The Good Samaritan and the Police Department that Insourced Compassion
The Good Samaritan
Jesus echoed the teaching of his scriptures, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” After a little silence, a listener asked, “Who should be my neighbor?” Jesus responded with the following story. A Jew, who had been traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, had been robbed, wounded, and left for dead. Two people from his own tribe passed him and did nothing. One of the two was even a priest. The third person to pass by was a man from an enemy tribe, the Samaritans. He saw the suffering Jew and was overcome with compassion. He dressed the man’s wounds and brought him to an inn. The next day, when he had to leave, he gave some money to the innkeeper and requested that the man be looked after. He also instructed the innkeeper to put any further expenses on his own tab, which he would settle on the next visit. Jesus ended with a question — which of the three was a neighbor to the robbed Jew? The listener replied, “He that showed mercy on him.” And in his remarkable pithy way, Jesus responded, “Go and do likewise.”
Since the time of the New Testament, this story has been immortalized as the story of The Good Samaritan. In the era that this story was shared, that part of the world was racked with narrow tribal thinking. Jesus’ teaching came as a wonderful invitation to look beyond one’s narrow tribal boundaries. A great human freedom is the freedom to choose who one can love. Not in the corny love glorified in popular movies, but in truly and consciously loving others regardless of their actions and thoughts.
Outsourcing Compassion
The Good Samaritan story touched one philosopher more than any other. Ivan Illich was an extraordinary philosopher, in the garb of a Christian priest, an identity that he outgrew in his later years. When he was in his forties, Illich was struck by how easily the Good Samaritan story was passed on as an idealistic teaching, one of many in the Bible. To Illich, this was the greatest contribution of Christianity to humanity.
Illich would go on to trace how this huge frameshift affected the early Christians. Initially, it was a deeply personal practice to see divinity in others. But as the Christians finally started gaining political power, and had their say in building institutions, they felt motivated to rethink institutions from the perspective of the Good Samaritan. Shouldn’t we be taking care of the less fortunate? Shouldn’t a government’s spending be to alleviate suffering? And parishes that tended to those in need started to get in vogue. The idea grew and grew, to the extent that we have massive government departments focused on social service.
Illich then makes a damning observation. He reminds us of the ancient Latin quote, “Corruptio optimi pessima,” or, the corruption of the best is the worst. Seeing divinity in the other is one of the best ideas humanity has produced. Instead of institutionalizing compassion, Illich argues that we have created institutions that have made it extremely hard for us to touch our own divinity by seeing the divinity of the other. Requiring others to act according to the compassion we personally feel is what I would call “outsourcing our compassion.” When we practice this, it takes the form of, “I feel badly for someone, and because I have a good story for why I cannot support them, I will force you-over-there to do something about it.” This is a huge perversion of a sacred idea, and by Illich’s logic, it is one of the worst ideas humanity has seen. The very attempt to outsource compassion was destined to fall flat on its face and it has.
In spite of so much government spending to tackle major social problems, most of the problems still remain with us.
Illich gives a wonderful example of this malaise with the story of a convert to Christianity in China just before the Second World War. This man had pledged that if he were accepted into the church, he’d take a pilgrimage to the Vatican, which he did. In The Rivers North of the Future, Illich shares the story of this pilgrim’s journey:
At first, it was quite easy… In China he only had to identify himself as a pilgrim, someone whose walk was oriented toward a sacred place, and he was given food, a handout, and a place to sleep. This changed a little bit when he entered the territory of Christianity. There they told him to go to the parish house, where a place was free, or to the priest’s house. Then he got to Poland, the first Catholic country, and he found that the Polish Catholics generously gave him money to put himself up in a cheap hotel. It is the glorious Christian and Western idea that there should be institutions, preferably not just hotels but special flophouses, available for people who need a place to sleep. In this way the attempt to be open to all who are in need results in a degradation of hospitality and its replacement by caregiving institutions.
From just before the Second World War, let’s fast forward seven decades. In 2005, a young couple set out on an unscripted walking pilgrimage in India with the following intention: “To journey by foot, living on a dollar a day, eating wherever food is offered, sleeping wherever a flat surface is found.” Nipun and Guri Mehta were already well known in the San Francisco Bay Area as the co-founders of a maverick organization called ServiceSpace that focuses on radical generosity and challenges conventional norms of what institutions should be. The walking pilgrimage was Nipun and Guri’s attempt to explore their own authenticity far away from fame and family support. Would they hold on to their ideals in an unknown context with no support? Would they be able to see divinity in all those they encountered?
Their pilgrimage was a deeply inspiring spiritual experience, not just in their lives and those who met and supported them, but also for those who read about the couple’s experience through their blogs and interviews. Nipun and Guri realized that it does not take much to be generous, and they were swept away by the love they received from people who they had never met before. However, they did note something odd. In an interview with SFGate, Nipun was asked about the difference between urban and rural areas in India.
He responded, “When we were walking in the really rural areas there was all this kind hospitality, and as soon as we went into an urban area, it seemed like everyone was too busy to even look at you. Everyone was on their mission. And so we could immediately tell: We must be in the area near a city now, because people …” Guri continued, “Because people would no longer be curious, they would no longer stop and chat and see what we were doing, why we were there, offer us water or tea or anything. They were just much more suspicious, much more critical. It was interesting to see that, city after city.”
There are two very different Indias — the India of the cities, and the India of the villages. Indian city institutions are largely remnants of institutions from the times of the British empire. One can see the link with Illich’s Good Samaritan analysis and the British empire, leading back several centuries, where the idea of outsourcing compassion had penetrated deeply, and the welfare of others is largely the state’s responsibility and not a personal one. And yet, in villages where Western institutional presence is largely lacking, compassion and generosity still abound in the most surprising and delightful of ways.
In a world that is used to the luxuries of modern city life, it is hard to question the basic coercive structures that sustain it. In a world that is looked down upon as backward, without institutional support for our “modern” life, it is hard to ignore how generously compassion is expressed. We find ourselves trapped in this paradox. The more we are hurt by a particular issue and wish other people would do something about it, the more farcical are the responses of institutionalized action. Could people in institutions truly care with a sense of personal responsibility? How might such cultures come into being where systems, instead of taking away our personal responsibility, help bring that responsibility into sharp focus?
The Drunk is Our Client
“We’ll project a positive and courteous image toward our clients and fellow employees,” announced the police chief to his staff. He then defined who a client might be, “All the drunks we pick up are also our clients. It’s everybody you come in contact with.” “How can a drunk we are arresting be our client?” came the response from his senior officers. Stanford Police Chief Marvin Herrington tried his best to convince them. “If you look at the people you’re arresting as your clients, you’ve got a lot better perspective. This person has a problem, I gotta deal with it. But he’s not the enemy, he’s a client. Taking a drunk driver off the road, even if he bites me, I’m doing him a favor.”
The senior officers who opposed such a change in attitude were in the context of a career in public police departments where it was typical to look at the people being arrested as troublemakers, not worthy of respect. The police derived their image of self-worth by keeping troublemakers off the street. So ingrained is this culture that legendary sociologist John Van Maanen’s ethnography on policing had a word of abuse as its title, referring to the dominant perspective of the police about the people Herrington now wanted to call “clients.” Herrington’s proposal was nothing short of heresy in the world of orthodox policing.
The police chief stuck to his guns, and the senior officers who opposed him eventually retired and were gone. He only hired those who agreed with this value system, and by doing so, laid the foundation of values-based policing. His successor, Chief Laura Wilson, noted the thoroughness of Herrington’s reflection on the values of policing, “Herrington started with an 18-page document on values that he whittled down to a few pages. When I took over, I reviewed this document. I can tell you that there is not a single word in it that I would change.”
The transition to values-based policing did not happen by accident. Herrington was the product of an era that saw incredible violence on campuses during the anti-war movements of the 60s and the 70s. In the spring of 1970, now infamous as the Cambodia spring, Stanford saw incredible turmoil. Richard Lyman, who was the President of Stanford at that time, recalled later, “The Cambodia spring was the most thoroughly disrupted period. The police were called to campus I think 13 times in two months, and a lot of people were hurt. One person was even shot in the leg. It was just a very, very rough April and May, and a general strike closed the university pretty well down, and there wasn’t much we could do about it. I remember the then police chief (Tom Bell) putting up a notice saying ‘If you can’t get to your office, try to identify the people who are preventing you from doing so and turn their names in, but we can’t do anything to help you.’”
It was around this time that Stanford realized it could not outsource its spirit of caring for its students, and needed its own police force which was more than just security guards. Relying on public police forces was proving to be disastrous as the response would be heavy and violent, which wasn’t the best way to deal with young students who just wanted to be heard. Compassionate policing that was grounded in the culture of Stanford was the need of the hour. Stanford began a search for a leader who could help create a new police department, and the search ended with Marvin Herrington, an officer with a good reputation who had developed Northwestern University’s eight-man security group into a highly-trained 40-man police department. Herrington was heading security operations in 19 state colleges at the time he was recruited.
When Herrington came in, the university had been negotiating with the Sheriff of Santa Clara county to obtain peace officer status for the SUDPS. Herrington joined University officials in negotiations with the Attorney General to let the department hire peace officers under strict professional standards. Given the extraordinary situation on campus, the attorney general at the time agreed that he would essentially approve that a private entity such as Stanford could pay reserves to work for them. Thus, legally, the department exists on the basis of an Attorney General’s “opinion” that a private institution in the state of California can pay the salaries of reserve officers.
On the internal front, Herrington was horrified with the level of training of the existing officers. He took a bold step — and took everyone’s guns away. He then made them reapply to the police department. Current chief Laura Wilson reminisced, “One of the conditions was that the new officers would have to attend a full police officer’s academy. We wouldn’t even dream of doing anything else now, but back then, that was a whole five weeks. Now it’s six months long.”
Herrington also made clear to Stanford that the department would be run on its values, and would not accept any interference from the University on who to arrest or who to let go, even though Stanford was paying and sustaining the department. Stanford would have to agree to abide by the laws and regulations of the office of the Sheriff of Santa Clara County.
This Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the police department and Stanford University was critical in helping the fledgling department make clear that it was not a mercenary police department but a values-driven one.
Herrington reminisced, “I think that’s the reason it succeeded for thirty-some years because we made it very clear at the outset that this would be a standalone police department not answerable to the university in terms of legal actions. We’re not going to go in there and say, ‘Is it alright to arrest this person or not?’ The first time the administration knows about an arrest is when it’s on the sheet when any newspaper can come and look at it.”
This independence allowed the university to tell parents of offenders, even if they were influential, that they couldn’t interfere with policework. While independence in policing is crucial, the Stanford police department got its next big jump on values in the 90s, when ideas around what constitutes a viable and effective organization began to seep into departmental culture from the world of business and consulting. Herrington attended a talk on campus around 1994, by Jerry Porras, co-author of the book Built to Last with Jim Collins, which exposed the chief to their research about lasting organizations. The researchers exhorted that great organizations had a “core purpose.” Herrington set about articulating the police department’s core purpose and came up with a document that is followed unchanged by the department to this day. An excerpt from this document describes the department’s core values:
We pledge to honor the spirit and letter of the laws we are charged to uphold. We will strive to maintain and improve our professional skills and knowledge. We will project a positive and courteous image towards our clients and fellow employees. We will dedicate our full attention to our duties to earn and maintain the public trust. The hallmarks of our service and conduct will be a dedication to the principles of honesty, integrity, fairness, courage and courtesy.
How does one operationalize courtesy to clients, including those that need to be arrested or pulled up for breaking the law? Here, the story is beyond anything I could make up, and it has to do with education, the context in which the police department is situated. But first, let’s go back in time a little.
In 1764, a 26-year old Italian jurist and philosopher named Cesare Beccaria published a treatise that would forever alter the criminal justice system. His work was titled, On Crimes and Punishments, and was the first Western work to suggest that criminal justice should conform to rational principles. He was against the death penalty and suggested that punishments have a preventive goal as opposed to a retributive function. They should be proportionate to the crime committed. A big idea was that a higher probability of punishment, and not the severity, would achieve the deterrence. With many other good ideas, Beccaria ended his treatise with an odd note, “Finally, the most certain method of preventing crimes is, to perfect the system of education. But this is an object too vast, and exceeds my plan; an object, if I may venture to declare it, which is so intimately connected with the nature of government, that it will always remain a barren spot, cultivated only by a few wise men.”
Unknown to Beccaria, a little over 200 years after he wrote this, Stanford University at the other end of the world would cultivate this barren spot in a truly remarkable manner. By virtue of the Stanford Police Department being situated inside Stanford University, it had over the years acquired the value of education as a core part of its identity. The police department is in fact called “Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS),” just like we might have a Department of Electrical Engineering.
One of the best ways to respect the dignity of their clients, the police have discovered, is to use education to help people make better decisions. Stanford police officers take on the role of educators, partnering with other organizations on campus, like the Office of Alcohol Policy and Education, which goes into dorms and educates students on how to drink safely. All incoming freshmen are compulsorily required to watch an online module on alcohol education. Students are taught to deal with peer pressure with creative alternatives, such as non-alcoholic mocktails that look like real drinks. A big problem in alcohol abuse is that students fear that they will get in trouble with the law, and don’t report it when friends are in serious need of medical attention. Stanford’s Police Department sent out a message to the student community encouraging them to call when such situations arose and promised not to arrest the students when others called on their behalf. Their main goal was to ensure the health and safety of the students, and if anyone was unconscious from alcohol abuse, their top priority would be to get this person to the hospital.
The focus on alcohol education is not limited to education programs. Large party events are organized with a cross-functional team involving campus administrators and the police department. Officers and administrators are aided by student volunteers who commit to avoiding alcohol at the event so they can watch out for other students who are taking alcohol and may need medical assistance. Sometimes, underage students who are fascinated by the novelty of alcohol will drink up hard liquor very quickly (called frontloading) and then join the party. They will then get a kick from the alcohol as it starts affecting their brain. Many such students pass out or start throwing up. For their safety, the police will arrest them to be able to take them to the hospital or a sobering station where they are “unarrested.” Once sober and back on their feet, students are required by the university to have a meeting with the Director of Alcohol Policy where it is made clear to them that the university cares for them and wants them to make better decisions next time.
Stanford police officers also pull over bicyclists, who are notorious on campus for not obeying traffic rules. Officers would cite them for a traffic violation, which usually causes deep resentment in the student population. To tackle this, the department again took an educational approach in a partnership between SUDPS and the Department of Parking & Transportation Services by agreeing to waive the citation provided the student took a class on bicycle safety organized by Stanford’s Department of Transportation. Officers would present hard data in this class, with videos and pictures, showing how easy it was for students to hurt themselves by not following the rules, and many times with serious consequences. Surgeons at Stanford Hospital would be called in to share about head injuries caused by not wearing helmets.
Students walking in with resentment at being cited started walking out with gratitude, of the kind that we feel when we realize that someone we do not really know has cared for us without asking for anything in return. Education is the shell in which the essence of the Good Samaritan lives for the police department. Whether it is to support the education of their clients to keep them safe, or to support the education of police officers to help them grow and be better officers.
If I had to map the meaningful purpose of the Stanford Police Department, I might come up with the following:
Responding to Protests
I had the opportunity to see these values in action. It was during the peak of the Occupy movement that swept through the United States in 2011 when many sections of society protested against growing economic inequality. University of California, Berkeley, is a known bastion of socially-minded students and saw widespread participation in the movement, along with violent police behavior against it. Traditionally, Berkeley and Stanford consider each other rivals when it comes to football.
However, the police brutality caused many Stanford students to look beyond rivalry, and they ended up inviting Berkeley students over to have a combined march of solidarity at Stanford on a big game weekend. When the Stanford police department and the University officials heard of this, after decades of values-based policing, they were ready for it. Instead of a knee-jerk reaction trying to stop it, they identified a route that would make it easy for a large number of protestors to go on a march. The Stanford police department showed up, not to arrest the students but to ensure that they were safe. As it was a hot day, the police were around with water bottles just in case someone collapsed due to dehydration. And to top it all, for the grand finale of the march, Stanford offered the use of its large stadium which was not scheduled for any event that day, so that the marchers could gather around on the field and listen to each other’s stories. The police kept a respectful distance, far enough to leave the protestors alone, but close enough to be of assistance should there be a need. That event ended with many marchers giving hugs to the police chief.
A Service-Oriented Mindset
The Stanford Police Department’s unique experiment with values is worthy of reflection and emulation in a broader policing context, but one must note that it takes a lot of effort and conviction to create such a department. One of the values the department takes to heart is that of education, and it does so not just by valuing candidates who have higher education degrees but also supporting officers in pursuing education while they are at SUDPS. This emphasis on education has led to officers obtaining a Bachelors and even Masters degrees. People who perceive law-enforcement as exclusively being the use of coercive force will be dissatisfied at Stanford because of the holistic set of tools that is in use here. But those who have a service-oriented mindset and believe in creating strong community relations through teamwork will find themselves at home here.
Looking back at our original question on how to navigate the paradox of compassion, the Stanford Police Department has taught us that you cannot outsource compassion, but you can source it from the inside if you hire those who already feel compassion and are deeply moved by service. When there is a critical mass of such people, a culture emerges that is organized around compassion. Compassion is not just about polite words. Sometimes, compassion can come in the form of arresting individuals who are deliriously drunk to the point that they may end up hurting themselves and others on the road. The construct of the arrest allows the police to legally transport such individuals to a sobering station and sometimes even jail, where they can safely recover. In spite of the fact that they carry guns, and are well-trained in using lethal force when necessary, what the police at Stanford and their partners carry in their hearts is a spirit of service. They give a new meaning to the technical term for police officers, “Peace officers.”
The Boundless within Bounds
Upholding the dignity of work is a continuous process as opposed to a static endpoint. It requires a constant awareness of the ways in which dignity of work can be lost. The police department went far beyond treating their clients with respect and understood how human dignity could be breached by public safety enforcement. If they had concluded that it would be best not to have police departments, I wouldn’t be writing about them here. The reason they are so interesting to me is that they have fully embraced their identity as police officers with all the attendant boundaries that come with that role. Within those boundaries, they have found a way to respect human dignity by expanding their identity not just as police officers but also as educators.
By seeing themselves in this way, they have created a channel for expressing their boundless compassion within the boundaries of policework. This is what I find truly remarkable and worthy of emulation. Their story inspires the rest of us to reflect on where our systems paradoxically interfere with the very compassion they were intended to enshrine, and how we might insource our compassion within the context of our systems to transcend the paradox.
For different contexts, the paradoxes will be different, and the way to bridge them would also be different. Finally, the police department’s greatest lesson is that no matter how challenging our environments, such as the violent anti-war era and a policing context, when the maxim of seeing the other as a neighbor, and a neighbor as an extension of the self is practiced, it can lead to very different systems. Perhaps, a summary of the maxim is:
Don’t outsource compassion, insource it.
Further Reading
The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich by David Cayley
Questions for reflection
- What are some ways in which you may have been outsourcing compassion?
- What does insourcing compassion mean to you?
- If you were to organize your work around insourcing compassion, what would you change? What would you start?
My gratitude to Prof. Ray Levitt for tipping me on to the police department for my dissertation research. Cannot even begin to thank Chief Laura Wilson whose wholehearted support allowed me to get into the unbelievable and utterly fascinating SUDPS story. It all started with Prof. Sam Chiu’s class project on probability, and soon turned into ride-alongs with the police, applying ethnographic fieldwork methods that I learned from Prof. Jennifer Wolf at the Department of Education at Stanford University and from my PhD advisor Prof. Stephen Barley at the Department of Management Science and Engineering. I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing Chief Marv Herrington while he was still with us. None of this research would be possible without the support and continuous encouragement of my primary PhD advisor, Prof. Ronald Howard. My gratitude also to Richard Whittaker for bringing Ivan Illich into my life, and to Nipun and Guri for letting us all learn from their pilgrimage.
