Speechless

Self-appointed supervisor oversees inexplicable mayhem on Sherbourne Street

There's a lot going on in this week's picture that you can't see all that well. Behind the man on the sidewalk, there's a local tv station doing a man-in-the-street interview. Across the street obscured by traffic are two of seven police cruisers huddled around the scene of a crime. 

At about 7:30 in the morning three Saturdays ago, a disagreement arose for unknown reasons in a rooming house across the street from where I live. There was a struggle, one of the parties pulled a weapon of some sort, attacked two people, and fled south on Sherbourne to where he had parked his vehicle. You can read the details here.

At the time, I was at my computer, writing my blog. I heard the commotion. I looked out my window and saw a man in a grey tracksuit - the suspect, I later learned - as he trotted slowly down Sherbourne Street.

When the police cruisers arrived, I stepped away from my computer, put on some proper clothes and went to tell them what I saw.

They were not interested in what I had to say. One of the officers on the scene directed me to sit on a step until they had time to talk with me.

Instead, I listened to the officer as she radioed in her report. There were several eye-witnesses to the whole incident, and all I had to offer was a scrap of information confirming what they already knew.

I went back home.

****************************

Yesterday, I attended a day-long meeting of a panel of experts advising the government on one of its major priorities. I was second on the agenda and was to have presented on the overall framing of the strategy for government action - providing answers to the question of "why" as opposed to "what" the government would do, or "how." These were topics for other presentations that day.

In fact, the leading agenda item was one of the major "whats." The discussion on that item went long, taking all the time set for my presentation. After that, the panel's estimable chair stuck to the agenda, giving priority to all the other items over mine. 

At almost the very end of a long day, and after about half of the panel members had already left, the chair gave me twenty minutes to cover an hour's worth of material. When I was about two thirds of the way through the presentation, the chair called the proceedings to a halt. We'd gone over time and facility staff needed to clear the room for another function.

*****************************

The "why" of the brutal incident on Sherbourne Street may never be fully known, but I'll hazard this guess: the preconditions for violence in my neighbourhood are established by de facto policies of the municipal police that warehouse drug dealers and the people they prey on in the same place. Police figure that if the mayhem is intramural, no one will care. They are likely right about that.

The estimable chair of the expert panel seemed to be applying a similar logic: given the choice between discussing what a government is doing as opposed to why a government is doing something, people will prefer the former over the latter. If you never really get around to exploring the why, no one will care.

************************

Another Experiment in Behavioural Science - Part VII

With this week's question, we are 70% of the way to the end of this historic, epochal, epic, iconic, effort. 

The wise, awesome, brilliant hordes of respondents just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The fastest time for a response to last week's question was 22 seconds!  

You'll find this week's question here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen