Page 123 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

“If a physical barrier on the bridge were to be erected, it would not surprise me if after three
months, a suicide prone individual would walk to the north tower with a pistol and put the gun to
his head in frustration of not being able to jump. What then of the millions to erect a physical
suicide barrier?”
“People bent on suicide will find many ways to do away with themselves—pills, hanging,
drowning, cutting arteries, jumping from any other bridge or building. Wouldn’t it be much better
to spend the money on mental health care for many people instead of worrying about the few that
jump off bridges?”
“I oppose the construction of a suicide barrier because it would waste money and achieve
nothing. Anyone who was prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would find
another, more destructive, way of killing himself or herself. Someone who jumps off a tall
building would be much more likely to kill someone who is walking in the street than someone
who jumps off the bridge into the water.”
“All it will do is cost money and deface the bridge. There are many ways to commit suicide.
You take one away from someone it will only be replaced by another.”
In one national survey, three quarters of Americans predicted that when a barrier is finally put up
on the Golden Gate Bridge, most of those who wanted to take their life on the bridge would simply
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take their life some other way. But that’s absolutely wrong. Suicide is coupled.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of
transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top
of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not
understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

4.

Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct covers the neighborhood surrounding Greenwood Cemetery, from
Prospect Expressway in the north to Bay Ridge in the south. In the narrow strip between the western
perimeter of the cemetery and the waterfront, a series of streets run downhill toward the water. A
crumbling, elevated freeway meanders down the middle. Today, it is a gentrifying neighborhood.
Thirty years ago, when David Weisburd spent a year walking up and down those streets, it was not.

“This was a different world,” Weisburd remembers. “This was a scary place. You’d go into an
apartment building, there’d be refrigerators in the hall, garbage would be in the halls. Apartment
buildings would have backyards five feet deep in garbage. There were people on the streets who
would scare the hell out of you.”
Weisburd was a criminologist by training. He had done his dissertation at Yale University on
violent behavior among settlers in the West Bank in Israel. He was born in Brooklyn. After leaving
Yale, he got a job working on a research project back in his old borough.
The study was based out of the precinct house on Fourth Avenue, a squat, modernist box that
looked as if it were designed to repel an invading army. There were nine officers involved, each
assigned to a beat of ten to thirty blocks. “Their job was to walk around those beat areas and to
interact with the public, and to develop ways of doing something about the problems,” Weisburd
said. He was the observer and note-taker, responsible for writing up what was learned. Four days a
week, for a year, he tagged along. “I would always wear a suit and tie, and I had a police
identification card. People in the street thought I was the detective and I would say, ‘Oh no.’”

He had been studying crime in a library. Now he was at ground level, walking side by side with
beat cops. And right from the beginning, something struck him as odd. Common sense had always
held that crime was connected to certain neighborhoods. Where there were problems such as
poverty, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was crime: The broad conditions of economic and
social disadvantage bred communities of lawlessness and disorder.
In Los Angeles, that neighborhood was South Central. In Paris, it was the outer suburbs. In