Talking to Strangers

by

Malcolm Gladwell

Talking to Strangers: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
1. Brian Encinia pulls over Sandra Bland at 4:27 p.m. on July 10, 2015. Gladwell conveys much of the encounter through a transcription from the scene recorded on Encinia’s body camera. Initially, Encinia and Bland are polite to each other. Encinia takes Bland’s license back to his patrol car. When he returns a few minutes later, he thinks that Bland looks “very, really irritated” and asks her what is wrong. She replies honestly: she’s annoyed about the ticket. Most people consider this to be Encinia’s first mistake: in asking Bland to explain or justify her irritation, he escalates rather than deescalates the situation. 
Sandra Bland’s encounter with Brian Encinia becomes more complex once we examine it in light of the flawed social strategies Gladwell has covered over the course of the book. Here, for instance, we can focus on Encinia’s assumption that Bland’s “very, really irritated” demeanor was suspicious enough to warrant an interrogation. Encinia fixated on Bland’s irritation because he thought she was transparent and that her irritation was suspicious, perhaps a sign of guilt. His suspicions compelled him to ask Bland probing questions about her mood. This escalated the situation. Thus, Encinia’s assumption of transparency was the indirect cause of this unnecessary escalation.
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Next, prompted by Encinia, Bland announces that she’s “done” voicing her frustrations. She lights a cigarette to relax. If everything played out as it should have, Encinia and Bland’s interaction would have ended here. But Encinia decides to escalate the situation once more, aggressively demanding that Bland put out her cigarette. She (correctly) states that Encinia has no right to make her do this. Encinia balks at Bland’s challenge to his authority and escalates the situation yet again, demanding that Bland exit her car. They argue back and forth until Encinia literally threatens to “remove” Bland from the vehicle. He gives her a “lawful order” to exit on her own. Then, he reaches his hand inside the car to remove Bland. She orders him not to touch her. He tells her she’s under arrest.
Once more, Encinia escalates the situation by interrogating Bland about her actions. He’s doing this because he believes her actions indicate inner guilt or intent to act violently. He believes Bland is transparent, and that her behavior indicates an inner, sinister intent. He thinks there’s something more to Bland’s irritation at being pulled over for a minor traffic violation. His assumption that he knows Bland well enough to be an authority on her mannerisms causes him to escalate a situation that needn’t have lasted longer than a few minutes. 
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Bland and Encinia’s struggle continues as Encinia tries to remove Bland from her car. Eventually, Encinia handcuffs Bland. Encinia’s backup arrives, and tensions continue to build. A female officer orders Bland to stop resisting. Eventually, they take her into custody and charge her with felony assault. Three days later, she dies by suicide in her cell. Encinia is fired for having violated Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00 of the Texas State Trooper General Manual which, among other guidelines, requires officers to “be courteous to the public,” and to “exercise the utmost patience and discretion.” One takeaway from the incident is that Encinia is a “bully” who should have been more courteous with Bland. But Gladwell thinks there’s more to it than this.
Gladwell takes issue with regarding Encinia as a “bully” and moving on because it ignores the broader context of Encinia and Bland’s encounter. To get to the root of why things went awry between them, or why Encinia was compelled to escalate the situation in the first place, we need to consider the backgrounds of both of the involved parties. For instance, having more information about what kind of training Encinia received that might have influenced his interpretation of Bland’s behavior can help us understand why he acted the way he did.
Themes
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
2. Gladwell describes a Kansas City traffic stop as “a search for a needle in a haystack,” since they use the common infraction of a traffic stop “to search for something rare—guns and drugs.” The same principle applies to hand luggage security checks at the airport. For every 1.7 billion bags the TSA screens each year, they only find a few thousand guns, which equates to a hit rate of roughly 0.0001 percent. When the TSA conducts audits by slipping a fake gun or bomb into a piece of luggage, the weapon goes undetected 95 percent of the time. Gladwell attributes this low detection rate to humanity’s “tendency to default to truth.” Because guns are so rare, the average airport screener assumes that a mildly suspicious-looking object is likely nothing to worry about and moves on without further inspecting the luggage. Kansas City-style policing, in contrast, takes an opposite approach.
The Kansas City style of policing is a great example of why defaulting to truth is the more logical way to navigate the average stranger encounter. Because deception is so rare, it’s akin to “search[ing] for a needle in a haystack” to approach every stranger encounter suspiciously, as it’s highly unlikely that the stranger doesn’t mean well. While it might be alarming to hear that the TSA fails to pass 95% of audits, the reality is that it’s very rare to find a gun in a piece of luggage. Thus, defaulting to truth is the more logical choice for TSA agents, who are forced to check a large amount of luggage as efficiently as possible. 
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
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The unofficial guide to Kansas City-style policing is Tactics for Criminal Patrol by Charles Remsberg (1995). Remsberg calls for officers to “go beyond the ticket,” meaning they should pursue “curiosity ticklers,” or “anomalies that raise the possibility of protentional wrongdoing.” For instance, a motorist who stops at a red light in a bad part of town and looks down at the passenger seat could, in theory, be looking at a gun. As such, their actions warrant a traffic stop.
Remsberg’s method asks police officers to take the opposite approach of TSA agents, “go[ing] beyond the ticket” by actively searching for signs of danger or misconduct in places where one might not spot anything suspicious at first glance. This method asks officers to go against their fundamental instinct to default to truth. Officers are trained to fixate on doubts that our bias toward truth would make us dismiss under normal circumstances.      
Themes
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Once an officer stops a motorist, the officer needs to be on high alert for subtle clues that imply discretion. For instance, drug couriers often use air fresheners to conceal the scent of drugs. Another tactic involves engaging the motorist in conversation to prolong the incident as long as possible, giving the officer ample time to detect nervousness in the motorist. While many of these supposed signs of illegal activity are totally normal, the officer searching for a “criminal needle in the haystack” has to assume guilt, not innocence.
Again, Gladwell reaffirms how Remsberg’s Kansas City-style of policing teaches officers to go against their human instinct to assume the best in everyone. In addition to fixating on subtle signs of deception or wrongdoing that most people would dismiss under normal circumstances, officers trained in this method are asked to read into details (i.e., an air freshener, which many law-abiding people have in their car) that wouldn’t raise the slightest doubt in other contexts.
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Gladwell returns his focus to Brian Encinia, selecting a random day in Encinia’s career, September 11, 2014, to see how the officer applies Remsberg’s methods to his policing. Predictably, much of Encinia’s day consists of pulling people over for minor infractions: an improperly placed license plate, a lack of reflective tape on a trailer, driving with expired registration, driving with “no/improper ID lamp.” Only one of Encinia’s stops—one at 5:58 for driving more than 10 percent over the speed limit—could count as a serious infraction. For the most part, Encinia’s day is a case study in “modern, proactive policing.” 
The banality of Encinia’s day illustrates how ineffective proactive policing is when law enforcement disregard context. As Gladwell shows with his analysis of Lawrence Sherman’s Kansas City experiments in Chapter Eleven, preventative patrol does little to reduce crime outside of focused areas with high crime rates. Encinia spends his day apprehending motorists for minor violations, none of which yield the more serious infraction, the proverbial “needle in the haystack,” that preventative patrol is supposed to yield.
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Remsberg advises proactive patrol officers to pull over everyone to avoid being accused of racial profiling. If an officer is accused of bias, then, they need only bring their logbook to court to show the myriad of minor infractions for which they chose to initiate traffic stops. It’s this logic that initiates Bland’s traffic stop. Encinia sees her Illinois license plates and considers them to be a “curiosity tickler.” When Bland spots Encinia pulling up fast behind her, she moves over to let him pass, giving Encinia his in to initiate a traffic stop. When he walks up to her car and looks inside, he sees fast-food wrappers scattered on the floor. For Bland, who has just driven from Illinois to Texas for her job interview, the wrappers are entirely excusable. But for Encinia, “the new breed of police officer” trained to cast suspicion on everything, the wrappers indicate that something is amiss.
That Encinia views Bland’s out-of-state license plates as a “curiosity tickler” shows how hyper-alert modern police training teaches officers to be. Interstate travel is a wholly unremarkable—and legal—activity. In fact, the plates make the presence of fast-food wrappers in her car even more understandable: people taking long road trips need to eat. Many of them take care of this need with convenient, road-side fast-food restaurants. Yet, “the new breed of police officer” is trained to cast suspicion on all manner of perfectly understandable, commonplace behaviors, so Encinia swaps defaulting to truth for defaulting to doubt. 
Themes
Default to Truth Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
3. In his deposition with state investigator Cleve Renfro, Encinia states that he found Bland’s “aggressive body language and demeanor” suspicious. Gladwell interprets this as Encinia’s “belie[f] in transparency,” of believing that people’s external appearance can reliably help us understand their inner character. In fact, most training programs for law enforcement believe in transparency, too. The Reid Technique is a system that teaches law enforcement “to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.” For example, Reid training states that a refusal to maintain eye contact indicates deception. So, Encinia sees Bland appearing restless and decides that something is wrong.
Gladwell situates Encinia’s “belie[f] in transparency” within the context of his police training. Gladwell’s aim is not to excuse Encinia’s behavior but to explain it. As Gladwell argues in Chapter Ten, knowing the context of a stranger’s behavior is essential to understanding why they act the way to do. Here, Gladwell suggests that Encinia reads Bland’s “aggressive body language and demeanor” as a threat because his training has taught him “to use demeanor as a guide to judge innocence and guilt.” Encinia’s training causes him to treat Bland’s demeanor as evidence of guilt. This explains his later decision to prolong the traffic stop as well.
Themes
Default to Truth Theme Icon
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Quotes
As Encinia returns to his patrol car to check Bland’s license, he observes her through her rear window and watches her “disappear[ing] from view for an amount of time,” which indicated the possible presence of a gun in the car. This explains why Encinia approaches Bland’s driver’s side window when he next approaches the car: training teaches officers that it’s more difficult for suspects to shoot someone standing outside the driver’s side.
There are many reasonable explanations for why Bland was “disappear[ing] from view for an amount of time” that don’t involve a gun. But because Encinia is trained to look for the worst in people, he never considers the many valid reasons Bland might disappear and instead, assumes the worst of her.
Themes
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
And so, Encinia’s training leads him to believe that Bland poses a threat to him. Gladwell considers this thinking “dangerously flawed” under normal circumstances, and even more so when we apply it to “mismatched” people. And Sandra Bland is mismatched: she is an innocent person who Encinia believes is guilty. Besides this, her record reveals a history of numerous encounters with the police, $8,000 in outstanding fines, and a suicide attempt in the recent past. To Gladwell, Bland was a woman in crisis: she has a troubled past of debt, hardship, and mental illness. She’s just moved to a new town for a fresh start, and now a minor traffic violation has threatened to upend all her hopes for the future. Because Encinia is a stranger who knows nothing about Bland, however, he mistakes her despair for malice.
Encinia’s belief that Bland poses a threat to him is “dangerously flawed” because he’s relying on the main problematic strategies we use in stranger interactions to justify his actions. For starters, he believes that Bland is transparent: that her outward irritation is a sign that she poses a threat to him. Second, he's ignoring how the context of their encounter is possibly affecting Bland’s behavior. For instance, he fails to acknowledge how entirely reasonable it is to be irritated about getting pulled over and receiving a ticket. Additionally, he’s completely unaware of the history of mental illness and personal hardship that Bland brings to their encounter, and how this history influences her behavior.
Themes
Default to Truth Theme Icon
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
When Renfro asks Encinia about his order for Bland to extinguish her cigarette—the moment the altercation took a turn for the worse—Encinia claims that he wanted to ensure that Bland didn’t throw it at him. Gladwell interprets this as evidence that Encinia is “terrified of her,” which “is the price you pay for not defaulting to truth.” As Renfro’s interrogation continues, Encinia continues to assert his belief that Bland posed a threat to him. States Encinia, “My safety was in jeopardy at more than one time.”
Encinia claims that his “safety was in jeopardy at more than one time,” but this isn’t entirely true. A more accurate phrasing would be that Encinia thought he was in danger. Encinia’s language reaffirms how significantly his police training warps his sense of reality and influences his behavior. Being trained not to “default[] to truth” causes Encinia to regard the normal action of lighting a cigarette as concrete evidence of Bland’s ill-intent.
Themes
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Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Gladwell criticizes the common portrayal of Encinia as an unfeeling bully “without empathy.” He believes that Encinia wasn’t “indifferent” to Bland’s feelings—he simply misread them. To illustrate his point, Gladwell highlights the couple times Encinia asked Bland if she was “okay.” He ends with the conclusion that Encinia’s incident with Bland didn’t go awry because Encinia disregarded his training—it went awry “because he did exactly what he was trained to do.”
Gladwell thinks it’s missing the point to accuse Encinia of being “without empathy” and indifferent to Bland’s feelings. In fact, he was hyper-fixated on her feelings. And if he hadn’t been so concerned with Bland’s demeanor, the whole altercation could have ended with Encinia writing Bland a ticket or issuing her a warning and sending her on her way. Instead, he narrows his focus on Bland’s temperament to search for signs of guilt. In this way, suggests Gladwell, Encinia “did exactly what he was trained to do.”
Themes
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Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Quotes
4. In 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a white police officer named Darren Wilson shot an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown. Wilson had approached Brown on suspicion of robbing a grocery store, Brown reached inside Wilson’s patrol and punched him, and Wilson responded by shooting Brown six times. Riots ensued. Prosecutors didn’t press charges against Wilson. Ferguson began what Gladwell refers to as “the strange interlude in American life when the conduct of police officers was suddenly front and center.” The U.S. Department of Justice sent a team to Ferguson to investigate. Their findings revealed that frustrations in Ferguson were less about Brown’s death than a critique of the Kansas City style of policing that the Ferguson Police Department practiced. It was their job to pull over as many people for as many reasons as possible.
Michael Brown’s death resulted in many riots and protests that brought the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement national recognition. The central focus of the Black Lives Matter movement is to challenge police violence and injustice against Black people.  The U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation revealed that people were frustrated with a style of policing that is fundamentally incompatible with a functional society. Gladwell has previously established that a society where people do not default to truth would crumble. But in practicing Kansas City style policing and treating everybody as a suspect, Ferguson police instilled in their community a culture of fear and mistrust in law enforcement. 
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Gladwell believes these types of traffic stops are ineffective. To illustrate his point, he reveals that the North Carolina Highway Patrol’s annual increase of 400,000 searches turned over only 17 guns. “Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?” asks Gladwell. Larry Sherman predicted this problem when he organized the Kansas City gun experiment and anticipated it would create “hostility to the police.” It’s for this reason that the Kansas City officers who pioneered the program received special training, and that proactive policing was limited to District 114. If the purpose of the Kansas City experiment was to apply specialized proactive policing to the city’s most crime-ridden areas, the question regarding Encinia’s incident with Bland thus becomes: “was he in the right place?”
Gladwell highlights the North Carolina Highway Patrol’s statistics on annual gun seizures to reaffirm the importance of context. As Gladwell establishes in Chapter Ten, crime is a coupled behavior: it's fundamentally linked with place. Thus, preventative patrol works—but only when applied to a focused are with high crime rates. Not only does indiscriminate, unfocused preventative patrol not reduce crime to a meaningful degree, but it’s also harmful in the long term due to the atmosphere of  “hostility” it creates within communities. 
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5. Prairie View, Texas, where Encinia pulled over Bland, is a rural area 50 miles outside Houston. It’s a small town with a population of fewer than 1,000 people. The majority of its population is Republican, white, and working-class. In his interrogation with Renfro, Encinia claims that the area of town where he pulled over Bland is a high crime area. However, this is blatantly untrue. Encinia’s official records show no evidence of the drug- and weapons-related arrests he claims to have made there in the past. 
This passage illustrates another way Encinia’s training caused his encounter with Bland to go awry. Not only does Encinia rely on the flawed logic of transparency to cast suspicion on Bland’s normal behavior, but he’s also applying the principles of preventative police to an area where crime isn’t much cause for concern. While this context makes the suspicion Encinia directs toward Bland even more illogical, it makes perfect sense within the context of his training. 
Themes
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While it’s true that Encinia might have exaggerated the area’s dangerousness as an excuse to pull over Bland, Gladwell thinks it’s equally likely that Encinia hadn’t thought to associate crime with place in the first place. For Gladwell, Bland’s death “is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.” Encinia’s police training taught him to assume the worst in everyone. At the same time, the Texas Highway Patrol disregarded the connection between crime and place and assigned Encinia a historically safe area to patrol. Most everyone in the world believes that demeanor is an indication of inner character. And nobody stops to question that any of these decisions or assumptions might be wrong.
Gladwell implies that modern policing reflects and perpetuates the broader issue of our society “not know[ing] how to talk to strangers.” After all, the principles of modern policing weren’t created in a vacuum: they’re informed by society’s flawed ideas about human communication and behavior. Encinia’s police training taught him to combat his human bias toward truth by casting suspicion on everybody. It taught him that humans are transparent. To that end, the elements of modern policing that people tend to criticize are merely exaggerated versions of the ways in which we, as a broader society, fail to understand and communicate with each other.  
Themes
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Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
In his closing remarks, Gladwell references a portion of Renfro’s interrogation of Encinia in which Encinia speculates that Bland might have behaved as she did simply because “she did not like police officers.” Encinia’s argument conveniently reframes his incident to construe Bland—and not himself—as the villain. Encinia’s logic illustrates Gladwell’s final point: when interactions with strangers go awry because we don’t understand each other, we inevitably “blame the stranger.”
Our methods for dealing with strangers are skewed toward justifying our own actions and vilifying the stranger’s. Stranger interactions end badly when we overestimate our ability to understand strangers and misjudge them. Until we can acknowledge our own communicative shortcomings, we will continue to make uninformed judgments about strangers. While we can’t eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding strangers, we can adjust the way react to that misunderstanding by approaching strangers with more caution and humility.
Themes
Default to Truth Theme Icon
Limitations of Transparency  Theme Icon
Coupling Theory and Context  Theme Icon
Self vs. Stranger  Theme Icon
Quotes