Page 135 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

District 144. They were told not to stray outside the area’s 0.64 square miles. They
were freed from all other law-enforcement obligations. They didn’t have to answer
radio calls or rush to accident scenes. Their instructions were clear: watch out for what
you think are suspicious-looking drivers. Use whatever pretext you can find in the
traffic code to pull them over. If you’re still suspicious, search the car and confiscate
any weapon you find. The officers worked every night from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., seven
days a week, for 200 consecutive days. And what happened? Outside District 144,
where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever. But
inside 144? All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders,
woundings—in half.

Remember, the police had all but given up by that point. Hotline? Nobody calls it.
Concealed-weapons detection? A crew from 20/20 comes down and twice goes home
empty-handed. Lee Brown, up in New York City, was mourning the powerlessness of
the police to do anything serious about violent crime. Everyone remembered the
previous Kansas City experiment, which had plunged the law-enforcement community
into twenty years of despair. But now the same city had come back, and this time they
were declaring victory. “I don’t know why it didn’t occur to us to really focus on guns,”
the Kansas City police chief said after the results came in. He was as stunned as
everyone else at what just two extra patrol cars had accomplished. “We usually focus
on getting the bad guys after a crime. Maybe going after guns was too simplistic for
us.”
The first Kansas City experiment said that preventive patrol was useless, that having
more police cars driving around made no difference. The second Kansas City
experiment amended that position. Actually, extra patrol cars did make a difference—
so long as officers took the initiative and stopped anyone they thought suspicious, got
out of their cars as much as possible, and went out of their way to look for weapons.
Patrol worked if the officers were busy. The statistics from the final report on the
experiment were eye-opening. Over the seven months, each patrol car issued an
average of 5.45 traffic citations per shift. They averaged 2.23 arrests per night. In just
200 days, the four officers had done more “policing” than most officers of that era did
in their entire careers: 1,090 traffic citations, 948 vehicle stops, 616 arrests, 532
pedestrian checks, and 29 guns seized. That’s one police intervention every forty
minutes. On a given night in the tiny 0.64 square miles of 144, each squad car drove
about twenty-seven miles. The officers weren’t parked on a street corner, eating
doughnuts. They were in constant motion.
Police officers are no different from the rest of us. They want to feel that their
efforts are important, that what they do matters, that their hard work will be rewarded.
What happened in District 144 provided exactly what the profession of law
enforcement had been searching for: validation.
“Officers who recovered a firearm received favorable notoriety from their peers,
almost to the point that recovery of a firearm came to be a measure of success,” Shaw
wrote in his account of the program. “Officers could frequently be heard making
statements such as ‘I’ve just got to get a gun tonight,’ or ‘I haven’t gotten a gun yet;
tonight will be the night!’”
In 1991 the New York Times ran a front-page story on the miracle in Kansas City.
Larry Sherman says that over the next few days his phone rang off the hook: 300 police
departments around the country bombarded him with requests for information on how
he had done it. One by one, police departments around the country followed suit. To
give one example, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol went from 400,000 to