The Sunday, May 24th Washington Post featured a local opinion piece against recent proposals to fight game crime by preventing gang members from congregating in some public spaces. The piece makes a strong case for the first several hundred words – but then takes a turn that mixes the message in a way that undermines the piece.
The author, Tracy Velazquez, the Executive Director of The Justice Policy Institute, makes two points: such injunctions don’t work and they are racist. These are two different arguments that appeal to two different views of the world: what works and what’s fair, head versus heart.
The head versus heart debate is a familiar one – “just the facts ma’am”, a reliance on statistics and studies on one hand, and do gooder social workers showing those poor kids some love on the other hand.
A corollary of the heart debate is that we believe people who break the law should be punished (“don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time”). Non-data driven decisions about justice work both ways – for redemption, but also for retribution.
We embrace both the data and emotional approaches, in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other. We carry around a limited number of stories about how the world works, and apply those stories to the world we encounter. We don’t compare the stories to each other, checking for intellectual consistency – we find an explanatory framework and then operate as if the framework were true, regardless of the contents. The stories are more important than the facts the populate them; as such, arguing about data within a storyline is usually futile.
In the face of gang violence in Washington, DC the mayor and several councilmen have proposed new laws discussed in the opinion piece. Arguments for the proposals rely on the retribution story – “get those kids off the street.” As someone who lives in one of those areas, my gut reaction was favorable; when cops get shot on the corner, criticism that such rules were unfair didn’t hold water, “actions have consequences” is more compelling than “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived”
Velazquez introduces a different story – data – into the mix. If I want gangs gone, and data demonstrates how to do it, then I think about gangs differently. It’s a story that ignores questions of “fairness” entirely. The new story, “it’s time to stop posturing and do what works” is a compelling one. Velazquez could have built on that, using data from the Pew Public Safety Performance Project and elsewhere, telling a good tale about data-driven solutions. Instead starts the data story and switches to the justice story – which gets me thinking about thugs on corners, bad kids up to no good. Her admonition that breaking up groups of kids has racist implications loses to getting those thugs off my corner. A more successful piece would have focused entirely on data, telling a story about doing what works and ignoring the justice story altogether.
