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The Atlantic staff writer David A. Graham has been thinking and writing about Memphis’s policing crisis for several months now. This past weekend, he went back to survey the aftermath of released video footage of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating by police officers. David is at work on a story about where police reform goes from here, and I called him today to talk a bit about what he saw and heard over the weekend, and how Memphis’s policing strategy led to tragedy.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The myth propelling America’s violent police culture The internet loves an extremophile. J. Kenji López-Alt thinks you’ll be fine with an induction stove.

Not Enough

Isabel Fattal: You were in Memphis over the weekend. What did you hear from residents of the city?

David A. Graham: The sense I got from people in Memphis is that they are glad the city moved so quickly to fire these officers, and they’re glad the district attorney moved so quickly to prosecute. But it’s not enough. They want to know more about the incident. It’s unclear why Tyre Nichols was pulled over. They want to see action against the other officer who tased Tyre Nichols and who has been relieved from duty but has not been fired. They want to know who else was involved. We’ve seen the SCORPION [Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods] unit that these officers were members of disbanded, but they want to see the broader organized-crime unit in the department disbanded. And they want this to not happen again. The city is saying the right things, but the trick is avoiding it in the future.

Isabel: You wrote last Friday that “one of the more remarkable things about the video is that it exists.” To what extent is police activity surveilled in Memphis?

David: Often, when we learn about these incidents, it’s because of bystander video. But in this case, as far as we know, no bystanders were involved. People didn’t come out of the houses around there. I went to the scene on Saturday, and it’s a quiet suburban street. But there is something called SkyCop, which is this surveillance system all over Memphis. It’s really eerie: There are these twinkling blue lights 15 or so feet off the ground, and there are surveillance cameras, which I think are hard to miss, whether you’re a civilian or a police officer. And these officers were wearing body cams.

We’ve seen cases where officers have tried to manipulate body cams. But there’s no effort to hide this. In the video, there’s nothing that suggests they thought they made a mistake, either morally or as a matter of police work.

Isabel: During your past reporting in Memphis, you heard from residents in places with high crime that the city is simultaneously under-policed and over-policed. Can you talk a bit about that?

David: When you’ve got a spike in violent crime—as you did in Memphis, and in a lot of other American cities in 2020—one of the solutions that a lot of departments turn to is hot-spot policing, where you put a lot of officers in an area where there’s crime. We know from experience in a lot of cities that hot-spot policing can drive down crime, but the question is how it does that.

One way you can do it is by sweeping a lot of people up—just arresting a lot of people, stopping people on pretext, and seeing what you can get them on. That may stop crime, but it also creates animosity between residents and the police department. It seeks out people for things that have nothing to do with public safety, and because of where a lot of this hot-spot policing is done, it leads to a lot of Black men being arrested.

So in Memphis, this SCORPION unit was created in 2021 to deal with violent crime and the sorts of public-safety issues that residents are complaining about. And what you see them doing instead, in this case, is terrorizing and killing a citizen who at the worst was driving unsafely, from what we know. So I think it’s a clear example of under-policing and over-policing. They’re not doing anything to stop violent crime, but they are abusing citizens.

Isabel: You wrote last week, “The problem with a troubled department like Memphis’s adopting a tool like hot-spot policing is that culture tends to triumph over tactics.” Why was hot-spot policing a mistake for Memphis?

David: If you have a police department that has a history of excessive force, like Memphis’s does, and you institute a new tactic like hot-spot policing but you don’t do anything to change the underlying culture of the department, then you’re going to get abuses in hot-spot policing.

In the aftermath of Nichols’s death, the mayor of Memphis said that an outside review will help determine whether this is a matter of training or a matter of culture. You can’t watch a video like that and think, Well, if only they had been trained better. No police officer is trained to savagely beat someone like that. It’s not that they needed to be told that. It’s that there’s a problem with the culture.

Isabel: How do you think Nichols’s death might affect the national conversation about police reform?

David: Each of these situations does have its own unique factors and local context. But the national horror that we have seen reflects not only just how visceral this video is but also the fact that we are familiar with this.

It’s always hard for me to know when one of these stories will become a national story. I think this one did partly because the video is so visceral, but also because people are primed for this. They’ve seen so many of these cases. And I think every time we have one of them, it’s a reminder that there was a moment after George Floyd’s death when people were unified on this and there were some changes, but there’s still a lot of work to do to make sure that people are experiencing just policing around the country.

Related:

Memphis’s policing strategy was bound to result in tragedy. Inhumanity in Memphis

Today’s News

The seven states that comprise the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin failed to reach an agreement on water-conservation plans for the second time in six months. Representative George Santos of New York told House Republicans that he will temporarily step down from his congressional-committee positions amid ongoing scrutiny of his campaign finances and biographical fabrications. President Joe Biden announced his plan to end COVID-19 national-emergency and public-health-emergency declarations on May 11.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: For the first time in half a century, the rich are buying more free time, Derek Thompson writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Daniele Castellano

The Existential Wonder of Space

By Marina Koren

Of all the moons in the solar system, Saturn’s largest satellite might be the most extraordinary. Titan is enveloped in a thick, hazy atmosphere, and liquid methane rains gently from its sky, tugged downward by a fraction of the gravity we feel on Earth. The methane forms rivers, lakes, and small seas on Titan’s surface. Beneath the frigid ground, composed of ice as hard as rock, is even more liquid, a whole ocean of plain old H2O.

The wildest part about Titan—the best part, perhaps—is that something could be living there. NASA is currently working on a mission, called Dragonfly, that would travel to the faraway moon and search for potential signs of alien life, past and present. A helicopter will fly around and study the local chemistry, checking whether conditions may be right for microbes to arise. Hypothetical Titanian life-forms could resemble the earthly varieties we’re familiar with or be something else entirely, feeding on methane compounds the way we rely on oxygen.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Angry football fans keep punching their TVs. Airplane toilets could catch the next COVID variant. Never underestimate Jennifer Coolidge.

Culture Break

Salman Rushdie, April 2021 (Benedict Evans / August)

Read. Victory City, the latest novel from Salman Rushdie—and “a triumph,” according to the writer Judith Shulevitz.

Listen. Gloria, the radically inoffensive new album by the pop singer Sam Smith.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For a more detailed analysis of the Memphis Police Department’s troubled history, David recommends this recent New York Times opinion essay by the Memphis-based journalist Emily Yellin. “One reason I wanted to focus on Memphis when I started writing about it was that it’s really similar to a lot of cities but also has its own distinctive characteristics,” David told me. Yellin’s article helps situate this recent tragedy within the city’s particular history.

— Isabel

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

These days, strolling through downtown New York City, where I live, is like picking your way through the aftermath of a party. In many ways, it is exactly that: The limp string lights, trash-strewn puddles, and splintering plywood are all relics of the raucous celebration known as outdoor dining.

These wooden “streeteries” and the makeshift tables lining sidewalks first popped up during the depths of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when restaurants needed to get diners back in their seats. It was novel, creative, spontaneous—and fun during a time when there wasn’t much fun to be had. For a while, outdoor dining really seemed as though it could outlast the pandemic. Just last October, New York Magazine wrote that it would stick around, “probably permanently.”

But now someone has switched on the lights and cut the music. Across the country, something about outdoor dining has changed in recent months. With fears about COVID subsiding, people are losing their appetite for eating among the elements. This winter, many streeteries are empty, save for the few COVID-cautious holdouts willing to put up with the cold. Hannah Cutting-Jones, the director of food studies at the University of Oregon, told me that, in Eugene, where she lives, outdoor dining is “absolutely not happening” right now. In recent weeks, cities such as New York and Philadelphia have started tearing down unused streeteries. Outdoor dining’s sheen of novelty has faded; what once evoked the grands boulevards of Paris has turned out to be a janky table next to a parked car. Even a pandemic, it turns out, couldn’t overcome the reasons Americans never liked eating outdoors in the first place.

For a while, the allure of outdoor dining was clear. COVID safety aside, it kept struggling restaurants afloat, boosted some low-income communities, and cultivated joie de vivre in bleak times. At one point, more than 12,700 New York restaurants had taken to the streets, and the city—along with others, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia—proposed making dining sheds permanent. But so far, few cities have actually adopted any official rules. At this point, whether they ever will is unclear. Without official sanctions, mounting pressure from outdoor-dining opponents will likely lead to the destruction of existing sheds; already, people keep tweeting disapproving photos at sanitation departments. Part of the issue is that as most Americans’ COVID concerns retreat, the potential downsides have gotten harder to overlook: less parking, more trash, tacky aesthetics, and, oh God, the rats. Many top New York restaurants have voluntarily gotten rid of their sheds this winter.

The economics of outdoor dining may no longer make sense for restaurants, either. Although it was lauded as a boon to struggling restaurants during the height of the pandemic, the practice may make less sense now that indoor dining is back. For one thing, dining sheds tend to take up parking spaces needed to attract customers, Cutting-Jones said. The fact that most restaurants are chains doesn’t help: “If whatever conglomerate owns Longhorn Steakhouse doesn’t want to invest in outdoor dining, it will not become the norm,” Rebecca Spang, a food historian at Indiana University Bloomington, told me. Besides, she added, many restaurants are already short-staffed, even without the extra seats.

In a sense, outdoor dining was doomed to fail. It always ran counter to the physical makeup of most of the country, as anyone who ate outside during the pandemic inevitably noticed. The most obvious constraint is the weather, which is sometimes pleasant but is more often not. “Who wants to eat on the sidewalk in Phoenix in July?” Spang said.

The other is the uncomfortable proximity to vehicles. Dining sheds spilled into the streets like patrons after too many drinks. The problem was that U.S. roads were built for cars, not people. This tends not to be true in places renowned for outdoor dining, such as Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which urbanized before cars, Megan Elias, a historian and the director of the gastronomy program at Boston University, told me. At best, this means that outdoor meals in America are typically enjoyed with a side of traffic. At worst, they end in dangerous collisions.

Cars and bad weather were easier to put up with when eating indoors seemed like a more serious health hazard than breathing in fumes and trembling with cold. It had a certain romance—camaraderie born of discomfort. You have to admit, there was a time when cozying up under a heat lamp with a hot drink was downright charming. But now outdoor dining has gone back to what it always was: something that most Americans would like to avoid in all but the most ideal of conditions. This sort of relapse could lead to fewer opportunities to eat outdoors even when the weather does cooperate.

But outdoor dining is also affected by more existential issues that have surmounted nearly three years of COVID life. Eating at restaurants is expensive, and Americans like to get their money’s worth. When safety isn’t a concern, shelling out for a streetside meal may simply not seem worthwhile for most diners. “There’s got to be a point to being outdoors, either because the climate is so beautiful or there’s a view,” Paul Freedman, a Yale history professor specializing in cuisine, told me. For some diners, outdoor seating may feel too casual: Historically, Americans associated eating at restaurants with special occasions, like celebrating a milestone at Delmonico’s, the legendary fine-dining establishment that opened in the 1800s, Cutting-Jones said.

Eating outdoors, in contrast, was linked to more casual experiences, like having a hot dog at Coney Island. “We have high expectations for what dining out should be like,” she said, noting that American diners are especially fussy about comfort. Even the most opulent COVID cabin may be unable to override these associations. “If the restaurant is going to be fancy and charge $200 a person,” said Freedman, most people can’t escape the feeling of having spent that much for “a picnic on the street.”

Outdoor dining isn’t disappearing entirely. In the coming years there’s a good chance that more Americans will have the opportunity to eat outside in the nicer months than they did before the pandemic—even if it’s not the widespread practice many anticipated earlier in the pandemic. Where it continues, it will almost certainly be different: more buttoned-up, less lawless—probably less exciting. Santa Barbara, for example, made dining sheds permanent last year but specified that they must be painted an approved “iron color.” It may also be less popular among restaurant owners: If outdoor-dining regulations are too far-reaching or costly, cautioned Hayrettin Günç, an architect with Global Designing Cities Initiative, that will “create barriers for businesses.”

For now, outdoor dining is yet another COVID-related convention that hasn’t quite stuck—like avoiding handshakes and universal remote work. As the pandemic subsides, the tendency is to default to the ways things used to be. Doing so is easier, certainly, than coming up with policies to accommodate new habits. In the case of outdoor dining, it’s most comfortable, too. If this continues to be the case, then outdoor dining in the U.S. may return to what it was before the pandemic: dining “al fresco” along the streetlamp-lined terraces of the Venetian Las Vegas, and beneath the verdant canopy of the Rainforest Cafe.

American employers are slowing their spending on employee wages—a data point that is likely to ease the inflationary concerns of Federal Reserve officials.

Read more...

Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back.

Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves?

I called up J. Kenji López-Alt—a chef, a New York Times columnist, and the author of The Food Lab and The Wok—to discuss. While we chatted, López-Alt cooked on his gas stove in the background. But don’t take that as an endorsement: He told me that the stove came with his house, but that if he were to build a kitchen from scratch, he’d probably opt for an induction range.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How much does the type of stove actually matter?

J. Kenji López-Alt: I would say for 99 percent of what home cooks—and even restaurant cooks—are doing at home, especially in the Western tradition, the heat source doesn’t matter much. All of your heat is being transferred to your food through the medium of a pan. A hot metal surface is a hot metal surface.

[David A. Graham: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies in American politics]

One of the things that I think people who are used to cooking on gas appreciate about a gas burner is that it has nearly instant response times. When you turn it up, the flame gets bigger, and the heat gets hotter. And it’s a very visual confirmation of what you’ve done.

Induction has a very fast response as well. It’s a little bit slower than gas, because usually you’re cooking on a glass surface that will retain some heat—rather than just the air that dissipates under gas flame. With electric, you have very slow response time, because the coil will take a long time to heat up and cool down. So of the three, gas and induction are really high, as far as responsiveness goes. Electric coil is more difficult to use.

Nyce: Why do you think people get so grumpy over non-gas stoves?

López-Alt: Technology has changed. Induction is a heck of a lot better than electric coil. It’s extraordinarily efficient as far as energy use goes. With gas and heating coils, a lot of the heat that you’re creating actually dissipates into your kitchen, whereas with induction, the heat generated is literally in the surface of the pan itself. So all of the energy that you’re using goes into the pan.

Your modern induction cooktops are just a lot better than what people might think of as far as what you can get from a non-gas range. Electric coil is just a lot harder to control than either induction or gas.

Nyce: But if you have the right cook at the helm, can you make equally good food on electric?

López-Alt: As with anything, it’s a matter of getting used to it. There are some things that you can’t do. For example, when you’re stir-frying, or searing a chicken breast, and then making a pan sauce, you want to be able to adjust the heat on the go.

To be able to do that on an electric coil, you have to shift the pan on and off the element, because if you just leave it there and turn the dial, the coil is still going to be blazing hot for a long time. So you might end up hurting your chicken skin.

That’s one of the difficulties of electric coils. But some of the best restaurants in the world use solely induction.

Nyce: What are the styles of cuisine—and the specific foods—where it really would be hard to give up gas?

López-Alt: So certainly, some types of wok-cooked dishes, particularly ones that rely on that smoky wok hei flavor that comes from the aerosolized oil actually igniting in the gas flame, like a Cantonese-style chow fun. Or fried rice, for example, would have that sort of smoky flavor that you can’t get out of induction. But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.           

People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one. There are very few specific recipes where that gas flavor—that smoky flavor of burnt oil—is an important part of the seasoning of the dish.

What I often recommend to people who have electric or induction is, if you want to cook something like a beef chow fun, the way you can do it is to get a portable butane-gas range. And the few times that you want to make that dish, you can pull that out, put it under your hood, or take it outside. And then you have a little portable gas thing, even though the rest of your kitchen is all induction.

My house came with a gas range. If I were to design my kitchen from scratch, I would probably go induction these days.

[Read: The why of cooking]

So that’s wok cooking. For other cuisines … so, for example, today I’m making sopes, so Mexican. And for the salsa I’m making, you need to char peppers on a gas flame. That’s part of the flavor. So I’ve put the peppers directly over the gas flame and let them really char, until the outside gets blackened.

Nyce: Could you also use a butane blowtorch for something like that?

López-Alt: For sure. In fact, there’s a technique I wrote about in my book where, if you want wok hei without a gas flame, you can get a butane torch. Essentially, you can stir-fry noodles, for example, and then spread them out onto a sheet tray, and then just use a butane torch. Pass it over them a few times, and you’ll see the oil kind of snap and crackle and char a little bit. Then put it back in the wok and finish stir-frying it. And you get that flavor that way. So there are definitely work-arounds.

Nyce: So if there are practical solutions for a lot of this stuff, do you think this debate—and the strong reactions that people have to news like this—is a little overblown?

López-Alt: For sure. I wrote online for many, many years. And I remember, any time you changed the fonts or the color scheme on the site, or had a redesign, people went nuts. People just hate, hate, hate change. And they especially hate when change is forced upon them by an outside party.

Nyce: Even if it’s good for their health.

López-Alt: You remember when the smoking ban came in, right? And people lost their minds. And then, like, two years later, it’s like, “Oh, I can go out and not have to inhale all this secondhand smoke and come home stinking.”

People who really cook a lot of, say, Cantonese dishes or certain types of Mexican food, things that really, really require that gas flavor and that direct interaction with the flame—they’re going to find workarounds. As far as restaurants go, I’m not sure, but I really hope that there are exemptions carved in place for restaurants that require wok ranges, for example. It would be insane and unfair to tell Chinese restaurants they can’t use wok burners anymore. But I think there are always industry exemptions for mandates like this, at least for any well-planned ones.

Nyce: Is there anything else from a practical perspective that you would want a home cook to know as they navigate a potential future change from gas to induction?

López-Alt: The biggest difference between cooking on the two for me is just the lack of visual feedback. Every stove is going to be slightly different, even if they all have dials from one to 10. With gas, I can see, This one’s got a really big burner that’s shooting a huge flame when I turn it to 10. Whereas with induction, who knows what that means?

It’s always better to follow visual and auditory cues written into recipes as opposed to ones like “medium for 10 minutes.” Really pay attention to what your food is doing, and correlate that to the settings on the stove. That way, you can rely on those settings instead of the visual feedback you used to rely on of the size of the flame.

Gas stoves are a new front in the culture wars. This month, an errant comment from a bureaucrat caused a full-blown conservative panic over whether such stoves would be banned, eventually prompting a White House statement that effectively walked the whole thing back.

Amid all this posturing, a more practical concern is getting lost: How much does gas actually matter when it comes to cooking? Are there some dishes that just can’t be made on electric stoves?

I called up J. Kenji López-Alt—a chef, a New York Times columnist, and the author of The Food Lab and The Wok—to discuss. While we chatted, López-Alt cooked on his gas stove in the background. But don’t take that as an endorsement: He told me that the stove came with his house, but that if he were to build a kitchen from scratch, he’d probably opt for an induction range.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: How much does the type of stove actually matter?

J. Kenji López-Alt: I would say for 99 percent of what home cooks—and even restaurant cooks—are doing at home, especially in the Western tradition, the heat source doesn’t matter much. All of your heat is being transferred to your food through the medium of a pan. A hot metal surface is a hot metal surface.

[David A. Graham: The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies in American politics]

One of the things that I think people who are used to cooking on gas appreciate about a gas burner is that it has nearly instant response times. When you turn it up, the flame gets bigger, and the heat gets hotter. And it’s a very visual confirmation of what you’ve done.

Induction has a very fast response as well. It’s a little bit slower than gas, because usually you’re cooking on a glass surface that will retain some heat—rather than just the air that dissipates under gas flame. With electric, you have very slow response time, because the coil will take a long time to heat up and cool down. So of the three, gas and induction are really high, as far as responsiveness goes. Electric coil is more difficult to use.

Nyce: Why do you think people get so grumpy over non-gas stoves?

López-Alt: Technology has changed. Induction is a heck of a lot better than electric coil. It’s extraordinarily efficient as far as energy use goes. With gas and heating coils, a lot of the heat that you’re creating actually dissipates into your kitchen, whereas with induction, the heat generated is literally in the surface of the pan itself. So all of the energy that you’re using goes into the pan.

Your modern induction cooktops are just a lot better than what people might think of as far as what you can get from a non-gas range. Electric coil is just a lot harder to control than either induction or gas.

Nyce: But if you have the right cook at the helm, can you make equally good food on electric?

López-Alt: As with anything, it’s a matter of getting used to it. There are some things that you can’t do. For example, when you’re stir-frying, or searing a chicken breast, and then making a pan sauce, you want to be able to adjust the heat on the go.

To be able to do that on an electric coil, you have to shift the pan on and off the element, because if you just leave it there and turn the dial, the coil is still going to be blazing hot for a long time. So you might end up hurting your chicken skin.

That’s one of the difficulties of electric coils. But some of the best restaurants in the world use solely induction.

Nyce: What are the styles of cuisine—and the specific foods—where it really would be hard to give up gas?

López-Alt: So certainly, some types of wok-cooked dishes, particularly ones that rely on that smoky wok hei flavor that comes from the aerosolized oil actually igniting in the gas flame, like a Cantonese-style chow fun. Or fried rice, for example, would have that sort of smoky flavor that you can’t get out of induction. But for most wok cooking, you don’t need it. There’s plenty of homestyle dishes that don’t have that flavor. For my Wok book tour, I brought around an induction wok cooktop. And it works just fine.           

People have this idea that you can’t cook on a wok without a gas flame. But most of the recipes in my book work just fine without one. There are very few specific recipes where that gas flavor—that smoky flavor of burnt oil—is an important part of the seasoning of the dish.

What I often recommend to people who have electric or induction is, if you want to cook something like a beef chow fun, the way you can do it is to get a portable butane-gas range. And the few times that you want to make that dish, you can pull that out, put it under your hood, or take it outside. And then you have a little portable gas thing, even though the rest of your kitchen is all induction.

My house came with a gas range. If I were to design my kitchen from scratch, I would probably go induction these days.

[Read: The why of cooking]

So that’s wok cooking. For other cuisines … so, for example, today I’m making sopes, so Mexican. And for the salsa I’m making, you need to char peppers on a gas flame. That’s part of the flavor. So I’ve put the peppers directly over the gas flame and let them really char, until the outside gets blackened.

Nyce: Could you also use a butane blowtorch for something like that?

López-Alt: For sure. In fact, there’s a technique I wrote about in my book where, if you want wok hei without a gas flame, you can get a butane torch. Essentially, you can stir-fry noodles, for example, and then spread them out onto a sheet tray, and then just use a butane torch. Pass it over them a few times, and you’ll see the oil kind of snap and crackle and char a little bit. Then put it back in the wok and finish stir-frying it. And you get that flavor that way. So there are definitely work-arounds.

Nyce: So if there are practical solutions for a lot of this stuff, do you think this debate—and the strong reactions that people have to news like this—is a little overblown?

López-Alt: For sure. I wrote online for many, many years. And I remember, any time you changed the fonts or the color scheme on the site, or had a redesign, people went nuts. People just hate, hate, hate change. And they especially hate when change is forced upon them by an outside party.

Nyce: Even if it’s good for their health.

López-Alt: You remember when the smoking ban came in, right? And people lost their minds. And then, like, two years later, it’s like, “Oh, I can go out and not have to inhale all this secondhand smoke and come home stinking.”

People who really cook a lot of, say, Cantonese dishes or certain types of Mexican food, things that really, really require that gas flavor and that direct interaction with the flame—they’re going to find workarounds. As far as restaurants go, I’m not sure, but I really hope that there are exemptions carved in place for restaurants that require wok ranges, for example. It would be insane and unfair to tell Chinese restaurants they can’t use wok burners anymore. But I think there are always industry exemptions for mandates like this, at least for any well-planned ones.

Nyce: Is there anything else from a practical perspective that you would want a home cook to know as they navigate a potential future change from gas to induction?

López-Alt: The biggest difference between cooking on the two for me is just the lack of visual feedback. Every stove is going to be slightly different, even if they all have dials from one to 10. With gas, I can see, This one’s got a really big burner that’s shooting a huge flame when I turn it to 10. Whereas with induction, who knows what that means?

It’s always better to follow visual and auditory cues written into recipes as opposed to ones like “medium for 10 minutes.” Really pay attention to what your food is doing, and correlate that to the settings on the stove. That way, you can rely on those settings instead of the visual feedback you used to rely on of the size of the flame.

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week.

One of the weirdest economic stories of the past half century is what happened to rich Americans—and especially rich American men—at work.

In general, poor people work more than wealthy people. This story is consistent across countries (for example, people in Cambodia work much more than people in Switzerland) and across time (for example, Germans in the 1950s worked almost twice as much as they do today).

But starting in the 1980s in the United States, this saga reversed itself. The highest-earning Americans worked longer and longer hours, in defiance of expectations or common sense. The members of this group, who could have bought anything they wanted with their wealth, bought more work. Specifically, from 1980 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men increased their work hours by more than any other group of married men: about five hours a week, or 250 hours a year.

In 2019, I called this phenomenon “workism.” In a time of declining religiosity, rich Americans seemed to turn to their career to fill the spiritual vacuum at the center of their life. For better or (very often) for worse, their desk had become their altar.

Since then, the concept of workism has been attached to a range of cultural and political phenomena, including declining fertility trends in the West. I’ve blamed workism for U.S. policies that resist national parental and sick leave because of an elite preference for maximizing the public’s attachment to the labor force.

Then the pandemic happened. I didn’t know how the forcible end of white-collar commutes and the demise of the default office would change affluent American attitudes. I assumed that remote work would make certain aspects of workism even more insidious. Researchers at Microsoft found that the boomlet in online meetings was pushing work into odd hours of the week, leading to more “just finishing up on email!” late nights, and Saturday mornings that felt like mini-Mondays. Working on our computer was always a “leaky” affair; with working from home and COVID, I feared the leak would become a flood.

But I was wrong. This year, Washington University researchers concluded that, since 2019, rich Americans have worked less. And less, and less. In a full reversal of the past 50 years, the highest-educated, highest-earning, and longest-working men reduced their working hours the most during the pandemic. According to the paper, the highest-earning 10 percent of men worked 77 fewer hours in 2022 than that top decile did in 2019—or 1.5 hours less each week. The top-earning women cut back by 29 hours. Notably, despite this reduction, rich people still work longer hours overall.

This analysis may have been thrown off by untrustworthy survey responses received during the chaos of the pandemic. But according to The Wall Street Journal, separate data from the Census Bureau back up that conclusion. From 2019 to 2021, married men reduced their workweek by a little more than an hour. Unmarried men had no similar decline.

So why are rich married men suddenly—and finally—reducing their working hours, by an unusual degree? Yongseok Shin, an economist at Washington University and a co-author of the paper, told me that he had “no doubt that this was a voluntary choice.” When I asked him if perhaps rich married men had worked less in dual-earner households to help with kids during the early pandemic period, he told me that their working hours continued falling in 2022, “long after the worst periods of school closures and issues with child-care centers.”

The title of the new paper is a bit misleading: “Where Are the Workers? From Great Resignation to Quiet Quitting.” The authors make frequent references to quiet quitting, the notion that workers in 2022 suddenly decided to reduce their collective ambition and effort. But their analysis doesn’t actually find anything like that. In the past three years, the median worker hardly reduced his or her hours. All of the decline in hours worked happened among the highest-earning Americans, with the longest workweeks. Is that an outbreak of quiet quitting? I’d say no. It’s more like the fever of workism is finally breaking among the most workaholic Americans.

“I think the pandemic has clearly reduced workaholism,” Shin told me. “And by the way, I think that’s a very positive thing for this country.”

I’m inclined to agree. In the years since I wrote the workism essay, I’ve toggled between two forms of writer’s guilt. Some days, I worry that I went too hard on people who are devoted to their job. If people can find solace and structure and a sense of control in their labor, who am I to tell them that they are suffering from an invisible misery by worshipping a false and marketized god?

But on other days, I think I wasn’t hard enough on workism, given how deeply it has insinuated itself into American values. The New York Times and Atlantic writer David Brooks has distinguished between what he calls “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” Résumé virtues are what people bring to the marketplace: Are they clever, devoted, and ambitious employees? Eulogy virtues are what they bring to relationships not governed by the market: Are they kind, honest, and faithful partners and friends?

Americans should prioritize eulogy virtues. But by our own testimony, we strongly prefer résumé virtues for ourselves and especially for our children. This year, Pew Research Center asked American parents: What accomplishments or values are most important for your children as they become adults? Nearly nine in 10 parents named financial security or “jobs or careers [our children] enjoy” as their top value. That was four times more than the share of parents who said it was important for their children to get married or have children; it was even significantly higher than the percentage of parents who said it’s extremely important for their kids to be “honest,” “ethical,” “ambitious,” or “accepting of people who are different.” Despite large differences among ethnicities in some categories, the primacy of career success was one virtue that cut across all groups.

I can’t read those survey results without thinking about the fact that teenage anxiety has been steadily rising for the past decade. Commentators sometimes blame a technological cocktail of smartphone use and social media for the psychological anguish of American youth. But perhaps a latent variable is the reverberation of workism in the next generation. These surveys suggest that everything society ought to consider bigger than work—family, faith, love, relationships, ethics, kindness—turns out to be secondary.

The message from American parents, in a century of economic instability, seems to be Your career is up here, and everything else is down there. Is there any scenario in which this is good for us? People can control their character in a way that they can’t control their lifetime earnings. In the ocean of the labor market, we’re all minnows, often powerless to shape our own destiny. It can’t be healthy for a society to convince its young people that professional success, the outcome of a faceless market, matters more to life than values such as human decency, which require only our own adherence.

I don’t know what will happen to workism in the next decade, but if rich American men are beginning to ease up on the idea that careerism is the tentpole of identity, the benefits could be immense—for their generation and the ones to come.

Office hours are back! Join Derek Thompson and special guests for conversations about the future of work, technology, and culture. The next session will be February 6. Register here and watch a recording anytime on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel.

On July 9, 1776, General George Washington amassed his soldiers in New York City. They would soon face one of the largest amphibious invasions yet seen. If the British took the city, they’d secure a strategic harbor on the Atlantic Coast from which they could disrupt the rebels’ seaborne trade. Washington thus judged New York “a Post of infinite importance” and believed the coming days could “determine the fate of America.” To prepare, he wanted his men to hear the just-issued Declaration of Independence read aloud. This, he hoped, might “serve as a fresh incentive.”

But stirring principles weren’t enough. By the end of August, the British had routed Washington’s forces on Long Island and were preparing to storm Manhattan. The outlook was “truly distressing,” he confessed. Unable to hold the city—unable even to beat back disorder and desertion among his own dispirited men—Washington abandoned it. One of his officers ruefully wished that the retreat could be “blotted out of the annals of America.”

As if to underscore the loss, a little past midnight five days after the redcoats took New York on September 15, a terrible fire broke out. It consumed somewhere between a sixth and a third of the city, leaving about a fifth of its residents homeless. The conflagration could be seen from New Haven, 70 miles away.

New York’s double tragedy—first invaded, then incinerated—meant a stumbling start for the new republic. Yet Washington wasn’t wholly displeased. “Had I been left to the dictates of my own judgment,” he confided to his cousin, “New York should have been laid in Ashes before I quitted it.” Indeed, he’d sought permission to burn it. But Congress refused, which Washington regarded as a grievous error. Happily, he noted, God or “some good honest Fellow” had torched the city anyway, spoiling the redcoats’ valuable war prize.

For more than 15 years, the historian Benjamin L. Carp of Brooklyn College has wondered who that “honest fellow” might have been. Now, in The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, he cogently lays out his findings. Revolutionaries almost certainly set New York aflame intentionally, Carp argues, and they quite possibly acted on instructions. Sifting through the evidence, he asks a disturbing question: Did George Washington order New York to be burned to the ground?

The idea of Washington as an arsonist may seem far-fetched. Popular histories of the American Revolution treat the “glorious cause” as different from other revolutions. Whereas the French, Haitian, Russian, and Chinese revolutions involved mass violence against civilians, this one—the story goes—was fought with restraint and honor.

But a revolution is not a dinner party, as Mao Zedong observed. Alongside the parade-ground battles ran a “grim civil war,” the historian Alan Taylor writes, in which “a plundered farm was a more common experience than a glorious and victorious charge.” Yankees harassed, tortured, and summarily executed the enemies of their cause. The term lynch appears to have entered the language from Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia, who served rough justice to Loyalists.

Burning towns was, of course, a more serious transgression. “It is a Method of conducting War long since become disreputable among civilized Nations,” John Adams wrote. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, whose writings influenced European warfare, forbade killing women and children, and judged unnecessary violence in seizing towns to be “totally repugnant to every principle of Christianity and justice.”

Still, in the thick of war, the torch was hard to resist, and in North America, it was nearly impossible. Although Britain, facing a timber famine, had long since replaced its wooden buildings with brick and stone ones, the new United States was awash in wood. Its immense forests were, to British visitors, astonishing. And its ramshackle wooden towns were tinderboxes, needing only sparks to ignite.

On the eve of the Revolution, the rebel Joseph Warren gave a speech in a Boston church condemning the British military. Vexed British officers cried out “Oh! fie! Oh! fie!” That sounded enough like “fire” to send the crowd of 5,000 sprinting for the doors, leaping out windows, and fleeing down the streets. They knew all too well how combustible their city was.

The British knew it too, which raised the tantalizing possibility of quashing the rebellion by burning rebel towns. Although some officers considered such tactics criminal, others didn’t share their compunctions. At the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill, they burned Charlestown, outside Boston, so thoroughly that “scarcely one stone remaineth upon another,” Abigail Adams wrote. The Royal Navy then set fire to more than 400 buildings in Portland, Maine (known then as Falmouth). On the first day of 1776, it set fires in Norfolk, Virginia; the city burned for three days and lost nearly 900 buildings.

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared just days after Norfolk’s immolation. In it, Paine noted the “precariousness with which all American property is possessed” and railed against Britain’s reckless use of fire. As Paine appreciated, torched towns made the case for revolution pointedly. “A few more of such flaming Arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk” and that case would be undeniable, Washington agreed. The Declaration of Independence condemned the King for having “burnt our towns.”

In Norfolk, however, the King had help. After the British lit the fires, rebel Virginia soldiers kept them going, first targeting Loyalist homes but ultimately kindling a general inferno. “Keep up the Jigg,” they cried as the buildings burned. From a certain angle, this made sense: The fire would deny the Royal Navy a port, and the British would take the blame. In early February a revolutionary commander, Colonel Robert Howe, finished the job by burning 416 remaining structures. The city is “entirely destroyed,” he wrote privately. “Thank God for that.”

A year later, the Virginia legislature commissioned an investigation, which found that “very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy”—only 19 in the New Year’s Day fire—whereas the rebels, including Howe, had burned more than 1,000. That investigation’s report went unpublished for six decades, though, and even then, in 1836, it was tucked quietly into the appendix of a legislative journal. Historians didn’t understand who torched Norfolk until the 20th century.

This was presumably by design: The Revolution required seeing the British as incendiaries and the colonists as their victims. Washington hoped that Norfolk’s ashes would “unite the whole Country in one indissoluble Band.”

Carp believes that what happened in Norfolk happened in New York. But how to square that with Washington’s renowned sense of propriety? The general detested marauding indiscipline among his men. Toward enemy prisoners, he advocated “Gentleness even to Forbearance,” in line with the “Duties of Humanity & Kindness.” And he deemed British-set fires “Savage Cruelties” perpetrated “in Contempt of every Principle of Humanity.” Is it thinkable that he disobeyed orders and set a city full of civilians aflame?

It becomes more thinkable if you look at another side of the war, Carp notes. In popular memory, the Revolutionary War was between colonists and redcoats, with some French and Hessians pitching in. But this version leaves out the many Native nations that also fought, mostly alongside the British. The Declaration of Independence, after charging the King with arson, indicted him for unleashing “merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

[From the May 2022 issue: Daniel Immerwahr reviews a new history of World War II]

This accusation—that Indigenous people fought unfairly—haunted discussions of war tactics. Redcoat attacks on American towns fed the revolutionary spirit precisely because they delegitimized the British empire, whose methods, John Adams wrote, were “more abominable than those which are practiced by the Savage Indians.”

Perhaps, but Adams’s compatriots, at least when fighting Indians, weren’t exactly paragons of enlightened warfare. A month after the Declaration of Independence complained about burned towns and merciless savages, the revolutionaries launched a 5,500-man incendiary expedition against the British-allied Cherokees, targeting not warriors but homes and food. “I have now burnt down every town and destroyed all the corn,” one commander reported.

This was hitherto the “largest military operation ever conducted in the Lower South,” according to the historian John Grenier. Yet it’s easily overshadowed in popular accounts by more famous encounters. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Rick Atkinson, in his painstakingly detailed, 800-page military history of the war’s first two years, The British Are Coming, spends just a paragraph on it. The Cherokee campaign was, Atkinson writes, a mere “postscript” to Britain’s short and unsuccessful siege of Charleston (even though, by Atkinson’s own numbers, it killed roughly 10 times as many as the Charleston siege did).

But the Cherokee campaign was important, not only for what it did to the Cherokees but for what it revealed about the revolutionaries. Washington brandished it as proof of how far his men were willing to go. The Cherokees had been “foolish” to support the British, he wrote to the Wolastoqiyik and Passamaquoddy peoples, and the result was that “our Warriors went into their Country, burnt their Houses, destroyed their corn and obliged them to sue for peace.” Other tribes should take heed, Washington warned, and “never let the King’s wicked Counselors turn your hearts against me.”

Indigenous people did turn their hearts against him, however, and the fighting that followed scorched the frontier. In one of the war’s most consequential campaigns, Washington ordered General John Sullivan in 1779 to “lay waste all the settlements” of the British-aligned Haudenosaunees in New York, ensuring that their lands were “not merely overrun but destroyed.” Sullivan complied. “Forty of their towns have been reduced to ashes—some of them large and commodious,” Washington observed. He commended Sullivan’s troops for a “perseverance and valor that do them the highest honor.”

It’s hard, looking from Indian Country, to see Washington—or any of the revolutionaries—as particularly restrained. In the 1750s, the Senecas had given him the name “Conotocarious,” meaning “town taker” or “town destroyer,” after the title they’d bestowed on his Indian-fighting great-grandfather. Washington had occasionally signed his name “Conotocarious” as a young man, but he fully earned it destroying towns during the Revolutionary War. “To this day,” the Seneca chief Cornplanter told him in 1790, “when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the neck of their mothers.”

Carp acknowledges but doesn’t linger over what the revolutionaries did on the frontier. As he shows, there’s enough evidence from Manhattan itself to conclude that the New York conflagration was intentional.

To start, this was perhaps the least surprising fire in American history. Rumors swirled through the streets that it would happen, and Washington’s generals talked openly of the possibility. The president pro tempore of New York’s legislature obligingly informed Washington that his colleagues would “chearfully submit to the fatal Necessity” of destroying New York if required. The fire chief buried his valuables in anticipation.

When the expected fire broke out, it seemed to do so everywhere simultaneously. Those watching from afar “saw the fire ignite in three, four, five, or six places at once,” Carp notes. He includes a map showing 15 distinct “ignition points,” where observers saw fires start or found suspicious caches of combustibles. The fire could have begun in just one place and spread by wind-borne embers, but to those on the scene it appeared to be the work of many hands.

As the fire raged, witnesses saw rebels carrying torches, transporting combustibles, and cutting the handles of fire buckets. Some offenders allegedly confessed on the spot. But, as often happens with arson, the evidence vanished in the smoke. The British summarily executed some suspects during the fire, others fled, and those taken into custody all denied involvement.

Months elapsed before the British secured their first major confession. They caught a Yankee spy, Abraham Patten, who’d been plotting to torch British-held New Brunswick. On the gallows, Patten confessed, not only to the New Brunswick scheme but also to having been a principal in the conspiracy to burn New York. “I die for liberty,” he declared, “and do it gladly, because my cause is just.”

[Amy Zegart: George Washington was a master of deception]

After Patten’s execution, Washington wrote to John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress. Patten had “conducted himself with great fidelity to our cause rendering Services,” Washington felt, and his family “well deserves” compensation. But, Washington added, considering the nature of Patten’s work, a “private donation” would be preferable to a “public act of generosity.” He’d made a similar suggestion when proposing burning New York. Washington had clarified that, if Congress agreed to pursue arson, its assent should be kept a “profound secret.”

It’s possible, given Carp’s circumstantial evidence, that New York radicals conspired to incinerate the city without telling the rebel command. Or perhaps Washington knew they would and feigned ignorance. Yet, for Carp, Patten’s confession and Washington’s insistence on paying Patten’s widow under the table amount to “a compelling suggestion that Washington and Congress secretly endorsed the burning of New York.”

Whoever burned the city, the act set the tone for what followed. As the war progressed, the British incinerated towns around New York and in the southern countryside. The rebels, for their part, fought fire with fire—or tried to. In 1778, Commodore John Paul Jones attacked an English port hoping to set it aflame, but he managed to burn only a single ship. Other attempts to send incendiaries to Great Britain were similarly ineffectual. British cities were too fireproof and too far for the revolutionaries to reach with their torches.

Vengeful Yankees had to settle for targets closer at hand: Native towns. In theory they were attacking Britain’s allies, but lines blurred. Pennsylvania militiamen searching for hostile Lenapes in 1782 instead fell on a village of pacifist Christian Indians, slaughtering 96 and burning it to the ground. If against the British the war was fought at least ostensibly by conventional means, against Indigenous people it was “total war,” the historian Colin G. Calloway has written.

That war continued well past the peace treaty signed in Paris—with no American Indians present—on September 3, 1783. Andrew Jackson’s arson-heavy campaigns against Native adversaries helped propel him to the presidency. Burning Indigenous lands was also key to William Henry Harrison’s election, in 1840. He won the White House on the slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”: Tyler was his running mate; “Tippecanoe” referred to the time in 1811 when Harrison’s troops had attacked an Indigenous confederacy and incinerated its capital.

Native Americans deserved such treatment, settlers insisted, because they always fought mercilessly, whereas white Americans did so only when provoked. Crucial to this understanding was a vision of the Revolution as a decorous affair, with Washington, venerated for his rectitude and restraint, at its head.

The legend of the pristine Revolution, however, is hard to sustain. The rebels lived in a combustible land, and they burned it readily, torching towns and targeting civilians. Like all revolutions, theirs rested on big ideas and bold deeds. But, like all revolutions, it also rested on furtive acts—and a thick bed of ashes.

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Did George Washington Burn New York?”

China has hit back after reports that Washington is moving to further restrict sales of American technology to Huawei.

Memphis moved quickly to shut down its SCORPION unit when five members of the squad were charged with murder for beating Tyre Nichols after stopping him for an alleged traffic violation. But across other major American cities, such teams remain common.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked, “​​What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?”

James contends that shootings by police mostly aren’t the products of “bad apple” cops:

Like a plane crash or a nuclear-plant mishap, they are the emergent result of training, hiring, dispatch, supervision, and more, all of which can be improved. An “event review,” not a “performance review” of the cop who pulls the trigger, allows for resident participation and expert input. This is not a substitute for discipline and punishment of violators. It assumes that the discipline of a lone violator is a bad place to stop if prevention is the goal.

Maryanne describes what made her late brother a good cop:

My brother Paul, a police officer for 37 years, died this past Thanksgiving Day. At Paul’s wake, the constant stream of fellow officers and staff demonstrated he was loved by all, but those to whom he was the field-training officer spoke about him in a tone of reverence. Many of your readers will suggest taking a hard look at how officers are trained. I would urge a hard look at who they are trained by. Can they demonstrate not just what to do but also how to be? Here is a story shared on Paul’s memorial website by one of his trainees:

“Paulie taught me the value of words over force. There is one particular incident I’ll never forget involving … a mentally unstable young man … who had real fighting skills. The guy kept repeating he would count to three and ‘kill all of us.’ He would get to two several times, which caused Kline and I to prepare for battle. Paulie, with his hands in his pockets and his calming demeanor, would say just what the kid needed to hear to interrupt his violent thoughts and reset. Eventually, the kid succumbed to Paul’s verbal judo and no force was required to bring the incident to a close. I’ll never forget that, or Paul, for all the other good he did. As a trainer years later, I always remembered that and tried to pass it along thanks to him. RIP Paulie. You touched many lives!”

My eulogy for Paul provided some additional context for how a beloved police field-training officer came to be the person he was and why that served his trainees and the community:

“The quality I’ve heard over and over again about Paul was that he was ‘nice,’ which is not the typical description of a cop; usually you hear good cop or bad cop, and nice cop may seem out of the norm. Often I suspected I was latching onto the word nice because he was my brother and of course I was biased. Yesterday at the wake, my biases were confirmed and I kept hearing story after story of what nice meant to his fellow officers and staff, that what most defined Paul were not the occasional events that resulted in his commendations or awards but instead his ‘thousand small acts of kindness.’”

Between the time Paul was married to his former wife and when he met and married Wei, the true love of his life, he found a very good counselor. Paul was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. As with many recurring adulthood patterns, the counselor saw there were roots in childhood, but a lot of it was fuzzy, and so they encouraged Paul to “go talk to your sister.” During that time we spent hours upon hours piecing together our childhood. Like many families, ours was touched by a depressed and alcoholic parent. The normal ebb and flow went between apparent calm and total chaos that kept us always on guard, not knowing which it would be at any given moment.

Bit by bit, we pieced together all the fractured moments to re-create many of the events we weren’t allowed to talk about and often told to ignore as if they hadn’t happened at all. At certain points, true to Paul’s nature, as all the memories of craziness and chaos began to emerge, he would just get me laughing and laughing, often by inserting the phrase “How in the world did we ever grow up to be fairly normal functioning adults?” The evidence and statistics were clearly not in our favor, and things easily could have gone in another direction.

But we had figured out how to cope. Paul’s role in our family was the “disrupter,” so any of you who marveled at Paul’s particularly skillful and effective methods for diffusing “domestic” calls who think he learned this at the police academy would be only partially correct. The truth is Paul started honing those skills from the time he was about 6. He transformed the coping and challenges of a child into kindness and helpfulness as an adult.

A few of you who had Paul as your field-training officer shared stories of Paul’s ability to use “Words, not force” in his work, and I will be forever proud that “Words, not force” is what you most wanted to share about what you learned from him. But now I’d like to share my favorite story that Paul shared with me … Of course it takes place in the police station.

Near the end of his career, after Paul had transferred from the street to the desk, one day a woman walked in … Paul sensed the signs of an alcoholic and he was sure this would have no small part in why the woman was there. The woman said that her teenage daughter hadn’t come home the prior night and she wanted to report her as a runaway. Paul took all the information and tried to reassure the woman that he thought her daughter was probably okay and just decided to stay over at a friend’s house. All the while, he was thinking to himself that he understood exactly why the daughter didn’t want to be at home.  

I can’t recall what the girl’s name was, but she needs a name for this story, so I’ll call her Amy. A while later, a teenage girl came into the station, walked up to Paul at the desk and just said “I need some help.” I suspect she was a little taken aback when Paul said “I bet you are Amy. Your mother has already been here, but you’ve come to the right place, and you’ve come to just the right person.” He took Amy to the back of the station and just sat and listened to her. It was no surprise to Paul that his assumptions were correct: This was a teenager struggling with a parent who was struggling with addiction.

He assured her there were safe places to share her story and get the support she needed. So they went over to the computer, where Paul helped her look up group meetings in the area. With a list in hand, Amy made a promise that she would go to the meetings, and also that she would go home. I think about Amy a lot and hope that she found the support she needed and grew up to be a “fairly normal functioning adult.” I can’t know any of that for sure, but I do know in my heart that when she left the police station that day, she felt a little more empowered and a lot less alone because she met Paul.

Scott is a criminal-defense attorney and longtime critic of flaws in policing and prosecuting:

For those of us who have spent decades trying to figure out and then implement reform, the past few years have been brutal. There was a rare window of opportunity for change, when the public wasn’t screaming for ever more laws, ever harsher punishments, and fewer alternatives to the historical (and failed) belief that we could punish our way out of violence, drugs, and crime. Instead, the activists took the field, indulging their fantasy ideological solutions that would neither work nor be accepted by the majority of Americans as viable solutions requiring trade-offs everyone could live with.

Simplistic solutions such as “defund,” based on ideologically bound understandings of the problem, never stood a chance. As soon as the next “wave” hit, as it surely would, the pendulum would swing and we would be back to the tried-and-failed more crimes, less due process, and harsher punishments. And here we are. We squandered a once-in-a-generation (or more) opportunity for serious reform where all stakeholders reached consensus and the best, if imperfect, fixes were accepted by a majority of Americans and to everyone’s benefit. Instead, we’re back where we started and no one was saved.

Robert urges an emphasis on accountability:

Eliminate qualified immunity, which renders all but the most egregious, outrageous conduct unaccountable. It is a long slog to change attitudes, but by making punishment more likely, we can change behavior. In an ideal world, we would also be able to foster a police culture where misbehavior is seen as an unacceptable stain on police as a whole and something that every effort is made to eliminate. Culture change is difficult to impossible to impose from outside, but it can occur.

I am a retired physician, and I remember the ’70s and early ’80s when physicians circled the wagons to defend malpracticing docs but gradually began to realize that malpractice hurt people and made everyone else look bad. The profession ceased to tolerate physician misbehavior. I can’t say how to make that happen in the police, but it’s where they need to go.

MC recommends more sunlight:

This issue is not about the failure of police departments but of the weak policing of them. I don't think policing can be improved much except by forced transparency and external enforcement of humane standards. Officers have to be more afraid of the consequences of brutality. Mandate body cameras that can't be disabled, monitored by an external office that doesn’t normally work with police officers. Footage becomes publicly available, with identities suppressed.

We’re horrified at police brutality whenever another video shows it. There’s nothing more horrifying than how obvious it is that this behavior is normal for the ones inflicting the violence. We must bring the eyes of the public into all the dark places where that treatment was learned and practiced.  

Jay wants police to be more active:

Improved policing begins with actually enforcing the law as written. We’ve deemed law enforcement of smaller crimes such as shoplifting, graffiti, and small theft “optional,” then wondered why larger crimes continue to soar. There’s little justice for criminals nor for victims in a system in which policing is optional, understaffed or harassed and harried into inertia.

C. is a white cop who is married to a Black police dispatcher on a college campus:

This question haunts me because of my job, because of my wife's job, and because any children we may have will have to interact with American police as mixed-race individuals.

One morning, we had a dining-hall employee pull into our department’s parking lot. She had been on her way to work on campus when her ex began following her in his car. She stopped at our department to scare him off, and to make us aware that he might show up at the dining hall to further harass her. We got information on the ex and found out that he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault (on the employee). The employee went on her way to work, and we followed to hang out in the area and keep an eye out.

The ex didn’t wait long, and parked right near the employee before she had even gotten out of her car. My shift partner found him first, and when I got on scene, the ex was outside his vehicle shouting toward the employee in her car. She was having a full-blown panic attack, breathing and crying so loud I could hear her through the closed car windows. And the ex had their child in the car. Couldn’t have been more than 2, and he wasn’t in a proper car seat; he was standing on the backseat looking out the window.

The ex was focused on the employee, ignoring my shift partner, and started freaking out at how much she was freaking out. I was likewise concerned about her, so I went ahead and radioed for medics to be dispatched. I could tell my shift partner was trying to get in a position to handcuff the ex, but he kept sidestepping, trying to keep an eye on the employee and still shouting toward her.

I knew if we went hands-on as the situation stood, it was going to be ugly (the guy was tall, like 6 foot 2, while my shift partner was a paltry 5 foot 5 and I’m an average 5 foot 10). So I got his attention and told him, “Look, I have medics on the way to check on her, but we can only do one thing at a time, and we have information that you have a warrant out. We’re still waiting for confirmation that the warrant is current and valid, but that’s what we know right now. If you would have a seat in our cruiser while we wait for that info, we can have medics check her out.”

The guy just stopped. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I got a warrant.’ He turned around and put his hands behind his back. My partner cuffed him and got him in a cruiser. I went to check on the employee, while our sergeant, who arrived during all this, retrieved the child and brought him to his mother. Medics showed up a bit later, and made sure the employee was okay.

Now, standard operating procedure when arresting someone with a warrant for a violent offense is to get them in a position where you can cuff them up real quick before they even know what’s happening, and then explain the situation. It’s supposed to prevent the individual from even trying to fight the arrest. In this situation, though, the guy was already amped way up; we had a woman that legitimately might need medical attention and a 2-year-old toddling around the back seat of a car. If we'd gone hands-on with no explanation, he would have struggled, and we would have had to fight to get him under control while his ex hyperventilated herself into passing out and his son watched from the car. It was going to be a bad day all around. So instead, I treated the guy with respect and explained the situation point-blank. And he let us arrest him.

My shift partner, later, told me he didn’t really like the way I’d handled it, and that we should’ve cuffed him before we told him about the warrant. I got a guy that brought his 2-year-old son with him to harass the mother of said son to let us arrest him for assault of that same mother. And my partner didn’t like the way I’d handled it. If that isn’t an indictment of police standard operating procedures and culture, then I don’t know what is.

Taylor argues that the best way forward is a relentless focus on creating and scaling up alternatives to police:

We should be thinking about crisis-response teams (Denver's STAR program relies on social workers to respond to calls), getting police out of traffic enforcement, and civilian systems for “welfare checks” (that often compose up to 70 percent of a jurisdiction’s 911 dispatches).

These programs take armed police out of the equation, in circumstances that most often escalate into police harassment, intimidation, abuse, and murder. They reduce harm, without any need for police-culture change, effective retraining, or functional internal accountability mechanisms.

But rebalancing public-safety budgets to rely far less on policing has not advanced, in part, because people with legitimate concerns about their safety cannot envision the world where police are not the first responders. "What happens when I call 911 if it’s not the police responding?” Before we will have the political space we need to then limit police to a narrower role, we need to build up these alternatives in a visible way and show they are effective, giving time for them to become a routine part of a multipronged public-safety structure.

Jaleelah urges a more active citizenry:

Monitor the police in your community. Go to city-council meetings and town halls. If police unions are blocking formal oversight, monitor them on the ground. If you see an officer yelling at a civilian, stop and record. If you see a barista threatening to call the police to remove a homeless person sleeping on a bench, try to mediate the disagreement.

Police officers may oppose civilian interference in their work. If that is the case, they should lobby their unions to make policy changes that will engender confidence in their intentions and capabilities. Until that happens, ordinary Americans’ on-the-ground surveillance is the only thing that can keep cops accountable.

D. H. argues that a lack of public understanding of what police work entails is an impediment to better policing:

The George Floyd situation was as close to indisputably wrong as any police-caused deaths in the past decade or so, and captured on videotape. It was clearly outrageous to keep him face down, handcuffed behind his back, and to continue to kneel on his neck while he was experiencing difficulty breathing.  

Other situations are not so clearly wrong, thus there is less outrage. Trying to shoehorn every deadly encounter with police into the same category as the George Floyd situation has probably hurt the cause rather than helped it, because people get outrage fatigue. We live in a violent society beset by an upsurge in violent crimes (at least in the Portland area). At this juncture, defunding the police feels more like giving free rein to criminals to prey on society, and encouraging vigilantes and militia to take policing into their own hands. “Defund the police” was one of the worst liberal rallying cries ever. The gun scourge in this country makes it feel very unsafe for officers and the public alike.

With the constant barrage of vitriol expressed toward the police, who would want to become a police officer? Who at retirement age would want to remain on the force? If they do not feel supported by the public, some may not feel highly motivated to protect and serve. How many quiet-quitting police officers are out there, and can you really blame them?  

We cannot work up sufficient outrage to take meaningful steps to prevent mass shootings, so why would anyone think a society numb to school and church shootings might remain outraged enough to effect meaningful change to the police organizations that must respond to those?  

I can understand how the fear of corrupt and/or brutal police could cause a rational person to resist arrest, as could impaired judgment from mental illness or intoxication.  However, if one chooses to resist arrest, that choice will be met by force (police violence) aimed to quickly overcome that resistance and gain control of the situation. Once force is employed, situations become much more volatile and outcomes worse. But, if police do not use force, then noncompliance will be encouraged. Getting the level of force right is more difficult in real time in the field than it may look after the fact.

I am not a police officer, but before retiring, I frequently represented them in civil-rights actions seeking money damages in federal court, and have a pretty good grasp on their perspective. They do have a strong sense that the public does not understand what they are called upon to do, and how they are trained to do it, and why they are trained that way (answer: survival). The way forward is thorny. The public needs to know what is and is not lawful police conduct. There is a lot of misinformation in the press, and the public deserves accurate information about persons armed and authorized to use force against them.  

Police should not police themselves; indeed, no group should police itself.  Recruiting diverse panels of retired judges, public defenders, prosecutors, academics, and others knowledgeable about the law and police procedures to take testimony, gather evidence about serious police conduct complaints, and issue public reports of their findings might be a start. It could help the poor and ignorant obtain representation in meritorious cases, publicly identify transgressing offices, and discourage frivolous lawsuits where the facts show the conduct was justified. Of course, that would cost money, and panels of experts can be wrong, biased, or even corrupted.  

Timothy believes that guns are a big part of the problem:

Improving policing is a tough problem as long as America remains a highly weaponed society. The police can’t respond to a traffic situation, a domestic situation, or even a missing-child situation without fearing for their lives. Hence, they react as if any situation is or will become violent. With the proliferation of drugs, their fears are increased. There are many situations where certain drugs increase a person’s sense of violence while deadening their awareness to pain or injury. That makes it really tough on the police.  

Jon concurs, and wants police officers to advocate for more gun control:

An acute manifestation of America’s gun insanity is that police departments, chiefs, sheriffs, and unions are not the most vocal supporters of gun-safety measures and laws to get guns off the streets. Where everyone (including, apparently, 6-year-olds) can possess a deadly weapon, police are not irrational to bring a sense of caution, or worse, fear, to almost every interaction, heightening tensions and leading to faster and deadlier escalations. This has contributed to more militant, violent, confrontational policing.

JD worries about the mental health of police officers:

I believe that the majority of those who undertake careers in law enforcement are motivated by a desire to make a positive difference. Over time, however, the soul-killing impact of repetitively dealing with humanity in its worst moments erodes empathy and altruism and generates resentment, hostility, fear, and an overarching effort to exert control.  

While our culture has made great strides in acknowledging the impact of PTSD on our veterans and others who experience trauma, only rarely does such understanding extend to law enforcement. As a former medical educator in a family-practice residency program, I recall the utility of Balint training in assisting medical-school graduates to maintain empathy and professionalism in the context of medical practices requiring them to encounter 15-20 persons a day, each seeking the best of medical care. Balint training created a context where peers could share the best and worst of their days in a judgment-free setting and, in the best of outcomes, permit them to renew their commitment.

Thanks to everyone who sent responses, whether or not I had space to print them––as ever, lots of great ones went unpublished. See you later this week.