Bland: [Cries.] For a fucking traffic ticket, you are such a pussy. You are such a pussy.
Female officer: No, you are. You should not be fighting.
Encinia: Get on the ground!
Bland: For a traffic signal!
Encinia: You are yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.
Bland: Don’t it make you feel real good, don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good, Officer Encinia? You’re a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground. I got epilepsy, you motherfucker.
Encinia: Good. Good.
Bland: Good? Good?
Bland was taken into custody on felony assault charges. Three days later she was found dead in her cell, hanging from a noose fashioned from a plastic bag. After a short investigation, Encinia was fired on the grounds that he had violated Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00, of the Texas State Trooper General Manual:
An employee of the Department of Public Safety shall be courteous to the public and to other employees. An employee shall be tactful in the performance of duties, shall control behavior, and shall exercise the utmost patience and discretion. An employee shall not engage in argumentative discussions even in the face of extreme provocation.
Brian Encinia was a tone-deaf bully. The lesson of what happened on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, is that when police talk to strangers, they need to be respectful and polite. Case closed. Right?
Wrong.
At this point, I think we can do better.
2.
A Kansas City traffic stop is a search for a needle in a haystack. A police officer uses a common infraction to search for something rare—guns and drugs. From the very beginning, as the ideas perfected in Kansas City began to spread around the world, it was clear that this kind of policing required a new mentality.
The person who searches your hand luggage at the airport, for example, is also engaged in a haystack search. And from time to time, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) conducts audits at different airports. They slip a gun or a fake bomb into a piece of luggage. What do they find? That 95 percent of the time, the guns and bombs go undetected. This is not because airport screeners are lazy or incompetent. Rather, it is because the haystack search represents a direct challenge to the human tendency to default to truth. The airport screener sees something, and maybe it looks a little suspicious. But she looks up at the line of very ordinary-looking travelers waiting patiently, and she remembers that in two years on the job she’s never seen a real gun. She knows, in fact, that in a typical year the TSA screens 1.7 billion carry-on bags, and out of that number finds only a few thousand handguns. That’s a hit rate of .0001 percent—which means the odds are that if she kept doing her job for another 50 years she would never see a gun. So she sees the suspicious object inserted by the TSA’s auditors, and she lets it go.
For Kansas City traffic stops to work, the police officer could not think that way. He had to suspect the worst of every car he approached. He had to stop defaulting to truth. He had to think like Harry Markopolos.
The bible for post–Kansas City policing is called Tactics for Criminal Patrol, by Charles Remsberg. It came out in 1995, and it laid out in precise detail what was required of the new, non-defaulting patrol officer. According to Remsberg, the officer had to take the initiative and “go beyond the ticket.” That meant, first of all, picking up on what Remsberg called “curiosity ticklers”—anomalies that raise the possibility of potential wrongdoing. A motorist in a bad neighborhood stops at a red light and looks down intently at something on the seat next to him. What’s that about? An officer spots a little piece of wrapping paper sticking out between two panels of an otherwise spotless car. Might that be the loose end of a hidden package? In the infamous North Carolina case, where the police officer pulled over a driver for a broken brake light—thinking, incorrectly, that this was against North Carolina law—the thing that raised his suspicions was that the driver was “stiff and nervous.” The most savvy of criminals will be careful not to commit any obvious infractions. So traffic cops needed to be creative about what to look for: cracked windshields, lane changes without signaling, following too closely.
“One officer,” Remsberg writes, “knowing that some of the most popular dope markets in his city are in dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs, just parks there and watches. Often drivers will get close before seeing his squad [car], then stop suddenly (improper stopping in a roadway) or hastily back up (improper backing in a roadway). ‘There’s two offenses,’ he says, ‘before I even pursue the car.’”
When he approached the stopped car, the new breed of officer had to be alert to the tiniest clues. Drug couriers often use air fresheners—particularly the kind shaped like little fir trees—to cover up the smell of drugs. (Tree air fresheners are known as the “felony forest.”) If there are remains of fast food in the car, that suggests the driver is in a hurry and reluctant to leave his vehicle (and its valuable cargo) unattended. If the drugs or guns are hidden in secret compartments, there might be tools on the back seat. What’s the mileage on the car? Unusually high for a car of that model year? New tires on an old car? A bunch of keys in the ignition, which would be normal—or just one, as if the car was prepared just for the driver? Is there too much luggage for what seems like a short journey? Or too little luggage for what the motorist says is a long journey? The officer in an investigatory stop is instructed to drag things out as long as possible. Where you from? Where are you headed? Chicago? Got family there? Where? He’s looking for stumbles, nervousness, an implausible answer, and whether the driver’s answer matches what he’s seeing. The officer is trying to decide whether to take the next step and search the car.
Keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of people with food in their car, air fresheners, high mileage, new tires on an old car, and either too little or too much luggage are not running guns and drugs. But if the police officer is to find that criminal needle in a haystack, he has to fight the rational calculation that most of us make that the world is a pretty honest place.
So what is Brian Encinia? He’s the police officer who does not default to truth. Here’s a day from Brian Encinia’s career, chosen at random: September 11, 2014.
3:52 p.m. The beginning of his shift. He stops a truck driver and tickets him for not having the appropriate reflective tape on his trailer.
4:20 p.m. He stops a woman for an improperly placed license plate.
4:39 p.m. He stops another woman for a license-plate infraction.
4:54 p.m. He notices a driver with an expired registration, stops him, and then also cites him for an expired license.
5:12 p.m. He stops a woman for a minor speeding infraction (that is, less than 10 percent over the speed limit).
5:58 p.m. He stops someone for a major speeding infraction.
6:14 p.m. He stops a man for an expired registration, then gives him three more tickets for a license infraction and having an open container of alcohol in his vehicle.
8:29 p.m. He stops a man for “no/improper ID lamp” and “no/improper clearance lamp.”
It goes on. Ten minutes later, he stops a woman for noncompliant headlamps, then two more minor speeding tickets over the next half hour. At 10 p.m. a stop for “safety chains,” and then, at the end of his shift, a stop for noncompliant headlamps.