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 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 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-abuse-treatment 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 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 nineteen-nineties, 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 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 emergency-room 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 cities to radically re�valuate 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 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 eight-thirty
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. “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 off-ramp 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 air-pollution
example offers another look at why we struggle so much with problems
centered on a few hard 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. 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
half-dozen 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 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.” ![](6-1_million_dollar_murray_files/dingbat.gif)