Disney World

When I was a little kid, my dad would participate in an annual conference at Disney World, and my mom and I would come along to take part in the magic. I loved those trips, and I remember reading excitedly about all of the resorts, parks and attractions in my little Disney guide book. I don’t think it was the magic that excited me—if anything, I’m more susceptible to believing in magic now than I was when I was five—you can’t study theoretical physics and not believe in witchcraft. What really thrilled me about Disney World was the way in which it seemed like the adults had conspired so thoroughly and immaculately to create a place of pure fun. I had a profound faith that the World was held together by some behind-the-scenes order designed by people who knew what was going on. If the boats stopped suddenly in Splash Mountain, the higher-ups had a reason for why this was the optimal arrangement of things, and that reason certainly wasn’t that somebody’s discarded turkey leg had gotten caught on the tracks.

My belief in the order of things wasn’t limited to Disney World, though that was where I felt it most strongly. It applied in nearly every aspect of life—air travel, preschool education, you name it. It was an assumption about the world that was, of course, flawed, and a large part of growing up was coming to terms with the fact that there wasn’t some all-knowing person or group of people pulling all the strings and making sure everything turned out alright.

This is, I think, a realization we all come to at some point, and the sting of the stringlessness is hardest when, as happens at around our age, we discover that our social and political institutions are imperfect. Our recent difficulties with police brutality and race relations are a case in point. It might be tempting just to say “the police are racist,” but I think looking at things that way obscures the problems of institutional design that are at play. In some senses, it should be obvious in retrospect that we would come across the problems we have. Police are, after all, subject to the exact circumstances that bring out some of the most unsavory aspects of human nature. It’s well-documented that humans are much more likely to make and act on in-group/out-group distinctions when the out-group is a perceived threat, and when the risk posed by the out-group is uncertain. We’re also more susceptible to making hasty generalizations about the characteristics of a whole class of people if those characteristics are negative. These are weaknesses we all have. It’s just that the police are frequently in exactly the right environment to exacerbate them—their personal security is often at stake, and they deal mostly in the negative side of human behavior. So, in the absence of counterbalancing mechanisms of accountability, we shouldn’t be all too surprised if the police turn out to act on negative stereotypes of racial minorities.

Am I being an apologist? Definitely not—I don’t think that a police officer should be allowed to strangle someone to death without there even being a trial to decide whether or not this was out of line. But I do think that instead of getting angry at the police, we’re much better served by figuring out how to provide institutional forces to counterbalance those that are responsible for this issue. Body-worn cameras might be a start. They’re certainly not going to solve the whole problem, but they would provide a better mechanism of accountability for police officers.

I can’t claim to propose even a partial solution—as if a college kid could, in 800 words, solve some of the deepest issues that face us today. I just want to make clear what the tensions are that we ought to be scrutinizing. Unless we decide to become philosophical anarchists, we all agree that we need the police. But that means that we need to have real people embodying the coercive power of the state. On the other hand, real people, when put in the conditions in which police officers often find themselves, don’t always show the best side of human nature. Recent events have shown that we need to think much harder about how we balance these two facts. And it’s not just a problem of race relations—it’s an issue with much deeper political philosophical significance, one that touches on that fundamental question of the legitimacy of the state. Like it or not, as we leave our childhood behind and discover that there is no mastermind who’s thought everything through, we’ll have to take up these problems with the mantle of adulthood.

Eugene Rabinovich is a Trinity senior. This is his first column of the semester.