Page 137 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

recalls.

Someone at the meeting said, “Well, David finds that crime doesn’t just move
around the corner. And that would suggest that you ought to become more focused.”
This guy turned around and he said, “My experience tells me that that’s just not true.
I don’t believe that.” That was the end of that. 3
Is something wrong with Israel’s deputy commissioner of police? Not at all.
Because his reaction is no different from the behavior of the highway patrol in North
Carolina, or the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, or the literary scholars who speak
confidently of Sylvia Plath’s doomed genius. There is something about the idea of
coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and
context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be
indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.

So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and
then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency?

You get Sandra Bland.

1 Wilson first experimented with preventive patrol when he was the chief of police in Wichita, Kansas. He
would later hold the same post in Chicago.
2 To deal with that hurdle, for example, Gallagher developed all kinds of tricks. He and his partner would
approach someone they thought was carrying a gun. They’d corner him, so he was feeling a little defensive.
Then Gallagher would identify himself: I’m a police officer.
“When you stop a man with a gun, 99 out of 100 times he’s going to do the same thing,” Gallagher told a reporter
years ago. “He’s going to turn the side that the gun’s on away from you—either several inches, just a quick
turn of the hip, or halfway around. And the hand and arm are going to come naturally in the direction of the
gun,” in an instinctive protective motion. “At that point you don’t have to wait to see if he goes under the shirt
for the gun or if he’s just going to keep it covered,” he said. “At that point you have all the right in the world
to do a frisk.”
3 One of Weisburd’s former students, Barak Ariel, went so far as to test resistance to the coupling idea in the
Derry region of Northern Ireland. Law-enforcement officers in Derry are asked to identify specific troubled
areas of their beats that they think are going to require additional police presence. Their predictions are called
“waymarkers.” Ariel wondered: how closely do the police officers’ waymarkers match up with the hot spots
where crime actually happens in Derry? I think you can guess. “The majority of streets included in
‘Waymarkers’ were neither ‘hot’ nor ‘harmful,’ resulting in a false positive rate of over 97 percent,” Ariel
concluded. This means that 97 percent of the blocks identified by police officers as being dangerous and
violent were not dangerous and violent at all. The officers who drew these waymarkers were not sitting behind
a desk, remote from the direct experience of the streets. This was their turf. These were crimes they
investigated and criminals they arrested. Yet somehow they could not see a fundamental pattern in the location
of the strangers they were arresting.