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

by Malcolm Gladwell

  But this was only part of Jaffe’s strategy. She also did things that don’t sound like typical policing strategy. She spent a lot of time, for example, finding the right kind of officer to serve on the task force. “I couldn’t put just any cop in there,” she said, sounding more like a social worker than a police chief. “I had to have a cop that loves kids. I had to have a cop that didn’t have an ounce of negativity about them, and who had the ability to help sway kids and push them in the right direction.” To head the group, she finally settled on David Glassberg, a gregarious former narcotics officer with children of his own.

  She was also obsessed, from the very beginning, with meeting the families of her J-RIPpers. She wanted to know them. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult. In her first attempt, she sent letters to every home, inviting the families to come to a local church for a group session. No one showed up. Then Jaffe and her team went door-to-door. Once again, they got nowhere. “We ended up going to each family, one hundred and six kids,” she said. “They would say, ‘Fuck you. Don’t come into my house.’”

  The breakthrough finally came months into the program. “There’s this one kid,” Jaffe said. She made up a name for him: Johnnie Jones. “He was a bad kid. He was fourteen, fifteen then. He lived with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old sister. His mother lived in Queens. Even the mother hated us. There was no one for us to reach out to. So now, November of the first year, 2007, Dave Glassberg comes to my office, Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

  “He says, ‘All the guys, all the people on the team, chipped in and we bought Johnnie Jones and his family Thanksgiving dinner tonight.’

  “And I said, ‘You’re kidding.’ This was a bad kid.

  “And he goes, ‘You know why we did it? This is a kid that we’re gonna lose but there are seven other kids in that family. We had to do something for them.’

  “I had tears in my eyes. Then he said, ‘Well, we have all these other families. What are we going to do?’ It’s ten a.m., day before Thanksgiving, and I said, ‘Dave, what if I go to the police commissioner and see if I can get two thousand bucks and see if we can buy a turkey for every family? Could we do it?’”

  She went upstairs to the executive level of police headquarters, and begged for two minutes with the police commissioner. “I said, ‘This is what Dave Glassberg did with the team. I want to buy a hundred and twenty-five turkeys. Can I get money somewhere?’ He said yes. Glassberg put his men on overtime. They found frozen turkeys and refrigerated trucks, and that night went door-to-door in the Brownsville projects. We put them in a bag, and we did a flyer: ‘From our family to your family, Happy Thanksgiving.’”

  Jaffe was sitting in her office at New York police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. She was in full uniform—tall and formidable, with a head of thick black hair and more than a hint of Brooklyn in her voice.

  “We’d knock,” she continued. “Momma or Grandma would open the door and say, ‘Johnnie, the police are here’—just like that. I’d say, ‘Hi, Mrs. Smith, I’m Chief Jaffe. We have something for you for Thanksgiving. We just want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.’ And they’d be, ‘What is this?’ And they’d say, ‘Come in, come in,’ and they would drag you in, and the apartments were so hot, I mean, and then, ‘Johnnie, come here, the police are here!’ And there’s all these people running around, hugging and crying. Every family—I did five—there was hugging and crying. And I always said the same thing: ‘I know sometimes you can hate the police. I understand all that. But I just want you to know, as much as it seems that we’re harassing you by knocking on your door, we really do care, and we really do want you to have a happy Thanksgiving.’”

  Now, why was Jaffe so obsessed with meeting her J-RIPpers’ families? Because she didn’t think the police in Brownsville were perceived as legitimate. Across the United States, an astonishing number of black men have spent some time in prison. (To give you just one statistic, 69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.) Brownsville is a neighborhood full of black male high school dropouts, which means that virtually every one of those juvenile delinquents on Jaffe’s list would have had a brother or a father or a cousin who had served time in jail.2 If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard? What Jaffe realized when she came to Brownsville was that the police were seen as the enemy. And if the police were seen as the enemy, how on earth would she be able to get fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—already embarked on a course of mugging and stealing—to change their ways? She could threaten them and warn them of the dire consequences of committing more crimes. But these were teenagers, stubborn and defiant by nature, who had already drifted into a life of crime. Why should they listen to her? She represented the institution that had put their fathers and brothers and cousins in prison. She needed to win back the respect of the community, and to do that, she needed the support of the families of her J-RIPpers. Her little speech on that first Thanksgiving—I know sometimes you can hate the police. I understand all that. But I just want you to know, as much as it seems that we’re harassing you by knocking on your door, we really do care, and we really do want you to have a happy Thanksgiving—was a plea for legitimacy. She was trying to get families who had been on the wrong side of the law—sometimes for generations—to see that the law could be on their side.

  After the success with the turkeys, Jaffe started Christmas-toy giveaways. The J-RIP task force started playing basketball with their young charges. They took them out for sushi dinners. They tried to get them summer jobs. They drove them to doctor appointments. Then Jaffe started a Christmas dinner, where every J-RIPper was invited along with his entire family. “You know what I do at the Christmas dinner with my J-RIP kids?” Jaffe said. “They act all tough in front of their friends. So I hug each one of them. It’s always ‘Come on. Let’s hug.’” Jaffe is not a small woman. She is strong and imposing. Imagine her approaching some skinny teenager with her arms wide open. A hug from her would swallow him up.

  This sounds like something out of a bad Hollywood movie, doesn’t it? Turkeys on Thanksgiving! Hugging and crying! The reason most police departments around the world haven’t followed Jaffe’s lead is that what she did doesn’t seem right. Johnnie Jones was a bad kid. Buying food and toys for people like him seems like the worst form of liberal indulgence. If the police chief in your town announced, in the face of a major crime wave, that she was going to start hugging and feeding the families of the criminals roaming the streets, you’d be speechless—right? Well, take a look at what happened in Brownsville.

  When Leites and Wolf wrote that “influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism,” they meant that the power of the state was without limits. If you wanted to impose order, you didn’t have to worry about what those whom you were ordering about thought of you. You were above that. But Leites and Wolf had it backwards. What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them—that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

  That was the mistake General Freeland made in the Lower Falls. He didn’t look at what was happening through the eyes of people like Rosemary Lawlor. He thought he’d ended the insurgency when he rode around the hushed streets of the Lower Falls like a British Raj on a tiger hunt. Had he bothered to drive up the street to Ballymurphy, where Harriet Carson was banging the lids of pots and saying, “Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered,” he would have realized the insurgency was just beginning.

  5.

  July in Northern Ireland is the height of what is known as “marching season,” when the country’s Protestant Loyalists organize parades to commemorate their long-ago victories over the country’s Catholic minority. There are church parades, “arch, banner and hall” parades, commemorative band parades, a
nd “blood and thunder” and “kick-the-Pope” flute band parades. There are parades with full silver bands, parades with bagpipes, parades with accordions, and parades with marchers wearing sashes and dark suits and bowler hats. There are hundreds of parades in all, involving tens of thousands of people, culminating every year in a massive march on the twelfth of July that marks the anniversary of the victory by William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when Protestant control over Northern Ireland was established once and for all.

  The night before the Twelfth, as it is known, marchers around the country hold street parties and build enormous bonfires.3 When the fire is at its height, the group chooses a symbol to burn. In past years, it has often been an effigy of the Pope or some hated local Catholic official. Here’s how one Twelfth ditty goes, sung to the tune of “Clementine”:

  Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,

  Stick a Catholic on the top,

  Put the Pope right in the middle,

  And burn the fucking lot.4

  Northern Ireland is not a large country. Its cities are dense and compact, and as the Loyalists march by each summer in their bowler hats and sashes with flutes, they inevitably pass by the neighborhoods of the people whose defeat they are celebrating. The central artery of Catholic West Belfast is, in places, no more than a few minutes’ walk from the street that runs through the heart of Protestant West Belfast. There are places in Belfast where the houses of Catholics back directly onto the backyards of Protestants, in such close proximity that each house has a giant metal grate over its backyard to protect the inhabitants against debris or petrol bombs thrown by their neighbors. On the night before the Twelfth, when Loyalists lit bonfires around the city, people in Catholic neighborhoods would smell the smoke and hear the chants and see their flag going up in flames.

  In marching season, violence always erupts in Northern Ireland. One of the incidents that began the Troubles was in 1969 after two days of riots broke out when a parade passed through a Catholic neighborhood. When the marchers went home, they went on a rampage through the streets of West Belfast, burning down scores of homes.5 The gun battles the following summer that so tried Freeland’s patience also happened during Protestant marches. Imagine that every summer U.S. Army veterans from the Northern states paraded through the streets of Atlanta and Richmond to commemorate their long-ago victory in the American Civil War. In the dark years of Northern Ireland, when Catholic and Protestant were at each other’s throats, that’s what marching season felt like.

  When the residents of the Lower Falls looked up that afternoon and saw the British Army descend on their neighborhood, they were then as desperate as anyone to see law and order enforced in Belfast. But they were equally anxious about how law and order would be enforced. Their world did not seem fair. The Twelfth, when either their flag or their Pope would be burned in giant bonfires, was only days away. The institution charged with keeping both sides apart during marching season was the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But the RUC was almost entirely Protestant. It belonged to the other side. The RUC had done almost nothing to try to stop the riots the previous summer; a tribunal convened by the British government concluded, after the Protestant Loyalists had torched houses, that the RUC officers had “failed to take effective action.” Journalists at the scene reported Loyalists going up to police officers and asking them if they could borrow their weapons. One of the reasons the British Army had been brought into Northern Ireland was to serve as an impartial referee between Protestant and Catholic. But England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, so it seemed only natural to Northern Ireland’s beleaguered Catholics that the sympathies of the soldiers would ultimately lie with the Protestants. When a big Loyalist march had run through Ballymurphy in the Easter before the curfew, British soldiers had stood between the marchers and the residents, ostensibly to act as a buffer. But the troops faced the Catholics on the sidewalk and stood with their backs to the Loyalists—as if they saw their job as to protect the Loyalists from the Catholics but not the Catholics from the Loyalists.

  General Freeland was trying to enforce the law in Belfast, but he needed to first ask himself if he had the legitimacy to enforce the law—and the truth is, he didn’t. He was in charge of an institution that the Catholics of Northern Ireland believed, with good reason, was thoroughly sympathetic to the very people who had burned down the houses of their friends and relatives the previous summer. And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6

  The great puzzle of Northern Ireland is why it took the British so long to understand this. In 1969, the Troubles resulted in thirteen deaths, seventy-three shootings, and eight bombings. In 1970, Freeland decided to get tough with thugs and gunmen, warning that anyone caught throwing gasoline bombs was “liable to be shot.” What happened? The historian Desmond Hamill writes:

  The [IRA] retaliated by saying that they would shoot soldiers, if Irishmen were shot. The Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force—an extreme and illegal paramilitary unit—quickly joined in, offering to shoot a Catholic in return for every soldier shot by the IRA. The Times quoted a Belfast citizen saying: “Anyone who isn’t confused here doesn’t really understand what is going on.”

  That year, there were 25 deaths, 213 shootings, and 155 bombings. The British stood firm. They cracked down even harder—and in 1971, there were 184 deaths, 1,020 bombings, and 1,756 shootings. Then the British drew a line in the sand. The army instituted a policy known as “internment.” Civil rights in Northern Ireland were suspended. The country was flooded with troops, and the army declared that anyone suspected of terrorist activities could be arrested and held in prison, indefinitely, without charges or trial. So many young Catholic men were rounded up during internment that in a neighborhood like Ballymurphy, everyone had a brother or a father or a cousin in prison. If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard? Things got even worse. In 1972, there were 1,495 shootings, 531 armed robberies, 1,931 bombings, and 497 people killed. One of those 497 was a seventeen-year-old boy named Eamon. Eamon was Rosemary Lawlor’s little brother.7

  “Eamon appeared at my door,” Lawlor said. “He said to me, ‘I’d love to stay here for a day or two.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you?’ He said, ‘Ma would have a fit. She would go ballistic.’ Then he confided in myself and my husband that he was getting harassed by the British Army. Every time he was out, every corner he turned, everywhere he went, they were stopping him and they threatened him.”

  Was he actually working with the IRA? She didn’t know, and she said it didn’t matter. “We were all suspects in their eyes,” she went on. “That’s the way it was. And Eamon was shot, shot by a British soldier. Him and another fellow were having a smoke, and one shot rang out, and Eamon got it. He lived for eleven weeks. He died on the sixteenth of January, at seventeen and a half years of age.” She began to tear up. “My father never worked again at the dock. My mother was destroyed, heartbroken. It’s forty years ago this year. It’s still rough.”

  Lawlor was a young wife and mother, living what she had expected would be a normal life in modern Belfast. But then she lost her home. She was threatened and harassed. Her relatives down the hill were imprisoned in their homes. Her brother was shot and killed. She never wanted any of it, nor asked for any of it, nor could even make sense of what happened. “That was my life, my whole new life,” she said. “And then this was forced upon me. And I go, This is not right. D’you know? Here are my people I grew up with in school, being burnt out of their houses. The British Army that came in to protect us has now turned on us and is wracking and ruining. I became hooked. I don’t mean that flippantly. I became that way because I can’t sit in the house while this is going on. I can’t be a nine-to-five mother.

  “People call it the Troubles,” she continued. “It was
war! The British Army was out there with armored cars and weapons and you name it. That’s a war zone we lived in. The British Army came in here with every means that they had available to put us down. And we were like rubber dolls—we’d just bounce back up again. Don’t get me wrong. We got hurt on the way down. A lot of people had heartache. I suffered from anger for a long, long time, and I’ve apologized to my children for that. But the circumstances dictated that. It wasn’t how I was. I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.”

  6.

  When General Freeland’s men descended on the Lower Falls, the first thing the neighbors did was run to St. Peter’s Cathedral, the local Catholic church just a few blocks away. The defining feature of the Lower Falls, like so many of the other Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast, was its religiosity. St. Peter’s was the heart of the neighborhood. Four hundred people would attend mass at St. Peter’s on a typical weekday. The most important man in the community was the local priest. He came running. He went up to the soldiers. The raid must be done quickly, he warned them, or there would be trouble.

  Forty-five minutes passed, and the soldiers emerged with their haul: fifteen pistols, a rifle, a Schmeisser submachine gun, and a cache of explosives and ammunition. The patrol packed up and left, turning onto a side street that would take them out of the Lower Falls. In the interim, however, a small crowd had gathered, and as the armored cars turned the corner, a number of young men ran forward and started throwing stones at the soldiers. The patrol stopped. The crowd grew angry. The soldiers responded with tear gas. The crowd grew angrier. Stones turned to petrol bombs and petrol bombs to bullets. A taxi driver said he had seen someone carrying a submachine gun heading for Balkan Street. The rioters set up roadblocks to slow the army’s advance: a truck was set ablaze, blocking the end of the street. The soldiers fired even more tear gas, until the wind had carried it clear across the Lower Falls. The crowd grew angrier still.