Catch and Release

One thing that has always annoyed me is when any authority figure tries to catch someone breaking a rule at the expense of actually preventing the transgression in the first place.

The most obvious example is the “speed trap.” You have a police cruiser parked somewhere that can’t be seen from the road, often in a spot where drivers might be prone to driving faster than the posted speed limit. Often it’s the case that a low speed limit makes sense during high-traffic times during the day, but a higher speed is perfectly safe in the evening or on the weekends, but speed limits don’t work like that.

So lo and behold, someone zips by that cruiser and then boom, on come the lights and sirens and the driver gets a nasty ticket. It always struck me as transparently exploitative. If the goal of speed limits is safety, then the aim of enforcement should be to keep people safe – and letting people break a law designed to keep them safe just so you can catch them doing it is deliberately putting lives at risk, right? You could have parked your cruiser in plain sight and everyone would have slowed down. The roads would be safer – but the town wouldn’t get its ticket money. When you see that, you can’t unsee it. Either the police are deliberately putting people’s lives at risk to make money, or they aren’t putting people’s lives at risk because the speed limit could easily be higher (or time-dependent) without making anyone less safe. Whichever it is, it clearly serves the agenda of the authority figures and not the people they have authority over.

That’s an obvious example, but the pattern is everywhere. You can see it in the behavior of almost anyone whose job is to enforce rules. Principals who wait until they know kids are smoking in the bathroom to barge in and catch them instead of just being more visible so they don’t try. Bosses who ambush their employees during slow times to try to catch them surfing the internet instead of just managing them more productively. Even parents do this kind of thing to their kids, all the time.

It’s all designed to intimidate. Authority through fear. They don’t want to overly punish, necessarily – that’s why these figures often “catch and release,” giving mild punishments along with the reminder that “they’re always watching.” It’s to get as many people on their “first offense” as possible, so that combined with the fact that they now think that hidden authority figures could be anywhere, they get paranoid and (in theory) stay on their best behavior all the time.

There are two problems with it: One, “authority through fear” is just bad in general. It doesn’t teach people to value a system proactively, it makes that system their enemy. Maybe you need people to have this sort of paranoia-based adherence in a prison, but in most systems, your goal isn’t just obedience to a rule set, it’s respect for the system and environment itself. Running a school like this doesn’t make kids want to be a part of the learning environment, it makes them treat school like a prison.

Which brings us to the second problem: When people view the system they’re in as an enemy, they start resisting. Fear-based authority breeds rebels. And it breeds smart rebels. People learn how to beat speed traps, sneaky principals, overbearing parents. In fact, they have the advantage – the authority figure is ruling through fear, and once you’re not afraid anymore, a little paranoia just makes you sharp. Once you start treating the system of rules as a game to be beaten and outsmarted instead of something you respect, it’s trivially easy to beat it most of the time.

Don’t enforce rules this way. If you have behaviors in any system you oversee that you don’t want people to engage in, then give them reasons not to engage in them. Some people still will! But some people still will no matter how you try to enforce rules. But when people respect their environment, it happens far less, because people won’t generally want to. And that’s always more powerful than them being afraid to.