Cops and Firemen

When I was young, my dad had a friend who was a sheriff's deputy in my hometown. He was one of those guys who loved being a deputy, and was thoroughly law enforcement, and thoroughly Colorado. But I remember my dad and him talking about being a volunteer fireman (as my dad was) and being a cop -- which job was scarier, or more dangerous, or more you-gotta-be-nuts-to-do-that.

For my dad, the answer was obvious. Being a fireman was a far safer gig. Fire had rules that it had to obey. It was terrifying, sure, and its power over buildings and landscapes was enormous, but it really could only do one thing: burn. There was a logic to stopping it, and a clear, rational method to containing fire, and later putting it out. It required courage to face down burn when people were trapped in burning buildings, but again, there were steps to take, and precautions and insulations to reduce the danger. Fire never changes its mind about what it does. What scared my dad far more than a burning building or a burning hillside was "some junkie in his skivvies high on PCP on the roof of a building waving a gun around."

My dad's friend the sheriff's deputy could hardly disagree more. For him, fire -- the sheer vastness of it, with its awesome potential, its capacity for almost exponential growth -- was the most frightening circumstance imaginable. The aforementioned scantily-clad guy with the alternative lifestyle -- that guy, well, one really shouldn't say that the police could "reason" with someone like that, but there were ways of perhaps dealing with him in a way that minimized the dangers to himself and the immediate community. Again, for my dad's deputy friend, such situations could be dangerous, but they were ultimately all about dealing with relationships between people. Understand that, my dad's friend would say, and you can minimize, if not eliminate the danger. But while there may be a few basic recommendations, every situation is different, and intuition serves a much greater role.

I thought of this story while trying to work out some problems with social science, and its relationship to harder sciences. Firefighting, in many important respects, is a science. No one ever talks about the philosophy of firefighting. Occasional disagreements surface about priorities, techniques, and materials, but it is largely a practice of applied physics, and just as there are debates in the scientific community about solving a physical problem, we should not be surprised. It has hard and fast rules. If things get too cold, or the oxygen is removed, the fire will go out. And it won't tap you on the shoulder 15 years later asking why you put it in prison.

The role of a deputy is significantly different. Policing is a far, far, more controversial topic, and for good reason. Techniques are subject to a double test both of their morality as well as their effectiveness. When riots and looting take place, we can certainly imagine more efficacious methods of policing than we saw in London. And indeed, many people were calling for these methods. However, these calls were not opposed for their potential for success (everyone seemed to recognize that rubber bullets would go a long way toward decreasing the rioting), but on moral grounds -- it would be wrong to do so, even if it was effective.

The other difficulty in techniques concerns the n=1 problem. Every junkie on a rooftop is different, and there's no guidebook with a handy chapter on "junkies on rooftops" sitting on a shelf at the sheriff's office. Methodology is possible, but it frequently needs to be massaged, and is often completely counterproductive. There may be some techniques, some theories, such as the Broken Windows theory, or concepts of community policing, that can offer a certain framework of probabilistic order, but individual, on-the-spot cases do not always fit into a nice pat theory. The individual art of the deputy, and his often intuitive "feel" of the situation is often a critical component of a successful resolution to the problem. This leads to qualifying remarks and probability problems that would never be tolerated by the fireman, whose "feel" of a situation is based on a far different mental process.

When we look at the problems of society, we suffer from the same limitations as the sheriff's deputy. We can map out a few ideas, but insofar as we cannot always even agree on whether something is a problem or a solution, (high gun ownership rates; immigration, legal and illegal; embryonic stem-cell research) we certainly will develop different opinions about what to do about the topic. This means that we are almost immediately forced into a metaphysical debate first. From there, only if we have agreed on the desired solution can we even begin to examine the best possible way to deal with the problem, and even then, every case will be different. This means that our toolkit will be necessarily basic compared to the sophisticated instruments the hard sciences can use. We have no access to retardants and chemicals to control the blazes of human hearts. Maybe that's scary, maybe that's wonderful.