Trust No One

A bit of simple, if fairly imprecise, math.

There have been about 33.4 million cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the United States to date. The most recent information I came across estimates the basic reproduction rate of the virus at about 2.5 with people remaining infectious for about 10 days or so. This means that over a 10-day period of being infections, that one sick person would spread the infection to two or three people. Although the math doesn't really bear this out. The 14 months or so the epidemic has been running in the United States would be a little over 40 10-day periods, and it only takes 2.5 to the 19th power to get to 36.3 million cases. So for all the surges and slowdowns that have happened, the disease hasn't actually spread as quickly as one might think.

But about a year ago, things were ramping up and governments were taking action. Masking requirements were set to go into effect (despite the fact that formal masks were next to impossible to obtain), there had been stay-at-home orders and businesses had been ordered to close. Even though the number of infected people wasn't that large, even as a percentage of the population. If even 25% of the current total are currently infectious, that's still about one in forty people. A year ago, to be where we are now, the numbers must have been fairly small. Still, the general mindset was that people who might be infected, and infectious, were to be treated as if they were infected, and precautions were to be taken. People were expected, if not required, to treat anyone who didn't live under their own roof as not only a threat to themselves, but to their broader families and social groups.

Given that, I wonder why it seems out of place for police officers to do the same; understanding that anyone they deal with might be a threat and therefore interacting with them as if they were an immanent threat until they were certain otherwise. Of course, part of the broader problem is that officers, as a group, tend to be selective with this; if officers used lethal force in every situation in which the rules allowed them to do so, the number of injuries and deaths would likely be some multiple of what it is now. And the disparities in whom lethal force is used on are fairly clear. But still, if it's understood that American society generally tends to work under an ethos of "threatening until proven innocent," then it only makes sense that police officers, who are, after all, also members of that same society would approach things in that manner.

And while the point can be made that police training reinforces the understanding of being surrounded by threats, the rapidity with which that attitude was adopted nationwide once the pandemic broke out would seem to indicate that it's a more generalized thing than just being a matter of training. People quickly internalized the "stranger danger," and even now that things are calming down, it's proving difficult for some people to let it go. It is any wonder that people who are taught to understand that they're dealing with the most dangerous elements of society are also jumpy?