Page 133 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

2.

Lawrence Sherman thought the focus ought to be on guns. He believed the sheer
number of guns in the city was what fueled its epidemic of violence. His plan was to
try a number of ideas in sequence, rigorously evaluate their effectiveness—as Kelling
had done—and pick a winner. He called a planning meeting with a group of the city’s
senior police officers. They chose as their testing ground Patrol District 144: a small,
0.64-square-mile neighborhood of modest single-family homes, bounded to the south
by 39th Street and to the west by Highway 71. District 144 was as bad as Kansas City
got in the early 1990s. The homicide rate there was twenty times the national average.
The area averaged one violent felony a day and twenty-four drive-by shootings a year.
A third of the lots were vacant. Just a few months before, an officer had been on patrol
through 144 when he saw some kids playing basketball in the street. He stopped, got
out, and asked them to move. One of the players threw the basketball at his head, then
two others jumped him. It was that kind of place.
Sherman’s first idea was for two-man teams to knock on every door in the
neighborhood over a three-month period. The officers would introduce themselves, talk
about gun violence, and give the residents a flyer with an 800 number on it: if they
heard anything about guns, they were encouraged to call in an anonymous tip. The plan
went off without a hitch. In many of the visits, the officers were trailed by a graduate
student in criminology, James Shaw, whose job was to evaluate the program’s
effectiveness. Sometimes the officers stayed for as long as twenty minutes, chatting
with people who had never had a police officer come to their door other than to make
an arrest. In his subsequent write-up, Shaw was effusive:
The police went to every residence in that community, some more than once, and
talked to residents in a friendly, non-threatening manner. In response, people were
very receptive and glad to see the police going door to door. People frequently
responded with comments like “God bless you all, we shoulda’ had a program like
this before,” or “Thank God! I didn’t think you all would ever come.”
In the end, 88 percent of the people visited said that they would use the hotline if
they saw any guns. So how many calls came in—after 858 door-to-door visits over
three months? Two. Both were about guns in another neighborhood.
The problem, everyone soon realized, was not that the residents of District 144
didn’t want to help. They did. It was that they never left their houses. “It’s starting to
sound like Beirut around here,” one homeowner told Shaw, and if you’re so scared that
you never leave your house, how on earth do you know who has guns or not? Shaw
wrote:
Not unlike residents in many other inner-city neighborhoods, these people have
become like caged animals in their own homes; bars on the windows are the norm.
One is not surprised even to see bars on second-story windows. More dismal
however is the fact that in house after house the blinds are drawn and drapes closed
up tightly, blocking out any trace of the outside world. These elderly people lock
themselves up and shut themselves in. They hear the world outside, and it
sometimes sounds like a battle zone. But they can’t see anything.

The group’s next idea was to train officers in the subtle art of spotting concealed
weapons. The impetus came from a New York City police officer named Robert T.
Gallagher, who in eighteen years on the force had disarmed an astonishing 1,200