Talking to Strangers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  “Persons learn about drunkenness…deserve what they get”: Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton, Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), pp.172–73.

  “My independence, natural joy…not how to drink less”: Emily Doe’s Victim Impact Statement, pp. 7–9, https://www.sccgov.org/sites/da/newsroom/newsreleases/Documents/B-Turner%20VIS.pdf.

  Chapter Nine: KSM: What Happens When the Stranger Is a Terrorist?

  “Call me Mukhtar…the 9/11 attacks”: James Mitchell, Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America (New York: Crown Forum, 2016), p. 7.

  portions of a videotaped deposition: Sheri Fink and James Risen, “Psychologists Open a Window on Brutal CIA Interrogations,” New York Times, June 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/20/us/cia-torture.html.

  From Wikipedia: “Water intoxication, also known as water poisoning, hyperhydration, overhydration, or water toxemia[,] is a potentially fatal disturbance in brain functions that results when the normal balance of electrolytes in the body is pushed outside safe limits by excessive water intake.”

  “The realistic stress of…actual combat”: Charles A. Morgan et al., “Hormone Profiles in Humans Experiencing Military Survival Training,” Biological Psychiatry 47, no. 10 (2000): 891–901, doi:10.1016/s0006-3223(99)00307-8.

  Rey-Osterrieth figures drawn before and after interrogation: Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Stress-Induced Deficits in Working Memory and Visuo-Constructive Abilities in Special Operations Soldiers,” Biological Psychiatry 60, no. 7 (2006): 722–29, doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2006.04.021. The Rey-Osterrieth figure was first developed by Andre Rey and published in his article “L'examen psychologique dans les cas d'encephalopathie traumatique (Les problemes),” Archives de Psychologie 28 (1941): 215-85.

  In another, larger study (in footnote): Charles Morgan et al., “Accuracy of eyewitness memory for persons encountered during exposure to highly intense stress,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 27 (2004): 264–65.

  KSM made his first public confession: Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024, March 10, 2007, http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2007/images/03/14/transcript_ISN10024.pdf.

  “might induce some form…wishes to have access to”: Shane O’Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 167.

  KSM was “making things up”: Robert Baer, “Why KSM’s Confession Rings False,” Time, March 15, 2007, http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1599861,00.html.

  “He has nothing…problem since he was captured”: Adam Zagorin, “Can KSM’s Confession Be Believed?” Time, March 15, 2007, http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1599423,00.html.

  Chapter Ten: Sylvia Plath

  “I am writing from London…he lived there!”: Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, November 7, 1962, in Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, eds., The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963 (New York: Harper Collins, 2018), p. 897.

  “She seemed different…never seen her so strained”: Alfred Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 30–31; “She talked about…how to ski,” pp. 18–19; “the poet as a sacrificial victim…the sake of her art,” p. 40.

  Plath poems: “The woman is perfected…it is over” from “Edge,” in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), p. 272; “And like the cat…Number Three,” from “Lady Lazarus,” pp. 244–45; and “If you only knew…my veins with invisibles…” from “A Birthday Present,” p. 207.

  poets have far and away the highest suicide rates: Mark Runco, “Suicide and Creativity,” Death Studies 22 (1998): 637–54.

  “A poet has to adapt himself” (in footnote): Stephen Spender, The Making of a Poem (New York: Norton Library, 1961), p. 45.

  “She could never again…ultimately her undoing” (in footnote): Ernest Shulman, “Vulnerability Factors in Sylvia Plath’s Suicide,” Death Studies 22, no. 7 (1988): 598–613. (“When she killed herself…a broken home” [in footnote] is from this source too.)

  “Had she supposed…laid her cheek on it”: Jillian Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), pp. 80, 291.

  “The victims…the top of the cozy”: Douglas J. A. Kerr, “Carbon Monoxide Poisoning: Its Increasing Medico-Legal Importance,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 3452 (March 5, 1927): 416.

  United Kingdom suicide rate in 1962: Ronald V. Clarke and Pat Mayhew, “The British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications,” Crime and Justice 10 (1988): p. 88, doi:10.1086/449144; graph “Relation between gas suicides in England and Wales and CO content of domestic gas, 1960–77,” p. 89; graph “Crude suicide rates (per 1 million population) for England and Wales and the United States, 1900–84,” p. 84; “[Town] gas had unique advantages…in front of trains or buses,” p. 99; graph of “Suicides in England and Wales by domestic gas and other methods for females twenty-five to forty-four years old,” p. 91.

  “the greatest peacetime operation in this nation’s history”: Malcolm E. Falkus, Always under Pressure: A History of North Thames Gas Since 1949 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 107.

  Town gas to natural gas conversion, 1965–1977: Trevor Williams, A History of the British Gas Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 190.

  our inability to understand suicide costs lives (in footnote): See, for example, Kim Soffen, “To Reduce Suicides, Look at Gun Violence,” Washington Post, July 13, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/suicide-rates/.

  the inexplicable saga of the Golden Gate Bridge: John Bateson, The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. 8; history of suicide barrier (or lack of it) on bridge, pp. 33, 189, 196.

  wound up filming twenty-two suicides (in footnote): Director Eric Steel’s documentary is starkly titled The Bridge (More4, 2006).

  Seiden followed up on 515 people: Richard H. Seiden, “Where are they now? A follow-up study of suicide attempters from the Golden Gate Bridge,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 8, no. 4 (1978): 203–16.

  “If a physical barrier…replaced by another”: These five quotes are from a set of public comments on the Transportation District’s proposal to erect a suicide net: http://goldengatebridge.org/projects/documents/sds_letters-emails-individuals.pdf.

  In one national survey…would simply take their life some other way: Matthew Miller et al., “Belief in the Inevitability of Suicide: Results from a National Survey,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 36, no. 1 (2006).

  Weisburd spent a year walking: David Weisburd et al., “Challenges to Supervision in Community Policing: Observations on a Pilot Project,” American Journal of Police 7 (1988): 29–50.

  Sherman had been thinking along these lines as well: Larry Sherman et al., Evidence-Based Crime Prevention (London: Routledge, 2002). (Both Sherman and Weisburd are enormously prolific. I’ve included a small sample of their work here; if it interests you, there’s much more to read!)

  “We chose Minneapolis”: L. W. Sherman et al., “Hot spots of predatory crime: Routine activities and the criminology of place,” Criminology (1989): 27–56.

  Half the crime in the city [of Boston]: Glenn Pierce et al., “The character of police work: strategic and tactical implications,” Center for Applied Social Research Northeastern University, November 1988. Although the study authors weren’t aware that their data supported the Law of Crime Concentration, Weisburd put the pieces together when he looked at their conclusions.

  Weisburd map of Seattle crime patterns:

  See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Understanding and Controlling Hot Spots of Crime: The Importance of Formal and Informal Social Controls,” Prevention Science 15, no. 1 (2014): 31–43, doi:10.1007/s11121-012-0351
-9. The map shows crime over the period from 1989 to 2004. For more on Weisburd’s research on crime and place, see David Weisburd et al., The Criminology of Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and David Weisburd et al., Place Matters: Criminology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  Not long after I met Weisburd in 2018, he arranged for me to spend a day with a colleague of his, Claire White. The two of them have been running a multimillion-dollar “hot spot” research project in Baltimore since 2012—studying 450 street segments all over the city. “It’s becoming well established that crime is highly concentrated,” White explained. “[Weisburd] has shown us that across numerous cities with different types of data. The big question is why? What is it about these places that have such a high concentration of crime?”

  White and Weisburd hired forty student interviewers. They send them out every day to document the condition of those 450 segments, gathering as much information as they can on their residents. “We ask about what we call collective efficacy, willingness to intervene,” White said. “If there’s kids climbing on a parked car, how willing are your neighbors to say something? If the local fire station was going to be shut down, how willing are your neighbors to do something about it? Kind of this willingness to be involved as well as trusting. Do you trust your neighbors? Do you share the same values as your neighbors?…We have questions about the police: Do you think the police treat you fairly? Do you think the officers treat people with respect?”

  For comparison purposes, some of those street segments are “cold” spots, defined as blocks with fewer than four police calls a year. A hot spot is anything with more than eighteen police calls a year. Keep in mind that Baltimore is an eighteenth-century city—the blocks are really short. So that’s a minimum of eighteen police calls along a street segment that you could walk in less than a minute. White said that some of the streets in the study had over six hundred calls for service in one year. That’s what Weisburd means by the Law of Crime Concentration. Most streets have none. A small number of streets are home to virtually all the crime in the area.

  White and I began our tour in West Baltimore, not far from the city’s downtown.

  “It’s notorious for being one of the pretty high crime areas. It’s where Freddie Gray was arrested and where the riots took place,” she said, referring to the 2015 case of a young African American who died in police custody, under suspicious circumstances, leading to angry protests. “If you’ve seen The Wire, they always talk about West Baltimore.” The area was typical of an older northeastern city: narrow streets, red-brick townhouses. Some blocks had been gentrified, others not. “There’s definitely many areas where you’ll be walking and you feel you’re in a nice neighborhood, right? You feel comfortable,” White said, as she drove through the heart of the neighborhood. “Then you turn the corner and you’re in a street that’s all boarded up. It’s a ghost town. You wonder if anyone even lives on the street.”

  She took me to the first of the street segments being studied and parked there. She wanted me to guess whether it was a hot spot or a cold spot. On the corner was an exquisite nineteenth-century church, and behind it a small park. The block had elegant European proportions. The sun was shining. I said I thought it must be a cold spot. She shook her head. “This is a violent street.”

  She drove on.

  Sometimes a street’s identity was obvious: a bedraggled block with a bar at one end and Slick Rick’s Bail Bonds at the other was exactly as it looked—a double hot spot, bad for both crime and drugs. “There’s ones where it’s very clear, right?” White asked me. “You get out of the car and the people on the street start shouting out their codes for a police officer coming.” She started laughing. “I love going out with the field researchers when they’re like, ‘That’s the code for us being on the street.’” Once, in broad daylight, White’s field workers found themselves in the middle of a gun battle; there was little ambiguity about that segment.

  But some bedraggled streets were perfectly fine. Once, in the midst of a particularly dismal stretch, we came across a little oasis: two consecutive street segments of manicured lawns and freshly painted houses. One large abandoned building had a sign posted in its window, a reference to John 14: 2, 3: “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” Was a glimpse of irony evidence of function or dysfunction?

  I asked White to explain what tipped a street segment one way or the other. Sometimes she could. Usually she couldn’t. “That’s exactly it,” she said. “The environment doesn’t always speak to what’s going on. In our pilot study, one of the streets we selected was a violent hot spot. The police officer and clinician were like, ‘No way is this a violent hot spot.’ All the homes are well kept. It’s this beautiful street. I went and checked to make sure. I thought maybe there was something wrong with our data. I have this officer saying no way is this a violent hot spot, and it is. You can’t always tell.”

  The lesson of an afternoon driving around Baltimore with Claire White was that it is really easy to make mistakes about strangers. Baltimore is a city where the homicide rate is many times the national average. The simplest thing in the world is to look at the abandoned buildings and the poverty and the drug dealers calling out their codes, then write off those areas and everyone in them. But the point of the Law of Crime Concentration is that most of the streets in “those areas” are perfectly fine. The hot spot is a spot, not a region. “We focus on all the bad people,” White said of Baltimore’s reputation, “but in reality there’s mostly good people.” Our ignorance of the unfamiliar is what fuels our fear.

  “Cal seemed pleased…I turned back”: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 175, 179, 181.

  as high as the suicide rate for women…has ever been: See Figure 3 in Kyla Thomas and David Gunnell, “Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A time-trends analysis,” International Journal of Epidemiology 39, issue 6 (2010): 1464–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyq094.

  Weisburd’s Jersey City map: See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Does Crime Just Move Around the Corner? A Controlled Study of Spatial Displacement and Diffusion of Crime Control Benefits.” Criminology 44, no. 3 (08, 2006): 549–92. doi: http://dx.doi.org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2006.00057.x.

  “I would park illegally…like moths to an electric light bulb”: Anne Sexton, “The Barfly Ought to Sing,” TriQuarterly no. 7 (1996): 174–75, quoted in Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 107. Also from the Middlebrook biography: “to be prepared to kill herself,” p. 165; “She stripped…asleep in familiar arms” and “surprised by her suicide,” p. 397; “For Ernest Hemingway…that fear,” “woman’s way out,” “I’m so fascinated…dying perfect,” and “a Sleeping Beauty,” all from p. 216.

  Chart of suicide methods by fatality rate: “Lethality of Suicide Methods,” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, January 6, 2017, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-fatality, accessed March 17, 2019.

  “Sleepmonger, deathmonger…I’m on a diet from death”: Anne Sexton, “The Addict,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Open Road Media, 2016), p. 165.

  Look at how suicides from carbon-monoxide poisonings declined in the years after 1975. It’s just like the chart of British suicides at the end of the town-gas era. See Figure 4 in Neil B. Hampson and James R. Holm, “Suicidal carbon monoxide poisoning has decreased with controls on automobile emissions,” Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, Inc. 42 (2): 159-64, March 2015.

  Chapter Eleven: Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments

  “Many of us…knew much about”: George Kelling et al., “The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: A Summary Report” (Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 1974), p. v, https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Kelling-et-al.-1974-THE-KANSAS-CITY-PREVENTIVE-PATROL-EXPERIMENT.pdf.r />
  “This country’s social problems…progress is very small”: Alan M. Webber, “Crime and Management: An Interview with New York City Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown,” Harvard Business Review 63, issue 3 (May–June 1991): 100, https://hbr.org/1991/05/crime-and-management-an-interview-with-new-york-city-police-commissioner-lee-p-brown.

  “A four-year-old boy…sickening, outrageous”: George Bush, “Remarks to the Law Enforcement Community in Kansas City, Missouri,” January 23, 1990, in George Bush: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, January 1–June 30, 1990, p. 74.

  The description of Kansas City’s Patrol District 144 is from Lawrence Sherman et al., “The Kansas City Gun Experiment,” National Institute of Justice, January 1995, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/kang.pdf; new strategy halves gun crimes in District 144, Exhibit 4, p. 6; statistics for 200 days of Gun Experiment, p. 6.

  “The police went…‘would ever come’”: James Shaw, “Community Policing Against Crime: Violence and Firearms” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland College Park, 1994), p. 118; “Not unlike residents…can’t see anything,” pp. 122–23; statistics for seven months of Kansas City Gun Experiment, p. 136; “Officers who recovered…‘will be the night!’” pp. 155–56.

  “When you stop…to do a frisk” (in footnote): Erik Eckholm, “Who’s Got a Gun? Clues Are in the Body Language,” New York Times, May 26, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/26/nyregion/who-s-got-a-gun-clues-are-in-the-body-language.html.

  “There are moving violations…personal judgment”: David A. Harris, “Driving While Black and All Other Traffic Offenses: The Supreme Court and Pretextual Traffic Stops,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87, issue 2 (1997): 558, https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6913&context=jclc.

  The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the officer: Heien v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 534 (2014), https://www.leagle.com/decision/insco20141215960.