Taxonomy of the Modern Mystery Story

SPEAKER_04: Pushkin. SPEAKER_06: Welcome. SPEAKER_04: Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_07: From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back, and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_04: Hello, hello, everyone. Malcolm Gladwell here. We're continuing our buildup to the main event in this season of Revisionist History, which is a mini-series on guns. Six parts, beginning August 31st, which is some of my favorite work that we've ever done in Revisionist History. So please put that on your calendar. And if you want to binge listen to it early, without any ads, go to pushkin.fm slash plus and sign up for a Pushkin subscription. Anyway, to get you in the mood for that series, which I will say right now goes in some very strange directions, I thought I'd give you this. It's a speech I gave at the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University. I asked the organizers if I could do an old-fashioned lecture on murder mysteries and police procedurals, which I have been obsessed with ever since my dad read Sherlock Holmes' short stories to me and my brothers when we were kids. They said, sure. And I said, oh my god. So picture a packed auditorium. Everyone has book bags, and while they're waiting, they're reading books. They're not on their phones, catching up on their Proust. This is a talk to a room full of serious readers, which is to say, a room full of people who are more interested in being delighted than they are in being persuaded. My kind of people. All right, here it is. SPEAKER_04: I want to thank the New Orleans Book Festival for allowing me this time today. I wanted to start by apologizing for the title. I don't know if you saw the title in the program. I'm going to talk about the title Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, an over-theorized and potentially absurd taxonomy of the modern mystery story. First, a simple warning. That title is dead serious. This whole episode is going to get a little absurd and over-theorized. So don't stand up at the end and say, Mr. Glaubel, I found your presentation absurd and over-theorized. I already warned you. I have disclosed that risk at the outset. Secondly, I've chosen to speak about crime novels and mysteries because I'm addicted to them. I read and order spy novels, thrillers of various kinds, novels involving events that potentially threaten the safety of the entire planet, and the category that concerns us today. I also read a lot of the books that I read about police procedurals and crime stories and their television and film equivalents. You know when you go into the Hudson News in an airport and there's that whole wall of paperbacks. I have read every one of those paperbacks except for the ones with the word girl in the title. My daughter, who is 18 months old, spends a lot of time in a very large playpen and the playpen immediately abuts the bookcase where I keep all of my thrillers. And a couple days ago she reached up and grabbed Daniel Silva's The Kill Artist and started to turn the pages. The Kill Artist is the first installment in Daniel Silva's series of books on the legendary Israeli assassin Gabriel Alon involving, in this case, his pursuit of the dastardly Palestinian terrorist Tariq. It's one of my favorite books ever. And I mean, I don't think any father ever has been more proud of his daughter than I was at that moment. But as I said, it's stories about the police that concern us today. Because I think that stories about the police have not been given nearly the kind of close cultural scrutiny that they deserve. Which makes no sense. Because the attitude of popular culture towards the police is really, really weird. So there are two million truck drivers in the United States. How many TV books and movies and novels are there about truck drivers? Right? Once in a Blue Moon. There are three million nurses in the United States. How many movies are there about nurses? Is there a genre of fiction devoted to nurses? No there is not. There are four million teachers in the United States. Teachers are everywhere. There must be a ton of teachers in this room right now. How many teachers do you know personally? I'm sure all of us, the list is this long. But has any 16 year old ever asked his girlfriend to come with him to see the new teacher movie at the multiplex? No. The creative role was taught by teachers, nurtured by teachers, encouraged by teachers, but they don't want to tell us stories about teachers. They want to tell us stories about cops. There are only 700,000 police officers in this country, but they are massively overrepresented in the culture. My guess is that almost everyone in this room can name way more fictional police officers than they can name real police officers. Have you ever heard a real police officer refer to a perp? Have you ever heard a real police officer talk about a cold case? Have you ever heard a real police officer say you have the right to remain silent? Have you ever heard a real police officer say of his partner, if you're going in there, I'm going in there with you too. Or hold on Jimmy, just hold on, remember when we were rookies together Jimmy? No, no, no. Virtually everything we know about the police comes from the movies and television and novels, right? Martians currently circling the United States in a hot air balloon, if, sorry, if one of those Martians currently circulating the United States in a hot air balloon ever gets a Netflix subscription, they will say, my God, we appear to have stumbled on a country of people running around in tight blue uniforms and wearing aviator glasses. So today I want to ask the question, what have we learned from our immersion in all these police procedurals and crime novels? And what are the social consequences of that learning? Which is an important question because I think all of those crime books and movies have really, really screwed us up. Okay, let's begin with Ed McBain. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with Ed McBain, he was in the post-war years, one of America's most popular mystery writers. He wrote police procedurals about a fictional 87th precinct. And the officers in his precinct were all young men. They all had very pretty wives. They were all happily married. They all got along wonderfully. They worked together well. And I want to read to you from one of the novels in that series called The Killer's Wedge. And it's about one of the officers in the 87th precinct, Cotton Hawes, who's just been transferred in from another precinct. And the 87th is in a bad part of town. And he initially has all kinds of doubts about what it would mean to work a poor part of town. So this is Ed McBain talking about how Cotton Hawes is making sense of his experience. He had learned that the people of the slums were only people. They enjoyed the same pleasures he did, and they suffered a great many misfortunes he would never have to suffer. They wanted love and they wanted respect. And the walls of a tenement did not necessarily become the cage of an animal. He had learned this from the men of the squad. He had seen each and every one of them in action. Then he goes on. But he was surprised to learn that the men of the 87th clung to another concept which in no way limited the effectiveness of their law enforcement. That concept was fairness. And within this concept, they knew when to get tough and when to understand. They did not automatically equate slum dwellers with criminals. A thief was a thief, but a person was a person. Now this is a remarkably idealized view of law enforcement, right? I mean, let me give you another example from the same era. 1950s, which is of course the television show Dragnet, created by Jack Webb. At its height, Dragnet is an astonishingly popular television show. At one point of the 27 million American homes with televisions, 16 million will be tuned to Dragnet on Thursday nights when it ran, which is a number that has never been approximated since. It's an insane number. And Dragnet is a show about the LAPD. And it's a story of a group of dispassionate, unbelievably professional, highly competent police officers. One of my favorite Dragnet episodes involved Joe Friday, who is the hero of Dragnet, arresting a woman for a crime. SPEAKER_04: And at the end of the episode, the woman he arrests thanks him for arresting her. When has this ever happened in real life ever? But it happened in Dragnet. And you could make a list of the five most influential television shows of all time, right? 60 Minutes, probably The Real World, which kind of invents reality TV, probably put the Cosby Show on there for its influence on race relations. But it absolutely is the case that Dragnet is one of the five most influential and important television shows of all time. And it belongs in that list because what it does is it represents the first time on television that the same idea that Ed McBain has is put forth, and which is this notion that the police are good at what they do. I'm quoting here from a Time Magazine article on Dragnet when it first became a hit. The flood of Dragnet fan mail suggests that the US completely forgets that it is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes are glued on Webb's show. That it has gained a new appreciation of the underpaid, long-suffering, ordinary policeman. And in many cases, its first rudimentary understanding of real life law enforcement. So this is Time Magazine in the 1950s when it was the embodiment of middle America describing the United States as a nation of incipient cop haters. Today when we think of cop haters, we think of progressives, radicalized activists, civil rights zealots. Back then, Time Magazine is saying America, middle America were the cop haters until people like Ed McBain and Dragnet came along and convinced Americans that their perception of law enforcement was wrong. Those shows represent a massive narrative innovation. They introduce Americans to an idea that had never occurred to them before, and that is the idea of the excellent police officer. More on the taxonomy of the modern mystery story in a moment. One of the big crossroads in my career was when I was in my late 20s. I'd been living in Washington DC for 10 years and knew I wanted to do something different. Go somewhere new, but I didn't know where. I had this idea that maybe I wanted to go to Germany, kind of start over, but I didn't talk to anyone about it. The biggest decision of my life to that point, and I just assumed I could handle it all by myself. Which is crazy, right? When you're faced with a major decision in your life, career, or relationships, or anything, having someone smart and thoughtful to talk to makes a world of difference. That's why therapy is so important. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Let therapy be your map with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Gladwell today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_06: People are excited about what AI will do for them. 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I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything you know and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts. If you're NASA is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly, for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us. Oh, yes, there is. ZipRecruiter. New hires cost an average forty seven hundred dollars for all of us non spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? ZipRecruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. And experience the value ZipRecruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, ZipRecruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. ZipRecruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free before you commit. ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G L A D W E L L. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there, believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_04: Now, back to my speech on the taxonomy of police storytelling. Now, this is of course not the only way that the popular culture represents law enforcement. Before Dragnet came along, the dominant narrative mode was the Western. And what is the Western? It's the parable about the consequences of the absence of institutional authority. What do you do in your little town on the plains when there is no police department? Well, ordinary citizens possessed of no more than their own courage and a sick shooter have to restore order on their own. Now, alongside that, you had the rise in fiction of the private detective. Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. And what is the prevailing view of law enforcement in the world of the private detective? It is that the police are present, but they're incompetent. They can only catch bad guys with the help of talented outsiders. Right? Abamitors. If you've read your Sherlock Holmes, you know all about Sherlock Holmes' long relationship with Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. Lestrade is honest, he's dogged, he's hardworking, but he lacks imagination and he can't solve a crime to save his life. And there's a moment in the Adventures of the Six Napoleons in 1900 when we have this passage. Lestrade is addressing Holmes after Holmes has just done one of his spectacular feats of deduction and figured out who the real criminal is. And Lestrade says, we are not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you. And if you come down tomorrow, there's not a man from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable who wouldn't be glad to shake you by the hand. So at Scotland Yard, they are under absolutely no illusion about their own ability. Right? They know Holmes is better than they are. They know that they're useless at this task of crime solving. And that the guy with the pipe and the crazy hat from Baker Street is the only way they're going to keep the criminals of London under control. Same thing in Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels. Right? Hercule Poirot was solving crime after crime to the extent that police ever show up. Right? When they show up, they have no idea what's going on. And he looks at them, our little Belgian with the mustaches, looks at the police with absolute contempt because he's the only one who can ever finger the bad guy. Right? So we have stories about highly competent cops. And for the sake of argument, let's call those Easterns. We have stories about absent cops. Let's call those Westerns. Right? They are called Westerns. And we have stories about incompetent cops and let's call those Northerns. Which only leaves the Southern. So what's the Southern? Well the Southern is the narrative of the police and authority as malignant. Right? Think about the great Brian De Palma movie The Untouchables with Kevin Costner playing the role of Elliot Ness. Right? The incorruptible Chicago District Attorney Elliot Ness who goes on his crusade against the mob during the height of prohibition. The reason it matters that Ness is incorruptible is that all around him the police of Chicago are corruptible. Right? They're not absent. They're not incompetent. They're not deft and professional. No. They have been seduced by the criminality that they're supposed to contain. They are indistinguishable from the bad guys. That's what a Southern is. Right? So these are the four kinds of police stories. Excellence, absence, incompetence, corruption. And this is the first, here's the first of my claims. I think that every single example of a crime novel or a police procedural falls into one of these four categories. Without exception. So let's explore this. I assume some of you have read the Lee Child Jack Reacher series. And if you haven't you need to start like right after this talk is over. I once did a back of the envelope calculation based on the very large sample of Jack Reacher novels that I've read. Which is as follows. Reacher kills on average 12 bad guys per book. There are 26 Reacher books. Meaning that he has murdered 284 people over the course of his life. He is the most prolific serial killer in American fiction. And yet 26 years after Jack Reacher first appeared in the Killing Floor, he remains at large. This is pretty good evidence that the police are absent in the Reacher series. The Reacher novels are Westerns. Only the Western can you get away with killing 284 people and remain at large. Right? For the Northern, for the incompetent police, we have more examples than we can count. But the one that I remember from my childhood and many of you are old enough to remember this as well is, is Hogan's Heroes. The legendary 1970s sitcom. For those of you who are too young to remember Hogan's Heroes, it was a hugely successful TV show set in a German prisoner of war camp during the Second World War. In which the comic foils of the captured German soldiers were Nazi prison guards. Don't even try pitching that show today by the way. And why do we laugh at the Nazis if memory serves Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Not because they are malicious or vicious. Not because they are ineffective or indifferent. No, we laugh at them because they're inept. Because Klink is a self-important fool. Because Schultz is a clown who says I know nothing, I see nothing. Right? The literary conceit of Hogan's Heroes is that the Nazis were the Three Stooges. Which is a Northern. That's what it is. Right? Then there's the Southern. Authority as malignant and corrupt. Who is the king of the Southern? Well I think it's obvious if you think about it. It's John Grisham. The plot of every John Grisham novel ever, and I say this as someone who loves John Grisham like a brother, is about the subversion of institutional authority. How does the Pelican brief end? The richest man in the country is under indictment, as are his closest aides and all of his lawyers. The chief of staff to the President of the United States has resigned, and the President himself has wisely decided not to seek a second term. Right? In the firm, our hero, played in the movie version by Tom Cruise, discovers that the biggest client of his law firm is a Mafia crime family. The FBI gets involved and we think the movie is going to end with the FBI helping Tom Cruise resolve the matter. But, no. What does our hero do? He ends up making a deal with the Mafia crime family and turning his back on the FBI. Why? Because the FBI double crosses him. Of course they do. Right? This is a Grisham novel. Right? The law is less trustworthy than a Mafia crime family. I have argued long and hard over the years, two very deaf ears, that Grisham is the most important literary figure of our generation. And I'm not joking. I mean, why did so many Americans think the 2022 election was stolen? That truckloads of purloined ballots were ferried around Philadelphia in the back of pickup trucks, that voting machines magically preferred Democrats to Republicans. Because these are the kinds of things that happen all the time in John Grisham novels. Right? And given that John Grisham has sold 300 million books and has had 28 consecutive number one New York Times bestsellers, it is a statistical certainty that a good majority of the people wearing MAGA hats and storming the Capitol on January 6th read a Grisham book every night before bedtime. After, of course, being inoculated with their daily dose of Tucker Carlson. Let's do a more difficult example. Some of you may have seen the new Apple TV series Slow Horses, based on the Mick Heron spy novels. The show is about an intelligence officer played by Gary Oldham, who has been exiled to a decrepit outbuilding called Slow House. And along with all the other misfits, all the other rejects, screw ups, weirdos who can no longer make it within MI5 headquarters. So what's that? Well, that sounds like a northern, right? It's an authority is incompetent, right? We have a group of screw ups. But then the Slow House crew go on to solve some of the most pressing national security crises of the day, which makes it sound like an eastern, like a dragnet and Ed McBain, like uber competent authority. So it doesn't fit, right? Doesn't that invalidate my theory? No, no, no. SPEAKER_04: Slow horses is just a hybrid, right? It's hybrids have been around forever. If you remember how many people read Scarlet Pimpernel novels growing up? What is the Scarlet Pimpernel? He is the nobleman who everyone thinks is stupid, but is simultaneously outwitting all of the evil French, right? Or think about Colombo, right? The magnificent 1970s television detective series where Peter Falk pretends to be a bumbling fool, but always gets the bad guy in the end. These are easterns masquerading as northerners. They're northeaster. There are no reasters, right? What does Hamlet say to Horatio? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That does not apply to my taxonomy. Okay, why am I going on and on about the four categories? Because I think they're deeply problematic. And I think they distort our understanding of what policing is. And here I'm going to get, go on a digression and simultaneously get a little bit serious. The father of modern policing was a man named Sir Robert Peel and he founds the Metropolitan Police Force in London in 1829, which is the first great urban police department. And Peel famously sets out nine principles that he thinks ought to govern modern police forces. And they are as applicable, if not more applicable today than they were in 1829. They are the ten commandments of policing. They're what every police officer is taught on the first day of their time at police academy. And to give you a flavor, I'm going to read a couple of Peel's principles. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect. Here's another one. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to maintain and secure public respect. Here's another one. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives. And here's the crucial one. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police. Right? What is the word that appears in all of those principles as often as police? It's public. Right? Public, public, public. The police are the public and the public are the police. I would submit to you that those two sentences are one of the most beautiful and essential lines that have ever been written about the modern democratic experiment. Now, where are we today with respect to Peel's principles in America? Are we a society that believes that the people are the police and the police are the people? I'm not so sure of that. Right? One of the ways, for example, that we measure the health and effectiveness of a police force is clearance rates. A clearance rate is simply the percentage of crimes that are solved by the police. And the most important of those, obviously, is the homicide clearance rate. And over the last 30 years, the homicide clearance rate in this country has been falling. And not by a small amount, by a large amount. 30 years ago it was roughly 70%. It's now 50%. So half of all murders committed in the United States go unsolved by the police. And by the way, that's an average. There are many, many places where the clearance rate is much lower than that. The clearance rate in Flint, Michigan is 17% for homicide. In Honolulu, it's 18%. It also varies by neighborhood. If somebody was murdered outside of this auditorium here in Tulane, the clearance rate would probably be 90%. But in the 7th ward, it's probably, I don't know, 10, 15%. Right? That is a very, very big problem for modern society. In the classic formulation of deterrence, deterrence is a function of the certainty, swiftness, and severity of punishment. And of those three things, the first is the most important. Right? Deterrence is really a function of the likelihood of being caught. And if we are in a situation where the clearance rates in many high crime neighborhoods is less than 20%, then that's a description of a failed state. Right? We live in a society now where there are many neighborhoods where murderers murder with impunity. Now why are clearance rates falling? It makes no sense. The police today are better funded, they're better trained than ever before, they have more access to technology, there's cameras everywhere. Plus murder rates have fallen dramatically in the last 30 years, they have less to do. If you watch CSI on television or Law and Order, you would think clearance rates would be 100%. But they're not. They're low and they're dropping. One reason for that is obvious, and that's the rise of gun violence. Guns used to be a small percentage of homicides, they're now an overwhelming percentage of homicides. And a gun crime is a lot harder to solve than a knife crime. Right? Less physical evidence, the killer can be further away. But that's not the real reason. The real reason is that the most important factor in solving a homicide is the cooperation of the public. You find out who pulled the trigger because three people come to you and said, I was there, I saw Billy pull the trigger. Right? But if those three people don't come forward, if they don't trust the police anymore, if they think of the police as an occupying force, then you have a problem. SPEAKER_04: Remember those principles from Peel. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect. That is what we don't have right now. In a most recent Gallup poll, only 19% of black adults said they had any confidence or trust in the police. The numbers for white Americans are a little bit higher, but they are also at historic lows. Right? How do you solve a homicide in a community where 8 out of 10 people don't trust you? What Robert Peel said 200 years ago is absolutely correct. The police cannot do their job without the support of the public. Right? Now, you might say, well, this collapse in trust makes perfect sense. Think about the last 10 years. We had Ferguson, we had George Floyd, we just had Tyre Nichols, on and on. All of these stories of kinds of things that would naturally undermine our faith in law enforcement. But that still doesn't solve the puzzle. Because in every way, this kind of problem was worse 50 years ago than it is today. Would you rather have the police department of Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 or the police department of Birmingham, Alabama today? Would you rather have the police department of Los Angeles in 1963 when they wouldn't even let black officers ride in the same squad cars as white officers than the LAPD of today? No. I could go on. I mean, in Atlanta in 1948, they hired their first black police officers, a group of eight men. They called them the YMCA-8. Why? Because they won't let them into the precincts. They make them work out of the basement of the colored YMCA downtown. Right? And they get so much abuse that half of them quit within the first year. Abuse from their fellow white police officers. They're not allowed to drive squad cars. They're not allowed to arrest white people. They're not allowed to patrol white neighborhoods. White officers would gang up against them and falsely report them for drinking on the job. White officers tried to run down a couple of them in the street. One white officer in Atlanta put a bounty on the head of the black officers saying he would give $200 to anyone who killed one of those officers. Now, those are good reasons not to trust a police department. Right? Really good reasons. Not today. Not today when the Atlanta Police Department is worlds better and different from that. You would have thought there was a crisis in clearance rates back then. Not now. We'll be right back. The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate. AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. SPEAKER_06: When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at I Heart Media, Incubation is a new podcast about the viruses that shape our lives. It's a show about how viruses attack us and how we fight back. SPEAKER_07: I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Incubation, we'll hear how scientists have pioneered new techniques in the fight against viruses. There was just something about the way the virus was shaped. It always felt like there was no hope for creating a vaccine. SPEAKER_09: Until now? SPEAKER_07: Until now! We'll celebrate the victories, like the incredible story of how smallpox was wiped off the face of the earth. SPEAKER_03: Eradication means you have to get to whatever disease you're targeting everywhere, wherever it exists. SPEAKER_07: Listen to Incubation on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_04: Malcolm Gladwell here. Imagine you could rewrite history. What would you change about your current employees' benefits? How could a straightforward change make your life and theirs simpler? Let's talk about what it takes to keep your business competitive. Of course, you need to be responsive to your customers. But it's just as important to look out for the needs of your employees. They're the ones who keep things humming along and fuel your company's success. So let the experts at the Hartford provide the quality benefits that your employees deserve. The Hartford Group Benefits makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, providing world-class customer care to ensure that your employees are treated like people, not policies. The best part? The Hartford offers flexible products and personalized service solutions to meet the many diverse and unique needs of every employee. From supplemental health benefits to coverage for life and loss, the Hartford has got you covered. So keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. You would have thought that in every way we would be better off today than we were 50 years ago. So what's to blame for this, right? This is one of the most profound problems facing our society. I think that there are many, many important issues, but the one I want to talk about is the influence of these four narratives. The first problem with the narratives, I think, is obvious, and that is that it is a dangerous thing to over-narrativize a group of people. The obvious analogy is the way that popular culture treated African Americans in the movies in the first half of the 20th century. There were only three categories of black people in the movies in that period. There was the mammy, remember? Gone with the Wind, the role play by Hattie McDaniel, and that is the big, warm, sassy, surrogate mother who puts her mistress's children ahead even of her own children, and who keeps her mistress in line with her straight talk. That's stereotype number one. Second stereotype was the Sambo. What is the Sambo? The Sambo is the childlike, passive, deeply loyal man-servant. The Uncle Tom. And if you were a black actor or actress in Hollywood in the first 40 years of the 20th century, those were the two roles that were available to you. And the third group is the shiftless, devious, untrustworthy, lazy subversive. The screenwriters and the novelists of America put all black people into one of those three categories for 100 years. Why? Because they couldn't be bothered to explore the idea that there was as much variety and beauty and complexity in black people as there were in white people. A narrative is a stereotype. It's a kind of shorthand used by writers, and these stereotypes aren't harmless. There's a famous study done in the 1930s of ethnic stereotypes where a group of psychologists asked thousands of Americans to describe what they felt black people were like. And the three most popular adjectives used by white people to describe black people were superstitious, happy-go-lucky, and lazy. And the kicker was that most of the white people they talked to for that survey didn't know any black people. So where do they get those ideas? They got them from the movies. Right? So the stereotypes that are put forth in popular culture matter. They are the raw material that people use to form their attitudes and perspectives about the rest of the world. And I really worry that police narratives are doing the same thing. They are doing an injustice to our understanding of the police. You know, Derek Chauvin murders George Floyd, and thousands of people take to the streets and say, let's defund the police. Right? The George Floyd case activated the southern narrative, law enforcement as impossibly corrupt and malicious. Our only choice is to shut it down. Right? But there's 700,000 police officers in this country. How do you possibly label the entire group based on the behavior of a small number? You know, after the Rodney King beating 30 years ago led to the Los Angeles riots, the Los Angeles Police Department was thrown into chaos. And they were accused of racial bias and insensitivity and turning a blind eye to misconduct. And they had once, of course, been the embodiment of the Eastern. Dragonite was a celebration of the perfection and professionalism of the LAPD. And now they were the Southern. They were cast as corrupt and malicious. And there was a massive investigation that was launched. And what the investigation found was that of the 8,500 police officers in the LAPD, 183 had been the subject of four or more excessive force complaints over in the period between 1986 and 1990. Right? So 183 out of 8,500. 44 of those 183 had six or more complaints and 16 had eight or more complaints. The investigation found that the LAPD, in other words, had a very small core of really bad apples and did a really bad job of identifying the bad apples and getting rid of them. SPEAKER_04: That is not an Eastern where everyone is perfect. There was one officer who had more than 16 excessive force complaints in the previous four years and still had his job. Right? That's not Dragonite. That's something very different. That's a problem. But at the same time, that is not the description of a Southern. It's not a description of an entire department that is malicious and malignant. Right? You cannot call a department of 8,500 people corrupt and malignant because it has 44 really bad apples. So our police narratives have made us sloppy. They've made it really hard for us to understand the nature of the problem we're facing. They blur over the subtleties. You know, you have one side saying it's all rotten and the other watching Dragonite and reading Ed McBain and saying these are noble, courageous men doing an impossible job against overwhelming odds. They deserve our unqualified support. Right? That neither of those narratives are true. How can the people be the police and the police be the people when the people don't understand who the police are? Problem number one. We don't make this mistake with teachers. We don't make it with truck drivers. We don't make it with nurses. When we hear that a teacher is a bad teacher whose students don't learn anything, we don't say, oh man, teaching is broken. Let's defund teaching. Right? We just say that's a bad teacher who should be replaced and let's do a better job of training and selecting them next time. And the reason we are free to do that is that no one has come along and constructed a magical teacher genre that allows us to assign every teacher to one of four reductive narrative categories. Second, and a more important point, is that I think we need to consider what these narratives do to those within the profession. Because how the police think of themselves is also shaped by these theories. You know, it's often been said that the Godfather, I'm sure you've heard this, the Godfather started out being about the mob but before long the mob was about being like the Godfather. Right? They all started pretending they were Marlon Brando or cultural narratives about groups don't just reflect those groups, they also start to define those groups. So the police also watch Law and Order. They also read crime novels. And what do they learn from them? They learn that law enforcement is about them. It's the story of their own identity and skill. Are they any good? Are they honest? Are they as dogged and skilled and fundamental as the police of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct? Or as hapless as Colonel Clink and Sergeant Schultz? The great crime novelist Joseph Wambaugh, who was an LAPD officer for many years, once said that the modern police novel was not about the man working the case but the case working the man. Meaning that the innovation of police fiction in the modern era was to turn the spotlight on what the job of maintaining law and order did to the psychology and peace of mind and character of the man tasked with maintaining law and order. And I think that's exactly what the four narratives are doing. They are simply giving different answers to that question of who the police officer is. In the Western, it's just the ordinary man must summon his own courage to step into the breach. In the Northern, the officer is not up to the task. In the Southern, the officer is corrupted by his responsibilities. And in the Eastern, our hero rises magnificently to the challenge. Police fiction in all of those forms is an exercise in narcissism. These are not novels and shows about solving crimes. They're shows about crime solvers. And where is the public in that? Right? Where? If Robert Peel were alive today, he would look around him and he would say, we have given police officers a picture of their profession that leaves out the most important element in their success. The people whose respect and support make police work possible. Remember that? Peel principle. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent on public approval of police existence. I defy you to find anywhere in the world of crime fiction a representation of that idea. It doesn't exist. That's not the reason people write police fiction and it's not the reason why readers like me love police fiction. So what is the solution? Well, it breaks my heart to say this. But it is time for us to turn our backs on a spy novel. Right? No more. Enough. It's been a hundred years or more and it has left us worse off than we started. I'm sure all of you are, uh, have been watching the governor of Florida on his current cultural cleansing campaign. And all I have to say is, where is Ron DeSantis when we need him? He's so busy banning Jodie Pico novels that he's missed the real culprit, which is Lee Child, John Grisham, Ed McBain, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Let us go to the Hudson News at the Jacksonville airport, take all of those paperbacks off the wall, put them in a big pile in front of the State House in Tallahassee, and light a match. Thank you. SPEAKER_04: I have time for a few questions. I think anyone wants to come forward? SPEAKER_02: Hi. I just wanted to ask if in this new conclusion that it's time to move past the mystery novel, the spy novel, do you think there's a room for something more nuanced, one that has evolved maybe with our understanding and our ability to capture information? Certainly when the genre was born, we did not have cell phones, we didn't have social media, and we certainly didn't have instant news, and these have all drastically changed the culture around policing, at least in the US. Do you think there's a way for the genre to move on and be more incorporated of these elements and more reflective of the way policing actually is? I do think that. Basically what has happened is that we have exhausted the possibilities of the form, and it's time for reinvention. SPEAKER_04: I think as well that people who write this kind of fiction need to understand what their social obligations are. What has happened is that there's a generation, I think this is more true in Hollywood than it is in the world of fiction, that people have really dodged the question of what the impact of their writing is. You make a movie, you make a really bad cop movie, and you just shrug and say it's entertainment, and you forget that actually know what you are providing is the cultural raw material for the way we make sense of the world. And if you just mail it in and just stick to some formula that is no longer relevant to the world we live in, you're doing society a disservice. So yes, I do think it is possible to reinvent it, but I think it's going to require a change of heart within the creative community. Thank you. SPEAKER_08: Okay, so hi, my name is Sabella, first of all thank you so much for talking. I wanted to ask a little bit about kind of going along that same crime show narrative about how much police officers are really able to do and how that kind of changes our public view and our public narrative. I'm a huge fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Knives Out, all that stuff, and we see police officers and detectives going in asking questions, breaking into things, all without warrants and everything like that. Do you think that changes the way we view police officers and how incompetent we may see them to be? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, so it's a really interesting point. The unreality of a lot of police fiction contributes to our disillusionment because we have this impression from the way that police work is represented in fiction, that the police officer has an awful lot more agency than he or she actually does in real life. There are, for good reason, significant constraints on what they are able to do, and of course that doesn't make for a good story. So when we compare, there's a whole line of psychology on what's called the CSI effect in juries, that juries are now more likely to acquit defendants because the level of evidence presented in the trial does not match up with the level of evidence they're used to seeing in criminal trials from CSI. And that's a good example of how there's no surer path to distrust and disillusionment if the standard of police work is described over here in fiction and in real life it's over here. So I think that is a very accurate observation. SPEAKER_08: Thank you. SPEAKER_04: I think I've run out of time, so thank you all very much. Thank you. Now is the time. We're about to drop a sweeping mini series on Guns in America, where we go down all kinds of strange rabbit holes about our national obsession. It's going to drop August 31. Pushkin Plus listeners will get the whole series that day ad free. Everyone else gets the first episode, and then the balance of the series over the next five weeks. Both good choices but I highly recommend the first option. Go to pushkin.fm slash plus to join up. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got you back. Learn more at the Hartford.com slash benefits. SPEAKER_05: The real wild west left out a lot of the people. People say they've never seen a black cowboy. This is the history book, but did you know about these other facts? Watch the real wild west now on CuriosityStream. With monthly annual and bundled plans, find the one that works for you at CuriosityStream.com. SPEAKER_09: Do you hear it? The clock is ticking. It's time for the new season of 60 Minutes. The CBS News Sunday Night Tradition is back for its 56th season with all new big name interviews, hard-hitting investigations, and a new series of interviews. SPEAKER_01: New episode airs Sunday, September 24th on CBS and streaming on Paramount Plus.