June 2026
THE COMPETENCE GAP: ASSESSING THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT AND SYSTEMIC RISK IN POLICING
Lieutenant Daniel Kranz, Fanwood Police Department
The world had never seen a more confident bank robber than McArthur Wheeler, a man who rubbed lemon juice on his face as a disguise, or so he thought. On January 6, 1995, Wheeler robbed two separate banks in Pittsburgh in broad daylight without wearing a mask. When police apprehended him and showed him the surveillance footage, Wheeler was stunned, muttering that he had worn“ the juice.” He operated under the profound delusion that because lemon juice functions as invisible ink, it would render his features invisible to cameras.
How exactly did Wheeler learn about this fantastic“ trick” to evade law enforcement? His descent into criminal infamy began when he was introduced to the lemon juice theory by his accomplice, Clifton Earl Johnson. During their planning, Johnson suggested that lemon juice could act as a cloak of invisibility against cameras. This logic was rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of chemistry, specifically the way lemon juice serves as invisible ink on paper. Johnson convinced Wheeler that if the substance could hide written words from the naked eye, it could also mask a human face from the electronic sensors of a surveillance system.
Wheeler didn’ t just take Johnson at his word; he attempted to verify the claim using a Polaroid camera. After applying the juice to his face, he snapped a self-portrait. However, due to the juice stinging his eyes or a simple lapse in coordination, he failed to point the lens at himself. When the film developed into a blank image of the room behind him, he didn’ t consider that he had missed the shot. Instead, he viewed the blank photo as definitive, scientific proof that the lemon juice had successfully rendered him invisible! The fact that we are still talking about McArthur Wheeler today is proof that his plan failed; after all, you don ' t become a household name for being " The Invisible Bank Robber." It’ s a funny story, but the underlying psychology is much more serious.
This case served as the primary catalyst for social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger to investigate the inability of the unskilled to recognize their own incompetence( Dunning, 2011). It illustrates that without a baseline of knowledge; one cannot even recognize the existence of a mistake. We have all been Wheeler at some point in our lives. We hear something on a podcast, see a 10-second social media video, or talk to a relative who gives us the false confidence of knowledge on a topic. Given the right video on Instagram, one might feel they could solve the Russia-Ukraine War overnight, leading to the question: Why haven ' t politicians seen the same video? It’ s a classic case of knowing just enough to be dangerous.
This lack of metacognition, the ability to think about one’ s own thinking, is a pervasive human condition that manifests in various amateur pursuits. In the culinary world, it appears as the home cook who believes they possess the skills to run a Michelin-star restaurant based on family praise for an“ okay” lasagna, remaining unaware of the massive gaps in food safety and running a business that define professional mastery. Similarly, in the academic realm, a first-year psychology student might read a single chapter on personality disorders and begin diagnosing relatives, failing to realize that psychology is a dense thicket of nuanced research where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing( Kruger & Dunning, 1999).
These blind spots extend into leisure, finances, and technology. An armchair quarterback convinces themselves they could manage a professional football team better than a coach by viewing a simplified, two-dimensional broadcast that ignores variables like wind speed and player fatigue. In finance, a novice trader might mistake the luck of a rising market tide for personal skill, leaving them exposed when a bubble inevitably bursts( Schrand & Zechman, 2012). Furthermore, office " power users " often mistake their proficiency with software interfaces for the deep architectural knowledge required to write functional code. Most people know someone who discovered how basic Excel formulas work, only to add“ Proficient at Microsoft Excel” to their resume. In all these cases, the individual lacks enough knowledge to understand just how much they do not know. They are essentially speeding in the dark without headlights.
In popular psychology, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is often visualized as a curve mapping confidence against competence, a journey that is particularly hazardous for newly promoted law enforcement leaders.
The first stage, known as the " Peak of Mount Stupid," represents high confidence paired with very low actual knowledge. A newly promoted Lieutenant might arrive on their first day, having read a single leadership book, and immediately begin overhauling schedules while dismissing veteran concerns. They remain unaware of labor laws and morale issues they are violating, and they may overlook past practices as outdated methods of the past.
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