The pots we watch, and why: Cannabis is legally in New York, at long last
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Pot’s legal in New York now, so take a deep breath and let’s flash back to newly installed French Governor-General Paul Doumer’s arrival in Hanoi in 1897 to “civilize” the capital of the tropical territories of Indochina.
To do that, as historian Michael G. Vann details in “The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” Doumer, a future president of France, expanded on the modern new European mini-city within the ancient Vietnamese one by adding a first-rate sewer system for the quartier européen’s flush toilets paid for by new taxes on the natives while their quartier indig 1/4 u00e8ne got a drainage system that dumped human waste into a nearby lake and river except during monsoon season when it pushed that waste back into people’s homes.
Those new pipes below the wide boulevards of the European mini-city made a perfect, predator-free home for rats. As the rats emerged to find food, what the colonizers had dismissed as a problem for the natives became a problem for them amid concerns about supposedly unhygienic locals spreading la peste, the bubonic plague that had afflicted Europe for centuries and that French scientist Alexandre Yersin had just discovered in 1894 rats and fleas were vectors of.
So in 1902, Doumer’s administration started paying teams of locals by the rat, with those teams descending into the sewers to kill as many as 20,000 in a day even as colonial civil servants, dressed in all white, compared those filthy locals emerging from the sewers to pests like the ones they’d been dispatched to hunt.
With the rats reproducing faster than the teams could kill then, the colonial administration raised their meager pay and added a one-cent bounty for tails to entice solo hunters. The bureaucrats put an end to that after they caught on to entrepreneurial vigilantes chopping off tails but letting rats live and even starting rat farms outside the city.
As other dératisation efforts continued, the plague arrived as feared in 1903, on a British vessel that had come to Hanoi for Doumer’s International Colonial Exposition intended to highlight his bastion of European science in the tropical Orient. Rats carrying infected fleas escaped into his modern sewers and the dreaded disease ended up killing hundreds of indig 1/4 u00e8nes and at least two Europeans.
Jump ahead in time to roughly halfway between then and now and the U.S. had its own experience with counting the wrong things in Vietnam, as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a devoted believer in systems analysis operating on the theory that wars were won by damaging the enemy to the point where they surrender, used metrics showing that the Viet Cong death rate (he wasn’t particularly concerned about civilians) was generally double the U.S. one. He also counted things like bombs dropped, ships intercepted and land “controlled” to show we were winning the Vietnam War right up until we lost it.
That’s why the idea that only what can be measured quantitatively exists significantly — think of the old joke about the drunkard explaining he’s looking for the keys he dropped inside a bar under a streetlamp because the light’s better there — is sometimes called the McNamara Fallacy, akin to Goodhart’s Law that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Which brings us to pot, and to Jack Maple, the creator of the Compstat system that transformed New York City for the better.
“The units enforcing quality of life laws must be sent where the maps show concentrations of crime and criminals,” he wrote, adding a crucial, not entirely quantifiable caveat: that those units are there “to catch the sharks, not the dolphins.”
But after Maple departed the NYPD, bosses began using the petty crime enforcement numbers as a proxy for effective policing while many cops continued to pick up collars for overtime dollars, and an approach that was supposed to be about protecting people began treating many young men and especially Black ones as presumptive criminals while using a whiff of pot (or the claim of one) as an easy way to justify dragnetting.
It all fed into the idea, which the NYPD and most of its members chafe at, of the police as an occupying force counting the wrong things and “the common mind-set among cops that the general public is at best a nuisance and at worse the enemy” that Maple warned “feeds mistakes, missteps and misunderstandings in a business that allows very little room for any of the three.”
With pot at least, that’s done now, and all it took was a generation of falling crime rates, a vast change in American attitudes, a political revolution in Albany, a pandemic that threatened to collapse the state’s economic model and a series of scandals weakening an imperial governor to get us here, albeit at a moment when violent crime has been trending disturbingly upward.
Now that we’re here, it’s a fine time to consider what else is being over-counted and what isn’t being counted at all.
