City of Omens by Dan Werb

Author:Dan Werb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER 9

Causation

I did not know Tijuana like Ana did, but I had a dataset that captured the knowledge of hundreds of people like her who navigated the city daily and were familiar with its sources of pleasure and death. By the spring of 2015, roughly a year and a half after I had begun working with Steffanie and her team, my analysis of police extortion among El Cuete participants was almost complete. On the one hand, I was building a model to see if being forced to pay bribes to police made people who injected drugs less likely to access addiction treatment. I was also mapping all the places where the study’s participants said they interacted with police. The goal was to spot some kind of pattern across the city’s colonias that could help explain why the level of uptake of methadone treatment among people who most needed it—heroin-dependent injectors in the city—was so pitifully low. I had quadruple-checked my analysis to make sure that I didn’t repeat the statistical errors that Tom had flagged in my Vancouver research during my first visit to San Diego. Nevertheless, I was having trouble interpreting the results until I met Ana.

It wasn’t so much her description of how endemic police corruption had become across Tijuana. That had been a constant refrain from Susi, Rosa, and Patty, and it was repeated hundreds of times in the rows of El Cuete participant data that had become a flashing fixture on my laptop screen. Instead, it was that Ana understood the police and the narcos to be largely indistinguishable. That’s not to say that there weren’t good officers; just that despite the attempts to rout the grifters from the rank and file, there were still grinning duos of beat cops looking to fill their personal quota by any means necessary. And like the cartels, benefiting from the misery of people who turned to drugs that they supplied, the police in the Zona relied on the underclass of injectors to both justify their presence and keep the bribes flowing.

Like a good epidemiologist, I had been seeking causal pathways in my model of bribery and addiction treatment access. And like any scientist, I had brought my own biases with me as I approached its construction. It would be so elegant if I could show that the police willfully targeted Tijuana’s methadone clinics for cash, and that was—more than anything else—what I was hoping my analyses would reveal. There were signs, though, that it probably wasn’t that simple: Susi was adamant that while cops hunted down people in picaderos, she hadn’t seen that happen outside the methadone clinics. And yet, I was committed to the idea that the police were engaged in a conspiracy of sorts and thought that if I squinted at the data hard enough I would find it.

*

A certain uneasiness can bubble up when scientists present as overly passionate advocates for their chosen cause. Epidemiologists who have been working in the trenches with marginalized populations for

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