responded by shooting Brown six times. Riots ensued. Prosecutors didn’t press charges against Wilson. Ferguson began what Gladwell refers to as “the strange interlude in American life when the conduct of police officers was suddenly front and center.” The U.S. Department of Justice sent a team to Ferguson to investigate. Their findings revealed that frustrations in Ferguson were less about Brown’s death than a critique of the Kansas City style of policing that the Ferguson Police Department practiced. It was their job to pull over as many people for as many reasons as possible.

Gladwell believes these types of traffic stops are ineffective. To illustrate his point, he reveals that the North Carolina Highway Patrol’s annual increase of 400,000 searches turned over only 17 guns. “Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?” asks Gladwell. Larry Sherman predicted this problem when he organized the Kansas City gun experiment and anticipated it would create “hostility to the police.” It’s for this reason that the Kansas City officers who pioneered the program received special training, and that proactive policing was limited to District 114. If the purpose of the Kansas City experiment was to apply specialized proactive policing to the city’s most crime-ridden areas, the question regarding Encinia’s incident with Bland thus becomes: “was he in the right place?”

5. Prairie View, Texas, where Encinia pulled over Bland, is a rural area 50 miles outside Houston. It’s a small town with a population of fewer than 1,000 people. The majority of its population is Republican, white, and working-class. In his interrogation with Renfro, Encinia claims that the area of town where he pulled over Bland is a high crime area. However, this is blatantly untrue. Encinia’s official records show no evidence of the drug- and weapons-related arrests he claims to have made there in the past. 

While it’s true that Encinia might have exaggerated the area’s dangerousness as an excuse to pull over Bland, Gladwell thinks it’s equally likely that Encinia hadn’t thought to associate crime with place in the first place. For Gladwell, Bland’s death “is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.” Encinia’s police training taught him to assume the worst in everyone. At the same time, the Texas Highway Patrol disregarded the connection between crime and place and assigned Encinia a historically safe area to patrol. Most everyone in the world believes that demeanor is an indication of inner character. And nobody stops to question that any of these decisions or assumptions might be wrong.

In his closing remarks, Gladwell references a portion of Renfro’s interrogation of Encinia in which Encinia speculates that Bland might have behaved as she did simply because “she did not like police officers.” Encinia’s argument conveniently reframes his incident to construe Bland—and not himself—as the villain. Encinia’s logic illustrates Gladwell’s final point: when interactions with strangers go awry because we don’t understand each other, we inevitably “blame the stranger.”