What is the mark of a good question?
Assessing the question "what is the work and how is it done?"
Image obtained from the Library of Congress
Questions and answers
I like questions. To be frank, I like questions more than answers.
When people answer questions, we do so with an inescapable air of finality. We say ‘the world is this way’, and drop a big heavy full stop right at the end of that sentence. And then the next person with a different answer to that same question steps up and delivers it with exactly the same air of finality, as does the next person, and the next, and the next. This bothers me. Answers are ephemeral and multiple. We shouldn’t associate them with endings.
Questions though have, if not full permanence, then at least a much longer duration than answers. It is entirely possible to repeat the same question again and again, for years, and never stop feeling that it was useful to ask it. A question can be a constant companion across the years, in a way an answer cannot. Thanks to that persistence, we have the time to build atop questions edifices of consideration and rumination that are both delightful spaces for the mind to reside within, and, potentially beautiful sights for other people to witness. However, this does depend on us actually finding a decent question in the first place. Not all of them are rock - some are sand, and building on them is parably unwise.
However, I have recently come up with a question that seems pretty rock-like. It runs “What is the work and how is it done?” What I want to do here, is ask myself why do I find this question so valuable?
A route to better imagination
My primary answer is that this question improves the quality of my imagination.
For example: at this point it seems to me that the way in which police go about the work of protecting people requires constant review, but if I was challenged I could not say specifically what I thought should be done differently. So, let’s see how the question above can help with that, if I adapt it slightly to: “What is the work of protecting people and how is it done?”
Now, responding to demands that we fundamentally reform society with requests for detail about how the reformed society would operate (“ok, but how is that supposed to work?”) is not new. This sort of questioning is frequently deployed as a method of critique (Colin Yeo’s querying of the Illegal Migration Bill 2023 being a fantastic case in point).1 But such questions should also be able to be used constructively as well as critically. Unfortunately, what such questioning often leads people to construct is the most depressing kind of worldbuilding imaginable e.g. the inventing a new complex array of Proper Noun’ed governing bodies with annoyingly complex rules of operation.2 Such worldbuilding takes a lot of effort to produce and is so boring to read that the effort of production is entirely wasted.
However, as a result of people defending against this destructive line of questioning, I think there has been an equally-problematic retreat from beneficial imagination among people seeking to radically change society. To use the words of Gracie May Bradley, who unlike me is committed to full police abolition:
‘And I suppose the other missing thing that I see in the UK is maybe…an unwillingness to grapple with the fact that abolition is also about the remaking of our interpersonal relationships right, that we’re not gonna abolish the police if we don’t genuinely figure out how we’re gonna deal with the rapist in our community, or deal with all these other kinds of harm. Like, we are genuinely gonna have to figure that out together, and I think people are quite happy to get on board with the big programme of “yeah we don’t want prisons, we don’t want police” and it’s like “ok, then there’s work that we need to, do, there’s stuff that needs to be there” and that I think people are still a little…they kinda think that we can somehow bypass that maybe and we can’t.’3
I think that the way to produce this ‘figuring out’ would be with more focused questions.
Freddie de Boer did something like this recently, asking ‘what should be done with Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer, from the standpoint of someone who believes in defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and similar’.4 This is a good question! It targets the imagination by focusing it on a specific, villainous individual, thus constraining invention to a succession of solitary events: one decision, one punishment, et cetera. This makes the new world much easier to grasp. Also, because the description is focused on a single person, it becomes loosely biographical, which I assume from *gestures vaguely at all journalism* would make the answer a lot more captivating and memorable. This is a properly constructive question!
If I had one small quibble though, it is that, because the question is focused on Derek Chauvin, any response to this question is going to be tailored to him, a man so obviously guilty of murder that he managed to get convicted despite being a US police officer. As such, any imagining that responds to this question will be focused on how a system should treat the most publicly evil people subject to it. This is useful, but insufficient if we want to envision how protection works more broadly. I prefer a question that would provoke imagination that is both similarly concrete, and yet broader in scope.
“What is the work of protecting people, how is it done?” achieves this goal for me. This is because ‘work’, by which I mean the actions people actually take day to day, is where politics becomes both concrete and, with a little abstraction, consistent. Once I have something concrete to work with, I can start to think about how it could work differently.
For example, let’s now apply this question to the police. A literature review by Professor Aaron Chalfin identifies three major examples of the work police do specifically to prevent harm.5 The first is police simply making themselves present in crime ‘hotspots’, areas identified as having high concentrations of crime. The intent here is that police, purely through their visibility, will dissuade people from committing crimes. ‘Mass enforcement policing’ is an evolution of this which involves police out on patrol frequently stopping and searching the bodies and/or vehicles of people. The idea is that these searches can uncover weapons or drugs which will then be prevented from harming people in spaces outside of police visibility. Then there is ‘precision policing’. The distinction between this method and the previous two is that the former methods are about targeting spaces where crime is more likely to happen. Precision policing is about targeting individuals identified as being more likely to harm others for warnings or arrests, usually by using gang membership6 as a proxy.
This is a really broad overview of police work, and as such overlooks a fair bit of activity. But despite any shortcoming, I feel like the question has served its purpose well, because now the work of police in harm prevention is at least partially concrete. The common thread across hot spot policing, mass enforcement and precision is the attempt to restrain people before they harm others. Potential harm-doers are identified through the use of broad proxies - that is, being present in a space where crimes are more likely to occur, or being a member of a group that coordinates crimes - and then either deterred or incapacitated through presence, searches, seizures and arrests. This provides just the information we need to start asking even more targeted questions. How well do these proxies work as identification mechanisms? Drilling down within the hot spot, how do individual officers pick out individual likely to commit harm within the suspect space, and what does their assessment ability mean for the strategy as a whole? If presence by itself is an effective deterrent, how much do we need the searches? If the identification does work, should the first response be arrests, or are there other interventions that would do?
The text above demonstrates the value of this question. Through concretising and summarising what police do, further questions about the worth of that work and whether it could be replaced seem to spring forth almost without effort. I can feel my attention being funnelled and my imagination provoked towards new directions and specific goals. This flowering of thought is the sign of good roots. This question works.
Future efforts
With sure foundations set beneath my feet, where do we go from here?
So far I see two directions. First, it’s time to choose the work I want to start actively amassing information on. Harm prevention will be a good place to start, deepening what I learned from Chalfin’s review.
Second, I should work on designing more questions. “What is the work and how is it done?” does what I need it to do, but there are concrete features of the world that require attention and are not ‘work’. A strong intellectual foundation will allow me to keep those in mind as well. I am now standing on a single rock. Time to start laying down some more.
Colin Yeo in ‘What will implementation of the Illegal Migration Bill look like in practice?’, posted on his Substack We Wanted Workers on the 9th June 2023.
For an example of this in action, see the history of NHS reorganisation.
Gracie May Bradley, speaking on the episode titled ‘Locating Legacies: “Abolition in the UK” with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’, on the Radicals in Conversation podcast. Starts at 24:44.
De Boer is opposed to abolition, but he is in favour of people having concrete political demands, which is why I see his intervention as constructive, even as his approach to the issue is critical. Freddie de Boer, writing in the article ‘A Defund/Derek Chauvin Challenge’, on his eponymous Substack.
Aaron Chalfin, Policing and Public Safety, published July 2022. These practices are mostly derived from studies of US policing, but UK police seem to speak the same language. See for example Ian Sample’s article about ‘precision policing’ and its use by the Metropolitan Police. Ian Sample, ‘Met expands use of crime data to focus on most serious criminals’, published in The Guardian on the 31st July 2023.
Gang in this context has a broad definition, as reported by Chalfin and his coauthors: ‘this new operation was intended to target not only established criminal enterprise (e.g., national gangs such as the Bloods or the Crips) but also crews—“loosely affiliated groups of teens” who often “identify themselves by the blocks where they live and are responsible for much of the violence in public housing.”’ p.1057 in Aaron Chalfin, Michael LaForest and Jacob Kaplanin’s ‘Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns” in New York City’, published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2021.