Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  So that’s how Sexton took her life, after taking off her rings and putting on her mother’s fur coat. She went to her garage, closed the door, sat in the front seat of her red 1967 Mercury Cougar, and turned on the engine. The difference between her original choice of sleeping pills and carbon-monoxide poisoning, of course, is that whereas the former are rarely lethal, carbon monoxide invariably is. She was dead within fifteen minutes.

  But here Sexton’s story converges with Plath’s once again. Beginning in 1975—the year after her suicide—automobiles sold in the United States were required to have catalytic converters installed on their exhaust systems. A catalytic converter is a secondary combustion chamber that burns off carbon monoxide and other impurities before they leave the exhaust pipe. The fumes from Sexton’s 1967 Cougar would have been thick with carbon monoxide. That’s why she could sit in a closed garage with the engine running and be dead within fifteen minutes. The exhaust from the 1975 version of that car would have had half as much carbon monoxide—if that. Today’s cars emit so little carbon monoxide that the gas barely registers in automobile exhaust. It is much more difficult to commit suicide today by turning on your car and closing the door of the garage.

  Like her friend Sylvia Plath, Sexton was unlucky. She had an impulse coupled with a lethal method, just a year before that method stopped being so lethal. Had her difficult 1974 been instead her difficult 1984, she too might have lived much longer.

  We overhear those two brilliant young poets in the bar at the Ritz, eagerly exchanging stories about their first suicide attempts, and we say that these two do not have long to live. Coupling teaches us the opposite. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

  1 “A poet has to adapt himself, more or less consciously, to the demands of his vocation,” Stephen Spender, himself an accomplished poet, once wrote, “and hence the peculiarities of poets and the condition of inspiration which many people have said is near to madness.”

  2 “When she killed herself at age thirty,” Ernest Shulman wrote, “Sylvia fit several categories for which suicide odds are increased. Although former suicide attempters constitute about 5 percent of the population, a third of completed suicides have previously attempted suicide; this includes Sylvia. Ex–mental patients comprise a significant proportion of suicides; this also includes Sylvia. Divorcees have a suicide rate several times higher than that of married women; Sylvia was getting a divorce. Foreigners everywhere have elevated suicide rates; Sylvia was living in England, far from familiar places and people. Suicides tend to be isolated people under severe stress; this was true of Sylvia. Broken homes produce a disproportionate number of suicides; Sylvia came from a broken home.” He goes on: “She could never again be intertwined with a man from whose alleged greatness she could feed her own dreams of glory.” Not to mention Plath’s earlier, aborted grieving for her father, who died when she was eight. “If a child’s development is impeded because of incomplete mourning of a loss, that child will be handicapped in acquiring the mutuality necessary for building an integrated identity and maintaining strong emotional ties,” Shulman continues. “Sylvia’s narcissism was ultimately her undoing.”

  3 I haven’t even mentioned the biggest example of how our inability to understand suicide costs lives: roughly 40,000 Americans commit suicide every year, half of whom do so by shooting themselves. Handguns are the suicide method of choice in the United States—and the problem with that, of course, is that handguns are uniquely deadly. Handguns are America’s town gas. What would happen if the U.S. did what the British did, and somehow eradicated its leading cause of suicide? It’s not hard to imagine. It would uncouple the suicidal from their chosen method. And those few who were determined to try again would be forced to choose from far-less-deadly options, such as overdosing on pills, which is fifty-five times less likely to result in death than using a gun. A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides. That’s a lot of people.

  4 Suicides happen on the Golden Gate with such devastating regularity that in 2004 filmmaker Eric Steel put a video camera at either end of the bridge and wound up filming twenty-two suicides over the course of the year. In the death that served as the signature case study in Steel’s subsequent documentary, The Bridge, his camera followed a thirty-four-year-old man named Gene Sprague for ninety-three minutes as he paced back and forth across the bridge before jumping to his death. If you stand on the bridge long enough, you can expect to see someone try to jump off.

  5 Thirty-four percent, in fact, predicted that everyone thwarted at the bridge would simply switch to another method.

  6 Take a look at a map Weisburd made of Seattle (page 369). Those dots are Seattle’s crime “hot spots.” If you talk to someone from Seattle, they will tell you their city has some bad areas. But the map tells you that statement is false. Seattle does not have bad neighborhoods; it has a handful of problematic blocks scattered throughout the city. What distinguishes those problematic blocks from the rest of the city? A jumble of factors, acting in combination. Hot spots are more likely to be on arterial roads, more likely to have vacant lots, more likely to have bus stops, more likely to have residents who don’t vote, more likely to be near a public facility such as a school. The list of variables—some of which are well understood and many of which are not—goes on. And because most of those variables are pretty stable, those blocks don’t change much over time.

  Chapter Eleven

  Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments

  1.

  A century ago, a legendary figure in American law enforcement named O. W. Wilson came up with the idea of “preventive patrol.”1 Wilson believed that having police cars in constant, unpredictable motion throughout a city’s streets would deter crime. Any would-be criminal would always have to wonder if a police car was just around the corner.

  But think about it. When you walk down the street of your neighborhood, do you feel like the police are just around the corner? Cities are vast, sprawling places. It’s not obvious that a police force—even a large police force—could ever create the feeling that they were everywhere.

  This was the question facing the Kansas City Police Department in the early 1970s. The department was about to hire extra police officers, but it was divided over how to deploy them. Should they follow Wilson’s advice—and have them drive randomly around the city? Or assign them to specific locations—such as schools or difficult neighborhoods? To resolve the question, the city hired a criminologist named George Kelling.

  “One group said riding around in cars doesn’t improve anything, it doesn’t do anything,” Kelling remembers. “Another group said it’s absolutely essential. That was the standoff. Then I was brought in.”

  Kelling’s idea was to select fifteen beats from the southern part of the city and divide them into three groups. It was a big area: thirty-two square miles, 150,000 people, good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and even a little farmland on the fringes. One of the three groups would be the control group. Police work would continue there as it always had. In the second neighborhood, Kelling would have no preventive patrol at all; police officers would respond only when called. In the third neighborhood, he would double and in some cases triple the number of squad cars on the streets.

  “Nothing like this had ever been done in policing,” Kelling remembers. “This was 1970. Nothing had been written about police tactics.…This was at a very primitive stage in policing.” People like O. W. Wilson had ideas and hunches. But police work was considered an art, not a science that could be evaluated like a new drug. Kelling says that many people told him his experiment would fail, “that the police simply weren’t ready for research. I wouldn’t be able to do it. They’d sabotage it.” But Kelling had the backing of the city’s police chief. The chief had spent the bulk of his career in the FBI, and he was shocked to learn how little police departments seemed to know about what they did.
“Many of us in the department,” the chief would later admit, “had the feeling we were training, equipping, and deploying men to do a job neither we, nor anyone else, knew much about.” He told Kelling to go ahead.

  Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of the study. The result? Nothing. Burglaries were the same in all three neighborhoods. So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism. The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened. “The results were all in one direction and that was, it doesn’t make any difference,” Kelling said. “It didn’t matter to citizen satisfaction, it didn’t matter to crime statistics, it just didn’t seem to matter.”

  Every police chief in the country read the results. Initially, there was disbelief. Some urban police departments were still committed Wilsonites. Kelling remembers the Los Angeles Police Chief standing up at one national law-enforcement conference and saying, “If those findings are true, every officer in Kansas City was asleep at the switch because I can assure you that’s not how it is in Los Angeles.”

  But slowly resistance gave way to resignation. The study came out as violent crime was beginning its long, hard, two-decade surge across the United States, and it fed into the growing feeling among people in law enforcement that the task before them was overwhelming. They had thought they could prevent crime with police patrols, but now the Kansas City PD had tested that assumption empirically, and patrols turned out to be a charade. And if patrols didn’t work, what did? Lee Brown, chief of the New York City Police Department, gave a famous interview in the middle of the crack epidemic in which he all but threw up his hands. “This country’s social problems are well beyond the ability of the police to deal with on their own,” Brown said. He had read George Kelling’s Kansas City report. It was hopeless. No matter how many police officers a city had, Brown said, “You could never have enough to use traditional policing techniques to deter crime.…If you don’t have a police officer to cover every part of the city all the time, the chance of an officer on patrol coming across a crime in progress is very small.”

  In 1990, President George H. W. Bush came to Kansas City. He spent the morning in one of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, then gave a speech to a group of local police officers. He tried to be upbeat. He failed. The homicide rate that year in Kansas City was three times the national average. It would go up again in 1991 and again in 1992, then once more in 1993. There wasn’t much to say. Halfway through his remarks, Bush was reduced to simply listing the terrible things happening on the city’s streets:

  A four-year-old boy shot dead in a suspected crack house; an eleven-year-old kid gunned down outside another drug den, allegedly at the hands of a fourteen-year-old guard; in a downtown bar, a mother sells her baby for crack; and a firebombing leaves three generations dead, including a grandmother and three little kids—the headlines are horrifying, sickening, outrageous.

  But in the early 1990s, twenty years after the first Kansas City experiment, Kansas City decided to try again. They hired another brilliant young criminologist named Lawrence Sherman. As they had with George Kelling, they gave him free rein. It was time for Kansas City Experiment Number Two. Why not? Nothing else was working.

  2.

  Lawrence Sherman thought the focus ought to be on guns. He believed the sheer number of guns in the city was what fueled its epidemic of violence. His plan was to try a number of ideas in sequence, rigorously evaluate their effectiveness—as Kelling had done—and pick a winner. He called a planning meeting with a group of the city’s senior police officers. They chose as their testing ground Patrol District 144: a small, 0.64-square-mile neighborhood of modest single-family homes, bounded to the south by 39th Street and to the west by Highway 71. District 144 was as bad as Kansas City got in the early 1990s. The homicide rate there was twenty times the national average. The area averaged one violent felony a day and twenty-four drive-by shootings a year. A third of the lots were vacant. Just a few months before, an officer had been on patrol through 144 when he saw some kids playing basketball in the street. He stopped, got out, and asked them to move. One of the players threw the basketball at his head, then two others jumped him. It was that kind of place.

  Sherman’s first idea was for two-man teams to knock on every door in the neighborhood over a three-month period. The officers would introduce themselves, talk about gun violence, and give the residents a flyer with an 800 number on it: if they heard anything about guns, they were encouraged to call in an anonymous tip. The plan went off without a hitch. In many of the visits, the officers were trailed by a graduate student in criminology, James Shaw, whose job was to evaluate the program’s effectiveness. Sometimes the officers stayed for as long as twenty minutes, chatting with people who had never had a police officer come to their door other than to make an arrest. In his subsequent write-up, Shaw was effusive:

  The police went to every residence in that community, some more than once, and talked to residents in a friendly, non-threatening manner. In response, people were very receptive and glad to see the police going door to door. People frequently responded with comments like “God bless you all, we shoulda’ had a program like this before,” or “Thank God! I didn’t think you all would ever come.”

  In the end, 88 percent of the people visited said that they would use the hotline if they saw any guns. So how many calls came in—after 858 door-to-door visits over three months? Two. Both were about guns in another neighborhood.

  The problem, everyone soon realized, was not that the residents of District 144 didn’t want to help. They did. It was that they never left their houses. “It’s starting to sound like Beirut around here,” one homeowner told Shaw, and if you’re so scared that you never leave your house, how on earth do you know who has guns or not? Shaw wrote:

  Not unlike residents in many other inner-city neighborhoods, these people have become like caged animals in their own homes; bars on the windows are the norm. One is not surprised even to see bars on second-story windows. More dismal however is the fact that in house after house the blinds are drawn and drapes closed up tightly, blocking out any trace of the outside world. These elderly people lock themselves up and shut themselves in. They hear the world outside, and it sometimes sounds like a battle zone. But they can’t see anything.

  The group’s next idea was to train officers in the subtle art of spotting concealed weapons. The impetus came from a New York City police officer named Robert T. Gallagher, who in eighteen years on the force had disarmed an astonishing 1,200 people. Gallagher had elaborate theories, worked out over many years: street criminals overwhelmingly put their guns in their waistbands (on the left side, in the case of a right-hander), causing a subtle but discernible hitch in their stride. The leg on the gun side takes a shorter step than the leg on the nongun side, and the corresponding arm follows a similarly constrained trajectory. When stepping off curbs or getting out of a car, Gallagher believed, gun carriers invariably glance toward their weapons or unconsciously adjust them.

  Gallagher flew to Kansas City, with great fanfare, the month after the failed hotline experiment. He gave seminars. He made videos. The officers took notes. The television program 20/20 sent a camera crew to record the technique in action on the streets of Kansas City. Nobody spotted anything. 20/20 came back again. The same thing happened—nothing. Whatever magical skills Robert T. Gallagher possessed were not, apparently, transferable to the beat cops of Kansas City. Two of the team’s best ideas for curbing gun violence had failed. They had one left.

  3.

  The winning entry in the Kansas City gun experiment was deceptively simple. It was based on a quirk in the American legal system.

  The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” That’s why the police cannot search your home without a wa
rrant. On the street, similarly, a police officer must have a good reason—“reasonable suspicion”—to frisk you.2 But if you’re in your car, that standard is not at all hard for a police officer to meet. Traffic codes in the U.S. (and in fact in most countries) give police officers literally hundreds of reasons to stop a motorist.

  “There are moving violations: speeding, running a red light. There are equipment violations: a light that doesn’t work, a tire not quite right,” legal scholar David Harris writes.

  And then there are catch-all provisions: rules that allow police to stop drivers for conduct that complies with all the rules on the books, but that officers consider “imprudent” or “unreasonable” under the circumstances, or that describe the offense in language so broad as to make a violation virtually coextensive with the officer’s unreviewable personal judgment.

  There was even a Supreme Court case in which a police officer in North Carolina stopped what he thought was a suspicious driver, using the pretext that one of the car’s brake lights was out. As it turns out, it’s perfectly permissible in North Carolina to drive with one brake light out, so long as the other one works. So what happened after the driver of the car sued, claiming he had been stopped illegally? The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the officer. It was enough that he thought driving with only one brake light seemed like an infraction. In other words, police officers in the United States not only have at their disposal a virtually limitless list of legal reasons to stop a motorist; they are also free to add any other reasons they might dream up, as long as they seem reasonable. And once they’ve stopped a motorist, police officers are allowed, under the law, to search the car, so long as they have reason to believe the motorist might be armed or dangerous.