Bugs and Thugs: Ebola, Ferguson, and Mediocrity

“Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you!”

--Salieri, in the film Amadeus

I was on a jury recently. I've been in several pools, but this was my first time actually making it into the jury box, and I was intrigued. I believe in courts as a vital element of administering justice and redressing wrongs. Well, I did before I served.

I suppose I still do, but wow, the glamour is certainly gone. The police investigated this particular crime for 11 minutes. Now, this was hardly the Lindbergh baby, but man, don’t they have to put some time in? When the prosecution rested, I couldn't imagine returning a guilty verdict, not because their conclusion was inconceivable or even unlikely, but because the possibility for doubt seemed reasonable.

My resolve lasted only until the defendant testified. Even before being cross examined, his version of events more than convinced me of his guilt. He eroded his credibility quickly and completely. I said in the jury room that I really hated to send a message that 11 minutes was all the investigation that was needed to convict. But that was the truth, like it or not.

No one was awful here. No police run amok or judicial incompetence. It was really just the banality, the uneventfulness of the vast majority of bureaucratic life. The question is whether “the system worked” or not. Despite my disappointment, I think it’s hard to argue that it didn't. In this case, working means allowing a man accused of a misdemeanor to argue with his accusers, as is his right. I believe the process resulted in a guilty man being appropriately convicted and sentenced. “Working” doesn't mean making me happy or giving me a chance to practice Al Pacino’s “You’re all out of order!” speech from And Justice for All. Of course this was a small trial on a comparatively noncontroversial topic. It doesn’t take long for the results to be less satisfying when the stakes are higher.

Bad summer to be a policeman in Ferguson, for example. I honestly don't know how police behaved during the infamous arrest and shooting. They were incompetent afterward though, and showed an amazing contempt for the people they serve. Of course, they aren't all scoundrels or saints. They're guys who write tickets and fill out reports that only insurance companies will ever see. But now they're all symbols--of oppression, or privilege, sure, but also of just how thin the wires are that hold civil society together. The problem isn't that the police are horrible people; the problem is that they are human beings operating in a system that assumes they will be superhuman.

Autumn has seen similar bad press for the CDC. The gist is that they are paid to be prepared and weren't. Incompetence? I guess that could be argued. But I'm not sure we were paying for the system we thought we were. See, everyone wants a flawless plan waiting in the wings. TV and movies promised as much.  Instead, we got what I saw in that courtroom: underwhelming performance that mostly got the job done. If you disagree, I must point out that the only death in the U.S. was a man who had advanced symptoms before he entered the system. I grant the following among other problems: Airline rules? Failed, true. Prescreening? Vulnerable to lies, it seems. Emergency rooms? Hard to convince of diseases they've never seen before. And yet, it was reigned in. Was the CDC maximally effective? No.  In a nation where our general medical infrastructure was less substantial, they would've been overseeing an epidemic. But that isn't where we are. They didn't have to be great. They were good enough.

My point is that, in our disease management process, we utilize many overlapping agencies that attack the problem differently. That makes them comparatively resilient to less than stellar performance, while still allowing for the possibility of exceptionalism. We could have been wildly impressed, but we were probably foolish to expect to be.

In the Ferguson police, we see an opposing example--a system that invests great power in average people and expects, even demands that they be exceptional, and that fails as a result. With apologies to the mythology that says all police and firefighters are heroes, these are people who took a job for all sorts of reasons, not unflagging bastions of liberty and justice. We've been foolishly arming the police with military grade weapons. There were a number of great articles pointing out how badly they performed with them. They behaved, at best, like an occupying force, at worst like jackbooted thugs.

It seems to me that they did what was natural in difficult circumstances for nonmilitary personnel using such weapons--by which I include their shields and vests and riot gear, since those too gave them greater security and power than the crowds they were managing--using them as the bludgeons the average person might take them to be. In fact, they can be wielded with more finesse by those trained to do so. I don’t mean exceptional people; I mean people who operate under a different set of premises, a different procedural set.

I don’t want to oversimplify a solution for this specific incident. But it’s clear that the system needs to be re-engineered to assume the participation of average people, not because police are worse than any other group. They aren't. But if you plan on them as a group being somehow better, or even heroes, your plan is likely to fail.  Stop treating a civil service job like it’s a calling. Stop using military models and making them a class set apart. Start examining the procedures and limitations that can interact with other societal elements to produce acceptable results, without relying on a nonexistent workforce of men and women with superhuman stamina, and patience, and judgement.

As we've seen in the case of Ebola, mediocre can get the job done. Good thing too, since most of us are.