March 17, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:All right, Moonbeam, call me
All right, Moonbeam, call me when the shuttle lands. . .
A reader thoughtfully sends along this excerpt from OpinionJournal:Sometimes, though, the mental-health lobby goes completely off the rails. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports on the case of Abu Kassim Jeilani, a 28-year-old man whom police fatally shot on Sunday. As this chronology shows, a policeman had spotted Jeilani walking down a Minneapolis street carrying a machete and a crowbar. He called the police department's crisis intervention team, which was on the scene in two minutes. Jeilani ignored orders to drop the weapons, and police twice tried unsuccessfully to immobilize him with a stun gun before resorting to bullets.The response of "some mental health professionals," the Star Tribune reports, is to say that the police never should have bothered Jeilani. Instead, a "mental health specialist" should have rushed to the scene--to confront a man with a machete. "We don't think it should be [in] the police hands. . . . It should be in the mental health hands," Theresa Carufel, of the Friends of Barbara Schneider Foundation, tells the paper. "We would love to replace the police." (Barbara Schneider was fatally shot by Minneapolis police in 2000 when she came at them with a knife and called them the "Satan squad.")
I know that the Friends of Barbara Schneider mean well, but they're a perfect example of the perils of hidden costs in Public Policy. To wit: the Friends of Barbara Schneider assume (probably correctly) that the tragedy of her death could have been averted if the policeman had not fired. However, they ignore the probability that in this case we would have the Friends of John Jacobs, Erwin Melville, and Tania Jones, the police officers or innocent bystanders that the knife-wielding psychotic killed, to contend with. Mental illness is tragic. Clearly, we all hope that there are better ways to contain a crazy person with a weapon than shooting them. But risking the lives of innocent bystanders, or even police [I say this from no lack of regard for the lives of policemen, but because we pay them to take risks, to a certain extent, with their lives in order to protect the rest of us] is no more appropriate than shooting to kill when there's the possibility of talking someone down. However, when people like the Friends of Barbara Schneider talk, we never hear about poor John, Erwin, and Tania, who didn't die -- only the woman who did. The costs of alternative action are hidden because they were averted by the action that did.
This is how we get a great deal of regulation in this country. Take an example you may or may not be aware of -- fuel efficiency. While some of the costs, like higher car prices, are visible (although not, due to the byzantine methods car manufacturers use to shake every last dime out of our pockets, visible enough), others, like safety, are not. Reputable data seems to suggest that the mandated increases in CAFE standards currently cause an additional 5,000 deaths a year. This cost is not explicit, because no one death can be pinned on the weight of the metal in the car (higher fuel efficiency = lighter cars = less metal = more deaths. And before you tell me that this is due to SUV's, the rise in death, according to my sources, is the same in accidents involving two small cars as it is in accidents involving a small car and a truck. He also says that there hasn't been a significant rise in collisions between trucks (SUV's) and cars because the shift to SUV's has been marked by a decline in the number of other light trucks.) Nonetheless, the cost is there, and if it were made explicit (most people seem unaware of the tradeoff), we might have a very different national opinion on fuel standards.
Or take another classic example, the FDA. If a bunch of people die from taking a drug the FDA has approved, the FDA gets in big-assed trouble. If a bunch of people die because the FDA was slow to approve a drug, the FDA gets in less trouble. If a bunch of people die because a drug was never invented because having the FDA makes drug development prohibitively expensive, the FDA gets in no trouble at all. This makes the FDA extraordinarily risk averse. This is not to say that we shouldn't have the FDA (that's another argument) but that because we don't examine these hidden costs -- and in this case, it's pretty hard to examine drugs that weren't invented -- we may well be producing sub-optimal outcomes.
It's fine to ask the police to check their procedures for dealing with the mentally ill. But saying that we should let someone deranged wander around with a machete while we wait for the mental health professional -- that's just nuts.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 17, 2002 06:36 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links