Bike lock agitators and the license of reasonableness
People misrepresent evidence because reasonableness is a permit
The Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at the New York Police Department went on TV this morning claiming that students at the protest at Columbia had some suspiciously “professional” gear, a huge chain and a lock.
As many online noted, the problem with this was that that lock and chain looks like a relatively ordinary bike lock and chain. In fact, as noted by Kieran Healy, it looks suspiciously like one of the locks that the university recommends:
I think we all agree that the officer’s presentation was misleading, but I want to walk through why it’s misleading, and why it matters.
It’s not about a “false claim”, it’s about misrepresented evidence
The first thing to realize is that the argument here is not really about the chain. Rather, there is a claim here being advanced for which the chain is evidence. That overarching claim is something like “Dramatic force against the protestors was justified”. For the NYPD it’s important to support this claim because the force that many witnessed seemed disproportional to a student protest.
And that’s what the commissioner is doing. We can map out the argument made by the deputy commissioner to be something like this:
Roughly, evidence (the bike lock) is connected via a series of assumptions and reasoning to the idea that the use of force was justified.
If it is something professionals use, and you can accept that professional agitators may be dangerous, and that non-students may not have the same free speech rights on campus, then you can maybe accept the police action was justified. And maybe those assumptions in the warrant are not comfortable assumptions for you, but to most Americans they would be, which is why the guy is on TV with a bike lock.
So first things first — structurally, the argument is effective.
The problem is that the backing provided doesn’t support the grounds here.1 We can accept the testimony that it was found at the protest, but in this case we can look at the documentation – the lock itself – and see that it is not evidence of the grounds. As Healy and others demonstrate, not only is this not professional riot gear, but it is exactly the sort of thing that students would have. With our analysis of the lock swapped for the deputy commissioner’s, it seems to be potential evidence of the opposite point:
One way to express how misleading the original presentation on Morning Joe was is that when the full context of the evidence became known it didn’t not merely reduce the strength of the evidence, it (at least moderately) reversed it. The evidence is actually somewhat supportive of the counter-argument.
Again, maybe you disagree with parts of the argument here. May your “propositional attitude” towards the claim is moderated. Students could be dangerous. Free speech rights are bounded even for students. And so on.
Additionally, just because one piece of evidence is faulty doesn't mean the overarching claim is wrong. There may be other evidence of professional agitation. When we look at argument we don’t evaluate the truth directly — we evaluate the argument provided. We can’t say from this what level of influence agitators might have on these protests.2 We can say that you can’t get there with this evidence.
It’s clear that what we have here on TV is misrepresented evidence, and when the evidence is correctly represented it is – at best – no evidence at all. And if we want to collectively get smarter about what’s going on, that sort of looseness with evidence is not going to help.
Misinformation is impactful because reasonableness is a license
This brings me to my last point. I see many people conceptualizing misinformation’s impact as people having wrong ideas. In at least one telling, it is “viral wrong belief”, e.g. one person believes that these bike locks are professional riot gear, convinces others, and so on. People often counter that those spreading misinformation, such as the NYPD here or their supporters, are not convinced by counterevidence. This in turn is often presented as part of the “lol nothing matters” school of thought.
This loses track of how misinformation has an impact on the public sphere. There’s a reason why this police administrator is on TV with a bike lock, and it’s the same reason Guiliani was on TV showing various misrepresented video evidence in 2020.
He is on TV, after all, because it matters. In order to continue to take the sorts of police actions they want to take, it’s important that those actions are made to seem reasonable just as if one wishes to overturn an election, it is important to make the idea that the election was stolen reasonable. Likewise, the students and others look to make their actions reasonable, so they can maintain some level of public support. Reasonableness must be maintained, which is why anyone who wants to take or encourage action forages for evidence on a daily basis and presents it to the public, whether the actions they want to portray as reasonable (or necessary) involve divestment or sending in riot police.
When people violate the norms of argument either through sloppiness or intention, one reason we call that out because reasonableness is a license, and it’s important that that license is come to honestly, and not through the misrepresentation of evidence.3
This part is a bit rhetoric-geeky, but the video here is backing for the grounds with three different components – there is testimony that the chains were found around doors, this is actually indirect testimony since I assume the deputy commissioner was not there. There is documentation of this, in this case, the physical artifact itself. And finally there is analysis – the deputy commissioner speaks as an expert, who offers an purportedly informed opinion that this is something that professionals use. (Fans of Rieke and others will note that I have split up testimony into personal accounts and expert testimony).
One thing I’ll point out here from having watched the BLM protests in 2020 unfold while living in the Portland area — I’m certain that some of these protests have outsiders as one of the escalating factors. But again, we evaluate the evidence here, and this bike lock doesn’t get us there. And it certainly doesn’t show the centrality that the NYPD is arguing for here. For that sort of claim you’d need strong evidence, and obviously, this is not that.
Since this is a fraught subject, I’ll just point out my feelings on these protests are complex. I’ll probably alienate many of my academic friends by saying I think these protests are dumb and counterproductive. That said, at many universities it has been the reaction that has thrown gasoline on the fire, and irreparably damaged trust on campuses. I could go on. In the end, my strongest reaction is at this point this spectacle that TV news is eating up and fueling is taking the focus off of Gaza and the future of this country in ways that could have profoundly negative effects for decades to come. This bike lock event is part of that spectacle, but it’s an escalating cycle involving multiple parties.