http://www.fasdconnections.ca/id83.htm
1
MILLION-DOLLAR MURRAY; DEPT. OF SOCIAL SERVICES
MALCOLM GLADWELL. The New Yorker. New York: Feb 13, 2006.Vol.82, Iss. 1; pg. 96
Abstract (Document Summary)
Gladwell discusses why problems like homelessness may be easier to
solve than to manage. He
profiles Murray Barr, a homeless ex-marine living on the streets of Reno NV.
Full Text (6343 words)
(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c)
2006 The Conde Nast
Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Homeless, Homelessness; Barr, Murray; Reno, Nevada; Denver, Colorado;
Los Angeles Police
Department; Automobile Emissions; Air Pollution; Alcohol, Alcoholism;
Poverty; Culhane,
Dennis; Mangano, Philip
Murray Barr was a bear of a man, an ex-marine, six feet tall and
heavyset, and when he fell
down--which he did nearly every day--it could take two or three grown
men to pick him up. He
had straight black hair and olive skin. On the street, they called him
Smokey. He was missing
most of his teeth. He had a wonderful smile. People loved Murray.
His chosen drink was vodka. Beer he called "horse piss." On the
streets of downtown Reno,
where he lived, he could buy a two-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle
of cheap vodka for a
dollar-fifty. If he was flush, he could go for the
seven-hundred-and-fifty-millilitre bottle, and if
he was broke he could always do what many of the other homeless people
of Reno did, which is
to walk through the casinos and finish off the half-empty glasses of
liquor left at the gaming
tables.
"If he was on a runner, we could pick him up several times a day,"
Patrick O'Bryan, who is a
bicycle cop in downtown Reno, said. "And he's gone on some amazing
runners. He would get
picked up, get detoxed, then get back out a couple of hours later and
start up again. A lot of the
guys on the streets who've been drinking, they get so angry. They are
so incredibly abrasive, so
violent, so abusive. Murray was such a character and had such a great
sense of humor that we
somehow got past that. Even when he was abusive, we'd say, 'Murray,
you know you love us,'
and he'd say, 'I know'--and go back to swearing at us."
"I've been a police officer for fifteen years," O'Bryan's partner,
Steve Johns, said. "I picked up
Murray my whole career. Literally."
Johns and O'Bryan pleaded with Murray to quit drinking. A few years
ago, he was assigned to a
treatment program in which he was under the equivalent of house
arrest, and he thrived. He got a
job and worked hard. But then the program ended. "Once he graduated
out, he had no one to
report to, and he needed that," O'Bryan said. "I don't know whether it
was his military
2
background. I suspect that it was. He was a good cook. One time, he
accumulated savings of
over six thousand dollars. Showed up for work religiously. Did
everything he was supposed to
do. They said, 'Congratulations,' and put him back on the street. He
spent that six thousand in a
week or so."
Often, he was too intoxicated for the drunk tank at the jail, and he'd
get sent to the emergency
room at either Saint Mary's or Washoe Medical Center. Marla Johns, who
was a social worker in
the emergency room at Saint Mary's, saw him several times a week. "The
ambulance would
bring him in. We would sober him up, so he would be sober enough to go
to jail. And we would
call the police to pick him up. In fact, that's how I met my husband."
Marla Johns is married to
Steve Johns.
"He was like the one constant in an environment that was ever
changing," she went on. "In he
would come. He would grin that half-toothless grin. He called me 'my
angel.' I would walk in the
room, and he would smile and say, 'Oh, my angel, I'm so happy to see
you.' We would joke back
and forth, and I would beg him to quit drinking and he would laugh it
off. And when time went
by and he didn't come in I would get worried and call the coroner's
office. When he was sober,
we would find out, oh, he's working someplace, and my husband and I
would go and have dinner
where he was working. When my husband and I were dating, and we were
going to get married,
he said, 'Can I come to the wedding?' And I almost felt like he
should. My joke was 'If you are
sober you can come, because I can't afford your bar bill.' When we
started a family, he would lay
a hand on my pregnant belly and bless the child. He really was this
kind of light."
In the fall of 2003, the Reno Police Department started an initiative
designed to limit
panhandling in the downtown core. There were articles in the
newspapers, and the police
department came under harsh criticism on local talk radio. The
crackdown on panhandling
amounted to harassment, the critics said. The homeless weren't an
imposition on the city; they
were just trying to get by. "One morning, I'm listening to one of the
talk shows, and they're just
trashing the police department and going on about how unfair it is,"
O'Bryan said. "And I
thought, Wow, I've never seen any of these critics in one of the
alleyways in the middle of the
winter looking for bodies." O'Bryan was angry. In downtown Reno, food
for the homeless was
plentiful: there was a Gospel kitchen and Catholic Services, and even
the local McDonald's
fed the hungry. The panhandling was for liquor, and the liquor was
anything but harmless. He
and Johns spent at least half their time dealing with people like
Murray; they were as much
caseworkers as police officers. And they knew they weren't the only
ones involved. When
someone passed out on the street, there was a "One down" call to the
paramedics. There were
four people in an ambulance, and the patient sometimes stayed at the
hospital for days, because
living on the streets in a state of almost constant intoxication was a
reliable way of getting sick.
None of that, surely, could be cheap.
O'Bryan and Johns called someone they knew at an ambulance service and
then contacted the
local hospitals. "We came up with three names that were some of our
chronic inebriates in the
downtown area, that got arrested the most often," O'Bryan said. "We
tracked those three
individuals through just one of our two hospitals. One of the guys had
been in jail previously, so
he'd only been on the streets for six months. In those six months, he
had accumulated a bill of a
3
hundred thousand dollars--and that's at the smaller of the two
hospitals near downtown Reno. It's
pretty reasonable to assume that the other hospital had an even larger
bill. Another individual
came from Portland and had been in Reno for three months. In those
three months, he had
accumulated a bill for sixty-five thousand dollars. The third
individual actually had some periods
of being sober, and had accumulated a bill of fifty thousand."
The first of those people was Murray Barr, and Johns and O'Bryan
realized that if you totted up
all his hospital bills for the ten years that he had been on the
streets--as well as substance-abusetreatment
costs, doctors' fees, and other expenses--Murray Barr probably ran up
a medical bill as
large as anyone in the state of Nevada.
"It cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray," O'Bryan said.
Fifteen years ago, after the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles
Police Department was in
crisis. It was accused of racial insensitivity and ill discipline and
violence, and the assumption
was that those problems had spread broadly throughout the rank and
file. In the language of
statisticians, it was thought that L.A.P.D.'s troubles had a "normal"
distribution--that if you
graphed them the result would look like a bell curve, with a small
number of officers at one end
of the curve, a small number at the other end, and the bulk of the
problem situated in the middle.
The bell-curve assumption has become so much a part of our mental
architecture that we tend to
use it to organize experience automatically.
But when the L.A.P.D. was investigated by a special commission headed
by Warren Christopher,
a very different picture emerged. Between 1986 and 1990, allegations
of excessive force or
improper tactics were made against eighteen hundred of the eighty-five
hundred officers in the
L.A.P.D. The broad middle had scarcely been accused of anything.
Furthermore, more than
fourteen hundred officers had only one or two allegations made against
them--and bear in mind
that these were not proven charges, that they happened in a four-year
period, and that allegations
of excessive force are an inevitable feature of urban police work.
(The N.Y.P.D. receives about
three thousand such complaints a year.) A hundred and eighty-three
officers, however, had four
or more complaints against them, forty-four officers had six or more
complaints, sixteen had
eight or more, and one had sixteen complaints. If you were to graph
the troubles of the L.A.P.D.,
it wouldn't look like a bell curve. It would look more like a hockey
stick. It would follow what
statisticians call a "power law" distribution--where all the activity
is not in the middle but at one
extreme.
The Christopher Commission's report repeatedly comes back to what it
describes as the extreme
concentration of problematic officers. One officer had been the
subject of thirteen allegations of
excessive use of force, five other complaints, twenty-eight "use of
force reports" (that is,
documented, internal accounts of inappropriate behavior), and one
shooting. Another had six
excessive-force complaints, nineteen other complaints, ten
use-of-force reports, and three
shootings. A third had twenty-seven use-of-force reports, and a fourth
had thirty-five. Another
had a file full of complaints for doing things like "striking an
arrestee on the back of the neck
with the butt of a shotgun for no apparent reason while the arrestee
was kneeling and
handcuffed," beating up a thirteen-year-old juvenile, and throwing an
arrestee from his chair and
4
kicking him in the back and side of the head while he was handcuffed
and lying on his stomach.
The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those
forty-four cops the L.A.P.D. would
suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the
report also suggests that
the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad
cops were so bad that the
institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly
weren't working. If you made
the mistake of assuming that the department's troubles fell into a
normal distribution, you'd
propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle--like
better training or better
hiring--when the middle didn't need help. For those hard-core few who
did need help,
meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn't be nearly strong enough.
In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a
national issue, the assumption
was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority
of the homeless were in the
same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred
despair: if there were so
many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them?
Then, fifteen years
ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane
lived in a shelter in
Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his
dissertation. A few months later he
went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn't find any of
the people he had recently
spent so much time with. "It made me realize that most of these people
were getting on with their
own lives," he said.
Culhane then put together a database--the first of its kind--to track
who was coming in and out of
the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way
homelessness is understood.
Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has
a power-law distribution.
"We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really
quickly," he said. "In
Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless
is one day. And the
second most common length is two days. And they never come back.
Anyone who ever has to
stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how
to make sure you never come
back."
The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They
would come for three weeks
at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They
were quite young, and they
were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent--the group
at the farthest edge of the
curve--that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically
homeless, who lived in the
shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were
mentally ill or physically
disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social
problem--the people sleeping on the
sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled
on subway grates and
under bridges--it's this group that we have in mind. In the early
nineteennineties, Culhane's
database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million
people who were homeless at
some point in the previous half decade --which was a surprisingly high
number. But only about
twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.
It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and
social-services systems far
more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New
York at least sixty-two
million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those
twenty-five hundred hard-core
homeless. "It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of
these shelter beds," Culhane
5
said. "We're talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next
cot." Boston Health Care for
the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in
Boston, recently tracked the
medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless
people. In the course of five
years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing
homes, and the group still
accounted for 18,834 emergencyroom visits--at a minimum cost of a
thousand dollars a visit. The
University of California, San Diego Medical Center followed fifteen
chronically homeless
inebriates and found that over eighteen months those fifteen people
were treated at the hospital's
emergency room four hundred and seventeen times, and ran up bills that
averaged a hundred
thousand dollars each. One person--San Diego's counterpart to Murray
Barr--came to the
emergency room eighty-seven times.
"If it's a medical admission, it's likely to be the guys with the
really complex pneumonia," James
Dunford, the city of San Diego's emergency medical director and the
author of the observational
study, said. "They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their
lungs and develop a lung
abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they're out
in the rain. They end up in
the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical
infections. These are the guys who
typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a
neurosurgical catastrophe as
well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their
head and getting a subdural
hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it's the guy who
falls down and hits his
head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, they are going through
alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds
to their inability to fight
infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We
run up big lab fees, and the
nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and
over, and all we're doing is
making them capable of walking down the block."
The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.'s bad-cop problem. It's
a matter of a few hard
cases, and that's good news, because when a problem is that
concentrated you can wrap your
arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those
few hard cases are hard.
They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections
and mental illness. They
need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money
are already being spent
on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it
would take to solve the
homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to
ignore it. Murray Barr
used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the
state of Nevada. It would
probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.
The leading exponent for the power-law theory of homelessness is
Philip Mangano, who, since
he was appointed by President Bush in 2002, has been the executive
director of the U.S.
Interagency Council on Homelessness, a group that oversees the
programs of twenty federal
agencies. Mangano is a slender man, with a mane of white hair and a
magnetic presence, who got
his start as an advocate for the homeless in Massachusetts. In the
past two years, he has
crisscrossed the United States, educating local mayors and city
councils about the real shape of
the homelessness curve. Simply running soup kitchens and shelters, he
argues, allows the
chronically homeless to remain chronically homeless. You build a
shelter and a soup kitchen if
you think that homelessness is a problem with a broad and unmanageable
middle. But if it's a
problem at the fringe it can be solved. So far, Mangano has convinced
more than two hundred
6
cities to radically reevaluate their policy for dealing with the homeless.
"I was in St. Louis recently," Mangano said, back in June, when he
dropped by New York on his
way to Boise, Idaho. "I spoke with people doing services there. They
had a very difficult group
of people they couldn't reach no matter what they offered. So I said,
Take some of your money
and rent some apartments and go out to those people, and literally go
out there with the key and
say to them, 'This is the key to an apartment. If you come with me
right now I am going to give it
to you, and you are going to have that apartment.' And so they did.
And one by one those people
were coming in. Our intent is to take homeless policy from the old
idea of funding programs that
serve homeless people endlessly and invest in results that actually
end homelessness."
Mangano is a history buff, a man who sometimes falls asleep listening
to old Malcolm X
speeches, and who peppers his remarks with references to the
civil-rights movement and the
Berlin Wall and, most of all, the fight against slavery. "I am an
abolitionist," he says. "My office
in Boston was opposite the monument to the 54th Regiment on the Boston
Common, up the
street from the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison
called for immediate
abolition, and around the corner from where Frederick Douglass gave
that famous speech at the
Tremont Temple. It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage
a social wrong. You
should be ending it."
The old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver is on Sixteenth Street, just east
of the central business
district. The main building is a handsome six-story stone structure
that was erected in 1906, and
next door is an annex that was added in the nineteen-fifties. On the
ground floor there is a gym
and exercise rooms. On the upper floors there are several hundred
apartments--brightly painted
one-bedrooms, efficiencies, and S.R.O.-style rooms with microwaves and
refrigerators and
central airconditioning--and for the past several years those
apartments have been owned and
managed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless.
Even by big-city standards, Denver has a serious homelessness problem.
The winters are
relatively mild, and the summers aren't nearly as hot as those of
neighboring New Mexico or
Utah, which has made the city a magnet for the indigent. By the city's
estimates, it has roughly a
thousand chronically homeless people, of whom three hundred spend
their time downtown, along
the central Sixteenth Street shopping corridor or in nearby Civic
Center Park. Many of the
merchants downtown worry that the presence of the homeless is scaring
away customers. A few
blocks north, near the hospital, a modest, low-slung detox center
handles twenty-eight thousand
admissions a year, many of them homeless people who have passed out on
the streets, either
from liquor or--as is increasingly the case--from mouthwash. "Dr.
Tichenor's--Dr. Tich, they call
it--is the brand of mouthwash they use," says Roxane White, the
manager of the city's social
services. "You can imagine what that does to your gut."
Eighteen months ago, the city signed up with Mangano. With a mixture
of federal and local
funds, the C.C.H. inaugurated a new program that has so far enrolled a
hundred and six people. It
is aimed at the Murray Barrs of Denver, the people costing the system
the most. C.C.H. went
after the people who had been on the streets the longest, who had a
criminal record, who had a
problem with substance abuse or mental illness. "We have one
individual in her early sixties, but
looking at her you'd think she's eighty," Rachel Post, the director of
substance treatment at the
7
C.C.H., said. (Post changed some details about her clients in order to
protect their identity.)
"She's a chronic alcoholic. A typical day for her is she gets up and
tries to find whatever she's
going to drink that day. She falls down a lot. There's another person
who came in during the first
week. He was on methadone maintenance. He'd had psychiatric treatment.
He was incarcerated
for eleven years, and lived on the streets for three years after that,
and, if that's not enough, he
had a hole in his heart."
The recruitment strategy was as simple as the one that Mangano had
laid out in St. Louis: Would
you like a free apartment? The enrollees got either an efficiency at
the Y.M.C.A. or an apartment
rented for them in a building somewhere else in the city, provided
they agreed to work within the
rules of the program. In the basement of the Y, where the racquetball
courts used to be, the
coalition built a command center, staffed with ten caseworkers. Five
days a week, between eightthirty
and ten in the morning, the caseworkers meet and painstakingly review
the status of
everyone in the program. On the wall around the conference table are
several large white boards,
with lists of doctor's appointments and court dates and medication
schedules. "We need a staffing
ratio of one to ten to make it work," Post said. "You go out there and
you find people and assess
how they're doing in their residence. Sometimes we're in contact with
someone every day.
Ideally, we want to be in contact every couple of days. We've got
about fifteen people we're
really worried about now."
The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless
client per year. An
efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over
forty-five hundred a year,
which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless
person for at most fifteen
thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the
street. The idea is that once
the people in the program get stabilized they will find jobs, and
start to pick up more and more of
their own rent, which would bring someone's annual cost to the program
closer to six thousand
dollars. As of today, seventy-five supportive housing slots have
already been added, and the
city's homeless plan calls for eight hundred more over the next ten years.
The reality, of course, is hardly that neat and tidy. The idea that
the very sickest and most
troubled of the homeless can be stabilized and eventually employed is
only a hope. Some of
them plainly won't be able to get there: these are, after all, hard
cases. "We've got one man, he's
in his twenties," Post said. "Already, he has cirrhosis of the liver.
One time he blew a blood
alcohol of .49, which is enough to kill most people. The first place
we had he brought over all his
friends, and they partied and trashed the place and broke a window.
Then we gave him another
apartment, and he did the same thing."
Post said that the man had been sober for several months. But he could
relapse at some point and
perhaps trash another apartment, and they'd have to figure out what to
do with him next. Post had
just been on a conference call with some people in New York City who
run a similar program,
and they talked about whether giving clients so many chances simply
encourages them to behave
irresponsibly. For some people, it probably does. But what was the
alternative? If this young man
was put back on the streets, he would cost the system even more money.
The current philosophy
of welfare holds that government assistance should be temporary and
conditional, to avoid
creating dependency. But someone who blows .49 on a Breathalyzer and
has cirrhosis of the
liver at the age of twenty-seven doesn't respond to incentives and
sanctions in the usual way.
8
"The most complicated people to work with are those who have been
homeless for so long that
going back to the streets just isn't scary to them," Post said. "The
summer comes along and they
say, 'I don't need to follow your rules.' " Power-law homelessness
policy has to do the opposite
of normal-distribution social policy. It should create dependency: you
want people who have
been outside the system to come inside and rebuild their lives under
the supervision of those ten
caseworkers in the basement of the Y.M.C.A.
That is what is so perplexing about power-law homeless policy. From an
economic perspective
the approach makes perfect sense. But from a moral perspective it
doesn't seem fair. Thousands
of people in the Denver area no doubt live day to day, work two or
three jobs, and are eminently
deserving of a helping hand--and no one offers them the key to a new
apartment. Yet that's just
what the guy screaming obscenities and swigging Dr. Tich gets. When
the welfare mom's time
on public assistance runs out, we cut her off. Yet when the homeless
man trashes his apartment
we give him another. Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of
moral justification. We
give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small
children. Giving the
homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different
rationale. It's simply about
efficiency.
We also believe that the distribution of social benefits should not be
arbitrary. We don't give only
to some poor mothers, or to a random handful of disabled veterans. We
give to everyone who
meets a formal criterion, and the moral credibility of government
assistance derives, in part, from
this universality. But the Denver homelessness program doesn't help
every chronically homeless
person in Denver. There is a waiting list of six hundred for the
supportive-housing program; it
will be years before all those people get apartments, and some may
never get one. There isn't
enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little
bit--to observe the principle of
universality--isn't as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot.
Being fair, in this case, means
providing shelters and soup kitchens, and shelters and soup kitchens
don't solve the problem of
homelessness. Our usual moral intuitions are little use, then, when it
comes to a few hard cases.
Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true
to our principles or we
can fix the problem. We cannot do both.
A few miles northwest of the old Y.M.C.A. in downtown Denver, on the
Speer Boulevard offramp
from I-25, there is a big electronic sign by the side of the road,
connected to a device that
remotely measures the emissions of the vehicles driving past. When a
car with properly
functioning pollution-control equipment passes, the sign flashes
"Good." When a car passes that
is well over the acceptable limits, the sign flashes "Poor." If you
stand at the Speer Boulevard
exit and watch the sign for any length of time, you'll find that
virtually every car scores "Good."
An Audi A4 --"Good." A Buick Century--"Good." A Toyota
Corolla--"Good." A Ford Taurus--
"Good." A Saab 9-5--"Good," and on and on, until after twenty minutes
or so, some beat-up old
Ford Escort or tricked-out Porsche drives by and the sign flashes
"Poor." The picture of the
smog problem you get from watching the Speer Boulevard sign and the
picture of the
homelessness problem you get from listening in on the morning staff
meetings at the Y.M.C.A.
are pretty much the same. Auto emissions follow a power-law
distribution, and the airpollution
example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems
centered on a few hard
9
cases.
Most cars, especially new ones, are extraordinarily clean. A 2004
Subaru in good working order
has an exhaust stream that's just .06 per cent carbon monoxide, which
is negligible. But on
almost any highway, for whatever reason--age, ill repair, deliberate
tampering by the owner--a
small number of cars can have carbon-monoxide levels in excess of ten
per cent, which is almost
two hundred times higher. In Denver, five per cent of the vehicles on
the road produce fifty-five
per cent of the automobile pollution.
"Let's say a car is fifteen years old," Donald Stedman says. Stedman
is a chemist and
automobile-emissions specialist at the University of Denver. His
laboratory put up the sign
on Speer Avenue. "Obviously, the older a car is the more likely it is
to become broken. It's the
same as human beings. And by broken we mean any number of mechanical
malfunctions--the
computer's not working anymore, fuel injection is stuck open, the
catalyst died. It's not unusual
that these failure modes result in high emissions. We have at least
one car in our database which
was emitting seventy grams of hydrocarbon per mile, which means that
you could almost drive a
Honda Civic on the exhaust fumes from that car. It's not just old
cars. It's new cars with high
mileage, like taxis. One of the most successful and least publicized
control measures was done
by a district attorney in L.A. back in the nineties. He went to LAX
and discovered that all of the
Bell Cabs were gross emitters. One of those cabs emitted more than its
own weight of pollution
every year."
In Stedman's view, the current system of smog checks makes little
sense. A million motorists in
Denver have to go to an emissions center every year--take time from
work, wait in line, pay
fifteen or twenty-five dollars--for a test that more than ninety per
cent of them don't need. "Not
everybody gets tested for breast cancer," Stedman says. "Not everybody
takes an AIDS test."
On-site smog checks, furthermore, do a pretty bad job of finding and
fixing the few outliers. Car
enthusiasts--with high-powered, high-polluting sports cars--have been
known to drop a clean
engine into their car on the day they get it tested. Others register
their car in a faraway town
without emissions testing or arrive at the test site "hot"--having
just come off hard driving on the
freeway--which is a good way to make a dirty engine appear to be
clean. Still others randomly
pass the test when they shouldn't, because dirty engines are highly
variable and sometimes burn
cleanly for short durations. There is little evidence, Stedman says,
that the city's regime of
inspections makes any difference in air quality.
He proposes mobile testing instead. Twenty years ago, he invented a
device the size of a suitcase
that uses infrared light to instantly measure and then analyze the
emissions of cars as they drive
by on the highway. The Speer Avenue sign is attached to one of
Stedman's devices. He says that
cities should put half a dozen or so of his devices in vans, park them
on freeway off-ramps
around the city, and have a police car poised to pull over anyone who
fails the test. A half-dozen
vans could test thirty thousand cars a day. For the same twenty-five
million dollars that Denver's
motorists now spend on on-site testing, Stedman estimates, the city
could identify and fix
twenty-five thousand truly dirty vehicles every year, and within a few
years cut automobile
emissions in the Denver metropolitan area by somewhere between
thirty-five and forty per cent.
10
The city could stop managing its smog problem and start ending it.
Why don't we all adopt the Stedman method? There's no moral impediment
here. We're used to
the police pulling people over for having a blown headlight or a
broken side mirror, and it
wouldn't be difficult to have them add pollution-control devices to
their list. Yet it does run
counter to an instinctive social preference for thinking of pollution
as a problem to which we all
contribute equally. We have developed institutions that move
reassuringly quickly and forcefully
on collective problems. Congress passes a law. The Environmental
Protection Agency
promulgates a regulation. The auto industry makes its cars a little
cleaner, and--presto--the air
gets better. But Stedman doesn't much care about what happens in
Washington and Detroit. The
challenge of controlling air pollution isn't so much about the laws as
it is about compliance with
them. It's a policing problem, rather than a policy problem, and there
is something ultimately
unsatisfying about his proposed solution. He wants to end air
pollution in Denver with a halfdozen
vans outfitted with a contraption about the size of a suitcase. Can
such a big problem have
such a small-bore solution?
That's what made the findings of the Christopher Commission so
unsatisfying. We put together
blue-ribbon panels when we're faced with problems that seem too large
for the normal
mechanisms of bureaucratic repair. We want sweeping reforms. But what
was the commission's
most memorable observation? It was the story of an officer with a
known history of doing things
like beating up handcuffed suspects who nonetheless received a
performance review from his
superior stating that he "usually conducts himself in a manner that
inspires respect for the law
and instills public confidence." This is what you say about an officer
when you haven't actually
read his file, and the implication of the Christopher Commission's
report was that the L.A.P.D.
might help solve its problem simply by getting its police captains to
read the files of their
officers. The L.A.P.D.'s problem was a matter not of policy but of
compliance. The department
needed to adhere to the rules it already had in place, and that's not
what a public hungry for
institutional transformation wants to hear. Solving problems that have
power-law distributions
doesn't just violate our moral intuitions; it violates our political
intuitions as well. It's hard not to
conclude, in the end, that the reason we treated the homeless as one
hopeless undifferentiated
group for so long is not simply that we didn't know better. It's that
we didn't want to know better.
It was easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they
involve special treatment for
people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little
appeal to the left, because their
emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold
number-crunching of Chicago-school
cost-benefit analysis. Even the promise of millions of dollars in
savings or cleaner air or better
police departments cannot entirely compensate for such discomfort. In
Denver, John
Hickenlooper, the city's enormously popular mayor, has worked on the
homelessness issue
tirelessly during the past couple of years. He spent more time on the
subject in his annual State
of the City address this past summer than on any other topic. He gave
the speech, with deliberate
symbolism, in the city's downtown Civic Center Park, where homeless
people gather every day
with their shopping carts and garbage bags. He has gone on local talk
radio on many occasions to
discuss what the city is doing about the issue. He has commissioned
studies to show what a drain
on the city's resources the homeless population has become. But, he
says, "there are still people
who stop me going into the supermarket and say, 'I can't believe
you're going to help those
11
homeless people, those bums.' "
Early one morning a year ago, Marla Johns got a call from her husband,
Steve. He was at work.
"He called and woke me up," Johns remembers. "He was choked up and
crying on the phone.
And I thought that something had happened with another police officer.
I said, 'Oh, my gosh,
what happened?' He said, 'Murray died last night.' " He died of
intestinal bleeding. At the police
department that morning, some of the officers gave Murray a moment of silence.
"There are not many days that go by that I don't have a thought of
him," she went on. "Christmas
comes-- and I used to buy him a Christmas present. Make sure he had
warm gloves and a blanket
and a coat. There was this mutual respect. There was a time when
another intoxicated patient
jumped off the gurney and was coming at me, and Murray jumped off his
gurney and shook his
fist and said, 'Don't you touch my angel.' You know, when he was
monitored by the system he
did fabulously. He would be on house arrest and he would get a job and
he would save money
and go to work every day, and he wouldn't drink. He would do all the
things he was supposed to
do. There are some people who can be very successful members of
society if someone monitors
them. Murray needed someone to be in charge of him."
But, of course, Reno didn't have a place where Murray could be given
the structure he needed.
Someone must have decided that it cost too much.
"I told my husband that I would claim his body if no one else did,"
she said. "I would not have
him in an unmarked grave."
Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.
