David Thacher

@dtha15

Professor studying police history, police reform, policy responses to serious mental illness, ethics. Richard Olney & John Dewey stan. Dad to a danseur and a goalie; married to a historic preservationist

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David Thacher@dtha15· Jun 2

Southeast Michigan, you have one more chance to see LUCAS on stage before he makes it big on Broadway! The Chelsea Area Players are doing Oklahoma in 11 days; he & other Ballet Chelsea dancers will perform the dream/dance scenes. Here he is strangling Tommy. Tix here: chelseaareaplayers.org

Dancer strangling another dancer while other dancers look on aghast, during rehearsal

David Thacher@dtha15· May 13

Reminds me of the opening page of Colin Ward's The Child in the City

Albert Parr's
article "The Child in the City: Urbanity and the Urban Scene" in which he
describes his own childhood experience in a Norwegian seaport at the turn of
the century:
"Not as a chore, but as an eagerly desired pleasure, I was fairly often entrusted with
the task of buying fish and bringing it home alone. This involved the following:
walking to the station in five to ten minutes; buying a ticket; watching train with
coal-burning steam locomotive pull in; boarding train; riding across long bridge
over shallows separating small-boat harbour (on the right) from ship's harbour (on
the left), including small naval base with torpedo boats; continuing through a
tunnel; leaving train at terminal, sometimes dawdling to look at railroad equipment;
walking by and sometimes entering fisheries museum; passing central town park
where military band played during mid-day break; strolling by central shopping and
business district, or, alternatively, passing fire station with horses at ease under
suspended harnesses, ready to go, and continuing past centuries-old town hall and
other ancient buildings; exploration of fish market and fishing fleet; selection of fish;
haggling about price; purchase and return home."
Bernard Rudofsky, who like my informants, instantly grasps the significance
of this story in his book Streets for People, points out that the important
thing is that young Albert was four years old at the time

David Thacher@dtha15· May 5

Herman Goldstein's comments on a draft of Egon Bittner's "Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton", challenging the demand to isolate a single characteristic that unifies all police work. It's an interesting bridge to Goldstein's own, more eclectic analysis, in Policing a Free Society.

As to the overall thrust of your analysis, I, for one, appreciate your effort to come up with a singular characteristic that is descriptive of all that the police do and that provides the unifying theme for the vast array of functions in which the police are involved. I must admit, however, that there are times - ln debates over the nature of the police function - that I find myself hard-pressed to explain why it is so essential

that we identify the characteristic that is common to all that the police do. Maybe I simply despair at hard work, but more recently - especially ln contact with students - I have found it easier to explain the police function as organized around four or five common characteristics - each of which shows up ln your analysis of the police role. The authority to make use of force stands out as being of special importance -as does the ability to bring about a temPorary solution a problem that is ln need of immediate attention. It seems to me that the average citizen, in calling the police, is summoning a package of characteristics and attributes (e.g., the authority and ability to use force, the ability to investigate, the capacity to deal wlth situations quickly, and the capacity to freeze situations) - one or more of which he thinks are necessary to deal with the problem he confronts.

David Thacher@dtha15· May 4

The finished product btw. Amazing show. So proud of my boy!

A jaunty, zany Mad Hatter with pink hair and a psychedelic outfit posing onstage

David Thacher@dtha15· Apr 27

Mad Hatter is ready. Get your tix! (Lucas is Mad Hatter in the Sunday show.). events.ticketleap.com/tickets/ball...

dancer with pink hair and multicolored nails

David Thacher@dtha15· Apr 15

Across the political spectrum, people in Idaho realized it was a mistake to cut ACT. The same will happen in other states that pull Medicaid funding from ACT. Families will take on more caregiving, ERs and crisis beds will be inundated, police will be called, and people will die.

“We have had four deaths that you can pinpoint directly back to these programs that were done away with,” said Senator Kevin Cook, a Republican from Idaho Falls. “Our sheriffs, our E.R.s and our courts are dealing with the same individuals over and over again.”

Sheriff Hulse said that after the services ended in December, his patrol teams were carrying out 14 involuntary psychiatric commitments per month, more than double the rate from a year ago, and crisis centers had seen a 28 percent increase in demand.

Last week, Idaho’s Legislature voted to restore the programs, allocating $10.4 million from state opioid and tobacco settlement funds. The amount will bring back peer support services, as well as the ACT program, for a year.

In Idaho, unlike other parts of the country where battles are playing out over health care, it was Republican legislators who led the charge. They cited the four deaths, but also laid out a financial argument — that stripping services for severely mentally ill people will simply reroute them toward jails or emergency hospitalizations, which cost the state far more.

“They realized, well, that was a mistake,” said Sheriff Sam Hulse of Bonneville County, a Republican. “You started seeing deaths occurring in the community. We started seeing the numbers in the crisis system rise. The very thing we told them would happen was beginning to happen.”

Idaho’s experience may serve as a harbinger for other states poised to make deep cuts in Medicaid. The major domestic policy bill President Trump signed last summer enacted the largest Medicaid cuts in history, reducing federal funding by 15 percent, or $1 trillion, over a decade.

David Thacher@dtha15· Apr 11

just left a bar that was livestreaming the artemis splashdown

photo of a bar, with tv on the orion capsule floating in the ocean and the list of beers next to it

David Thacher@dtha15· Apr 2

In more recent news here is Chell last week on twitter explaining his "standing order" to go easy on reckless drivers who listen to right-wing radio

John Chell tweet: Emily let me clue you into something that has been a standing order for decades - No Doctors, Nurses, teachers and other city agencies. Since I was the Chief of Dept -I altered this to add , Any friend of
@sidrosenberg19
was a friend of ours - free pass for Sid’s friends. I did this because I could. That’s just the way it is my precious snowflake.
11:41 AM · Mar 25, 2026

David Thacher@dtha15· Mar 18

My nephew goes to Northern Michigan University, in Marquette, where they got 36" of snow in 48 hours (on top of God knows how much snow was already on the ground).

photo of a yield sign 2/3 buried in snow

David Thacher@dtha15· Feb 22

Another is the mockery of due process in many commitment proceedings and appeals. Often judges and hearing officers simply defer to a psychiatrist who may have just met you and spent less than an hour examining you.

• The judicial process itself raises substantial procedural justice concerns. A qualitative study of 13 NYC judges and 20 attorneys (Player 2015) found that judges overwhelmingly defer to the single evaluating psychiatrist, apply the evidence standard loosely, and rarely credit testimony from the individual subject to the order. Defense attorneys reported that their clients’ testimony often “means nothing” in practice and that psychiatric evaluations are typically 15–60 minutes conducted by clinicians with no prior treatment relationship.

David Thacher@dtha15· Feb 22

One especially absurd part of many mental health systems is that voluntary clients often cannot get access to the extensive services and provider accountability that involuntary patients can. To get the help you want and need, you have to sign away your rights as part of the bargain.

• Confounding of court orders with enhanced services. AOT enrollment typically comes with priority access to assertive community treatment (ACT) or intensive case management, linkage to SSI/SSDI and other social welfare benefits and sometimes guaranteed access to supportive housing. When hospitalizations or arrests decrease after someone begins receiving ACT and/or supported housing, attributing that improvement to the court order rather than the services is not justified.

• Provider accountability confound. AOT creates mandated accountability for providers to deliver services. This monitoring and accountability effect may itself drive improved service delivery, independent of the legal coercion experienced by the individual.

David Thacher@dtha15· Feb 9

This is one big problem with the current push for involuntary removal: It's using mental health law & acute care facilities for purposes they aren't designed for. Psych ERs & inpatient facilities have no special role keeping homeless people warm. Why isn't narrower/more specific authority available?

David Thacher@dtha15· Jan 19

If law enforcement fails to monitor/record its own actions (and refuses to submit sworn statements) the courts aren't going to take their claims seriously. (from the Minneapolis case yesterday: law.justia.com/cases/federa...)

As to substance, Director Easterwood’s declaration offers a partial counter-factual narrative of the events leading up to the arrests of Tincher and Noor (id. ¶¶ 24, 27), and a more generalized discussion of the December 9, 2025 encounter between protesters and ICE officers during which Crenshaw was sprayed with a chemical irritant (id. ¶ 25).19 As described more fully below, the Court concludes that Easterwood’s accounts of what occurred with respect to Plaintiffs Tincher, Noor, and Crenshaw are entitled to considerably less weight than Plaintiffs’ declarations.

Moreover, Defendants’ supplementation of the record does not cure the imbalance. Following the motion hearing, the Court instructed the parties to supplement the record with any video evidence in their possession. Defendants asserted that they were unable to locate relevant video evidence as to the claims of Plaintiffs Tincher, Lee, Biestman, and Webb, but submitted videos relevant to Plaintiffs Noor and Crenshaw’s claims. However, after close review, the Court concludes that the supplementary videos do not provide meaningful evidentiary support for Defendants’ position regarding the incidents involving either Noor or Crenshaw.

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 16

Here's the arrests-by-city table. I'm not sure where I got 86% (this thread was a while ago...). This shows that in Houston the experimental group had ~77% fewer arrests than the control group. In Tucson especially, the main question is why the control group made such an insanely high # of arrests

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 16

Here were Cody's responses. I appreciated his thoughtful engagement. I just don't think such huge effects (86% reduction in arrests in Houston) could plausibly be produced by PJ (eg that PJ officers avoid escalating a situation to the point where arrest seems necessary). These are short run effects.

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 16

Another possibility is failed randomization. The demographics of the PJ versus comparison group are pretty different (e.g. far more female and Hispanic officers in the PJ group). The diffs aren’t statistically significant, but there were only 14 officers per group. Who knows.

table S8 from the study linked in the second post

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 16

The training didn’t seem to encourage officers to make fewer arrest. The word “arrest” hardly appears in the training materials. Here is one of the few slides where it does:

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 16

By far the biggest diff between the PJ & comparison groups was the *dramatically* lower number of arrests in the PJ group. That matters b/c PJ’s central claim is that people care more about process than outcomes--they will defer to the police even if they don't get what they want

table S19 from the study linked in second post in this thread

David Thacher@dtha15· Dec 11

I'm like a proud father link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The normative case study has been proposed as one approach to support navigation of public values [48, and in education, 49]. These are case studies that aim to outline real situations and the values underpinning choices that might be made, through an assessment of the normative features of those cases. As Thacher [48] outlines, these cases can draw attention to thick ethical concepts, such as ‘courage’ or perhaps more salient in the case of AI, ‘creepy’. What distinguishes thick ethical concepts like creepiness, is that they are both descriptive (they describe an ethical standard, perhaps of privacy and autonomy in this case), and evaluative (they ascribe a particular judgement in their application). When we say a technology is creepy, we are doing more than just describing the applicable ethical-legal principles of privacy or autonomy, we are also making a particular kind of evaluative judgement regarding the technology. The normative case study is intended to describe cases as a way to bring into focus the ways they are imbued with values, and in this way to help us probe, navigate, and perhaps change these values.

David Thacher@dtha15· Nov 28

snail robber, snail bystander, snail sheriff, all right next to each other; bystander says, "He's long gone, sheriff--you'll never catch him."

David Thacher@dtha15· Nov 21

Here's one reference, from Cyrus Karraker, The Seventeenth-Century Sheriff

David Thacher@dtha15· Nov 16

I will say about the costumes...I was talking to my son about the lead male for Firebird...he must've been like, "omg! I got the lead in Firebird!" and then he showed up to rehearsal, and they handed him these white booties and a white tape measurer for his costume...how do you react to that???? 🤔

Dance Theater of Harlem Firebird dancers...the male dancer is wearing....very little....

David Thacher@dtha15· Oct 20

This is what Vance's office and Darrell Issa (R who represents nearby district) said yesterday, before shrapnel rained down on a CHP car during the artillery fire apnews.com/article/cali...

quote from AP story: "In a statement to The New York Times, a spokesperson for Vance, William Martin, said Newsom misled the public about the safety risk.

“If Gavin Newsom wants to oppose the training exercises that ensure our Armed Forces are the deadliest and most lethal fighting force in the world, then he can go right ahead,” Martin said."

"

Quote from AP story: "Republicans castigated the highway shutdown.

U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents a district east of the base, called it “a spiteful publicity stunt” by Newsom."

David Thacher@dtha15· Sep 26

this report is a few years old so maybe things have changed, but fwiw (1) they did find that CCRB cases were slower, but (2) even DAO cases took ~a year on average. Partly because the office was understaffed. Accountable policing costs money.

David Thacher@dtha15· Sep 2

Latour is PISSED today

today's NYT Spelling Bee, shows me trying to enter the word "Actant" and the game responds, "Not in word list"

David Thacher@dtha15· Aug 19

re: the connection between housing first and ACT, Tsemberis again: Paul Brodwin's ethnography of ACT does a good job showing how blurry the idea of "coercion" is in these contexts

HF consumers have access to treatment and comprehensive support
services. These are usually provided through a multidisciplinary approach,
such as Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) or an intensive casemanagement team. The teams are located off-site but are available on-call
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and provide most services
in a consumer’s natural environment, such as an apartment, workplace,

David Thacher@dtha15· Aug 19

I appreciate what they're doing here to save HUD-VASH ("Lovett said HUD-VASH 'is not Housing First' because participants are required to work with a case manager") and I hope it's a wedge for others to preserve their own programs. But this was always how HF worked; here is Tsemberis:

Quotation from Sam Tsemberis's overview of the Housing First model he pioneered: "All consumers are required to meet with the program staff at least once
each week. A typical home visit consists of a conversation about such issues
as how things are going, next steps to take, current unmet needs, as well as
an informal assessment of the consumer’s living environment and general
well-being. It is essential to keep the channels of communication between
the consumer and program staff open. Staff members offer assistance with
any domain the consumer wishes to address, from fixing a leaky faucet to
mending broken ties with family members."

David Thacher@dtha15· Aug 4

I was wondering why there were so few starfish when I went tidepooling in San Diego last month! But, I saw AN OCTOPUS!

David Thacher@dtha15· Jul 23

As Aftab suggests, the structure of liability and risk perception in this area is perverse and harmful.

David Thacher@dtha15· Jul 16

or as bittner put it