Brown Tracey - Playing by the rules: how our obsession with safety is putting us all at risk

Copyright 2014, 2016 by Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon

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Originally published as In the Interests of Safety in 2014 in England by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group. This edition issued based on the hardcover edition published in 2014 in England by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brown, Tracey. | Hanlon, Michael

Title: Playing by the rules : how our obsession with safety is putting us all at risk / Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon.

Description: Naperville, IL : Sourcebooks, Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015024448

Subjects: LCSH: Risk management. | Risk assessment. | Safety regulations. | Safety appliances.

Classification: LCC HD61 .B78 2016 | DDC 363.1--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015024448

For Zachary, Francis, Alec, and Carl.

We know its hard when your parents insist on asking
for evidence in public places.

Go back! Go back! chanted the safety sentinels from their canoe patrols along Lake Michigan. It was the summer of 2012. You have passed the safe swimming depth.

But were only up to our knees.

Yes. But we must instruct you to stay at the safe swimming depth.

But theres been a drought. The safe swimming depth is a puddle. Its only three feet deep where you are. Why cant we swim there?

Its not safe.

Why?

One of our patrol canoes might run into you.

Over the past twenty years, new rules have mushroomed for your safety and security, and they have sneaked into new parts of our lives. These rules are making life more complicated, more expensive, and more frustrating than it needs to be. If you are traveling through an airport with carry-on baggage, you will already have discarded your bottle of shampoo and abandoned your water (only to find yourself waiting in line for replacements at twice the price on the other side of security). You will have kicked yourself for leaving your good nail file in your bathroom bag, as this will now be at the bottom of a ten-gallon drum, along with discarded snow globes, bottles of aftershave, key rings, and a variety of artifacts and souvenirs whose plane-hijacking potential could never have been anticipated by their owners.

If you visited the last Summer Olympics or other major sporting event, you probably had your outside food and drinks confiscated on arrival. If you have ever tried to find out which hospital a relative has been taken to, boarded a Greyhound bus with a penknife in your backpack, taken more than two small children to a public swimming pool, or dropped by to help with reading classes at your local school, you will quite likely have discovered that, in the interests of safety and security, you cant .

Most of us, in one area of our lives or another, have encountered safety and security rules that appear to defy logic and common sense. For our own safety, we are guided out of danger that we never knew we were in. Guards are employed along the shores of American lakes to make sure that we do no more than paddle. Cyclists cant leave their bikes near government buildings in some international cities because of fears the frames might have been turned into bombs. Children have to use more complex passwords on their school intranets than the U.S. government used to defend its nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War.

This safety imperative is confounding and intimidating. It regularly silences our better judgment. Youth soccer coaches enforce rules they dont really agree with because they dont want to appear to be encouraging pedophiles. Passengers worry that if they seem less than cooperative, they will be deemed a security risk and banned from boarding their flightsand theyre probably right. Many of us dont question the increasing regulation of the Internet, for fear that to do so looks like a vote for pornography, child abuse, or fraud. Any politician or public official who suggests relaxing a safety rule courts career suicide.

We also worry that there are hidden dangers we cannot perceive. We imagine that these rules must be necessary and that someone somewhere has evidence that shows they are making us safer. However, go in search of that evidence and you will find conflicting stories about why safety rules are imposed, as well as huge disparities concerning their justification. In some cases, there is compelling evidence that the rules do indeed make us safer. For others, the evidence is contradictory, or based on a single, dubious study, or even shows that the rules put us in more danger, not less. In many cases, there is simply no evidence one way or the other. There is sometimes, though, an unwelcome alliance of official self-importance, media hysteria, and commercial exploitation, with the result that many safety rules enjoy an authority they dont deserve.

This makes us angry, which was why we decided to write this book. We first met more than a decade ago, when Michael was a newspaper science editor and Tracey was persuading scientists to speak up in public debates about research. Over the following ten years, we maintained a conversation that focused on some of the most controversial science stories in the news and the evidence behind them. Then, one day, we both attended a conference about science, health, and reason. During a lull in proceedings, we started passing a scrap of paper back and forth. On it, we competed over who had engaged in the most ridiculous argument about safety rules. At the top of Traceys list was being told she couldnt leave her son at his swimming lesson. Michael countered that he was once threatened with arrest for contemplating an unseasonal dip in one of the Great Lakes. We also discovered that we both like our hamburgers rare, something that regularly results in debates with waiters about what we are allowed to order.

Over the following year, our little competition developed into a series of phone calls and emails to get to the bottom of mysterious safety measures and then into more formal requests for evidence and investigations into their origins. We suddenly found ourselves writing a book.