David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

by Malcolm Gladwell

  The Lower Falls is an all-Catholic neighborhood just down the hill from Ballymurphy. Lawlor had gone to school in the Lower Falls. Her uncle lived there, as did countless cousins. She knew as many people in the Lower Falls as she did in Ballymurphy. The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched for illegal weapons.

  “I didn’t know what ‘curfew’ meant,” Lawlor said. “Hadn’t a clue. I had to say to somebody, ‘What does that mean?’ She said, ‘They’re not allowed out of their houses.’ I said, ‘How can they do that?’ I was totally stunned. Stunned. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The people are locked in their houses. They can’t get out for bread or milk.’ While the Brits, the British Army, were kicking in doors and wracking and ruinin’ and searchin’, I was, ‘What?’ The biggest thought in everybody’s mind was, there are people locked in their houses, and there’s children. You have to remember, some houses then had twelve, fifteen kids in them. D’you know? That’s the way it was. ‘What do you mean they can’t get out of their houses?’” They were angry.

  Rosemary Lawlor is now in her sixties, a sturdily built woman with ruddy cheeks and short, white-blond hair swept to the side. She was a seamstress by trade, and she was dressed with flair: a bright floral blouse and white cropped pants. She was talking about things that had happened half a lifetime ago. But she remembered every moment.

  “My father said, ‘The Brits, they’ll turn on us. They say they’re in here to protect us. They’ll turn on us—you wait and see.’ And he was one hundred percent right. They turned on us. And the curfew was the start of it.”

  2.

  The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists—Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.—wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies. Leites and Wolf worked for the RAND Corporation, the prestigious think tank started after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years, when the world was exploding in violence, everyone read Leites and Wolf. Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple:

  Fundamental to our analysis is the assumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves “rationally,” that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly.…Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.

  In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it’s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren’t high enough. And when Leites and Wolf said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,” what they meant was that nothing mattered but that calculation. If you were in a position of power, you didn’t have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice.

  The general in charge of the British forces in Northern Ireland was a man straight out of the pages of Rebellion and Authority. His name was Ian Freeland. He had served with distinction in Normandy during the Second World War and later fought insurgencies in Cyprus and Zanzibar. He was trim and forthright, with a straight back and a square jaw and a firm hand: he “conveyed the correct impression of a man who knew what needed to be done and would do it.” When he arrived in Northern Ireland, he made it plain that his patience was limited. He was not afraid to use force. He had his orders from the prime minister: the British Army “should deal toughly, and be seen to deal toughly, with thugs and gunmen.”

  On June 30, 1970, the British Army received a tip. There were explosives and weapons hidden in a house at 24 Balkan Street in the Lower Falls, they were told. Freeland immediately dispatched five armored cars filled with soldiers and police officers. A search of the house turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. Outside, a crowd gathered. Someone started throwing stones. Stones turned into petrol bombs. A riot started. By ten p.m. the British had had enough. An army helicopter armed with a loudspeaker circled the Lower Falls, demanding that all residents stay inside their homes or face arrest. As the streets cleared, the army launched a massive house-to-house search. Disobedience was met with firm and immediate punishment. The next morning, a triumphant Freeland took two Protestant government officials and a pack of journalists on a tour of the neighborhood in the back of an open flatbed truck, surveying the deserted streets like—as one soldier later put it—“the British Raj on a tiger hunt.”

  The British Army went to Northern Ireland with the best of intentions. The local police force was overwhelmed, and they were there simply to help—to serve as a peacekeeper between Northern Ireland’s two warring populations. This was not some distant and foreign land: they were dealing with their own country, their own language, and their own culture. They had resources and weapons and soldiers and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain. When Freeland toured the empty streets of the Lower Falls that morning, he believed that he and his men would be back home in England by the end of the summer. But that’s not what happened. Instead, what should have been a difficult few months turned into thirty years of bloodshed and mayhem.

  In Northern Ireland, the British made a simple mistake. They fell into the trap of believing that because they had resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain, it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them. General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” And Leites and Wolf were wrong.

  “It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,” Seán MacStiofáin, the provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years. “Well, you had that to start with in [Northern Ireland], all right.”

  3.

  The simplest way to understand the British mistake in Northern Ireland is to picture a classroom. It’s a kindergarten class, a room with brightly colored walls covered in children’s drawings. Let’s call the teacher Stella.

  The classroom was videotaped as part of a project at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and there is more than enough footage to provide a good sense of the kind of teacher Stella is and the kind of classroom she has. Even after a few minutes, it is abundantly clear that things aren’t going well.

  Stella is sitting in a chair at the front of the room. She’s reading out loud from a book that she is holding up to one side: “…seven slices of tomatoes,” “eight juicy olives,” “nine chunks of cheese.…” A girl is standing in front of her, reading along, and all around her, the class is in chaos, a mini-version of Belfast in the summer of 1970. A little girl is doing cartwheels across the room. A little boy is making faces. Much of the class seems to be paying no attention at all. Some of the students have actually turned themselves entirely around, so that they have their backs to Stella.

  If you were to walk in on Stella’s class, what would you think? I’m guessing your first reaction would be that she has a group of unruly children. Maybe she teaches in a school in a poor neighborhood and her students come from troubled families. Maybe her students come to school without any real respect for authority or learning. Leites and Wolf would say that she really needs to use some discipline. Children like that need a firm hand. They need rules. If there is no order in the classroom, how can any learning take place?

  The truth is, though, that Stella’s school isn’t in some terrible neighborhood. Her students aren’t particularly or unusually unruly. When the class begins, they are perfectly wel
l behaved and attentive, eager and ready to learn. They don’t seem like bad apples at all. They only start to misbehave well into the lesson, and only in response to the way Stella is behaving. Stella causes the crisis. How so? By doing an appalling job of teaching the lesson.

  Stella had the girl from the class reading alongside her as a way of engaging the rest of the students. But the pacing of the back-and-forth between the two of them was excruciatingly slow and wooden. “Look at her body language,” one of the Virginia researchers, Bridget Hamre, said as we watched Stella. “Right now she is just talking to this one kid, and no one else is getting in.” Her colleague Robert Pianta added: “There’s no rhythm. No pace. This is going nowhere. There is no value in what she’s doing.”

  Only then did the class begin to deteriorate. The little boy started making faces. When the child started doing cartwheels, Stella missed it entirely. Three or four students to the immediate right of the teacher were still gamely trying to follow along, but Stella was so locked onto the book that she wasn’t giving them any encouragement. Meanwhile, to Stella’s left, five or six children had turned themselves around. But that was because they were bewildered, not because they were disobedient. Their view of the book was completely blocked by the little girl standing in front of Stella. They had no way of following along. We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.

  “With classrooms like this one, people will call what is happening a behavioral issue,” Hamre said. We were watching one of Stella’s kids wiggling and squirming and contorting her face and altogether doing whatever she could to avoid her teacher. “But one of the things we find is that this sort of thing is more often an engagement problem than a behavioral problem. If the teacher is actually doing something interesting, these kids are quite capable of being engaged. Instead of responding in a ‘let me control your behavior’ way, the teacher needs to think, ‘How can I do something interesting that will prevent you from misbehaving in the first place?’”

  The next video Pianta and Hamre played was of a third-grade teacher giving homework to her students. Each student was given a copy of the assignment, and the teacher and the class read the instructions aloud together. Pianta was aghast. “Just the idea that you would be choral reading a set of instructions to a bunch of eight-year-olds is almost disrespectful,” he said. “I mean, why? Is there any instructional purpose?” They know how to read. It is like a waiter in a restaurant giving you the menu and then proceeding to read every item to you just as it appears on the page.

  A boy sitting next to the teacher raises his hand midway through the reading, and without looking at him, the teacher reaches out, grabs his wrist, and pushes his hand back down. Another child starts to actually do the assignment—an entirely logical action, given the pointlessness of what the teacher is doing. The teacher addresses him, sharply. “Sweetie. This is homework.” It was a moment of discipline. The child had broken the rules. The teacher had responded, firmly and immediately. If you were to watch that moment with the sound turned off, you would think of it as Leites and Wolf perfectly applied. But if you were to listen to what the teacher was saying and think about the incident from the child’s perspective, it would become clear that it is having anything but its intended effect. The little boy isn’t going to come away with a renewed appreciation of the importance of following the rules. He is going to come away angry and disillusioned. Why? Because the punishment is completely arbitrary. He can’t speak up and give his own side of the story. And wants to learn. If that little boy became defiant, it was because his teacher made him that way, just as Stella turned an eager and attentive student into someone who did cartwheels across the floor. When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave.

  This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

  All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself. That’s why the story of Stella is not all that surprising. Anyone who has ever sat in a classroom knows that it is important for teachers to earn the respect of their students.

  What is harder to understand, however, is the importance of these same principles when it comes to law and order. We know our parents and our teachers, so it makes sense that legitimacy should matter a lot inside the home or the school. But the decision about whether to rob a bank or shoot someone seems like it belongs to a very different category, doesn’t it? That’s what Leites and Wolf meant when they said that fighting criminals and insurgents “requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” They were saying that at that level, the decision to obey the law is a function of a rational calculation of risks and benefits. It isn’t personal. But that’s precisely where they went wrong, because getting criminals and insurgents to behave turns out to be as dependent on legitimacy as getting children to behave in the classroom.

  4.

  Let me give you an example. It involves an experiment that has been going on for the past few years in the New York City neighborhood of Brownsville. Brownsville is home to just over a hundred thousand people, and it lies in the eastern part of Brooklyn, past the elegant brownstones of Park Slope and the synagogues of Crown Heights.1 For more than a century, it has been among the most destitute corners of New York City. There are eighteen public housing projects in Brownsville, more than in any other part of the city, and they dominate the skyline: block upon block of bleak, featureless brick-and-concrete developments. As the crime rate in New York City fell dramatically over the past twenty years, Brownsville always remained a step behind, plagued by groups of teenagers who roamed the streets, mugging passersby. From time to time, the police would flood the streets with extra officers. But the effect was never more than temporary.

  In 2003, a police officer named Joanne Jaffe took over as head of the city’s Housing Bureau, the group with primary responsibility for the Brownsville projects. She decided to try something new. Jaffe began by making a list of all of the juveniles in Brownsville who had been arrested at least once in the previous twelve months. That search yielded 106 names, corresponding to 180 arrests. Jaffe’s assumption was that anyone arrested for a mugging had probably committed somewhere between twenty and fifty other crimes that never came to the attention of the police, so by her rule of thumb, her 106 juveniles were responsible for as many as five thousand crimes in the previous year.

  She then put together a task force of police officers and had them contact every name on the list. “We said to them, ‘You’re in the program,’” Jaffe explained. “‘And the program is that we’re going to give you a choice. We want to do everything we can to get you back in school, to help you get a high school diploma, to bring services to your family, find out what’s needed in the household. We will provide job opportunities, educational opportunities, medical—everything we can. We want to work with you. But the criminal conduct has to stop. And if it doesn’t stop and you get arrested for anything, we’re going to do everything to keep you in jail. I don’t care how minor it is. We are going to be all over you.’”

  The program was called J-RIP, for Juvenile Robbery Interventi
on Program. There was nothing complicated about it—at least on the surface. J-RIP was standard-issue, high-intensity modern policing. Jaffe put her J-RIP task force in a trailer in the parking lot of a housing project, not off in a station house somewhere. She made every surveillance tool available to her J-RIP team. They made lists of each J-RIPper’s associates—the people they had been arrested with. They went on Facebook and downloaded photos of their friends and looked for gang affiliations. They talked to brothers and sisters and mothers, and they put together giant, poster-size maps showing the networks of friendships and associations that surrounded each person—the same way an intelligence organization might track the movements of suspected terrorists.

  “I have people out there 24/7,” Jaffe said. “So when a J-RIPper is arrested, I’m willing to send in a team if I have to. I don’t care if it’s the Bronx, or the middle of the night. There have got to be dire consequences. They’ve got to know what’s going to happen. It’s got to be swift. If you get arrested, you’re going to see my face.”

  She went on, “I tell them, ‘You can slam the door when I come to your house. But I’ll see you on the street. I’ll say hello to you. I’ll learn everything about you. You go from Brooklyn to the Bronx, I’ll know what trains you take.’ We say to someone, ‘Johnnie, come into the J-RIP office tomorrow,’ and Johnnie comes in, and we say, ‘You were stopped in the Bronx last night. You got a summons.’ He says, ‘What?’ ‘You were with Raymond Rivera and Mary Jones.’ ‘How do you know that?’ They started thinking we were all over the place. Since we had developed a folder on each kid, we’d show them what we had on them. We’d say, ‘These are all your buddies. Here’s all your information. Here are your pictures. We know you’re part of this development. We know you might be a part of a crew. We know your world.’ We started learning about where they’re supposed to go to school, who they’re hanging out with at school. When they’re not in school, we get a call. So my J-RIP team goes out and wakes them up and says, ‘Get up!’”