When people meet me for the first time on my job, they often feel inspired to share a revelation they've had about me, and it kind of goes something like this.
"Hey, I know why police chiefs like to share their deep, dark secrets with you.
Phil, with your PhD in psychology, and your shiny bald head, you're basically the Black Dr. Phil, right?"
(Laughter) And for each and every person who's ever said that to me I do want to say thank you because that was the first time I ever heard that joke.
(Laughter) But for everybody else, I really hope you'll believe me when I tell you no police chief likes talking to me because they think I'm a clinical psychologist.
And also I'm not.
I have no idea what your mother did to you, and I can't help.
(Laughter) Police chiefs like talking to me because I'm an expert on a problem that feels impossible for them to solve: racism in their profession.
Now my expertise comes from being a scientist who studies how our minds learn to associate Blackness and crime and misperceive Black children as older than they actually are.
It also comes from studying actual police behavior, which is how I know that every year, about one in five adults in the United States has contact with law enforcement.
Out of those, about a million are targeted for police use of force.
And if you're Black, you're two to four times more likely to be targeted for that force than if you're white.
But it also comes from knowing what those statistics feel like.
I've experienced the fear of seeing an officer unclip their gun and the panic of realizing that someone might mistake my 13-year-old godson as old enough to be a threat.
So when a police chief, or a pastor, or an imam, or a mother -- when they call me after an officer shoots another unarmed Black child, I understand a bit of the pain in their voice.
It's the pain of a heart breaking when it fails to solve a deadly problem.
Breaking from trying to do something that feels simultaneously necessary and impossible.
The way trying to fix racism usually feels.
Necessary and impossible.
So, police chiefs like talking to me because I'm an expert, but I doubt they'd be lining up to lie down on Dr. Phil's couch if I told them all their problems were hopeless.
All of my research, and the decade of work I've done with my center -- the Center for Policing Equity -- actually leads me to a hopeful conclusion amidst all the heartbreak of race in America, which is this: trying to solve racism feels impossible because our definition of racism makes it impossible -- but it doesn't have to be that way.
So here's what I mean.
The most common definition of racism is that racist behaviors are the product of contaminated hearts and minds.
When you listen to the way we talk about trying to cure racism, you'll hear it.
"We need to stamp out hatred.
We need to combat ignorance," right?
It's hearts and minds.
Now the only problem with that definition is that it's completely wrong -- both scientifically and otherwise.
One of the foundational insights of social psychology is that attitudes are very weak predictors of behaviors, but more importantly than that, no Black community has ever taken to the streets to demand that white people would love us more.
Communities march to stop the killing, because racism is about behaviors, not feelings.
And even when civil rights leaders like King and Fannie Lou Hamer used the language of love, the racism they fought, that was segregation and brutality.
It's actions over feelings.
And every one of those leaders would agree, if a definition of racism makes it harder to see the injuries racism causes, that's not just wrong.
A definition that cares about the intentions of abusers more than the harms to the abused -- that definition of racism is racist.
But when we change the definition of racism from attitudes to behaviors, we transform that problem from impossible to solvable.
Because you can measure behaviors.
And when you can measure a problem, you can tap into one of the only universal rules of organizational success.
You've got a problem or a goal, you measure it, you hold yourself accountable to that metric.
So if every other organization measures success this way, why can't we do that in policing?
It turns out we actually already do.
Police departments already practice data-driven accountability, it's just for crime.
The vast majority of police departments across the United States use a system called CompStat.
It's a process that, when you use it right, it identifies crime data, it tracks it and identifies patterns, and then it allows departments to hold themselves accountable to public safety goals.
It usually works either by directing police attentions and police resources, or changing police behavior once they show up.
So if I see a string of muggings in that neighborhood, I'm going to want to increase patrols in that neighborhood.
If I see a spike in homicides, I'm going to want to talk to the community to find out why and collaborate on changes on police behavior to tamp down the violence.
Now when you define racism in terms of measurable behaviors, you can do the same thing.
You can create a CompStat for justice.
That's exactly what the Center for Policing Equity has been doing.
So let me tell you how that works.
After a police department invites us in, we handle the legal stuff, we engage with the community, our next step is to analyze their data.
The goal of these analyses is to determine how much do crime, poverty, neighborhood demographics predict, let's say, police use of force?
Let's say that those factors predict police will use force on this many Black people.
There?
So our next question is, how many Black people actually are targeted for police use of force?
Let's say it's this many.
So what's up with the gap?
Well, a big portion of the gap is the difference between what's predicted by things police can't control and what's predicted by things police can control -- their policies and their behaviors.
And what we're looking for are the types of contact or the areas in the city where that gap is biggest, because then we can tell our partners, "Look here.
Solve this problem first."
It's actually the kind of therapy police chiefs can get behind, because there is nothing so inspiring in the face of our history of racism as a solvable problem.
Look, if the community in Minneapolis asked their police department to remedy the moral failings of race in policing, I'm not sure they know how to do that.
But if instead the community says, "Hey, you're data say you're beating up a lot of homeless folks.
You want to knock that off?"
That's something police can learn how to do.
And they did.
So in 2015, the Minneapolis PD let us know their community was concerned they were using force too often.
So we showed them how to leverage their own data to identify situations where force could be avoided.
And when you look at those data, you'll see that a disproportionate number of their use-of-force incidents, they involved somebody who's homeless, in mental distress, has a substance abuse issue or some combination of all three -- more than you expect based on those factors I was just telling you about.
So right there's the gap.
Next question is why.
Well, it turns out homeless folks often need services.
And when those services are unavailable, when they can't get their meds, they lose their spot in the shelter, they're more likely to engage in behaviors that end up with folks calling the cops.
And when the cops show up, they're more likely to resist intervention, oftentimes because they haven't actually done anything illegal, they're literally just living outside.
The problem wasn't a need to train officers differently in Minneapolis.
The problem was the fact that folks were using the cops to "treat" substance abuse and homelessness in the first place.
So the city of Minneapolis found a way to deliver social services and city resources to the homeless community before anybody ever called the cops.
(Applause) Now the problem isn't always homelessness, right?
Sometimes the problem is fear of immigration enforcement, like it was in Salt Lake City, or it is in Houston, where the chiefs had to come forward and say, "We're not going to deport you just for calling 911."
Or the problem is foot pursuits, like it was in Las Vegas, where they had to train their officers to slow down and take a breath instead of allowing the adrenaline in that situation to escalate it.
It's searches in Oakland; it's pulling folks out of cars in San Jose; it's the way that they patrol the neighborhoods that make up Zone 3 in Pittsburgh and the Black neighborhoods closest to the waterfront in Baltimore.
But in each city, if we can give them a solvable problem, they get busy solving it.
And together our partners have seen an average of 25 percent fewer arrests, fewer use-of-force incidents and 13 percent fewer officer-related injuries.
Essentially, by identifying the biggest gaps and directing police attentions to solving it, we can deliver a data-driven vaccine against racial disparities in policing.
Right now, we have the capacity to partner with about 40 cities at a time.
That means if we want the United States to stop feeling exhausted from trying to solve an impossible problem, we're going to need a lot more infrastructure.
Because our goal is to have our tools be able to scale the brilliance of dedicated organizers and reform-minded chiefs.
So to get there we're going to need the kind of collective will that desegregated schools and won the franchise for the sons and daughters of former slaves so that we can build a kind of health care system capable of delivering our vaccine across the country.
Because our audacious idea is to deliver a CompStat for justice to departments serving 100 million people across the United States in the next five years.
(Applause and cheers) Doing that would mean arming about a third of the United States with tools to reduce racial disparities in police stops, arrests and use of force, but also tools to reduce predatory cash bail and mass incarceration, family instability and chronic mental health and substance abuse issues, and every other ill that our broken criminal-legal systems aggravate.
Because every unnecessary arrest we can prevent saves a family from the terrifying journey through each one of those systems.
Just like every gun we can leave holstered saves an entire community from a lifetime of grief.
Look, each and every one of us, we measure the things that matter to us.
Businesses measure profit; good students keep track of their grades; families chart the growth of their children with pencil markings in doorframes.
We all measure the things that matter most to us, which is why we feel the neglect when nobody's bothering to measure shale@example.net.
For the past quarter millennium, we've defined the problems of race and policing in a way that's functionally impossible to measure.
But now the science says we can just change that definition.
And the folks at the Center for Policing Equity, I actually think we may have measured more police behavior than any one in human history.
And that means that once we have the will and the resources to do it, this could be the generation that stops feeling like racism is an unsolvable problem and instead sees that what's been necessary for far too long is possible.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House.
The auditorium was empty.
It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign.
This was the most exciting day of Vera's life.
She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett.
1,400 people were coming.
And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play.
But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well.
Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer.
Then the producer came over to Vera and said ...
"If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play."
There'd been a mistake.
The opera house had provided the wrong instrument.
This one had this harsh, tinny upper register, because all the felt had worn away.
The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small.
It wouldn't create the volume that would fill a large space such as the Cologne Opera House.
So Keith Jarrett left.
He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano.
Now she got a piano tuner, but she couldn't get a new piano.
And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert.
And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget ... only for you."
And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began.
(Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening.
Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality.
But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass.
And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row.
It's an electrifying performance.
It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time it's full of energy, it's dynamic.
And the audience loved it.
Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history.
Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess.
He had embraced that mess, and it soared.
But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct.
He didn't want to play.
Of course, I think any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct.
We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools.
We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles.
But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind.
And I think our instinct is also wrong.
I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess.
So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll.
So cognitive psychology first.
We've actually known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacle, can actually improve our performance.
For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers.
And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes.
So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman.
But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized.
Now, these are really ugly fonts, and they're difficult fonts to read.
But at the end of the semester, students were given exams, and the students who'd been asked to read the more difficult fonts, had actually done better on their exams, in a variety of subjects.
And the reason is, the difficult font had slowed them down, forced them to work a bit harder, to think a bit more about what they were reading, to interpret it ...
and so they learned more.
Another example.
The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters.
What do I mean by that?
What I mean is, imagine you're in a restaurant, you're having a conversation, there are all kinds of other conversations going on in the restaurant, you want to filter them out, you want to focus on what's important to you.
Can you do that?
If you can, you have good, strong attentional filters.
But some people really struggle with that.
Some of Carson's undergraduate subjects struggled with that.
They had weak filters, they had porous filters -- let a lot of external information in.
And so what that meant is they were constantly being interrupted by the sights and the sounds of the world around them.
If there was a television on while they were doing their essays, they couldn't screen it out.
Now, you would think that that was a disadvantage ...
but no.
When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, the ones with the weak filters were vastly more likely to have some real creative milestone in their lives, to have published their first novel, to have released their first album.
These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill.
They were able to think outside the box because their box was full of holes.
Let's talk about complexity science.
So how do you solve a really complex -- the world's full of complicated problems -- how do you solve a really complicated problem?
For example, you try to make a jet engine.
There are lots and lots of different variables, the operating temperature, the materials, all the different dimensions, the shape.
You can't solve that kind of problem all in one go, it's too hard.
So what do you do?
Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step.
So you have some kind of prototype and you tweak it, you test it, you improve it.
You tweak it, you test it, you improve it.
Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine.
And it's been quite widely implemented in the world.
So you'll hear about it, for example, in high performance cycling, web designers will talk about trying to optimize their web pages, they're looking for these step-by-step gains.
That's a good way to solve a complicated problem.
But you know what would make it a better way?
A dash of mess.
You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better.
And the reason for that is the trouble with the step-by-step process, the marginal gains, is they can walk you gradually down a dead end.
And if you start with the randomness, that becomes less likely, and your problem-solving becomes more robust.
Let's talk about social psychology.
So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime -- alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects.
And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime.
And there were two treatments in this experiment.
In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well.
In other cases, three friends and a stranger.
And you can see where I'm going with this.
Obviously I'm going to say that the groups with the stranger solved the problem more effectively, which is true, they did.
Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively.
So the groups of four friends, they only had a 50-50 chance of getting the answer right.
Which is actually not that great -- in multiple choice, for three answers? 50-50's not good.
(Laughter) The three friends and the stranger, even though the stranger didn't have any extra information, even though it was just a case of how that changed the conversation to accommodate that awkwardness, the three friends and the stranger, they had a 75 percent chance of finding the right answer.
That's quite a big leap in performance.
But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it.
So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job.
They were complacent.
When she spoke to the three friends and the stranger, they had not had a nice time -- it's actually rather difficult, it's rather awkward ...
and they were full of doubt.
They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had.
And I think that really exemplifies the challenge that we're dealing with here.
Because, yeah -- the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move ...
these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative.
But we don't feel that they're helping us.
We feel that they're getting in the way ...
and so we resist.
And that's why the last example is really important.
So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll.
And you may know him, he's actually a TED-ster.
His name is Brian Eno.
He is an ambient composer -- rather brilliant.
He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years.
He's worked with David Bowie on "Heroes," he worked with U2 on "Achtung Baby" and "The Joshua Tree," he's worked with DEVO, he's worked with Coldplay, he's worked with everybody.
And what does he do to make these great rock bands better?
Well, he makes a mess.
He disrupts their creative processes.
It's his role to be the awkward stranger.
It's his role to tell them that they have to play the unplayable piano.
And one of the ways in which he creates this disruption is through this remarkable deck of cards -- I have my signed copy here -- thank you, Brian.
They're called The Oblique Strategies, he developed them with a friend of his.
And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards.
He'll draw one at random, and he'll make the band follow the instructions on the card.
So this one ...
"Change instrument roles."
Yeah, everyone swap instruments -- Drummer on the piano -- Brilliant, brilliant idea.
"Look closely at the most embarrassing details.
Amplify them."
"Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action.
Incorporate."
These cards are disruptive.
Now, they've proved their worth in album after album.
The musicians hate them.
(Laughter) So Phil Collins was playing drums on an early Brian Eno album.
He got so frustrated he started throwing beer cans across the studio.
Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "Lodger" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid."
But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies.
And he tells his students to use The Oblique Strategies because he's realized something.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you.
The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list -- list on the recording studio wall.
A checklist of things you might try if you got stuck.
The list didn't work.
Know why?
Not messy enough.
Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely.
And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts.
These things help us.
They help us solve problems, they help us be more creative.
But also ...
we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this.
So however we do it ...
whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano.
Thank you.
(Applause)