Page 136 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

800,000 traffic stops a year in the space of seven years.

The Drug Enforcement Agency used “Operation Pipeline” to teach tens of
thousands of local police officers across the United States how to use Kansas City–
style traffic stops to catch drug couriers. Immigration officials started using police stops
to catch undocumented immigrants. Today, police officers in the United States make
something like twenty million traffic stops a year. That’s 55,000 a day. All over the
United States, law enforcement has tried to replicate the miracle in District 144. The
key word in that sentence is tried. Because in the transition from Kansas City to the rest
of the country, something crucial in Lawrence Sherman’s experiment was lost.

4.

The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had
worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law
of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers,
where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done
the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate
interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City
—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.

And what was the principal implication of coupling? That law enforcement didn’t
need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused. If criminals operated overwhelmingly
in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily
policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime-fighting strategies used by police in
those areas ought to be very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city
with virtually no crime at all.
“If crime is concentrated on a few percent of the city streets,” Weisburd asked, “why
the hell are you wasting resources everywhere? If it’s coupled to those places and
doesn’t move easily, even more so.” The coupling theorists believed they had solved
the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventive patrol. How do you
effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring
more police officers, or by turning the entire city into a surveillance state. You do it by
zeroing in on those few specific places where all the crime is.

But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000
traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and
concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway
Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot
more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City
was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed
was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was
concentrated. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.
Weisburd and Sherman say they have trotted out their maps and numbers, trying to
convince their peers of the Law of Crime Concentration, to little effect. Back in the
72nd precinct in Brooklyn where he began his work, after a long day roaming the
neighborhood, Weisburd would turn to the police officers he had been walking with
and say, “Isn’t it strange how we’re returning again and again to the same blocks?”
They would look at him blankly.
“I was in a meeting with the deputy commissioner [of police] in Israel,” Weisburd