Marble Falls Virtually, every day, rain or shine, the Peoples’ Daily News has to be written and produced for the “voice of the people” stations in New Orleans and Little Rock.
Recently, there was a brief squib about the decline of traffic enforcement and what that meant for both increased fatalities and perhaps a reduction in racial profiling. The item was brief, but if you missed it, here goes:
By the end of 2023, the police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did pre-pandemic. In Seattle and New York, the citations given during stops dropped off, too. The downturn appears even among some state agencies that monitor road safety on highways, like the Texas Highway Patrol and Connecticut State Police. Road deaths may have increased because of this.
Pretty straight forward, right? The article mentioned that the data of the Times used was not available for all cities.
Interestingly, in the current Peoples’ Daily News, traffic was again the subject, but the mention focused instead on data, and why we didn’t have a better picture of the whole country as opposed to just selected cities in the earlier piece. This time, it was more to the point, saying…
Data collection is a police reform in itself. Data mandates tell the police that their actions are being tracked. The existence of data alone can change how the police behave.
Truer words were never spoken, and, frankly, it’s ridiculous even in our loose federation of overlapping governmental jurisdictions that we cannot get consensus or enforcement on producing the necessary information to make informed policy judgments on traffic, crime, domestic abuse, and a ton of other critical societal issues, simply because those that should do so are simply unwilling to do the reporting.
We should eliminate all the rationales about lack of manpower, bureaucracies, laziness, and more, because the problem is simple: not counting is a resistance to accountability. This is not just true in government, but in almost any sphere, including organizing. If you’re not counting, then you’re not caring. Counting is how we know what is happening, what is working, or broken and needs to be fixed. Without counting, there is no accountability in a million endeavors.
Recently, we had a whole ACORN crew from our affiliates in much of Africa meeting in Nairobi. On the last day, everyone was making plans for the coming six months based on the training they had just been through. It’s fair to say that there’s some pressure in making goals and putting them on paper, into the spreadsheets, and on the wall where everyone can see them, especially when it comes to the numbers, like new members, members at meetings and actions, and more. Organizers know that they are going to be held to those numbers. One organizer, new to the work, vacillated between hoping no number would work to believing, as he argued, that it would be acceptable to lowball the goals to make sure he had minimal accountability on performance. Of course, neither strategy could be acceptable, so that office was asked to submit a plan later, rather than have the rest of the team live through the pain of one person’s attempt to avoid the planning process.
Accountability is in the counting. It’s not a choice. If we know that in building organizations, how is that not obvious to everyone everywhere? In fact, it is, and that’s the problem, just as having to count is the solution.