Highlights

Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety.

Loc 74–75

Such training ignores two important factors in Garner’s death. The first is the officers’ casual disregard for his well-being, ignoring his cries of “I can’t breathe,” and their seeming indifferent reaction to his near lifelessness while awaiting an ambulance. This is a problem of values and seems to go to the heart of the claim that, for too many police, black lives don’t matter.

Loc 94–97

The endlessly repeated point is that any encounter can turn deadly in a split second if officers don’t remain ready to use lethal force at any moment. When police come into every situation imagining it may be their last, they treat those they encounter with fear and hostility and attempt to control them rather than communicate with them—and are much quicker to use force at the slightest provocation or even uncertainty.

Loc 174–177

Unfortunately, there is little evidence to back up this hope. Even the most diverse forces have major problems with racial profiling and bias, and individual black and Latino officers appear to perform very much like their white counterparts.

Loc 206–208

There is now a large body of evidence measuring whether the race of individual officers affects their use of force. Most studies show no effect.

Loc 214–215

By calling for colorblind “law and order” they strengthen a system that puts people of color at a structural disadvantage and contributes to their deep social and legal estrangement.38 At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo.

Loc 254–257

[…] police following proper procedure are still going to be arresting people for mostly low-level offenses, and the burden will continue to fall primarily on communities of color because that is how the system is designed to operate—not because of the biases or misunderstandings of officers.

Loc 267–269

Steve Herbert shows that community meetings tend to be populated by long-time residents, those who own rather than rent their homes, business owners, and landlords.41 The views of renters, youth, homeless people, immigrants, and the most socially marginalized are rarely represented.

Loc 277–280

Since 1900, the police in Great Britain have killed a total of fifty people. In March 2016 alone, US police killed one hundred people.

Loc 408–409

A kinder, gentler, and more diverse war on the poor is still a war on the poor.

Loc 442–442

Bayley goes on to point out that there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates.

Loc 515–516

Peel developed his ideas while managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland and seeking new forms of social control that would allow for continued political and economic domination in the face of growing insurrections, riots, and political uprisings.

Loc 553–555

The primary jobs of early detectives were to spy on political radicals and other troublemakers and to replace private thief catchers, who recovered stolen goods for a reward.

Loc 615–616

[…] the horrific 1918 massacre at Porvenir, in which Rangers killed fifteen unarmed locals and drove the remaining community into Mexico for fear of further violence. This led to a series of state legislative hearings in 1919 about extrajudicial killings and racially motivated brutality on behalf of white ranchers. Those hearings resulted in no formal changes; the graphic records of abuse were sealed for the next fifty years to avoid any stain on the Rangers’ “heroic” record.

Loc 690–693

Black boys in particular are being driven out of these schools, not for educational failure but for failure to sit still in class and wear the right color shoes.

Loc 927–928

New York Times found that the large Success Academy charter-school network in New York had a suspension rate of 10 percent, with some schools as high as 23 percent, while city public schools had a rate of only 3 percent.15 One mother was told that if her six-year-old daughter’s misbehavior in class didn’t stop, the teacher would be forced to call 911.

Loc 932–935

President Bill Clinton was more than happy to oblige. In 1994 he introduced the Gun-Free Schools Act, which ushered in “zero tolerance” school discipline policies. Following that lead, legislators and school administrators embraced a raft of harsh disciplinary codes, placing surveillance systems, metal detectors, and huge numbers of police in schools.

Loc 944–947

In Chicago, in 2013–2014 black students were twenty-seven times more likely to be arrested than white students leading to 8,000 arrests in a two-year period.

Loc 957–959

Healthy and effective disciplinary systems take work and resources, though they are usually a lot cheaper than paying for extra armed police.

Loc 963–964

In another incident, the boy was slammed to the ground and handcuffed by the same SRO after resisting being dragged out of the classroom. This resulted in a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct and a felony charge of assault on a police officer. Shockingly, a family court judge found the youth guilty of all charges.

Loc 974–976

Nationally, police have been taking on tremendous amounts of surplus military hardware from the Pentagon. School police agencies have joined in as well. Such agencies have purchased mine-resistant ambush protection (MRAP) vehicles, AR-15 assault rifles, shotguns, and grenade launchers.

Loc 987–989

In 2003, administrators at Goose Creek High School in South Carolina coordinated a massive SWAT team raid of their school in an effort to ferret out drugs and guns. Armored police, with guns drawn, ordered hundreds of mostly black students onto the ground without any specific probable cause as administrators went around identifying students to be searched and arrested. A video of the incident shows students freezing or fleeing in terror as black-clad officers burst out of closets and stairwells screaming commands and pointing guns.28 Police dogs were brought in to find the drugs that supposedly necessitated the raid. None were found. The administrator who had organized the raid apologized to parents but pointed out that “once police are on campus, they are in control”—which is exactly the problem.

Loc 991–997

The Houston Chronicle found that, from 2010 to 2014, police in ten suburban Houston school districts reported 1,300 use-of-force incidents.39 Many large districts had no data or refused to cooperate;

Loc 1033–1034

Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.

Loc 664–665 (Page 20)

The third story, most respectful interpretation, and Hanlon’s razor are all attempts to overcome what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, where you frequently make errors by attributing others’ behaviors to their internal, or fundamental, motivations rather than external factors. You are guilty of the fundamental attribution error whenever you think someone was mean because she is mean rather than thinking she was just having a bad day.

Loc 671–675 (Page 20)

The problem with the just world hypothesis and victim-blaming is that they make broad judgments about why things are happening to people that are often inaccurate at the individual level.

Loc 702–703 (Page 22)

Learned helplessness describes the tendency to stop trying to escape difficult situations because we have gotten used to difficult conditions over time. Someone learns that they are helpless to control their circumstances, so they give up trying to change them.

Loc 704–706 (Page 22)

For many years, targets were given in physical terms—so many yards of cloth or tons of nails—but that led to obvious difficulties. If cloth was rewarded by the yard, it was woven loosely to make the yarn yield more yards. If the output of nails was determined by their number, factories produced huge numbers of pinlike nails; if by weight, smaller numbers of very heavy nails. The satiric magazine Krokodil once ran a cartoon of a factory manager proudly displaying his record output, a single gigantic nail suspended from a crane. Goodhart’s law summarizes the issue: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Loc 1141–1146 (Page 49)

Both describe the same basic phenomenon: When you try to incentivize behavior by setting a measurable target, people focus primarily on achieving that measure, often in ways you didn’t intend. Most importantly, their focus on the measure may not correlate to the behavior you hoped to promote.

Loc 1154–1156 (Page 50)

[…] seemingly small changes in incentive structures can really matter. You should align the outcome you desire as closely as possible with the incentives you provide. You should expect people generally to act in their own perceived self-interest, and so you want to be sure this perceived self-interest directly supports your goals.

Loc 1239–1241 (Page 55)

One model that can help you figure out how to strike this balance in certain situations is the precautionary principle: when an action could possibly create harm of an unknown magnitude, you should proceed with extreme caution before enacting the policy. It’s like the medical principle of “First, do no harm.” For example, if there is reason to believe a substance might cause cancer, the precautionary principle advises that it is better to control it tightly now while the scientific community figures out the degree of harm, rather than risk people getting cancer unnecessarily because the substance has not been controlled.

Loc 1307–1312 (Page 59)

Parkinson’s law (yes, another law by the same Parkinson of Parkinson’s law of triviality) states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Does that ring true for you? It certainly does for us.

Loc 1772–1774 (Page 89)

Tom Cargill was credited (in the September 1985 Communications of the ACM) for the similar ninety-ninety rule from his time programming at Bell Labs in the 1980s: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

Loc 1780–1782 (Page 89)

[…] if you can identify the center of gravity of an idea, market, or process—anything—then you might effect change faster by acting on that specific point. For example, you might convince a central influencer, someone other people or organizations look to for direction, that an idea is worthwhile.

Loc 2180–2182 (Page 112)

Racism in America exists to exclude people of color from opportunity and progress so that there is more profit for others deemed superior. This profit itself is the greater promise for nonracialized people—you will get more because they exist to get less. That promise is durable, and unless attacked directly, it will outlive any attempts to address class as a whole.

Loc 204–207

It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race. 2. It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color. 3. It is about race if it fits into a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.

Loc 236–241

[…] for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so.

Loc 110–112 (Page 20)

(One theory of the ammonites’ demise, popular in the early part of the twentieth century, was that the uncoiled shells of species like Eubaculites carinatus indicated that the group had exhausted its practical possibilities and entered some sort of decadent, Lady Gaga-ish phase.)

Loc 1240–1242 (Page 89)

[…] the reigning paradigm is neither Cuvierian nor Darwinian but combines key elements of both—“long periods of boredom interrupted occasionally by panic.”

Loc 1303–1304 (Page 94)

Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled.

Loc 1499–1502 (Page 108)

Canada’s boreal forest is huge; it stretches across almost a billion acres and represents roughly a quarter of all the intact forest that remains on earth.

Loc 2091–2092 (Page 151)

In 1890, a New York group that took as its mission “the introduction and acclimatization of such foreign varieties of the animal and vegetable kingdom as might prove useful or interesting” imported European starlings to the U.S. (The head of the group supposedly wanted to bring to America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare.) A hundred starlings let loose in Central Park have by now multiplied to more than two hundred million.

Loc 2920–2923 (Page 211)

(Rhino horns, which are made of keratin, like your fingernails, have long been used in traditional Chinese medicine but in recent years have become even more sought-after as a high-end party “drug”; at clubs in southeast Asia, powdered horn is snorted like cocaine.)

Loc 3073–3075 (Page 222)

To cite just one of many possible illustrations, by the mid-nineteen-eighties the population of California condors had dwindled to just twenty-two individuals. To rescue the species—the largest land bird in North America—wildlife biologists raised condor chicks using puppets. They created fake power lines to train the birds not to electrocute themselves; to teach them not to eat trash, they wired garbage to deliver a mild shock. They vaccinated every single condor—today there about four hundred—against West Nile virus, a disease, it’s worth noting, for which a human vaccine has yet to be developed. They routinely test the birds for lead poisoning—condors that scavenge deer carcasses often ingest lead shot—and they have treated many of them with chelation therapy.

Loc 3612–3617 (Page 262)

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes that we’re willing to perform ultrasounds on rhinos and handjobs on crows.

Loc 3651–3652 (Page 265)

Everyone has an opinion, and it is only by trying some things together that we can jointly see which ones will work in the situation at hand.

Loc 213–214

[…] enemyfying is seductive because it reassures us that we are OK and not responsible for the difficulties we are facing.

Loc 339–340 (Page 8)