Suicide: The Coupling of Intent and Opportunity

In his latest book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, Malcolm Gladwell introduces the concept of coupling, and describes it as critical to understanding how others, not well known to us, are likely to respond  This is an unfamiliar term in the context he uses it.  He provides this definition:

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”

Gladwell dwelled most on crime statistics in making a claim for what he refers to as coupling.  In that case, he pointed out that in our urban areas, crime tends to be concentrated in a few specific locations.  He presented data indicating that often as much as fifty percent of all crimes are committed in about three percent of the street segments.  The explanation for this effect is not well understood, but there are definitely “circumstances and conditions” that either encourage crime or facilitate its execution.  The conclusion to draw from this is that crime prevention should be focused on these high-crime areas using aggressive tactics, while treating low-crime areas much less aggressively.  That seems like an obvious approach, but police organizations often prefer to treat all areas and all persons as “likely” criminals.

Gladwell also produced data on suicides which indicated that attempts are highly affected by the types of opportunities available for the act.  To make his point he addresses the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath in London in 1963.

“…she took towels, dishcloths, and tape and sealed the kitchen door.  She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, placed her head inside the oven, and took her own life.”

This may seem a peculiar way to go about killing one’s self today, but in the London of that time it was by far the most common method—and it was also the most convenient.

“In the years after the First World War, many British homes began to use what was called ‘town gas’ to power their stoves and water heaters.  It was manufactured from coal and was a mixture of a variety of different compounds: hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and, most important, the odorless and deadly carbon monoxide.  That last fact gave virtually everyone a simple means of committing suicide right inside their home.”

“In 1962, the year before Sylvia Plath took her own life, 5,588 people in England and Wales committed suicide.  Of those, 2,469—44.2 percent—did so as Sylvia Plath did.  Carbon monoxide poisoning was by then the leading cause of lethal self-harm in the United Kingdom.  Nothing else—not overdosing on pills or jumping off a bridge—came close.”

This town gas was dirty and would eventually become more expensive than a more desirable alternative: natural gas (methane) containing zero carbon monoxide.  Beginning in 1965, the British began the long conversion to the safer gas.

“After 1977, if you stuck your head in an oven and turned on the gas, the worst that could happen to you was a mild headache and a crick in the neck.”

What is of interest is the behavior of the suicide rate as this ubiquitous source of a deadly gas came and went.  After the introduction of town gas, the suicide rate increased significantly and stayed high.  This could not have gone unnoticed, but people did not seem able to make the leap to the conclusion that the ready availability of opportunity might affect the probability of occurrence.  The conventional wisdom claimed that one who wished to commit suicide would perform the act one way or another, so the readiness of a particular option would not matter.  When the gas replacement began in the 1960s, the suicide rate began to fall and stayed at a lower level.  People who would have committed suicide when a convenient method was available mostly did not move on to the next best option.  That was a rather significant finding.

Gladwell provides quotes from the criminologist, Ronald Clarke, who in 1988 asserted that Gladwell’s type of coupling was involved.

“It was widely available (in about 80 percent of British homes) and required little preparation or specialist knowledge, making it an easy choice for less mobile people and for those coming under sudden extreme stress.  It was painless, did not result in disfigurement, and did not produce a mess (which women in particular will try to avoid).…Deaths by hanging, asphyxiation, or drowning all usually demand more planning, while more courage would be needed with the more violent methods of shooting, cutting, stabbing, crashing one’s car, and jumping off high places or in front of trains or buses.”

The experts of the day did not take well to Clarke’s assertion.

“They thought it was very superficial, that these people were so upset and demoralized that it was sort of insulting to think you could deal with it by simply making it harder to commit suicide.  I got quite a bit of pushback here and there from people about that idea.”

Gladwell also supports his claim with the history and data on suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

“Since it opened in 1937, it has been the site of more than 1,500 suicides.  No other place in the world has seen as many people take their lives in that period.”

To support Gladwell’s hypothesis, and be consistent with the British data, those who would choose to jump off that bridge would be prompted to do so by the particular ambiance of the bridge itself, not necessarily a desire to die no matter how.  Fortunately, their exists data to address this issue.

“…this is exactly what seems to be the case according to a very clever bit of detective work by psychologist Richard Seiden.  Seiden followed up on 515 people who had tried to jump from the bridge from between 1937 and 1971, but had been unexpectedly restrained.  Just 25 of those 515 persisted in killing themselves some other way.  Overwhelmingly, the people who want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at a given moment want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge only at that moment.”

The notion that intent and circumstances of opportunity were tightly coupled in suicides was either unknown or incomprehensible to bridge authorities.

“So when did the municipal authority that runs the bridge finally decide to install a suicide barrier?  In 2018, more than eighty years after the bridge opened.”

Gladwell is focusing on policing techniques as he developed this topic, but he cannot resist providing a brief aside on the consequences of his coupling on the favorite—and most convenient—method of suicide in the United States: handguns.

“I haven’t even mentioned the biggest example of how our inability to understand suicide costs lives: roughly 40,000 Americans commit suicide every year, half of whom do so by shooting themselves.  Handguns are the suicide method of choice in the United States.  And the problem with that, of course, is that handguns are uniquely deadly.  Handguns are America’s town gas.  What would happen if the U.S. did what the British did, and somehow eradicated its leading cause of suicide?  It’s not hard to imagine.  It would uncouple the suicidal from their chosen method.  And those few who were determined to try again would be forced to choose from far-less-deadly options, such as overdosing on pills, which is fifty-five times less likely to result in death than using a gun.  A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides.  That’s a lot of people.”

The interested reader might find Policing and the Coupling of Crime and Place informative and interesting.

Policing and the Coupling of Crime and Place

Malcolm Gladwell has researched a number of ways that our human nature can cause us problems in social interactions.  He assembled this collection of topics and published them under the title Talking to Strangers:What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.  As expected, this Gladwell book provides numerous insights and revelations and leaves the reader with much to think about.  It begins with a reminder of the interaction of Sandra Bland with a Texas patrolman that we all observed as its was endlessly replayed in the media.  Gladwell then examines the ways in which interacting with a stranger can go awry before returning at the end to finish with a reevaluation of that interaction.  Gladwell asks the reader to focus on three factors that affect human interactions.  He labels them as default to truth, the illusion of transparency, and coupling to circumstances. 

The first two are well known from psychological studies.  Unless we have indications to the contrary, we tend to assume that someone providing us with information is telling the truth.  Evolution seems to have wired this response into our subconscious as a way of facilitating social interactions.  Consider how difficult it would be to conduct business if the default assumption was that everyone was likely to be lying.  Transparency refers to the working assumption that we can understand the feelings and motivations of people by observing physical manifestations of their inner thoughts.  Evolution has also wired into our subconscious body language and facial expressions that convey information about emotion and motivation.  Again, transparency, the ability to interpret what others are feeling was designed to facilitate social interactions.  Natural selection has decided that these two tendencies are beneficial in general.  Gladwell’s book is dedicated to warning us that these traits can be disastrous when dealing with people who are determined to deceive or harm us, or if we are dealing with people that are outliers who do not express emotions in the customary manner.

Adolf Hitler and Bernie Madoff are examples of two people whose activities clearly sent signals that should have indicated to others that they were being deceptive and up to no good.  However, when default to truth and the illusion of transparency were applied to interpersonal interactions with them, they were successful in hiding their intentions.  The lesson learned is that what serves us well in most interactions leaves us ill prepared to deal with outliers such as these.  Those who avoided personal interactions were better able to determine criminal intent.  People like Hitler and Madoff must somehow be identified as requiring a suspension of those two traits and treatment with a much higher level of suspicion. 

Dealing with outliers is critical in our criminal justice system.  Police officers must often judge probable guilt or innocence; prosecutors must make similar judgements; the setting of bail by a judge requires a decision as to which defendants are flight risks and which are not.  Gladwell dwells on tests performed by the psychologist Tim Levine.  They involve scenarios in which participants, usually college students, are presented with the opportunity to cheat at an endeavor.  They are then filmed to ascertain if they cheated, and also filmed denying or admitting that they cheated.  The purpose is to determine whether an observer of the tapes can determine which of the participants are lying.  It seems we humans are not very good at making that determination. The default to truth tendency and failed readings of transparency lead us astray.

“We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth.  But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying.”

“On average, the people he had watch…videos correctly identified liars 56 percent of the time.  Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment.  The average for all of them? 54 percent.  Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists—even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Everyone…”

“We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.  We do the opposite.  We start by believing.  And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”

These results suggest that when anyone falls into the hands of our criminal justice system, they may end up being evaluated by people who are not very good at discretionary decisions about guilt or innocence.

How then is a policing agency to identify those who should receive special and perhaps discriminatory treatment without disturbing the overall healthy functioning of society?  This is where the concept of coupling with circumstances can be of assistance.

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”

Gladwell indicates two criminologists who identified coupling between crime and location.  The first was David Weisburd who participated in a study of a high-crime district in Brooklyn, the 72nd Precinct.

“Common sense had always held that crime was connected to certain neighborhoods.  Where there were problems such as poverty, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was crime: The broad conditions of economic and social disadvantage bred communities of lawlessness and disorder.”

“In Los Angeles, that community was South Central.  In Paris, it was the outer suburbs.  In London, places like Brixton.  Weisburd was in New York’s version of one of those neighborhoods—only the neighborhood wasn’t at all what he had imagined.  ‘What I found was, quite quickly, that after we got to know the area, we spent all our time on one or two streets,’ he says.  ‘It was the bad neighborhood in town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime’.”

“’So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology,’ Weisburd said.  ‘Like most other people, my studies were about people.  I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.”

Weisburd then teamed with Lawrence Sherman in the late 1980s to discover that what was observed in his Brooklyn district was also observed in other urban areas.  They first studied Minneapolis and concluded that “3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls.”

“In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks…Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York.  Seattle.   Cincinnati.  Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas.  Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers.  And every place they looked they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments.  Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically.  His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv.  Same thing.  ‘I said…Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime?  There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’  Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration…crime is tied to very specific places and contexts.”

This is an effect that is not well understood, but the fact that it does exist should play a significant role in determining how police forces use their resources.  Gladwell points out that studies have shown this coupling of behaviors with places and circumstances applies to other social issues in addition to crime.

“They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior.  And that means that when you confront a stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you are confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.”

Gladwell then introduces the “Kansas City Experiments” and their results before the Sandra Bland incident can be revisited.  In 1970, Kansas City was planning on hiring more police officers and wondering how best to utilize them.  They brought in the criminologist George Kelling to assist them.  He conducted an experiment aimed at assessing the efficacy of three different modes of policing.  He selected a large segment of the city and divided it up into three areas.

“One of the three groups would be the control group.  Police work would continue there as it always had.  In the second neighborhood, Kelling would have no preventive control at all; police officers would respond only when called.  In the third neighborhood, he would double and in some cases triple the number of squad cars on the streets.”

“Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of study.  The result?  Nothing.  Burglaries were the same in all three neighborhoods.  So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism.  The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols.  They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened.”

These results were disappointing to Kansas City and to police departments around the nation, and these dismal results came in just as crime rates were climbing.  Fortunately, Kansas City decided they would give policing experiments a try again.  Twenty years later, in the early 1990s they hired Lawrence Sherman, the same criminologist who had worked with Weisburd in discovering the intense concentration of crime.  He had the benefit of that knowledge and focused on a small, high-crime section.

“They chose as their testing ground Patrol District 144: a small 0.64-square-mile neighborhood…The homicide rate there was twenty times the national average.  The area averaged one violent felony a day and twenty-four drive-by shootings a year.”

Sherman’s view was that crime and guns were associated.  He would focus on methods for finding guns in hope that success would lower crime rates.  He was ultimately successful because he chose to try a very aggressive form of policing in that area involving a small number of specially trained officers.  His approach recognized that searching homes for guns or frisking individuals was impractical and illegal, but stopping and searching cars could be easily justified.

“Traffic codes in the U.S. (and in fact in most countries) give police officers literally hundreds of reasons to stop a motorist.”

The experiment employed only four officers in two squad cars operating only at night when crime was most likely.

“Use whatever pretext you can find in the traffic code to pull them over.  If you’re still suspicious, search the car and confiscate any weapon you find.  The officers worked every night from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week, for 200 consecutive days.  And what happened?  Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever.  But inside 144?  All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half.”

Sherman’s work provided a model that could be copied by other police departments.

“And what was the principle implication of coupling?  That law enforcement didn’t need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused.  If criminals operated overwhelmingly in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime fighting strategies used by police in those areas ought to be very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city with virtually no crime at all.”

Aggressive tactics should be restricted to high-crime areas where residents were likely to appreciate the approach as providing them added safety.  In low-crime areas officers were to retreat to the default to truth assumption.  Aggressive policing in low crime areas would only lead to resentment of the tactics and of the police.

But what lesson did police departments learn?  That aggressive policing works, therefore aggressive policing was everyone’s duty—everywhere.  Traffic stops also became the method of choice for addressing illegal immigrants and drug trafficking.  Gladwell tells us that there are now 55,000 traffic stops per day in the United States.  He writes that traffic stops in North Carolina went from 400,000 a year to 800,000 over a span of seven years.

“How many extra guns and drugs did the North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those [extra] 400,000 searches?  Seventeen.  Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?”

Gladwell begins and ends with a discussion of the Sandra Bland incident.  He believes it must be viewed not as an unfortunate interaction between two individuals, but rather as an indication of something terribly wrong in our society.

“I said at the beginning of this book that I was not willing to put the death of Sandra Bland aside.  I have now watched the videotape of her encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count—and each time I do, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was ‘resolved.’  It was turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young black woman.  That’s not what it was.  What went wrong that day on FM 1098 in Prairie View, Texas, was a collective failure.  Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart.  Somebody else higher up in the chain of command at the Texas Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood.  Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast-food wrappers.  And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us share—and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider.”

Gladwell leaves the Sandra Bland incident with that thought, but after reading everything that he presented, one suspects that there is even a bit farther to go with this incident.  When Bland seems to be arguing with Encinia about what she has to do and what she doesn’t have to do, Encinia escalates the situation by demanding that she get out of the car.  That seemed excessive and unnecessary, but it turns out that type of response was also part of his training.

“And what does Tactics for Criminal Patrol instruct the police officer to do under these conditions? ‘Too many cops today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do.  People are allowed to move as they want, to stand where they want, and then officers try to adapt to what the suspect does.’  Encinia isn’t going to let that happen.”

Isn’t that a rather macho approach to dealing with Texas citizens, the kind of approach that a gun-totting master of his realm would take to heart?  It has often been pointed out that the world would be a better place if police departments put more social workers into uniforms and fewer people who enjoy being armed and ready for action.  Apparently, the social workers don’t show up but plenty of the others answer the hiring calls.

Sherman was inundated with calls from other police departments when news of his successful tactics went out.  He also wrote up a report describing his approach.  How could so many departments get it so wrong?  My suspicion is that they got it wrong because they wanted to get it wrong.  Why be concerned about the feelings of the citizenry when you can be a gun-totting master of your realm?  Perhaps there is yet another piece that Gladwell can produce on the subject.

Is there any evidence that we are populating our police forces with the wrong type of people?  Consider the scariest words Donald Trump has ever spoken.

“I can tell you I have the support of the police…”

Tesla: Its Strategy for Teaching Its Cars How to Drive Themselves

The vehicles in which we travel have always had known failure modes.  Whether cars or airplanes, there was never a guarantee that they were completely safe to ride in.  Manufacturers always had to weigh the cost and practicality of correcting a failure mode against the probability that such a failure would lead to loss of life.  Early on, when such probabilities were larger, producers would feel the heat when they made a poor choice.  As technology has evolved, probabilities of mechanical failure modes have become much smaller, to the point that they have become almost irrelevant in safety concerns compared to human or software errors. 

The next great improvement in transportation safety will involve removing error-prone humans from the system.  Aircraft, having a much simpler working environment, are well on their way to fully autonomous flying.  Automobiles, on the other hand, have a near endless variety of cases that must be dwelt with.  Humans are designed to be able to deal with all the possible situations that arise, but they are unreliable creatures who often fail to pay attention to their driving.  For safety and marketing reasons, numerous efforts are underway to create an autonomous driving capability for automobiles.

Manufacturers and regulators must again face the issues of “how safe is safe enough” as these technologies become available to the public.  Zachary R. Mider provided an interesting look into the audacious strategy being employed by Tesla in its development of an autonomous driving capability.  It appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek with a catchy title: Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save the Lives of Millions, But It Will Kill Some People First. 

The data tells us that almost 40,000 people are being killed each year in auto accidents in the US.  According to Mider, 94% of these are caused by driver error.  There have been a few instances of deaths associated with testing of autonomous vehicles.  The issue for developers and regulators is when are such technologies valuable enough to be released to the driving public.  There seems to be a somewhat timid approach by most organizations: retreating when an accident occurs and waiting until all bugs are out of their systems.  This is a prudent approach, but since human drivers are killing people at a hefty rate, when autonomous driving is not perfect but is better than humans the opportunity to save lives presents itself.  And there are a lot of lives at stake, to say nothing of the millions of injuries caused in the millions of accidents that occur every year.

One car manufacturer has decided to be aggressive in developing and utilizing autonomous capability as it becomes available.  Tesla provides a feature called Autopilot that will assume some of the responsibilities of controlling the car such as keeping the vehicle between lane markings and avoiding collisions.  It is far from a perfect system and it is not nearly a complete one.  Drivers are told to keep control of the vehicle by maintaining their hands on the steering wheel.  Notoriously, Tesla drivers use the technology and pursue other activities, such as taking a nap, while Autopilot does whatever it can do.  At least two deaths have been associated with use of Autopilot.  Tesla’s leader, Elon Musk, does not view a few deaths as a sign that Autopilot is too dangerous for use.  Given the behavior of drivers, an argument can be made that even relatively simple safety mechanisms will be lifesaving features.

Musk takes the view that the best way—and perhaps the only way—to develop an efficient system is by using it and learning from the experience gained.  Mider provides context using results from studies by Rand Corporation.

“In a 2017 study for RAND Corp., researchers Nidhi Kalra and David Groves assessed 500 different what-if scenarios for the development of the technology. In most, the cost of waiting for almost-perfect driverless cars, compared with accepting ones that are only slightly safer than humans, was measured in tens of thousands of lives. “People who are waiting for this to be nearly perfect should appreciate that that’s not without costs,” says Kalra, a robotics expert who’s testified before Congress on driverless-car policy.”

“Key to her argument is an insight about how cars learn. We’re accustomed to thinking of code as a series of instructions written by a human programmer. That’s how most computers work, but not the ones that Tesla and other driverless-car developers are using. Recognizing a bicycle and then anticipating which way it’s going to go is just too complicated to boil down to a series of instructions. Instead, programmers use machine learning to train their software. They might show it thousands of photographs of different bikes, from various angles and in many contexts. They might also show it some motorcycles or unicycles, so it learns the difference. Over time, the machine works out its own rules for interpreting what it sees.”

This type of learning requires the system under development to gain lots of experience/data to learn from.  Mider tells us that while fatal accidents seem to be plentiful, they only occur about once for every 86 million miles driven.  Consequently, any attempt to assess an autonomous system relative to the average human driver would require an enormous amount of testing.

“In another Rand paper, Kalra estimates an autonomous car would have to travel 275 million failure-free miles to prove itself no more deadly than a human driver, a distance that would take 100 test cars more than 12 years of nonstop driving to cover.”

Musk has hundreds of thousands of cars out there producing data that can be used to upgrade the Autopilot system.  Lax restrictions on how Autopilot is used by drivers allows them to place their vehicles in situations where the capability to respond does not yet exist.  While this can be dangerous, it also provides a “learning experience” for the software.  Current users regularly receive software upgrades as development proceeds.  

“…Musk’s plan to simultaneously refine and test his rough draft, using regular customers on real roads as volunteer test pilots, doesn’t sound so crazy. In fact, there may be no way to achieve the safety gains of autonomy without exposing large numbers of motorists to the risk of death by robot. His decision to allow Autopilot to speed and to let it work on unapproved roads has a kind of logic, too. Every time a driver wrests control from the computer to avoid an accident, it’s a potential teachable moment—a chance for the software to learn what not to do. It’s a calculated risk, and it’s one that federal regulators, used to monitoring for mechanical defects, may be ill-prepared to assess.”

Musk thinks Tesla is on the right path and is making steady progress.  Before an audience of investors and analysts, Musk had some rather astounding predictions to make.

“Over the course of the 2 1/2-hour presentation, Musk pointed investors toward a new focus: building the first truly driverless car. Cars on the road today, he said, would be able to use Autopilot on local roads within months. By sometime in 2020 they’d no longer need human oversight and could begin earning money as drone taxis in their downtime.”

“’It’s financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,’ Musk said, throwing up his hands. ‘It will be like owning a horse in three years’.”

Musk’s enthusiasm has been known to get him into trouble at times.  Investors have been able to make money betting against him in the short term, but he usually delivers eventually.  And his long-term seems to be much shorter than anyone else’s.