Page 124 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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
6
Law of Crime Concentration. 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