And complaining required time.
Knowledge.
Confidence.
Language.
Access.
Sometimes money.
Often courage.
People with less of those things disappeared from the dataset.
So Rebecca asked a different question.
What about encounters in which something went wrong but nobody complained?
She built a study around body-camera audits rather than complaints alone.
Randomly selected interactions.
No allegation necessary.
Just review.
The results disturbed nearly everyone.
Departments with low complaint numbers did not necessarily have fewer problematic encounters.
Some had less accessible complaint systems.
Some citizens did not know how to complain.
Some assumed nothing would happen.
Others feared retaliation.
In one county, the official complaint rate was exceptionally low and administrators had advertised that as proof of good policing.
Random review showed officers were routinely turning optional requests into commands.
Not violent.
Not usually arrestable.
But coercive.
“Can I see inside the trunk?”
“Do I have to?”
“If you want this to go easy.”
No formal complaint.
People opened trunks.
Drove home.
Thursday.
Rebecca titled her dissertation chapter:
The Absence of Complaints Is Not the Presence of Trust.
The phrase circulated.
Departments began experimenting with random interaction audits.
Officers hated them initially.
“Fishing expedition.”
“Looking for mistakes.”
“Punishing good cops.”
Some concerns were legitimate.
Poorly designed review could become gotcha supervision.
Rebecca argued for strict limits.
Random sample.
Clear standards.
Context.
No discipline for trivial technical deviations unless repeated.
Focus on patterns.
The first department to adopt the model was not Adrian’s old county.
It was hundreds of miles away.
A mid-sized city in North Carolina.
After a year, supervisors discovered something useful.
One officer had no citizen complaints.
Excellent arrest record.
High productivity.
But random review showed a repeated pattern.
He was polite to drivers who complied instantly.
Hostile to drivers who asked legal questions.
No slurs.
No obvious unlawful arrests.
Just escalating tone.
Longer stops.
More backup calls.
More “suspicious behavior” language.
Supervisors intervened early.
Coaching.
Ride-alongs.
Policy review.
The officer improved.
No scandal.
No victim needed to become famous.
When Rebecca later testified before a state commission, a senator asked:
“What inspired you to look at encounters with no complaints?”
She could have talked about data.
Research design.
Literature.
Instead she said:
“A question written by Judge Adrian Ross.”
The senator recognized the name.
“The general from Georgia?”
Rebecca hesitated.
“Yes.”
Then corrected:
“But the question only mattered because it asked us to imagine he wasn’t.”
That sentence reached Adrian’s niece through a newspaper clipping.
She smiled.
Maybe the notebook was doing what he wanted.