Page 131 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments

1.

A century ago, a legendary figure in American law enforcement named O. W. Wilson
1
came up with the idea of “preventive patrol.” 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