Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory

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Elinor Ostrom was my favorite scholar. Her research was empirically rigorous and methodologically innovative. After working with Vincent Ostrom on water management, she turned to a series of studies of police. Her findings are pertinent today, when crime has fallen but we are (and should be) deeply concerned about racial bias in the criminal justice system.

The topic of policing scrambles ideological lines. Progressives who are otherwise favorable toward governments and unions get leery of police forces and police unions, for good reasons. Some conservatives who are normally concerned about limiting the state suddenly get enthusiastic about the police.

Placing Elinor Ostrom on an ideological map is also tricky. She was deeply influenced by works like James M. Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, a foundational text of neoliberalism. She opposed centralized control and could be skeptical about redistribution, thus aligning with libertarians. At the same time, she was a committed environmentalist, a defender of indigenous cultures (many of which are not individualist or freedom-loving), and a theorist interested in moving “beyond markets and states”–the title of her Nobel lecture. She was a great proponent of commons and common-pool resources, which are popular on the left. To bring her ideas into the debate about policing offers insights that both sides may be prone to overlook.

Ostrom saw police as consumers and providers of a whole set of “services” (training, forensics, traffic control, patrol, arrests, pretrial detention, investigation, and more). Each unit within the world of policing–whether a forensic lab, a police station, or a specialized investigative team–negotiated with many other units to do its work. Some negotiations were formal, e.g., a town’s police department paying a different city’s forensic lab for services. More often, the negotiations within and among police systems were informal. Citizens were also organized in numerous overlapping ways–towns, counties, states, voluntary associations, juries–that influenced the police.

Ostrom analyzed all this complexity from the perspective of individuals, some of whom might happen to be police officers or other kinds of “professionals.” Citizens–meaning all individuals concerned with solving problems–would generally benefit if: 1) there were many potential providers of services, so that they had some choice, 2) the scale and boundaries of problems matched the scale and mandate of organizations, and 3) they could influence the goals and priorities of the police.

Her main empirical finding was that consolidating police departments reduced the quality of policing–as defined by citizens. Consolidation limited the choice available for services like training and forensics. It reduced the leverage that local police had over larger entities. It kept front-line professionals from being able to define goals and priorities, because they got slotted into larger systems. It kept them from addressing local problems (e.g., dangerous streets) because they had to meet targets, such as numbers of arrests, that came down from bureaucracies. And it blocked citizens in diverse communities from defining what “good policing” should mean.

Public safety (with a dimension of fairness to all) is a common-pool resource. Everyone benefits when it’s provided, but anyone can degrade it by illegally harming others; and lots of people must actively contribute to make it available. Lin Ostrom and her colleagues developed eight design principles that help with the management of common-pool resources, writ large. I list them below (from this summary) and offer some thoughts about how each applies to policing in the USA.

1. Define clear boundaries. Most police forces and organizations do have clearly defined jurisdictions. The fact that the geographical boundaries around police departments, sheriffs’ departments, state police, federal agencies, etc. form a complex pattern is probably an advantage, not a source of inefficiency or damaging conflict, according to the Ostroms’ “polycentric” theory. Thus our police systems do OK on this first design principle.

However, if we move beyond “clarity” and use other criteria to assess the boundaries, we see problems. For example, at the time of Michael Brown’s killing, the government and police force of Ferguson, MO were dominated by Whites even though the majority of the city was Black, and the metro area as a whole was better aligned with the Black population than the city was. To put it another way, the borders around Ferguson were unrelated to real patterns of settlement.

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions. In the US, criminal justice works poorly by this standard. The laws governing citizens–and policies for the police–are set by state legislatures and Congress. Their decisions are not helpful in many specific contexts. For example, criminalizing drugs might have some benefits for reducing drug abuse, but it is harmful in the neighborhoods where drugs are sold.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules. Most Americans have a vote and free speech. But we exercise those forms of influence at inappropriate scales and within unhelpful boundaries. A citizen of Baltimore gets a vote in Maryland statewide elections but is outvoted by suburbanites. The police are more accountable to the city and the state than to the specific communities where they work.

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities. Here again, mandates by state and federal authorities clearly interfere. In fact, community members are hardly involved at all in making rules in the domain of criminal justice. Common-pool resources rarely survive when this principle is violated.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior. We have police review boards and other tools for monitoring police. There are some interesting and valuable examples, like Community Policing in Chicago Beat Meetings. Still, my sense is that monitoring is underdeveloped.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators. The general principle is that violations of rules should carry highly predictable costs, but the costs should start low. If punishment begins at a draconian level, not only may the perpetrator be unduly harmed, but the community is likely to excuse some violators entirely. A first-time offender should be able to pay the price and then be completely embraced by the community. Although penalties should start low, they should rise steadily with repeated infractions. For both law-breakers and police, this principle is almost uniformly ignored in American criminal justice.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution. In the context of criminal justice, that would mean helping citizens to resolve disputes without necessarily involving the police. It would also mean allowing citizens to resolve their disputes with the police without filing federal lawsuits. Both opportunities seem sorely lacking, despite important exceptions.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system. We do the opposite. Mandates flow down from states to cities to neighborhoods; and Congress influences the whole system without much accountability.

In short, criminal justice in the United States is a commons problem that we manage in ways that violate almost every principle for the management of common resources.

Because my concern is with racial injustice, I have no interest in marginalizing racial analysis of policing. However, it is important to structure institutions well. If we assume that the majority population is prone to treat minorities unfairly, that is an extra reason to design the rules right. We should also work on reducing racial bias, but we’d have to be awfully optimistic on that front not to give primary attention to institutions. The design principles are particularly important when we have good reason to mistrust some key actors.

I think restructuring criminal justice in line with common-pool management principles is a promising alternative to “abolition.” To be sure, we should ask the critical question, Why do we employ armed and uniformed paramilitary organizations to keep the domestic peace? The idea of abolishing police is worthy of debate. However, wholesale social transformation has a pretty poor record of success. Restructuring is a better place to start.

By the way, this approach is compatible with recognizing that American police serve many people in many communities very well. We needn’t reorganize everywhere, and we may be able to learn from the better examples.

Finally, this approach has the great advantage of viewing public safety as the job of many actors, of which the police are only one. There is growing evidence that voluntary citizens’ efforts are important for reducing crime. In an American Sociological Review article, Sharkey, Torrats-Espinosa, and Takyar find that “every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life in a city with 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent reduction in the property crime rate.” That finding fits very nicely with the Ostroms’ theory. Vincent Ostrom told my friend Paul Aligica:

We do not think of ‘government’ or ‘governance’ as something provided by states alone. Families, voluntary associations, villages, and other forms of human association all involve some form of self-government. Rather than looking only to states, we need to give much more attention to building the kinds of basic institutional structures that enable people to find ways of relating constructively to one another and of resolving problems in their daily lives.*

The problem with policing is that we have not built structures that allow people to relate constructively across lines of race (and class) in order to resolve the problems that they define as important.

*V. Ostrom to P. Aligica, 2003, in Vlad Tarko, Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography, p. 49. See also: Ostrom, Habermas, and Gandhi are all we need; Habermas, Ostrom, Gandhi (II) or this video that explores Ostrom along with other “Civic Studies” thinkers.

the moral significance of instinct, with special reference to having a dog

When dogs and their human owners look into each others’ eyes, oxytocin, a hormone involved in the maternal bond, rises in both creatures. When dogs are given oxytocin via a nasal spray, they want to look in their humans’ eyes (source). I find this result interesting, but equally interesting is my reaction to it. Why is this scientific finding heart-warming? Is it evidence of something good?

As members of an evolved natural species, we human beings have instincts. Maternal bonding is an example. Domesticating dogs may be one as well.

Instincts are not universal, nor are they necessarily desirable. For example, we presumably developed an instinct for violence against people outside our own kin groups. Yet many individuals never exhibit that instinct, it is generally bad, and we can create contexts in which it becomes marginal. To say that humans have an instinct for violence is a little like saying that bees sting. It’s true even though most bees never actually sting. It’s not a statistical generalization but a claim about the way we were designed through the process of natural selection. It’s about what’s “built in” to us, for better or worse.

One pitfall is to replace moral evaluation with such talk of instincts. To say that anything we are hard-wired to do is right to do is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It excuses, for example, violence, exploitation, and dominance.

Another error is to romanticize the human species by defining only the good drives as our authentic instincts. An example would be claiming that we are naturally peaceful and made violent only by civilization. This seems implausible if it’s a testable claim; and if it’s meant to be true by definition, it’s an instance of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

A third error is to ignore the natural characteristics of the species entirely when making moral judgments. Perhaps ethics is species-independent, and we can first define the good (in general) and then use it to assess the actual behavior of human beings. What is right for us would also be right for angels, elves, Klingons, God.

One problem with this approach is that it’s unrealistic. A deeper problem is that it fails to demonstrate love for the species. To love an oak tree is to appreciate it for what it naturally does. And to love humankind is to appreciate us as the evolved natural species that we happen to be. To wonder whether we would be better without sex would be like wondering whether oak trees would be better off without acorns. (But then we shouldn’t wish that we had no proclivity for violence, because violence, too, is part of being human.)

Again, this doesn’t mean that there is a list of characteristics that are innate because of natural selection, and everyone should (or does) demonstrate those characteristics. Sex, for example, is an instinct that admits of great variation: some people want it and some don’t; various people want different kinds of it; and it can be good or bad for the people affected. Still, sex is not just a desire that some people happen to have, and it is not merely good if the net benefit happens to be positive. Sex is intrinsic to the species and is something we should encompass when we value human beings.

Back to dogs and people: It appears that these two species co-evolved very early, each taking its modern form under the influence of the other. I’ve even wondered whether guard dogs allowed our distant ancestors to sleep deeply; and deep sleep permitted cognitive development. Dogs certainly allowed us to spread into vast regions that had been dominated by big mammals with teeth. It’s not clear that we could have become who we are without dogs–or vice versa.

To say “Because having a dog is natural, it must be good” would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy. We can live without dogs. Some people much prefer to. Some communities bar them. And maybe those are the right decisions. Whether or not to have a dog is an ethical question. The rights and welfare of all affected people–and the dog–should be considered.

But it would also be a mistake to interpret (some) people’s bond with dogs as just another preference, a choice that happens to have hedonic value for them and that should be weighed against other desires and interests. Loving a dog is an instinct that influences human perceptions (we are good at interpreting dogs’ behavior) and even our hormones. That means that if you happen to love a dog, I think you are justified in believing that you are acting naturally. And if you happen not to like dogs, you should still recognize the impulse in others as a human capability. Like other capabilities, it is something that people should be able to choose to exercise so long as that is compatible with other important goods.

analyzing Donald Trump’s speech patterns

what is cultural appropriation?

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Matt Walsh, who writes from the perspective of the religious right, garnered widespread attention after sharing his dismay that Christians indulge in “Hindu worship” like yoga. … It’s worth noting that he’s not necessarily wrong. Yoga derives from ancient Indian spiritual practices and an explicitly religious element of Hinduism …. Modern practice has been commodified, commercialized, and secularized, and has been as controversial among Hindu scholars of religion as it has among members of the Christian right. Last week, Shreena Gandhi, a religious studies professor at Michigan State University, published an academic paper critiquing how the modern Western yoga industry is a form of “cultural appropriation … intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy.” —Tara Isabella Burton, in Vox.

“Appropriation” is bad. But we have other vocabulary for such cases: “imitation,” “borrowing,” “exchange,” “influence,” “confluence,” “mashup,” even “admiration.”

No culture is pure and free of influence, nor is purity desirable. Just for example, the word “Hinduism” derives from Greek. Traveling from the Mediterranean to explore or conquer the subcontinent, Greeks had to cross the River Indus, which defined India and its many systems of belief for the them. Later, similar words and meanings suited Arab and Western European imperialists who also arrived from the same direction. “India” and “Hindu” were then creatively appropriated by South Asians to promote religious unity from the immense diversity of the region. Thus to say that yoga is an appropriation of Hinduism is to use a European concept that Indians have powerfully appropriated for their own purposes.

I’m not suggesting that there is no problem with cultural appropriation: just that we need a sophisticated apparatus for distinguishing appropriation from other forms of interaction that we should celebrate.

One issue is respect. If you imitate a practice or aesthetic from somewhere else, do you demonstrate appropriate respect for the people who originated it? Are you making fun of them and treating their work as easy? Or are you striving to appreciate its excellence? (By the way, respect is not always merited; there is also room for satire.)

Another issue is quality. In borrowing a cultural product, are you making something excellent or are you cheapening the original? That judgment involves some subjectivity, but there are clearly wonderful examples of cultural imitation–and very poor ones.

And a third issue is the right of ownership. To “appropriate” often means to profit from something that should not be yours. If, for example, a group of people have been using a medicinal herb for centuries until a pharmaceutical company learns of its benefits and patents the compound, I would say that their intellectual property has been appropriated. Although intellectual property is a social construct (not a law of nature), the indigenous people get a raw deal in such cases. Likewise, if Western yoga somehow supports the economic exploitation of South Asians, that is bad. But this is a causal thesis that needs evidence. When a community converts to Christianity, they are not “appropriating Western culture,” and they owe nothing to the West (although some missionaries have thought that they do). Who owes what to whom depends on the context of power.

A deeper question is: What is a culture, anyway? And to whom does any culture belong?

Per the Oxford English Dictionary, “culture” can now be a “count noun,” a noun that makes sense in the plural. In that form, it means “the distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period. Hence: a society or group characterized by such customs, etc.”

This usage is not old. It is first attested in English in 1860, and since then, related uses have emerged, such as contact among cultures (since 1892), the idea of cultural gaps or boundaries (since 1921), culture clashes (since 1926), and the culture of an organization (since 1940).

These uses reflect a profound shift in the way English-speakers see the human world. For many centuries in Europe, it was assumed that there was one best way to do the most important things in life. A good building should have pointed arches and stained glass in 1400, baroque ornaments in 1700. “Culture” was not a count noun: there were not many cultures.

The word had originated in the middle ages with agricultural meanings, but it evolved to mean the cultivation of the mind or spirit–e.g., Sir Thomas More in 1510: “to the culture & profitt of their myndis”–and then a state of refinement. In 1703: “Men of any tolerable Culture and Civility must needs abhor the entering of any such Compact.” The world was divided between those who had Culture and those who did not.

To be sure, some authors, such as Herodotus and Montaigne, were fascinated by the diversity of human customs and beliefs. Still, to be cultured was to do things right, and differences either reflected superficial variations or the unfortunate fact that some people were uncivilized.

However, an alternative theory had emerged in Europe by ca. 1750. On this view, there were many cultures, each reflecting the spirit of a particular people or an age. A person could thus be assigned to a culture as a descriptive category.

I am not qualified to discuss whether other communities across time and space have viewed culture as singular or plural. I suspect that singular views have prevailed in some other places, e.g., in China and Islamic civilization before modernity. In any case, the shifting European theory of culture had global significance because of European colonialism.

One consequence of modern view is a distinction between authentic and borrowed culture. If you are actually English, then to behave like an Indian is inauthentic (and vice-versa). That framework depends on the premise that there are multiple and distinct cultures in the world, and each person really belongs to one.

Another consequence is a marked anxiety about whether we are doing anything right. If there are many cultures, then our cultural norms are local and perhaps arbitrary. Just as Europeans were beginning to understand styles of art and architecture from around the world, they stopped having a normative style of their own. Almost all 19th century European and American architecture is revivalist: it borrows (or “appropriates”) styles from other times and places: Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Gothic, Mughal, and countless others. High modernism is then a revolt against revivalism that seeks new universals–heroically, but without lasting success. And postmodernism is often revived revivalism with a layer of irony.

In this context, it’s important to remember that there are no cultures. Each person has a large set of more-or-less related beliefs, values, and habits that change over her lifetime. The person next door typically shares most but not all of these components. If you examine the components carefully, you’ll find that the come from all over the world and they fit together imperfectly.

A culture is a handy shorthand for this array of components. It’s useful for generalizing about groups of people but always risks overgeneralization. For almost any population, it is possible to draw the cultural boundaries in different places. Nothing they do and believe is completely original or immune to change. Everything is impure–wonderfully so, as a testament to the interconnectedness and avid interactivity of human beings.

Putting up walls and blocking out influences is foolish. But that is not to say that particular acts of borrowing are always respectful, excellent, or fair. When and how to imitate is a hard question for ethical and aesthetic judgment.

pseudoscience and the No True Scotsman fallacy

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal