In defense of The Rules
Last week, we discussed how the definition of 'asshole' includes rule-breaking. Fair-play in any game, including the game of life, requires credible, agreed upon, and equally enforced rules. Those rules may also need to be updated, when appropriate, to preserve the integrity of the game.
Sports fans know this well. Michael Lewis's podcast Against the Rules is a great series on this phenomena in sport and the implications beyond.
Our society seems to be in crisis regarding the rule of the law. This is not just in the United States. Class is to the United Kingdom what race-relations is to the United States. The "who gets to make the rules and then flout them" seems to be core to the outrage this week over the actions of Boris Johnson's senior advisor Dominic Cummings.
Here's an example of the complexity and dated-ness of our rules from work that I've done:
I was helping a US city on reducing gun violence.
The city had an idea to use a drone program to gather aerial footage of crime scenes detected by a shot spotter system. The trick was that the coverage area of the drone was going to the area with the highest rate of gun violence. That makes sense. That also happened to be an area of town with a community of people of color.
We held a workshop with the community.
And, yeah, it went about as well as you can imagine. Residents wanted to reduce crime in their neighborhoods. They knew there was a need for order and to reduce violence. But they had questions. Questions about their rights. Their questions were fair.
The city had developed a leading ‘real-time crime unit’ where a team would monitor and track crime using 80+ cameras set up around the city in areas where the most gun violence had occurred historically. Melissa, a thoughtful 40-something white woman, was the director of the unit.
I, not one to mess about, turn to Melissa*, and say something like “well, it looks like there are a lot of white people watching a lot of black people on screens, what are we doing about building a unit that is more representative of the community being monitored?”
Melissa’s face dropped. She stammered, “I’ve tried. I’ve tried so hard. But, they, they always fail.”
I wait.
She explains: To work in the real-time crime unit, you need to pass a federal standardized criminal justice process. One of the steps is a survey that includes a question asking if you’ve ever consumed marijuana. If you answer yes to that question, you are removed from the process. If you answer no, the next step is a polygraph to check the answers. Every single person of color that Melissa had ever recruited had failed to advance. Federal crime enforcement standards prevented her from hiring without that certification.
Bingo.
She starts sobbing, “I’m not a racist. I don’t mean to be racist. I want to have a more diverse team.”
I felt bad. She was crying. I made he r cry. But we need to get to real answers. I was tired of attending hours of polite workshops. And, too often, important actions fall in the ‘long-term, difficult to implement’ category of results. We all love ‘quick wins’, but those wins only get you so far while these ‘long-term, difficult to implement’ items never get started, or, worse, fail to endure to be seen to completion. Obviously, a long-standing federal regulation was out of Melissa's control. But it is within someone's purview. Who?
This week, a South African-American was poised to launch a rocket with the first manned exploration into space with billions of dollars of funding from NASA. He had smoked a giant blunt with Joe Rogan in a widely-circulated video.
Maybe it’s time we re-evaluate marijuana consumption and distribution regulations throughout our justice system. It is not an original thought, but it is an important one that has yet to take hold.
The rules. They are outdated. They are not applied equally.
Life may not be fair, but it should be a societal imperative to make them fairer. That is progress.