Page 175 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

White and I began our tour in West Baltimore, not far from the city’s downtown.
“It’s notorious for being one of the pretty high crime areas. It’s where Freddie Gray was arrested
and where the riots took place,” she said, referring to the 2015 case of a young African American
who died in police custody, under suspicious circumstances, leading to angry protests. “If you’ve
seen The Wire, they always talk about West Baltimore.” The area was typical of an older
northeastern city: narrow streets, red-brick townhouses. Some blocks had been gentrified, others
not. “There’s definitely many areas where you’ll be walking and you feel you’re in a nice
neighborhood, right? You feel comfortable,” White said, as she drove through the heart of the
neighborhood. “Then you turn the corner and you’re in a street that’s all boarded up. It’s a ghost
town. You wonder if anyone even lives on the street.”
She took me to the first of the street segments being studied and parked there. She wanted me to
guess whether it was a hot spot or a cold spot. On the corner was an exquisite nineteenth-century
church, and behind it a small park. The block had elegant European proportions. The sun was
shining. I said I thought it must be a cold spot. She shook her head. “This is a violent street.”
She drove on.
Sometimes a street’s identity was obvious: a bedraggled block with a bar at one end and Slick
Rick’s Bail Bonds at the other was exactly as it looked—a double hot spot, bad for both crime and
drugs. “There’s ones where it’s very clear, right?” White asked me. “You get out of the car and the
people on the street start shouting out their codes for a police officer coming.” She started laughing.
“I love going out with the field researchers when they’re like, ‘That’s the code for us being on the
street.’” Once, in broad daylight, White’s field workers found themselves in the middle of a gun
battle; there was little ambiguity about that segment.
But some bedraggled streets were perfectly fine. Once, in the midst of a particularly dismal stretch,
we came across a little oasis: two consecutive street segments of manicured lawns and freshly
painted houses. One large abandoned building had a sign posted in its window, a reference to John
14: 2, 3: “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” Was a glimpse of irony evidence of function
or dysfunction?
I asked White to explain what tipped a street segment one way or the other. Sometimes she could.
Usually she couldn’t. “That’s exactly it,” she said. “The environment doesn’t always speak to what’s
going on. In our pilot study, one of the streets we selected was a violent hot spot. The police officer
and clinician were like, ‘No way is this a violent hot spot.’ All the homes are well kept. It’s this
beautiful street. I went and checked to make sure. I thought maybe there was something wrong with
our data. I have this officer saying no way is this a violent hot spot, and it is. You can’t always tell.”
The lesson of an afternoon driving around Baltimore with Claire White was that it is really easy to
make mistakes about strangers. Baltimore is a city where the homicide rate is many times the
national average. The simplest thing in the world is to look at the abandoned buildings and the
poverty and the drug dealers calling out their codes, then write off those areas and everyone in them.
But the point of the Law of Crime Concentration is that most of the streets in “those areas” are
perfectly fine. The hot spot is a spot, not a region. “We focus on all the bad people,” White said of
Baltimore’s reputation, “but in reality there’s mostly good people.” Our ignorance of the unfamiliar
is what fuels our fear.
“Cal seemed pleased…I turned back”: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber,
1966), pp. 175, 179, 181.
as high as the suicide rate for women…has ever been: See Figure 3 in Kyla Thomas and David
Gunnell, “Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A time-trends analysis,” International Journal
of Epidemiology 39, issue 6 (2010): 1464–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyq094.
Weisburd’s Jersey City map: See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Does Crime Just Move Around
the Corner? A Controlled Study of Spatial Displacement and Diffusion of Crime Control Benefits.”
Criminology 44, no. 3 (08, 2006): 549–92. doi: http://dx.doi.org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/10.1111/j.1745-
9125.2006.00057.x.
“I would park illegally…like moths to an electric light bulb”: Anne Sexton, “The Barfly Ought
to Sing,” TriQuarterly no. 7 (1996): 174–75, quoted in Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A
Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 107. Also from the Middlebrook biography: “to