Speaker 1: Pushkin. What did it mean to go out on a
Speaker 1: Saturday or Friday night in nineteen ninety three in New York.
Speaker 2: It was kind of like a given.
Speaker 3: You know, you wear a fanny pack and once you
Speaker 3: are on the streets, you turn it around so it's
Speaker 3: in front of.
Speaker 2: You so you can see it.
Speaker 1: Did you really do that?
Speaker 4: Absolutely?
Speaker 5: Well?
Speaker 2: I actually I did interrupt, but I remember I just
Speaker 2: had a flash of remember keys. We all had.
Speaker 1: Keys, and I used to around with keys.
Speaker 2: So that each one. What would I have actually done
Speaker 2: if someone had attacked me? I would put my keys
Speaker 2: between my fingers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that someone atactly I was ready. Not long ago,
Speaker 1: I called up two friends so I used to hang
Speaker 1: out with when I first moved to New York City
Speaker 1: in my twenties, Peggy and Erica. Back in the nineties,
Speaker 1: we were all young and footloose and on edge. I
Speaker 1: seem to remember that at the end of every evening
Speaker 1: there was a discussion about everyone had to We all
Speaker 1: had to talk about everyone's plan for getting home. Do
Speaker 1: you remember this? And if you didn't, who did? And
Speaker 1: didn't have money for a cab? Did anyone under what
Speaker 1: circumstances would you take the subway on a Friday night after.
Speaker 2: Dinner if you were in a large group.
Speaker 1: Only if you're in a large group, a large group.
Speaker 2: And it was like a little adventure. So six people
Speaker 2: would all get on the subway late at night, and
Speaker 2: you felt like you were being adventurous.
Speaker 6: Yeah, thinking back on it, it felt very collegial.
Speaker 4: We did things as a group.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you were never left alone.
Speaker 1: The New York City of that era was one of
Speaker 1: the most dangerous big cities in America. The subway was filthy,
Speaker 1: there was graffiti everywhere. There were two thousand, two hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two murders in New York and eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: more than six a day. Were we personally at risk?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it felt like crime was all
Speaker 1: around us.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Someone would always say, Hey, don't worry, I'm walking you home.
Speaker 1: We were never allowed to walk along.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even on it right, people would walk me home
Speaker 2: just because you didn't want to be by yourself.
Speaker 1: As a won when you went on on a date,
Speaker 1: even if it was a disaster, you had to walk.
Speaker 1: You had to walk the woman home, right, which is
Speaker 1: like so insanely awkward.
Speaker 7: You're like, we were, you know, independent women but once
Speaker 7: the sun went down, you never walked alone.
Speaker 1: Let's tell about how it gets better. I just remember
Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, all of the precautions seemed
Speaker 1: to go out the window right, and it's shoe. Statistically,
Speaker 1: we know by ninety seven or ninety eight the murder
Speaker 1: rate has dropped. I remember this. I had a bedroom
Speaker 1: when I was living on that in that walk up
Speaker 1: on Bank Street. My bedroom window overlooked the fire escape,
Speaker 1: and I had previously been too scared to open my
Speaker 1: window at night, And then I started to open my
Speaker 1: window at night, so that technically someone could have walked
Speaker 1: up down up to fire escape and walked in. But
Speaker 1: I was like, it's fine, now I can sleep. My
Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part of
Speaker 1: a series introducing my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point,
Speaker 1: now available everywhere. And in this episode, I'm looking back
Speaker 1: that the question that got me started on tipping points
Speaker 1: twenty five years ago. How in the nineties did New
Speaker 1: York become one of the safest cities in America. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, I wrote an article for The New
Speaker 1: York and Mega trying to explain this puzzle. It was
Speaker 1: called The Tipping Point. That article led to my first book,
Speaker 1: called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation.
Speaker 1: The success of The Tipping Point led to another book
Speaker 1: and another. I wouldn't be here today talking to you
Speaker 1: were it not for my obsession way back when about
Speaker 1: what happened to crime in New York in the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: And now I've written a sequel to that first book.
Speaker 1: Did I mention that it's at in bookstores everywhere. It's
Speaker 1: called Revenge of the Tipping Point. And in that spirit,
Speaker 1: I've decided to go back and conduct an audit of
Speaker 1: my conclusions from twenty five years ago, to look at
Speaker 1: my thirty something self in the eye and ask was
Speaker 1: I right Back in the nineties. I used to go
Speaker 1: to New York University's library all the time to look
Speaker 1: for ideas, bopes. A big squat redstone building on Washington
Speaker 1: Square in Greenwich Village. This was before Google, so I
Speaker 1: was my own search engine. I'd wander the stacks for hours,
Speaker 1: and one day I was on the fifth floor in
Speaker 1: the HM one Dot, a sixth aisle and I started
Speaker 1: leafing through the bank issues of the American Journal of
Speaker 1: Sociology from nineteen ninety one, and I found a paper
Speaker 1: written by a professor named Jonathan Crane entitled the Epidemic
Speaker 1: Theory of Ghettos and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and
Speaker 1: teenage Childbearing. A choice of words no one would use today.
Speaker 1: This is how it started. The word epidemic is commonly
Speaker 1: used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos.
Speaker 1: The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics,
Speaker 1: epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenaged childbearing. The
Speaker 1: term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out
Speaker 1: to be real remarkably apt. The word epidemic to Crane
Speaker 1: wasn't a metaphor, It was a literal description. His point
Speaker 1: was that if you look closely at how those problems spread,
Speaker 1: how and why they go up and down, it looks
Speaker 1: exactly like the way viruses spread, same rules, same patterns.
Speaker 1: And when I read that first paragraph, I thought, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is exactly what happened in New York City.
Speaker 1: We had a real, live epidemic of crime. And what
Speaker 1: is the hallmark of an epidemic, a tipping point, the
Speaker 1: moment when everything changes all at once. That moment when
Speaker 1: I left my window open because I suddenly felt safe
Speaker 1: was our tipping point, and so front and center in
Speaker 1: my first book was a description of what I saw
Speaker 1: as the reason why New York's epidemic suddenly tipped the
Speaker 1: police department's commitment to broken windows. Policing broken windows was
Speaker 1: a theory that small rhymes or invitations for large crimes.
Speaker 1: That if you let people get away with little things,
Speaker 1: then you were signaling that it was okay to cross
Speaker 1: the line into bigger things, like serious acts of violence.
Speaker 1: And so what do you do? You don't let people
Speaker 1: get away with the little things. He was taking the
Speaker 1: concept of an epidemic and applying it to crime. Lawlessness
Speaker 1: wasn't random. It was something you could catch from those
Speaker 1: around you, the same way you can catch a cold
Speaker 1: from a warm, stuffy room full of four year olds.
Speaker 8: If somebody urinates in public, the person is telling you
Speaker 8: I got a big problem. This is what broken windows
Speaker 8: theory is all about.
Speaker 1: The biggest champion of this idea was Rudy Giulioni, the
Speaker 1: mayor of New York City at the time. Here he
Speaker 1: is at a press conference in the mid nineties, a
Speaker 1: few years into the Broken Windows experiment, where in a
Speaker 1: span of just a minute and a half he references
Speaker 1: public urination eight times.
Speaker 8: I mean, if some guy is urinated in public, we
Speaker 8: got a problem. Now you can do one of two things.
Speaker 8: You can ignore the problem and say, gee, I'm such
Speaker 8: a big, fuzzy headed liberal that I'm going to walk
Speaker 8: away from it, and you're gonna make believe they have
Speaker 8: no problem. That's New York City in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 8: That's New York City with two thousand murders. That's New
Speaker 8: York City with five hundred thousand crimes. You have to
Speaker 8: pay attention to people urinating on the streets, and you
Speaker 8: have to get people to stop urinating on the streets.
Speaker 8: That's moving towards civilization, that's moving toward decency. That's what
Speaker 8: I mean by a decent society that people want to
Speaker 8: invest in, people want their children to live in. You've
Speaker 8: got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street.
Speaker 8: It may be a minor thing, it may be a
Speaker 8: serious thing, but you cannot ignore it. You have to
Speaker 8: deal with it. It is against the law to urinate
Speaker 8: in public.
Speaker 1: Giuliani was elected in nineteen ninety three and re elected
Speaker 1: in ninety seven by a huge margin. Under his watch,
Speaker 1: the city was revitalized. People who had fled for the
Speaker 1: suburbs came back. Huge parts of Brooklyn were gentrified. Central
Speaker 1: Park was cleaned up. I cannot tell you how gratifying
Speaker 1: it was to be a New Yorker in those years
Speaker 1: and finally get a mayor who said enough, you can't
Speaker 1: jump subway turnstiles and smoke dope on the corner and
Speaker 1: harassed pedestrians. But Giuliani wasn't just making an argument for civility,
Speaker 1: that it was more pleasant to live in a city
Speaker 1: where the streets were clean and the police were alert
Speaker 1: to every sign of disorder. He was making a more
Speaker 1: extravagant claim that arresting the guy urinating on the street
Speaker 1: was the reason why the murder rate dropped, and I
Speaker 1: believed him. Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish a book.
Speaker 7: Whenever it happens, huge things occur.
Speaker 1: About ten years ago, the journalist John Ronson did a
Speaker 1: retrospect dive on the tipping Point for a British program
Speaker 1: called The Culture Show, and he talked to a public
Speaker 1: defender in The Bronx named Kate Rubin No.
Speaker 6: I would go around and I would talk to people
Speaker 6: in New York City, and the liberal people progressive people
Speaker 6: would say, oh, well, you know, we've had this miracle
Speaker 6: in New York and some people would say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: Malcolm Gladwell's idea broken windows.
Speaker 1: I didn't watch any of this at the time, even
Speaker 1: though Ronson interviewed me for the segment too. But I
Speaker 1: found it while working on this episode, and it made
Speaker 1: me realize the claims I made in The Tipping Point
Speaker 1: had far more reach than I'd ever imagined.
Speaker 6: Some people knew that it wasn't his idea, but that
Speaker 6: he had popularized it. They'd read about it in The
Speaker 6: New Yorker and his book, The Tipping Point. I would
Speaker 6: never try to speak to what his intent was, but
Speaker 6: I think the impact that.
Speaker 2: He had was to serve as.
Speaker 6: Basically a marketing force for this idea. He truly popularized.
Speaker 1: It, so once again was right. On the afternoon of
Speaker 1: February twenty seventh, two thousand and eight, a young man
Speaker 1: named David Floyd left his apartment on Beach Avenue in
Speaker 1: the Bronx. As he walked down the pathway next to
Speaker 1: his building. He ran into the tenant to live downstairs,
Speaker 1: who said he'd locked himself out of his apartment.
Speaker 9: I was leaving my apartment to actually go to school.
Speaker 9: Heading to school, I had my book bag on, you know,
Speaker 9: everything that normal students do as they're going to school.
Speaker 1: Missus Floyd, speaking in an interview with the Civil Rights Group,
Speaker 1: raced forward. The landlord was Floyd's godmother, so Floyd went
Speaker 1: back inside to her apartment to get a ring of keys,
Speaker 1: and as he and the tenant tried to figure out
Speaker 1: which key worked in the door, three plane clothes police
Speaker 1: officers suddenly emerged. There have been reports of burglars in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, and here were two young men trying to
Speaker 1: get into a locked up department.
Speaker 9: We were stopped. We were first. We were of course
Speaker 9: told to put our hands up to stay where we were.
Speaker 1: This was how the police put broken windows into practice.
Speaker 1: Don't let the little things pass you by. Be aggressive.
Speaker 1: Check for weapons, drugs. Maybe you find them, maybe you don't.
Speaker 1: But if you do that enough times, then young men
Speaker 1: leave their guns and drugs at home. Floyd had actually
Speaker 1: been stopped the previous April while walking down the street,
Speaker 1: followed by three officers in a van who jumped out
Speaker 1: and confronted him.
Speaker 9: And again, it's just the whole experience. It's humiliating, it's embarrassing,
Speaker 9: and really, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of
Speaker 9: person you are, how tough you are, whatever, it's a
Speaker 9: scary thing because you don't know what is going to
Speaker 9: happen with your life. You don't know what's going to
Speaker 9: happen with your freedom.
Speaker 1: Floyd becomes the face of a massive class action lawsuit
Speaker 1: Floyd the City of New York, challenging the NYPDS policy
Speaker 1: of stop and frisk, and in twenty thirteen, Floyd wins.
Speaker 1: In a shocking ruling, a federal judge said the NYPD's
Speaker 1: use of stopping frisk was unconstitutional, effectively ending the broken
Speaker 1: windows era in New York City policing. Yes, it still
Speaker 1: happens today, but not in the way that they did
Speaker 1: ten years ago, not even remotely close. It's no exaggeration
Speaker 1: to say that this was one of the most consequential
Speaker 1: court cases in the city's history.
Speaker 4: A lot of people at the time, and I think,
Speaker 4: you know, not without reason, said wow, this is going
Speaker 4: to compromise public safety.
Speaker 1: This is Aaron Chelfin, who's part of a group of
Speaker 1: criminologists who have devoted themselves to understanding what exactly happened
Speaker 1: in New York.
Speaker 4: The police are no longer going to be able to
Speaker 4: make a lot of stops and really show people that
Speaker 4: they were being proactive, so that might embolden more gun carrying,
Speaker 4: more violence, more homicide.
Speaker 1: When Cholfin says that at the time, a lot of
Speaker 1: people thought ending stop and frisk was going to lead
Speaker 1: to crime going back up, he means everyone, city government,
Speaker 1: the police force, pundits of every variety. That's what I
Speaker 1: thought too. What everyone was saying in effect was this, Yes,
Speaker 1: doing hundreds of thousands of police stops a year of
Speaker 1: young men like David Floyd, who maybe doing nothing more
Speaker 1: than helping out a friend is unfortunate, but being killed
Speaker 1: is a lot worse. And since this is what's keeping
Speaker 1: the crime rate down, we don't have a choice. That
Speaker 1: was the calculus. Even the judge in the Floyd case
Speaker 1: begins her ruling by making the same point I emphasize
Speaker 1: at the outset, as I have throughout the litigation, that
Speaker 1: this case is not about the effectiveness of stopping frisk
Speaker 1: in deterring or combating crime. This Court's mandate is solely
Speaker 1: to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness
Speaker 1: as a law enforcement tool. She goes on many police
Speaker 1: practices maybe useful for fighting crime, preventive detention or coerced confessions,
Speaker 1: for example, but because they are unconstitutional, they cannot be
Speaker 1: used no matter how effective. She's basically saying, there's a
Speaker 1: good chance that crime is going to go back up
Speaker 1: because of my ruling. But the Constitution is the constitution.
Speaker 1: Even the people who hated broken windows thought that it worked,
Speaker 1: but then the very thing that absolutely no one expected
Speaker 1: to happen happens. Crime falls.
Speaker 4: We ended stop question frisk in New York. We know
Speaker 4: that went down by ninety or ninety five percent, depending
Speaker 4: on which numbers you look at, and yet we had
Speaker 4: this incredible, incredible fifty percent to climb in homicide.
Speaker 1: In social science, a natural experiment is when the real
Speaker 1: world provides you with a clean way of measuring the
Speaker 1: truth or falsity of a given proposition. The Floyd decision
Speaker 1: was the perfect natural experiment for broken windows. All you
Speaker 1: have to do is compared before with after.
Speaker 4: The amazing thing about New York is that if you
Speaker 4: look at twenty ten, New York City had a banner
Speaker 4: year in terms of homicide.
Speaker 8: It had.
Speaker 4: It was one of the lowest homicide rates in forty
Speaker 4: years in the city's history in twenty ten, and you
Speaker 4: would have said, well, like, great progress, let's just keep
Speaker 4: it up. Let's keep up the good work. Incredibly, by
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, the year before the pandemic right, homicides went
Speaker 4: down by fifty percent in New York compared to twenty ten.
Speaker 4: Between twenty ten and twenty nineteen, New York is unique
Speaker 4: in that it had another great homicide decline at a
Speaker 4: time when homicides were really flat nationally.
Speaker 1: This is hands down one of the strangest and craziest
Speaker 1: urban transformations ever. Just to give you a sense, if
Speaker 1: New York City's crime rate in nineteen ninety had just
Speaker 1: stayed the same, didn't change for the next thirty five years,
Speaker 1: the city would have had an additional sixty two thousand homicides,
Speaker 1: most of them in all likelihood young men of color.
Speaker 1: Sixty two thousand young men currently walking around New York
Speaker 1: would be dead.
Speaker 4: And by twenty nineteen, New York is almost as safe
Speaker 4: as Paris with respect to homicide rate. It's New York
Speaker 4: is closer to Paris than it is to other US cities,
Speaker 4: even like Boston, which is another safe city. Right, it's incredible.
Speaker 1: You know how those billionaires left New York City from
Speaker 1: Miami during the pandemic, saying they couldn't deal with the
Speaker 1: taxes and the crime. Well, the violent crime rate in
Speaker 1: New York City after that second wave is half that
Speaker 1: of Miami. If you're really worried about crime, you should
Speaker 1: be selling your waterfront home in Coral Gables before someone
Speaker 1: murders you and move somewhere much safer like the Bronx.
Speaker 1: Or here's another. JD. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio,
Speaker 1: tweets this in twenty twenty one, serious question. I have
Speaker 1: to go to New York soon, and I'm trying to
Speaker 1: figure out where to stay. I've heard it's disgusting and
Speaker 1: violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season one
Speaker 1: or season four? I know, I know there's a whole
Speaker 1: cottage industry of unearthing crazy things. J. D. Vance once said,
Speaker 1: but Vance is from just outside Cincinnati. The violent crime
Speaker 1: rate in Cincinnati at the exact moment he wrote that
Speaker 1: tweet was twice the violent crime rate in New York City.
Speaker 1: Serious question, Senator. I have to go to your hometown soon,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to figure out where to stay because
Speaker 1: compared to where I come from, it's disgusting and violent there.
Speaker 1: But I digress back to Chalfin and the question at hand.
Speaker 4: And so you know, it does give you the sense
Speaker 4: that making loss and loss of these stops was not
Speaker 4: the key ingredient.
Speaker 1: It does, doesn't it. We conducted a natural experiment and
Speaker 1: the results are in. It wasn't broken windows, it wasn't
Speaker 1: stop and frisk.
Speaker 5: My administration will issue hundreds of millions of dollars in
Speaker 5: federal grants to reward cities and towns and return to
Speaker 5: proven crime fighting methods, including stop and frisk and broken
Speaker 5: windows policing. We did that with Rudy Giuliani was so successful.
Speaker 1: At three o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I lie awake
Speaker 1: and I think, oh God, did he read The Tipping
Speaker 1: Point too. I don't reread any of my books once
Speaker 1: I've written them, particularly ones from twenty five years ago,
Speaker 1: like the Tipping Point. I mean, why would I do?
Speaker 1: I want to wear the clothes I wore in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, No, I don't do I even want
Speaker 1: to see pictures of myself from two thousand, not particularly so.
Speaker 1: I didn't reread The Tipping Point until I made the
Speaker 1: decision last year to revisit my first book on its
Speaker 1: silver anniversary. There were parts that I love. It felt
Speaker 1: like rediscovering some lost friend, Hush Puppies, Six Degrees of
Speaker 1: Lois Weisberg, Paul Revere's Ride. There are also parts that
Speaker 1: mystified me. Did I really write an entire chapter on
Speaker 1: the children's TV show Blues Clues? But the crime chapter
Speaker 1: was the only place where I said I would write
Speaker 1: that so differently today Today, if I were rewriting, I'd
Speaker 1: begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named
Speaker 1: Andrew Papachristos.
Speaker 7: People talk about gun violence as an epidemic or disease,
Speaker 7: and it is in many fronts, but really I wanted
Speaker 7: to take it seriously, like, ohay, if it's an epidemic,
Speaker 7: is it a bloodborne pathogen or is it an airborne pathogen?
Speaker 7: And actually, thank God, it's not an airborne pathogen.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: You don't catch a bullet like you catch a cold.
Speaker 7: It's actually transmitted through behaviors. And I just try to
Speaker 7: figure out ways that science might kind of boost or
Speaker 7: amplify those insights.
Speaker 1: Papa Cristos took every single arrest over more than six
Speaker 1: years in Chicago, so hundreds of thousands of arrests, and
Speaker 1: he made something called a network map.
Speaker 7: All right, first you see it happens in groups, and
Speaker 7: then like, okay, what about individuals? All right, well does
Speaker 7: it concentrate? What about exposure? What about time?
Speaker 1: So if Andy and Malcolm are arrested together for shooting someone,
Speaker 1: then Andy and Malcolm are two dots on the map,
Speaker 1: connected by a line. And if Malcolm then is arrested
Speaker 1: with Joe as a line connecting Malcolm to Joe, Malcolm
Speaker 1: and Joe are one degree, or, to use Papa Cristos's
Speaker 1: favorite term, one handshake apart, Joe and Andy two handshakes apart.
Speaker 1: You do that for years and years of Chicago arrest data,
Speaker 1: and you get a truly enormous map.
Speaker 7: You have this very very large network, right, and then
Speaker 7: what you do is you sprinkle in the victimizations, which
Speaker 7: come from a separate source of data, right. They come
Speaker 7: from homicide records, they come from shooting files, police public health.
Speaker 1: He took the names of everyone who had been shot
Speaker 1: over the same period, and look to see how many
Speaker 1: of those names were in his network map. And what
Speaker 1: he found was the victims were already there, and they
Speaker 1: were clustered together.
Speaker 7: You just matched the data, and every place where there's
Speaker 7: a shooting, the victims bright red, for example. And then
Speaker 7: what you see is that these bright red dots all
Speaker 7: lingered together. I'll clump together, right like your kid took
Speaker 7: a handful of Christmas ornaments and like threw to the tree,
Speaker 7: and they're all on one spot.
Speaker 1: It looks just like the social maps epidemil just used
Speaker 1: to construct for the spread of HIV in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: If someone in your social circle got infected with HIV,
Speaker 1: then your chances of becoming infected with HIV increased. In
Speaker 1: Papa Cristo's maps, the risk of contagion extended three degrees.
Speaker 1: If Malcolm gets shot, Andy is at risk, and so
Speaker 1: is Joe, and so are any people Andy and Joe
Speaker 1: were arrested with.
Speaker 7: Like other social networks, the impact of these shootings tends
Speaker 7: to go about two or three handshakes and then it
Speaker 7: starts to kind of drop off. So these clusters are
Speaker 7: fairly dense, and they stick around.
Speaker 1: So hold on, this is this is crucial. So I've
Speaker 1: got my I've got my social network map, and I'm overlaying.
Speaker 1: I'm sticking in all of the shootings into the and
Speaker 1: I've noticed that the shootings are clustering. So we have
Speaker 1: this triangle of Joe, Andy, Malcolm, and Malcolm gets shot.
Speaker 1: And so once we observe that Malcolm gets shot, what
Speaker 1: you're saying is that the likelihood of someone in my
Speaker 1: someone connected to me also gets shot.
Speaker 7: Increases skyrockets absolutely.
Speaker 1: And you're saying that the connection the risk is skyrocketing.
Speaker 1: Within between one and three.
Speaker 7: Degrees, that's the where risk is the highest. Yeah, once
Speaker 7: you get past kind of three degrees, it really levels.
Speaker 7: It goes down and levels.
Speaker 1: When do you observe this? Did this surprise you?
Speaker 4: How concentrated it was surprised me.
Speaker 7: You know, when you look at these numbers, even when
Speaker 7: you look at the larger co funding network, you're talking
Speaker 7: about five to six percent of a neighborhood's population. But
Speaker 7: when you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's
Speaker 7: less than it's less than a percent. You're talking about,
Speaker 7: you know, on the West Side of Chicago, one of
Speaker 7: the neighborhoods we were working, it's about fifty thousand people.
Speaker 7: You're talking about four hundred individuals.
Speaker 1: Four hundred individuals on the entire West Side of Chicago.
Speaker 1: The crime problem on the West Side of Chicago isn't
Speaker 1: being driven by everyone. It's being driven by a tiny
Speaker 1: subset of people within a dense social network where someone
Speaker 1: close to them has already been a victim of gun violence.
Speaker 1: The West Side of Chicago is not a dangerous place.
Speaker 1: Highly specific networks of people within the West Side of
Speaker 1: Chicago are dangerous places. The same pattern holds true in
Speaker 1: New York City. Why wasn't stop and frisk an effective
Speaker 1: strategy in the end, because it assumed that violent crime
Speaker 1: was something embedded within an entire community, and it's not.
Speaker 1: Even the NYPD's own numbers said so. In one eight
Speaker 1: year span, New York City police officers frisked two point
Speaker 1: three million people and found weapons in one point five
Speaker 1: percent of those stops. They were looking for needles in haystacks.
Speaker 1: Why would that be an effective crime fighting strategy. Aaron Chaufin,
Speaker 1: the criminologist, says that one of the main reasons crime
Speaker 1: fell so dramatically in New York after Stop and Frisk ended,
Speaker 1: was that the NYPD took those lessons to heart. They
Speaker 1: switched from the kind of indiscriminate policing found in Stop
Speaker 1: and Frisk to precision policing. They started focusing on hotspots,
Speaker 1: deploying police to the specific places where crime was the worst.
Speaker 4: More targeted investigations, more thinking about who are the shooters,
Speaker 4: who are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving
Speaker 4: the shootings, What can we do to identify those people
Speaker 4: incapacitate those people. So when we think about good policing,
Speaker 4: and we think in particular about homicide, it's a very
Speaker 4: small number of people who drive the problem. It's a
Speaker 4: couple thousand people in a city of eight and a
Speaker 4: half million, And you know, making loss of low level rests,
Speaker 4: maybe you'll find some more guns and things like that,
Speaker 4: but it's probably a much better use of resources to focus, focus, focus,
Speaker 4: focus on the drivers of violence. And when you do that.
Speaker 4: In my paper, we find that when there's a major
Speaker 4: gang takedown around a public housing development, in the next
Speaker 4: eighteen months, homicides are down by about thirty percent.
Speaker 1: Thirty percent. Fighting an epidemic means focusing on the few,
Speaker 1: not the many, and by the way, who made this
Speaker 1: argument as loudly as anyone I did. In the Tipping Point,
Speaker 1: I called it the law the Few, and it took
Speaker 1: up a third of the book. When it comes to epidemics,
Speaker 1: I wrote, a tiny percentage of people do the majority
Speaker 1: of the work. I talked about how this principle plays
Speaker 1: out in outbreaks of infectious disease, in the spread of
Speaker 1: fashion trends in word of mouth. I described in great
Speaker 1: detail the kinds of people who make those special few,
Speaker 1: on and on. But then when it came to crime,
Speaker 1: I suddenly forgot all about the law of the few
Speaker 1: and endorsed an idea that's that a really good way
Speaker 1: to control an epidemic was to stop and frisk one
Speaker 1: hundred young men in the hopes of finding a gun
Speaker 1: on one of them. I was wrong. I'm sorry, So.
Speaker 9: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I Feelfred asked us any questions. There's one more thing
Speaker 1: I would do if I were rewriting the crime chapter.
Speaker 1: I would talk about Philadelphia and about a day I
Speaker 1: spent recently driving around the city with a guy named
Speaker 1: Keith Green. So where are we headed?
Speaker 3: So we're going to be driving in like the West
Speaker 3: Philadelphia area.
Speaker 1: Green works for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, a group that
Speaker 1: was founded in eighteen twenty seven and is best known
Speaker 1: for putting on the world's largest indoor flower show. And
Speaker 1: for two hours we talked about vacant lots thirty thousand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because over thirty thousand the portions in the city
Speaker 3: of the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there were blocks we drove past that had two
Speaker 1: or even three vacant lots. Every block seemed to have
Speaker 1: at least one. In the past, they were overgrown with weeds,
Speaker 1: covered in trash, home to rats and raccoons and pod
Speaker 1: And what Green's group has done is to systematically work
Speaker 1: its way through the city, cleaning up the lots, planting grass,
Speaker 1: putting up low fences.
Speaker 3: And we started seeing a dramatic change. Lots were being maintained.
Speaker 3: People starting people started using their lots.
Speaker 1: And when you see people started using the how are
Speaker 1: they used to.
Speaker 3: Well, people with kids were playing football, people would have
Speaker 3: having barbecues on the sites, horses or raising on vacant
Speaker 3: lots horses.
Speaker 1: In the history of the program, they've cleaned up seventeen
Speaker 1: thousand loots. Charles Brannis, the pioneer of the work. Let
Speaker 1: us study to see if cleaning up vacant lots lowered
Speaker 1: the homicide rate. When you fixed up a neighborhood, what
Speaker 1: happened to gun violence? It went down twenty nine percent. Now,
Speaker 1: what's the best way to describe this kind of anti
Speaker 1: crime intervention. It's broken windows only. Not broken windows as
Speaker 1: a grand metaphor, as a hysterical leap that sees a
Speaker 1: man urinating on a sidewalk and says we have no
Speaker 1: choice but to lock him up. No, broken windows has
Speaker 1: a literal call to action. You see the lot full
Speaker 1: of weeds and trash, and you pick up the garbage
Speaker 1: and mow the grass and put a fence out front.
Speaker 1: Region's history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with ben
Speaker 1: at Af Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Schakerji.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Sam Russick, Original scoring by Luis Kerra,
Speaker 1: mastering by Echo Mountain, Engineering by Sarah Bruger and Nina
Speaker 1: Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our Executive producer
Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix Always hell
Speaker 1: Hafe Gota Come, I'm Malcolm Glappa.