再Robocops, July 13th 2013 P69 重装備警察(書評)前半
History is littered with powerful people undone by hubris. Julius Caesar should have ignored the cheers of the Roman crowd and paid heed to the soothsayer. The late Steve Jobs overplayed his hand at Apple as a young man and was kicked out of the company he founded. And then there was Jimmy Cayne. When Mr Cayne walked out of Bear Stearns for the last time, having been eased out as boss of the ailing bank, he claimed there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Through the tears, he wistfully recalls, heart-broken bankers sent him on his way with a standing ovation. This is not how his staff remember it. So disliked was he that according to ゛House of Cards゛, a book by William Cohan, underlings would ask in meetings：゛Is Jimmy staying on? [Because] we're not coming back for another year of this shit.゛ After reading Mr Cayne's tale Sebastien Brion, a professor at IESE, a business school, decided to test whether the powerful overestimate the strength of their bonds with subordinates. The results, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, will come as a shock to business big cheeses, but to no one else. In one experiment, he randomly assigned people in working groups with positions of high or low power, or to a control group. Questioned afterwards, those primed with high power were convinced the other were on their side；a view not shared by those being bossed. In another he found that lowly participants would form alliances against the powerful, even when it was not in their financial interest to do so. The mighty were blissfully unaware of the forces working against them. So not only do bosses set too much store by their strengths, as our Schumpeter column notes on the next page, they also habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their underlings. Somehow, on reaching the corner office, they lose the knack of reading subtle cues in others' behaviour：in a further experiment Mr Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses his inate ability to distinguish between a real and fake smile. At the very least, bosses might improve their chances of staying on top by being aware of this bias. Some might feel that it just goes to show how Andy Grove, a founder of Intel, was right to say that ゛only the paranoid survive゛. However, besides watching his back Mr Grove also instituted a scheme in which employees stood nose-to-nose with bosses and shouted their honest advice into their faces. Maybe that is going too far, but some sort of mechanism for letting underlings speak truth unto power may be sensible, even if Mr Cayne might not have relished it.
Robocops, July 13th 2013 P69 重装備警察(書評)後半
Radley Balko's writing has long been read by people who care about civil liberties. First for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, then for his own blog, ゛The Agitator゛, now part of the Huffington Post, he has written about criminal-justice policy, with a focus on police abuses：not corruption so much as the excesses that have become inherent in ordinary policing. Mr Balko manages to avoid the cliches of both right and left, and provokes genuine outrage at the misuse of state power in its most brutal and unaccountable form：heavily armed police raiding the homes of unarmed, non-violent suspects on the flimsiest of pretexts, and behaving more like an occupying army in hostile territory than guardians of public safety. ゛Rise of the Warrior Cop゛, Mr Balko's interesting first book, explains what policies led to the militarisation of America's police. To his credit, he focuses his outrage not on police themselves, but on politicians and the phoney, wasteful drug war they created. After the obligatory backward glances to the colonial era - in which the sort of social shaming possible only in small, homogeneous communities obviated the need for standing police forces - and the American civil war, Mr Balko's really begins with the Supreme Court's 1963 ruling in Ker v California, which allowed the police to enter someone's home without a warrant and without knocking or announcing themselves. That was the first in a long series of rulings that gutted the Fourth Amendament's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The social upheaval of the 1960s caught the attention of ambitious politicians and led them to focus on crime. Daryl Gates, then a rising star in the Los Angeles Police Department, created America's first SWAT team in 1965 (he would eventually become the LADP's chief in 1978, call drug use ゛treason゛and state that casual drug users ゛ought to be taken out and shot゛). Richard Nixon ran successfully for president on a law-and-order ticket in 1968, bolstered by a ゛Silent Majority゛which, in Mr Balko's view, ゛began to see a link between drugs, crime, the counter-culture and race゛. Ronald Reagan made Nixon's drug policies tougher. He dramatically increased both federal involvement in combating drugs and asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize goods and property believed to be used in crime or, more controversially, purchased with the proceeds of crime. This gave the police an incentive to find connections between property and drug activity, often at the expense of more serious crimes. As Mr Balko notes, ゛Closing a rape or murder case didn't come with a potential kickback to the police department. Knocking off a mid- or low-level drug dealer did.゛ Financial incentives also came through drug-war grants and, after the attacks of Sptember 11th 2001, homeland-security grants that allowed police departments to buy surplus military hardware of dubious utility. Fargo, North Dakota, has received $8m in grants to buy goodies such as an armoured truck with a rotating turret - used ゛mostly for show, including at the annual city-picnic, where police parked it near the children's bouncy castle゛. Mr Balko is adept, in ゛Rise of the Warrior Cop゛, at finding outrageous examples of SWAT-team misuse, such as deploying heavily armed police to break up small-stakes poker games, raid fraternity parties suspected of serving alcohol to underage patrons and arrest barbers for operating without licences. But he is too dismissive of arguments that stricter policing may have helped produce the remarkable drop in America's crime rate. Thanks to his book, Americans will be more aware of the costs of those methods. But they - and he - should also consider possible benefits.
