This commentary is by Jeremy Morris of Brattleboro. He is an addiction medicine and family medicine physician at Grace Cottage in Townshend and treasurer of the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont.
The conversations in towns around homelessness, drug use and visible poverty have recently taken a sharp turn into talk of safety and policing. There are so many reasons for people to feel unsafe these days: our society is as unstable as it’s ever been, wealth disparity is rising to levels not seen in a hundred years, mental health has been worsening since the early 1990s, children and community have not recovered from the pandemic, and people are angry, afraid and bitter.
I live in Brattleboro, and the tenor of public discourse seems to be that the town gave tolerance a chance, things have gotten worse, and so it is time for intolerance. Aside from the obviously simplistic framing of a dichotomous choice, there are three traps that I think my town and others in the same situation are in real danger of falling into.
The first is one that is especially likely to affect lawmakers and officials: the notion that there is a class of people whom you do not represent. That is, that even though they reside in your catchment area, some aspect of their lives (homelessness, addiction, poverty) effaces their citizenship.
This is most baldly revealed in the common misstatement that most unhoused people are “transients” from other places. It is also hinted at in how people are discussing social problems, most notably in the words of elected and appointed officials. Even VTDigger’s recent coverage of public safety concerns sought out input from property owners, officials and social workers, without a single perspective of those we are seeking to further marginalize.
It is natural to believe that people like you matter more than other kinds of people, and the argument from the wealthy that they should have a greater say in how taxes are used is a classic one. We have seen where this can lead, though — judges underwritten by powerful moneyed interests, agencies that would restrain corporate action defunded and justice applied very unevenly.
The second misguided notion is that policing is always the answer to feeling unsafe. Unsurprisingly, Brattleboro hired a consultant with a police background and got a recommendation for more interdiction and the police to enforce it. If they had hired a doctor, it might have been for more medicine, a social worker for more social work.
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Most of us are familiar with the aphorism “don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”, but we should also not be bringing guns to a misery fight. To expect the police to take responsibility for every unaddressed social ill with the tools at their disposal is unfair to them and to those on whom we are siccing them. I am sure they feel much like emergency department staff do when the failures of public policy all end up in their waiting room.
There is plenty of work for police already without adding aesthetics and conduct to their list. These are also very subjective things, and subjective policing has great moral hazard. I think that Brattleboro did a very considered job of leaving out some of the most egregious suggestions submitted by the public (e.g., no congregating in public spaces, no carrying more than someone with a home might carry). The downside of this is that the behaviors to be interdicted were unnamed, only defined by their deviation from what someone making a complaint or enforcing it might consider appropriate behavior.
The last, and perhaps most dangerous, cognitive trap is identifying people by some aspect of their behavior or situation: someone who is homeless is only a homeless person; someone who uses drugs is only an addict. In this shorthand, the personhood of that human fades in your mind. It can be comforting: life becomes simpler, there are good guys and bad guys, and difficult social problems become more like herd management.
The greatest danger of this in the long run is slavery and genocide, where numbers don’t even matter since those affected aren’t fully human. Way before you get there, though, are the small adjustments we make in how we see the world. Often subconsciously, we winnow our individual view of who belongs in society, whom we have to consider as we move in the world. If you think that you are immune to this, then try to fix your mind on some group of people you would like to change, or control, or erase, and take an honest look at how fear or hatred might be leading you to discount the humanity of individuals belonging to that group.
We have real and salient social problems, and addressing them is going to be difficult and resource-intensive. There are no quick fixes — unlimited temporary shelter, pawning social support off onto nonprofits, and criminalizing small amounts of illicit drugs have all failed to prevent the rise of hardship in Vermont and the unlovely and sometimes scary ways that people adapt to those circumstances. Finding new ways to punish people and further immiserate them and their families is unlikely to produce better results. We need to recognize and own what we think, what we want, and for whom we want it, and go back to the drawing board.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Jeremy Morris: Cognitive traps in discourse around public safety.