Page 132 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

the FBI, and he was shocked to learn how little police departments seemed to know
about what they did. “Many of us in the department,” the chief would later admit, “had
the feeling we were training, equipping, and deploying men to do a job neither we, nor
anyone else, knew much about.” He told Kelling to go ahead.
Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he
could on crime in the three areas of the study. The result? Nothing. Burglaries were the
same in all three neighborhoods. So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism. The
citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the
areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened. “The results
were all in one direction and that was, it doesn’t make any difference,” Kelling said. “It
didn’t matter to citizen satisfaction, it didn’t matter to crime statistics, it just didn’t
seem to matter.”

Every police chief in the country read the results. Initially, there was disbelief. Some
urban police departments were still committed Wilsonites. Kelling remembers the Los
Angeles Police Chief standing up at one national law-enforcement conference and
saying, “If those findings are true, every officer in Kansas City was asleep at the switch
because I can assure you that’s not how it is in Los Angeles.”
But slowly resistance gave way to resignation. The study came out as violent crime
was beginning its long, hard, two-decade surge across the United States, and it fed into
the growing feeling among people in law enforcement that the task before them was
overwhelming. They had thought they could prevent crime with police patrols, but now
the Kansas City PD had tested that assumption empirically, and patrols turned out to be
a charade. And if patrols didn’t work, what did? Lee Brown, chief of the New York
City Police Department, gave a famous interview in the middle of the crack epidemic
in which he all but threw up his hands. “This country’s social problems are well beyond
the ability of the police to deal with on their own,” Brown said. He had read George
Kelling’s Kansas City report. It was hopeless. No matter how many police officers a
city had, Brown said, “You could never have enough to use traditional policing
techniques to deter crime.…If you don’t have a police officer to cover every part of the
city all the time, the chance of an officer on patrol coming across a crime in progress is
very small.”
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush came to Kansas City. He spent the morning
in one of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, then gave a speech to a
group of local police officers. He tried to be upbeat. He failed. The homicide rate that
year in Kansas City was three times the national average. It would go up again in 1991
and again in 1992, then once more in 1993. There wasn’t much to say. Halfway through
his remarks, Bush was reduced to simply listing the terrible things happening on the
city’s streets:

A four-year-old boy shot dead in a suspected crack house; an eleven-year-old kid
gunned down outside another drug den, allegedly at the hands of a fourteen-year-old
guard; in a downtown bar, a mother sells her baby for crack; and a firebombing
leaves three generations dead, including a grandmother and three little kids—the
headlines are horrifying, sickening, outrageous.
But in the early 1990s, twenty years after the first Kansas City experiment, Kansas
City decided to try again. They hired another brilliant young criminologist named
Lawrence Sherman. As they had with George Kelling, they gave him free rein. It was
time for Kansas City Experiment Number Two. Why not? Nothing else was working.