Page 174 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

Weisburd map of Seattle crime patterns:

See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Understanding and Controlling Hot Spots of Crime: The
Importance of Formal and Informal Social Controls,” Prevention Science 15, no. 1 (2014): 31–
43, doi:10.1007/s11121-012-0351-9. The map shows crime over the period from 1989 to 2004. For
more on Weisburd’s research on crime and place, see David Weisburd et al., The Criminology of
Place: Street Segments and Our Understanding of the Crime Problem (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), and David Weisburd et al., Place Matters: Criminology for the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Not long after I met Weisburd in 2018, he arranged for me to spend a day with a colleague of his,
Claire White. The two of them have been running a multimillion-dollar “hot spot” research project
in Baltimore since 2012—studying 450 street segments all over the city. “It’s becoming well
established that crime is highly concentrated,” White explained. “[Weisburd] has shown us that
across numerous cities with different types of data. The big question is why? What is it about these
places that have such a high concentration of crime?”
White and Weisburd hired forty student interviewers. They send them out every day to document
the condition of those 450 segments, gathering as much information as they can on their residents.
“We ask about what we call collective efficacy, willingness to intervene,” White said. “If there’s
kids climbing on a parked car, how willing are your neighbors to say something? If the local fire
station was going to be shut down, how willing are your neighbors to do something about it? Kind
of this willingness to be involved as well as trusting. Do you trust your neighbors? Do you share the
same values as your neighbors?…We have questions about the police: Do you think the police treat
you fairly? Do you think the officers treat people with respect?”
For comparison purposes, some of those street segments are “cold” spots, defined as blocks with
fewer than four police calls a year. A hot spot is anything with more than eighteen police calls a
year. Keep in mind that Baltimore is an eighteenth-century city—the blocks are really short. So
that’s a minimum of eighteen police calls along a street segment that you could walk in less than a
minute. White said that some of the streets in the study had over six hundred calls for service in one
year. That’s what Weisburd means by the Law of Crime Concentration. Most streets have none. A
small number of streets are home to virtually all the crime in the area.