January 15, 2009
Reducing people to problems: Let’s ‘imagine otherwise,’ says UW lecturer and author of new book
Once, when Jonathan Wender was a police sergeant, he was called to an elementary school because an 8-year-old student had become physically violent. “Rose” was the child of a neglectful mother and was in a class for children with diagnosed behavioral and mental disorders. When Wender arrived, she was seated in a locked “time-out room” where students were placed when they were out of control. She looked calm by then, and he asked her what had upset her. She told him that a teacher had taken away her necklace. He explained that the teacher had been afraid Rose would hurt herself, and he asked if she had intended to do that. Rose said no.
After a while a teacher arrived with an anti-depressant Rose was prescribed and some juice with which to take it. Rose took the pill without incident. Wender, seeing that there was nothing further he could do, left the room.
This incident is one of many that Wender, now a UW lecturer in sociology and law, society and justice, relates in his recently-published book, Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life. Rose, he says, had been transformed from a person into a problem. Referring to a report on the child handed to him by the school principal, he writes, “Rose’s entire existence had effectively been distilled down to a neat grid and summary of risks, to be treated with correspondingly meticulous attention to minimizing liabilities and harms.” Calling the police was, in fact, one of the requirements set out in the response plan.
This transformation of people into problems and what it leads to is the heart of Wender’s book and of his thinking. “I’m interested in the ways in which practitioners literally approach a human being, get close to a human being and in doing that, reduce that human being to an entity that is in some way meaningful to that practitioner,” he says.
The phenomenon is by no means confined to police officers. The teachers and the principal in Rose’s situation were doing the same thing. In fact, we all do it to some degree as we carry out practical tasks involving other people. The problem, Wender says, is that in reducing a person to a problem, we leave out the full richness of that human being and the context in which he or she exists. “And yet, that context, the rest of the picture, is often more important, more meaningful than what we reduce that person to.”
Wender settles lawsuit As part of the settlement, Wender has been reinstated to his position retroactive to 2005, all of the findings underlying his termination and the termination itself have been reversed, and the Mountlake Terrace Police Department has acknowledged that “Sergeant Wender’s reputation for honesty is properly considered restored.”
See “$815,000 settlement for fired Mountlake Terrace cop” from the Seattle Times or “Fired office gets his job back with settlement” from the Seattle P-I. |
After describing this incident in the book, Wender writes of Laura, “For the duration of the encounter…she became increasingly aware of her objectification and encipherment. This was apparent in Laura’s nonchalance (and even her utter resignation) in the face of bureaucratic manipulation, and in her remarkable conversancy with the law enforcement and child welfare systems.”
Wender walked away from his encounter with Laura knowing that nothing had been accomplished. And in fact, she continued to run away over the months that followed, eventually running afoul of the law by stealing.
That doesn’t mean, however, that he considered all his police work to be ineffective, or that he turned from it in despair. Wender’s career in policing was improbable, but he found it satisfying. He started in 1990, a year after he earned a bachelor’s in Middle Eastern Languages and Civilization from the UW. He was attracted by the idea of public service.
“It was complete culture shock,” Wender says of his first days on the job. “No one in my family had ever been a cop. And I’m a person who’s always had a fundamentally intellectual, philosophical inclination.”
Nonetheless, he loved the work, delighting in “the challenge of making order out of chaos.” But even as he grappled with the intensity of the streets, he missed the heady intellectual atmosphere of the University, so he enrolled in some graduate classes. Two in particular — both taught by now-retired professors — led to the core ideas in his book. One was a literary theory class with Eugene Vance in which he wrote a paper on the revelatory power of beauty and the other a public affairs class with Hubert Locke in which he wrote about the way in which bureaucratic thinking doesn’t completely understand its own presuppositions.
What do beauty and literary theory have to do with police work? That’s where Wender’s definition of poetry comes in, and why the book is titled Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life. “Poetry is more than a form of literary language,” he says. “Poetry is part of a human being. People, in everything they do — whether it’s walking down the street, sitting in a chair having a cup of coffee or having a conversation — create meaning. Because everything that people do creates meaning, human life has this poetic dimension. So poetry in the strict literary sense is just a subsidiary form of this deeper poetic dimension of human being.”
And therefore, people can’t really be reduced to problems. They are always much more. This leads to what Wender calls the bureaucratic paradox — that making a real difference often requires stepping outside the official role and engaging the person as a person.
“I’d say to the person I was dealing with, ‘Listen, forget for a moment that I’m a cop. Let’s talk about this issue.’ I tried to use the official role to more holistically engage the other person.”
But of course, that approach has its limitations too. “When one is acting strictly in an official capacity, the ability to engage another human being authentically is in some ways subverted,” Wender says. “This is what I call the tragedy of the exercise of power. You have this finite amount of time to respond to a call and engage another human being, but at some level you’ve got to make a decision, arrive at a resolution and walk away.”
Wender doesn’t have any easy answers to this dilemma because there are none. He was a police officer for 15 years, earning his doctorate in criminology along the way, but still doesn’t presume to know what should be done.
“The beginning of an answer is to do what I call imagining otherwise,” he says. “I want people to step back and think about how we engage in social practices of various kinds and to imagine, for example, that modern bureaucratic institutions may not be the only context in which to engage the kinds of things the police do, the kinds of things social workers do, the kinds of things teachers do. How might we otherwise deal with human predicaments?”
And that’s how he ends the book, with the story of Rose. He writes, “All of the people who encounter Rose — police officers, social workers, teachers, mental health professionals and others — for whom she is an object to be approached deftly with their confident, technical expertise, will interpret her presence in terms of what they know she really is. And so on. All the while, Rose will grow older. Barring an essential transformation of her circumstances, it seems all but inevitable that she will have more encounters with the police; and it may fairly be surmised, a ‘problem’ will eventually be found. The challenge facing all who would be a part of this process is to imagine otherwise.”
