Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct covers the neighborhood surrounding Greenwood Cemetery, from Prospect Expressway in the north to Bay Ridge in the south. In the narrow strip between the western perimeter of the cemetery and the waterfront, a series of streets run downhill toward the water. A crumbling, elevated freeway meanders down the middle. Today, it is a gentrifying neighborhood. Thirty years ago, when David Weisburd spent a year walking up and down those streets, it was not.

  “This was a different world,” Weisburd remembers. “This was a scary place. You’d go into an apartment building, there’d be refrigerators in the hall, garbage would be in the halls. Apartment buildings would have backyards five feet deep in garbage. There were people on the streets who would scare the hell out of you.”

  Weisburd was a criminologist by training. He had done his dissertation at Yale University on violent behavior among settlers in the West Bank in Israel. He was born in Brooklyn. After leaving Yale, he got a job working on a research project back in his old borough.

  The study was based out of the precinct house on Fourth Avenue, a squat, modernist box that looked as if it were designed to repel an invading army. There were nine officers involved, each assigned to a beat of ten to thirty blocks. “Their job was to walk around those beat areas and to interact with the public, and to develop ways of doing something about the problems,” Weisburd said. He was the observer and note-taker, responsible for writing up what was learned. Four days a week, for a year, he tagged along. “I would always wear a suit and tie, and I had a police identification card. People in the street thought I was the detective and I would say, ‘Oh no.’”

  He had been studying crime in a library. Now he was at ground level, walking side by side with beat cops. And right from the beginning, something struck him as odd. Common sense had always held that crime was connected to certain neighborhoods. Where there were problems such as poverty, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was crime: The broad conditions of economic and social disadvantage bred communities of lawlessness and disorder.

  In Los Angeles, that neighborhood was South Central. In Paris, it was the outer suburbs. In London, places like Brixton. Weisburd was in New York’s version of one of those neighborhoods—only the neighborhood wasn’t at all what he had imagined: “What I found was, quite quickly, that after we got to know the area, we spent all our time on one or two streets,” he says. “It was the bad neighborhood of town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime.”

  After a while it seemed almost pointless to walk every street in his patrol area, since on most of them nothing ever happened. He didn’t understand it. Criminals were people who operated outside social constraint. They were driven by their own dark impulses: mental illness, greed, despair, anger. Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.”

  Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. The kinds of social conditions that Draculas feed on were everywhere. But the Draculas weren’t everywhere. They were only on particular streets. And by “streets” Weisburd meant a single block—a street segment. You could have one street segment with lots of crime and the next, literally across an intersection, was fine. It was that specific. Didn’t criminals have legs? Cars? Subway tokens?

  “So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology,” Weisburd said. “Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.”

  5.

  When he finished his stint in Brooklyn, Weisburd decided to team up with Larry Sherman, another young criminologist. Sherman had been thinking along these lines as well. “I was inspired, at the time, by the AIDS map of the country,” Sherman remembers, “which showed that fifty census tracks out of fifty thousand had over half of the AIDS cases in the United States.” AIDS didn’t look to him like a contagious disease roaming wildly and randomly across the land. It looked to him like an interaction between certain kinds of people and certain very specific places, an epidemic with its own internal logic.

  Gathering the kind of data necessary to study the geographical component of crime wasn’t easy. Crime had always been reported by precinct—by the general geographical area where it occurred. But Weisburd had just walked the 72nd Precinct, and he knew an area that nonspecific wouldn’t help them. They needed addresses. Luckily, Sherman knew the police chief in Minneapolis, who was willing to help. “We chose Minneapolis because how could you find someone crazy enough to allow us to do what we wanted to do?” Weisburd said with a laugh.

  Sherman crunched the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls. Weisburd and his graduate students at Rutgers University then put a map of Minneapolis on the wall, and pasted little strips of paper wherever they found there had been a crime. The unbelievable finding was now impossible to dismiss. From his days walking the 72nd, Weisburd had expected some concentration of crime, but not this. “When Larry and I were talking about it, it was like, ‘Oh my God!’”

  In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

  6.

  So: Sylvia Plath. In her thinly disguised autobiography, The Bell Jar, Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, describes her descent into madness. And she thinks about suicide precisely as Ronald Clarke (who made the link between town gas and suicide) suggests she would. She is incredibly sensitive to the question of how she’ll take her own life. “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Esther asks Cal, a young man she’s lying next to on a beach.

  Cal seemed pleased. “I’ve often thought of that. I’d blow my brains out with a gun.” I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.

  That very morning Esther had tried to hang herself with the silk cord of her mother’s bathrobe, and it hadn’t worked. “But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.” She and Cal swim for the shore. She decides to try to drown herself—and dives for the bottom of the sea.

  I dived and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.

  The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy.

  I knew when I was beaten.

  I turned back.

  Plath’s protagonist
wasn’t looking to kill herself. She was looking for a way to kill herself. And not just any method would do. That’s the point of coupling: behaviors are specific. She needed to find a method that fit. And on that cold February night, the method that fit for Sylvia Plath happened to be right there in her kitchen.

  If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.

  To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

  This is “A Birthday Present,” written in September 1962, at the beginning of Plath’s anguished final months in London:

  But my god, the clouds are like cotton.

  Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

  Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,

  Filling my veins with invisibles…

  Take a look at the following graph showing suicide rates from 1958 to 1982 for British women ages twenty-five to forty-four. (Plath was thirty when she died.)

  In the early 1960s, when Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000—driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977, when the natural-gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for women of that age was roughly half that. Plath was really unlucky. Had she come along ten years later, there would have been no clouds like “carbon monoxide” for her to “sweetly, sweetly…breathe in.”

  7.

  In the fall of 1958, two years after their wedding, Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, moved to Boston. The poetry that would make her famous was still several years away. Plath worked as a receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. In the evenings, she took a writing seminar at Boston University. There she met another young poet by the name of Anne Sexton. Sexton was four years older than Plath—glamorous, charismatic, and strikingly beautiful. She would later win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die, establishing her reputation as one of the most formidable contemporary American poets. Plath and Sexton became friends. They would linger after class, then go out for drinks with another young poet, George Starbuck.

  “We would pile into the front seat of my old Ford, and I would drive quickly through the traffic to, or near, the Ritz,” Sexton recalled, in an essay written after Plath’s death:

  I would park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE telling them gaily, “It’s okay, because we are only going to get loaded!” Off we’d go, each on George’s arm, into the Ritz and drink three or four or two martinis.

  Sexton and Plath were both young, preternaturally gifted, and obsessed with death:

  Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail, and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with a burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb.

  Sexton came from a family with a history of mental illness. She suffered from wild mood swings, anorexia, depression, and alcoholism. She attempted suicide at least five times. She stole a bottle of the barbiturate Nembutal—deadly in large enough doses—from her parents’ medicine cabinet and carried it around in her purse. As her biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook explains, Sexton wanted “to be prepared to kill herself anytime she was in the mood.”

  In her early forties, she went into decline. Her drinking got worse. Her marriage failed. Her writing deteriorated. On the morning of October 4, 1974, Sexton had breakfast with an old friend, then lunch with another friend, as if saying goodbye.

  Middlebrook writes:

  She stripped her fingers of rings, dropping them into her big purse, and from the coat closet she took her mother’s old fur coat. Though it was a sunny afternoon, a chill was in the air. The worn satin lining must have warmed quickly against her flesh; death was going to feel something like an embrace, like falling asleep in familiar arms.

  She poured herself a vodka and took her own life. Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton will forever be in the category of doomed genius. “No one who knew Anne Sexton well was surprised by her suicide,” Middlebrook writes.

  I hope by now, however, that you aren’t satisfied with this account of Sexton’s death. If suicide is a coupled act, then Sexton’s character and pathology should be only part of the explanation for what happened to her. The same is true for Plath. Her friend Alfred Alvarez believed that too many people have painted her as “the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art,” and he’s absolutely right. That distorts who she is: it says her identity was tied up entirely in her self-destructiveness. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

  Weisburd has a map that, I think, makes this point even more powerfully. It’s from Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

  The dark area in the middle—bounded by Cornelison Avenue, Grand Street, and Fairmount Avenue—is a prostitution hot spot and has been for some time. A few years ago, Weisburd conducted an experiment in which he assigned ten extra police officers—an extraordinarily high number—to patrol those few blocks. Not surprisingly, the amount of prostitution in the area fell by two-thirds.

  Weisburd was most interested, though, in what happened in the lighter part of the map, just outside the triangle. When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over? Weisburd had trained observers stationed in the area, talking to the sex workers. Was there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most would rather try something else—leave the field entirely, change their behavior—than shift their location. They weren’t just coupled to place. They were anchored to place.

  We found people would say to us, “I’m in this area. I don’t want to move because it’ll make it hard on my customers.” Or, “No, I have to build up a business again.” There are all these objective reasons why they’re not moving. Another reason would be, “If I go someplace else, it’s good for drugs, to sell drugs. There’s already people there, they’ll kill me.”

  The easiest way to make sense of a sex worker is to say that she is someone compelled to turn tricks—a prisoner of her economic and social circumstances. She’s someone different from the rest of us. But what is the first thing the sex workers said, when asked to explain their behavior? That moving was really stressful—which is the same thing that everyone says about moving.

  Weisburd continues:

  They talked about how hard it would be for business. They’d have to reestablish themselves. They talked about danger, people they don’t know. What do they mean by people they don’t know? “Here, I know who’s going to call the police and who won’t call the police.” That’s a big issue for them.…When they’re in the same place, they begin to have a high level of correct prediction about people. Going to a new place? You don’t know who these people are. Someone who looks bad could be good. Someone who looks good, from their perspective, could be bad.

  The interviewer said, “Well, why don’t you just go four blocks away? There’s another prostitution site.” Her response: “Those are not my type of girls. I don’t feel comfortable there.” That hit me.…Even people with these tremendous problems, with these tremendous difficulties in life, they respond to many of the same things as you or I.

  Some of them may have children in nearby schools, and grocery stores where they shop, and friends they like to be close to, and parents they need to look in on—and as a result have all kinds of reasons not to move their business. Their job, at that moment, is sex work. But they are mothers and daughters and friends and citizens first. Coupling forces us to see the stranger in her full ambiguity and complexity.

  Was Sexton determined to take her own life, by any means possible? Not at all. She would never use a gun. “For Ernest Hemingway to shoot himself with a gun in the mouth is the greatest act of courage I can think of,” she told her therapist. “I worry about the minutes before you die, t
hat fear of death. I don’t have it with the pills, but with a gun there’d be a minute when you’d know, a terrible fear. I’d do anything to escape that fear.”

  Her chosen method was pills, downed with alcohol, which she considered the “woman’s way out.” Take a look at the following chart, comparing different suicide methods by fatality rate.

  People who overdose on pills die 1.5 percent of the time. Sexton was coupled to a method of suicide that was highly unlikely to kill her. That is not a coincidence. Like many people with suicidal tendencies, she was profoundly ambivalent about taking her own life. She took sleeping pills nearly every night, tiptoeing up to the line between dose and overdose but never crossing it. Just listen to her rationale, in her poem “The Addict”:

  Sleepmonger,

  deathmonger,

  with capsules in my palms each night,

  eight at a time from sweet pharmaceutical bottles

  I make arrangements for a pint-sized journey.

  I’m the queen of this condition.

  I’m an expert on making the trip

  and now they say I’m an addict.

  Now they ask why.

  Why!

  Don’t they know

  that I promised to die!

  I’m keeping in practice.

  I’m merely staying in shape.

  The pills are a mother, but better,

  every color and as good as sour balls.

  I’m on a diet from death.

  Plath’s death, however, made Sexton rethink her options. “I’m so fascinated with Sylvia [Plath]’s death: the idea of dying perfect,” she told her therapist. She felt Plath had chosen an even better “woman’s way.” She had gone out as “a Sleeping Beauty,” immaculate even in death. Sexton needed suicide to be painless and leave her unmarked. And by 1974, she had become convinced that dying from car-exhaust fumes fit that set of criteria. It would be her town gas. She thought about it, spoke about it with friends.