Building a Safe Los Altos

Another LAPD, perhaps slightly more famous than ours, has the motto, “To Protect and To Serve.” It is a sentiment I think we can all get behind – we want safe communities, and we would like the police department to help us achieve that.

We seem to end up in a lot of confusion and disagreement, though, when we look at how to actually make that happen. I once had a mentor who would always, always ask: “What is your goal?” He would push me to think hard about what I wanted, what the desired outcome was, before getting down into the weeds of the implementation. Without knowing what we are trying to accomplish, it’s unlikely that we can come up with a very good solution.

Being clear about goals helps our discussion in another way: we choose goals based on our preferences, desires, visions, and hopes. We (ought to) choose implementations based on empirical data. That is, once we’ve decided what we want, the question of how to get that becomes one of facts, not of opinions.

Too often we get it backwards. We have intuitive or emotional opinions on specific implementations – “it just stands to reason that we should build more prisons” – that often have no basis in what actually turns out to work when it’s tried. Alternatively, we try to use objective standards to determine our goals, to “prove” to others that our preferences are something more than that.

So before we begin, we should get clear on our goals for public safety. Here’s my list, starting from (what I guess will be) least controversial to the more controversial.

1. We should all be physically safe in our communities and homes.

2. We should all be mentally safe in our communities and homes.

3. Our stuff should not be stolen or broken, and if it is we want to get it back.

4. We should always be striving to make up for past injustices against people or groups.

5. We should minimize the intrusion of public safety on everyone’s life, while achieving the other goals.

There is a TON to unpack here. First, that order is about how much we will agree these should be the goals, not about how important the goals are. I don’t think we can really strongly prioritize one of these goals over another; we will have to trade them off against each other.

Second, our tradeoffs for those goals will be deeply personal, and that’s okay. It can’t be otherwise.

Third, there are a few other goals that could be imagined that I didn’t include here. I don’t think these are admirable goals to pursue, but you may differ on that. For example:

• We should extract vengeance on people who threaten or attack our safety or our property.

• We should enforce order by prohibiting and preventing activities that are inappropriate, even if they don’t threaten our safety or property.

• We should take steps to ensure that all community members conform to our neighborhood character.

• We should strive to keep things the way they have always been, and only change policies if we absolutely must.

I don’t think those are good goals, because they almost always push back against the numbered goals above. They tend to reduce the physical and mental safety of at least some members of our community. They interfere with efforts to address past injustices. And they are contrary to the value of “loving our neighbors,” which is important to me.

Now, like I said, the choice of goals is not one that can be based on data and studies. It’s one that is based on our individual values, preferences, and desires. We won’t all agree, and we’ll have to choose some values to live by as a community. The conversation is not one that we can have and be done with; it will continue.

The great difficulty, of course, is that we have to live and make policies and do that practical stuff in the midst of this ongoing and never-ending conversation about our goals. The practical implementation is a matter of facts, once our goals are decided. If we would just choose goals, the controversy would be over – we simply go see what works best in the real world to achieve those goals. These days, there is so much data, and so much recorded experience, that it’s pretty easy to learn from others’ mistakes. But with our goals never agreed upon, and the conversation constantly continuing, we’re trying to choose a path while we don’t know where we’re going.

Further complicating things is our human tendency to confuse the methods with the goals. We argue about methods (“We need more community policing!” “We need to increase funding!”) when we are really arguing about goals. We get out facts and figures to prove our point, none of which proves anything except that the methods we advocate will achieve our (unstated and differing) goals.

Sometimes, we’re embarrassed to state our goals. It’s safer to advocate for a policy. For example, let’s imagine some fellow we’ll call Bob. Bob very much wants criminals to suffer for what they’ve done; after all, they deserve what’s coming. One of Bob’s goals, unstated, is that “we should extract vengeance on people who threaten or attack our safety or our property.” But it seems a little gauche to come out and say that. It’s safer, in polite company, to advocate for long prison sentences “to prevent those criminals from doing more crimes.” Now, safety may ALSO be a goal of Bob’s, but when push comes to shove, it’s the vengeance: he doesn’t feel the least bit bad about elderly people living out their last days behind bars, even though they aren’t physically able to commit those crimes any more.

So it is critically important that we all think about, and be transparent about, our goals. This is hard to do, and requires a lot of introspection. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said. He didn’t mention that self-examination is a lot of work.