Page 147 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

problem. “You wouldn’t tell doctors to go out and start cutting people up to see if they’ve got bad
gallbladders,” Sherman says. “You need to do lots of diagnosis first before you do any kind of
dangerous procedure. And stop-and-search is a dangerous procedure. It can generate hostility to the
police.” To Sherman, medicine’s Hippocratic oath—“First, do no harm”—applies equally to law
enforcement. “I’ve just bought myself a marble bust of Hippocrates to try to emphasize every day
when I look at it that we’ve got to minimize the harm of policing,” he went on. “We have to
appreciate that everything police do, in some ways, intrudes on somebody’s liberty. And so it’s not
just about putting the police in the hot spots. It’s also about having a sweet spot of just enough
intrusion on liberty and not an inch—not an iota—more.”
That’s why the police officers involved in Sherman’s Kansas City experiment underwent special
training. “We knew that proactive policing was a legitimacy risk for the police, and I stressed that
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repeatedly,” Sherman said. Even more crucially, this is why the Kansas City gun experiment was
confined to District 144. That’s where the crime was. “We went through the effort of trying to
reconstruct where the hot spots were,” Sherman said. In the city’s worst neighborhood, he then
drilled down one step further, applying the same fine-grained analysis that he and Weisburd had
used in Minneapolis to locate the specific street segments where crime was most concentrated.
Patrol officers were then told to focus their energies on those places. Sherman would never have
aggressively looked for guns in a neighborhood that wasn’t a war zone.

In District 144, the “Mike and Sandra problem” didn’t go away. But the point of confining the
Kansas City gun experiment to the worst parts of the worst neighborhoods was to make the haystack
just a little smaller, and to make the inevitable trade-off between fighting crime and harassing
innocent people just a little more manageable. In an ordinary community, for the police to be as
aggressive as Sherman wanted them to be would be asking for trouble. On the other hand, to people
suffering in the 3 or 4 percent of streets where crime is endemic—where there might be as many as
100 or even 200 police calls in a year—coupling theory suggested that the calculus would be
different.
“What happens in hot-spots policing? You tell the police, ‘Go on the ten streets out of the one
hundred in that neighborhood, or out of a thousand in that neighborhood, and spend your time
there.’ That’s where things are happening,” Weisburd says. “And if you do that, there’s a good
chance the neighborhood will say, ‘Yeah, that intrusion is worthwhile because I don’t want to get
shot tomorrow.’”
The first question for Brian Encinia is: did he do the right thing? But the second question is just
as important: was he in the right place?

5.

Prairie View, Texas, where Sandra Bland was pulled over, is sometimes described as being
“outside” Houston, as if it were a suburb. It is not. Houston is fifty miles away. Prairie View is the
countryside.
The town is small: no more than a few thousand people, short streets lined with modest ranch
homes. The university sits at one end of the main street, FM 1098, which then borders the west edge
of the campus. If you drive around the school on the ring road, there is a small Episcopal Church on
the left, the college football stadium on the right, and after that lots of pasture land, populated with
the occasional horse or cow. Waller County—where Prairie View is located—is predominantly
Republican, white, middle- and working-class.
Renfro: OK, talk to me about that area. Is it a high-crime area?
Encinia: That portion of FM 1098 is a high-crime, high-drug area. It’s—with my experience in
that area, I have, in similar situations, with what I’ve seen, I’ve come across drugs, weapons,
and noncompliant individuals.
Encinia then goes on to tell Renfro that he has made multiple arrests for “warrants, drugs, and
numerous weapons, almost [all] within that vicinity.”
Encinia’s official record, however, shows nothing of the sort. Between October 1, 2014, and the