0:15

Pushkin. What

0:20

did it mean to go out on a Saturday or Friday

0:22

night in nineteen ninety three in

0:25

New York.

0:29

It was kind of like a given. You know, Yeah,

0:31

you wear a fanny pack and

0:34

was here on the streets. You turn it around so it's in

0:36

front of you so you can see it.

0:37

Did you really do that?

0:39

Absolutely? Well?

0:40

I actually I'm interrupt, but I

0:42

remember I just had a flash of remember

0:45

keys. We all had keys, and I used

0:47

to around with keys

0:49

so that each one What would I have actually

0:52

done if someone had attacked me? I would put

0:54

my keys between my fingers.

0:56

Yeah, so that someone exactly I was

0:58

ready. Not long ago. I

1:00

called up two friends so I used to hang out

1:02

with when I first moved to New York City in

1:05

my twenties, Peggy and

1:07

Erica. Back in the nineties,

1:10

we were all young and footloose and

1:13

on edge. I

1:15

seem to remember that at

1:17

the end of every evening there was a discussion

1:20

about everyone had to We all had to talk

1:22

about everyone's plan for getting home. Do

1:24

you remember this? And if you didn't,

1:27

who did and didn't have money for a cab?

1:30

Did anyone under what

1:32

circumstances would you take the subway

1:35

on a Friday night after.

1:37

Dinner if you were in a large group.

1:40

Only if you're a large group, a large group.

1:41

And it was like a little adventure. So six

1:43

people would all get on the subway late at night,

1:45

and you felt like you were being adventurous.

1:49

Yeah, thinking back on it,

1:50

it felt very collegial. We

1:52

did things as a group. Yeah,

1:55

you were never left alone.

1:57

The New York City of that era was one of the

1:59

most dangerous big cities in America. The

2:02

subway was filthy, there was graffiti

2:04

everywhere. There were two thousand, two

2:07

hundred and sixty two murders in New York andnineteen

2:09

ninety more than six a day.

2:12

Were we personally at risk? I

2:14

don't know, but it felt like crime was

2:16

all around us.

2:18

You know. Someone would always say, Hey, don't worry,

2:20

I'm walking you home. We were never

2:22

allowed to walk along.

2:23

Yeah, even on a right people

2:25

would walk me home just because you

2:28

didn't want to be by yourself.

2:29

As a wonder the pro when you went on

2:31

on a date, even if it was a disaster, you

2:34

had to walk. You had to walk the woman home,

2:37

right, which is like so insanely awkward.

2:39

You're like.

2:41

You we were you know independent

2:44

women, but once the sun went

2:46

down, you never walked alone.

2:50

Let's tell about how it gets better. I

2:52

just remember that all of a sudden, all

2:55

of the precautions seemed to go out the window right

2:58

and it shoot. Statistically, we know by

3:01

ninety seven or ninety eight the murder rate has

3:03

dropped. I remember this. I had a

3:05

bedroom when I was living on that

3:08

in that walk up on Bank Street. My

3:11

bedroom window overlooked

3:14

the fire escape, and I had previously

3:16

been too scared to open my window

3:18

at night, and then I started to open my window

3:21

at night, so that technically

3:23

someone could have walked up down up to fire

3:25

estrapem and walked in. But I was like, it's fine,

3:27

now I can sleep.

3:36

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening

3:38

to Revisionist History, my podcast about

3:41

things overlooked and misunderstood. This

3:43

is part of a series introducing my new book,

3:46

Revenge of the Tipping Point, now available

3:48

everywhere. And

3:51

in this episode, I'm looking back

3:54

that the question that got me started on tipping

3:56

points twenty five years ago.

4:00

How in the nineties did New York become

4:02

one of the safest cities in America?

4:06

In nineteen ninety six, I wrote an article for

4:08

The New York and Mega trying to explain this puzzle.

4:11

It was called The Tipping Point. That

4:13

article led to my first book, called The

4:15

Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete

4:18

explanation. The success of

4:20

The Tipping Point led to another book

4:22

and another. I

4:25

wouldn't be here today talking to you were it

4:27

not from my obsession way back when about

4:29

what happened to crime in New York in the nineteen

4:31

nineties. And now I've

4:33

written a sequel to that first book. Did

4:36

I mention that it's at in bookstores everywhere.

4:38

It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point.

4:41

And in that spirit, I've decided to go back

4:43

and conduct an audit of

4:46

my conclusions from twenty five years ago,

4:48

to look at my thirty something self in the eye

4:50

and ask was

4:53

I right Back

4:59

in the nineties. I used to go to New York University's

5:02

library all the time to look for ideas

5:05

popes a big squat redstone

5:07

building on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

5:10

This was before Google, so I was

5:12

my own search engine. I'd wander the

5:14

stacks for hours, and

5:17

one day I was on the fifth floor in

5:20

the HM one dot a sixth Aisle,

5:22

and I started leaping to the bank issues of

5:25

the American Journal of Sociology from

5:27

nineteen ninety one, and I found

5:29

a paper written by a professor named

5:32

Jonathan Crane entitled

5:35

the Epidemic Theory of Ghettos and

5:37

Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out

5:39

and teenage Childbearing. A choice

5:42

of words no one would use today.

5:45

This is how it started. The

5:48

word epidemic is commonly used

5:50

to describe the high incidence of social

5:52

problems in ghettos. The

5:55

news is filled with feature stories

5:57

on crack epidemics, epidemics

5:59

of gang violence, and epidemics

6:02

of teenaged childbearing. The

6:04

term is used loosely in popular

6:06

parlance, but turns out to

6:08

be remarkably apt. The

6:11

word epidemic to Crane wasn't

6:13

a metaphor, It was a literal description.

6:16

His point was that if you look closely at how

6:18

those problems spread, how and why

6:20

they go up and down, it looks exactly

6:23

like the way viruses spread, same

6:25

rules, same patterns. And

6:27

when I read that first paragraph, I thought,

6:30

oh my god, this is exactly

6:33

what happened in New York City. We had a

6:35

real, live epidemic of crime.

6:38

And what is the hallmark of an epidemic, a

6:40

tipping point, the moment when

6:42

everything changes all at once.

6:46

That moment when I left my window open

6:48

because I suddenly felt safe was

6:50

our tipping point, and

6:52

so front and center in my first

6:54

book was a description of what I

6:56

saw as the reason why New York's epidemic

6:59

suddenly tipped the police department's

7:01

commitment to broken windows. Policing

7:06

broken windows was a theory that small

7:09

crimes or invitations for large

7:11

crimes, that if you let people get away

7:13

with little things, then you were signaling

7:15

that it was okay to cross the line into bigger

7:18

things, like serious acts

7:20

of violence. And so what do you do?

7:22

You don't let people get away with the

7:24

little things. He was taking

7:26

the concept of an epidemic and applying

7:29

it to crime. Lawlessness wasn't

7:31

random. It was something you could catch

7:33

from those around you, the same way you

7:35

can catch a cold from a warm, stuffy

7:37

room full of four year olds.

7:40

If somebody urinates in public, the

7:42

person is telling you I got a

7:44

big problem. This

7:47

is what broken windows theory is all about.

7:50

The biggest champion of this idea was

7:52

Rudy Giulioni, the mayor of New York city

7:54

at the time. Here he is at a press conference

7:57

in the mid nineties, a few years into

7:59

the Broken Windows experiment, where in

8:01

a span of just a minute and a half he

8:03

references public urination eight

8:06

times.

8:07

I mean, if some guy is urinate in

8:09

public, we

8:11

got a problem. Now you can do one of two

8:13

things. You can ignore the problem and say,

8:15

gee, I'm such a big, fuzzy

8:18

headed liberal that I'm going to walk away from it,

8:21

and you're going to make believe they have no problem.

8:23

That's New York City in the nineteen eighties. That's

8:25

New York City with two thousand murders. That's

8:27

New York City with five hundred thousand

8:31

crimes. You have to pay attention

8:33

to people urinating on the streets, and

8:35

you have to get people to stop urinating

8:38

on the streets. That's moving

8:40

towards civilization, that's moving toward

8:42

decency. That's what I mean

8:44

by a decent society that people

8:47

want to invest in, people want their children

8:49

to live in. You've got to pay attention

8:51

to somebody urinating on the street. It may be a minor

8:54

thing, it may be a serious thing, but you cannot

8:56

ignore it. You have to deal

8:58

with it. It is against the law to

9:01

urinate in public.

9:05

Giuliani was elected in nineteen ninety three

9:08

and re elected in ninety seven by

9:10

a huge margin. Under his watch,

9:12

the city was revitalized. People

9:15

who had fled for the suburbs came back. Huge

9:17

parts of Brooklyn were gentrified. Central

9:19

Park was cleaned up. I cannot

9:22

tell you how gratifying it was to

9:24

be a New Yorker in those years and finally

9:26

get a mayor who said enough, you

9:28

can't jump subway turnstiles and

9:31

smoke dope on the corner and harassed

9:33

pedestrians. But Juliani wasn't

9:35

just making an argument for civility, that

9:38

it was more pleasant to live in a city where

9:40

the streets were clean and the police were alert

9:42

to every sign of disorder. He was

9:44

making a more extravagant

9:46

claim that arresting the guy urinating

9:49

on the street was the reason why

9:51

the murder rate dropped, and

9:54

I believed him.

9:59

Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish

10:01

a book.

10:02

Whenever it happens, huge things

10:04

occur.

10:05

About ten years ago, the journalist John

10:07

Ronson did a retrospect dive on the tipping

10:09

point for a British program called The

10:12

Culture Show, and he talked to a public

10:14

defender in The Bronx named Kate Rubin.

10:16

I would go around and I would talk to people in New York

10:19

City, and the liberal people

10:21

progressive people would say, oh, well, you

10:23

know, we've had this miracle in New York and some people

10:25

would say, oh, yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's idea broken

10:27

windows.

10:28

I didn't watch any of this at the time, even

10:30

though Ronson interviewed me for the segment too.

10:33

But I found it while working on this episode,

10:35

and it made me realize the claims I

10:37

made in The Tipping Point had far more

10:39

reach than I'd ever imagined.

10:41

Some people knew that it wasn't his idea,

10:43

but that he had popularized it. They'd read about it

10:45

in The New Yorker and his book, The Tipping Point.

10:48

I would never try to speak to what his intent

10:51

was, but I think the impact

10:53

that he had was to serve as

10:57

basically a marketing force for

11:00

this idea. He truly popularized

11:03

it.

11:06

So once again, right

11:17

on the afternoon of February twenty seventh,

11:20

two thousand and eight, a young man named

11:22

David Floyd left his apartment on

11:24

Beach Avenue in the Bronx. As

11:26

he walked down the pathway next to his

11:28

building. He ran into the tenant to lived

11:31

downstairs, who said he'd locked

11:33

himself out of his apartment.

11:35

I was leaving my apartment to

11:37

actually go to school. Heading

11:39

to school, I had my book bag on, you know,

11:42

everything that normal students do as

11:44

they're going to school.

11:45

Missus Floyd, speaking in an interview

11:48

with the Civil Rights Group, raced forward. The

11:50

landlord was Floyd's godmother, so

11:52

Floyd went back inside to her apartment

11:55

to get a ring of keys, and as

11:57

he and the tenant tried to figure out which key

11:59

worked in the door, three Plaine clothes police

12:01

officers suddenly emerged. There

12:04

have been reports of burglars in the neighborhood,

12:06

and here were two young men trying to get into

12:08

a locked up apartment, and we were stopped.

12:11

We were first. We were

12:13

of course told to put our hands up to stay

12:16

where we were.

12:17

This was how the police put broken windows

12:19

into practice. Don't let the little

12:21

things pass you by. Be aggressive. Check

12:24

for weapons, drugs. Maybe you find

12:26

them, maybe you don't. But if you do that enough

12:28

times, then young men leave their guns and

12:30

drugs at home. Floyd had

12:32

actually been stopped the previous April while

12:34

walking down the street, followed by three

12:36

officers in a van who jumped out

12:39

and confronted him.

12:40

And again, it's just the

12:42

whole experience. It's

12:44

humiliating, it's embarrassing, and

12:47

really, you know, it doesn't matter what kind

12:49

of person you are, how tough you are, whatever, it's

12:52

a scary thing because you don't know

12:55

what is going to happen with your

12:57

life. You don't know what's going to happen with your freedom.

13:04

Floyd becomes the face of a massive

13:06

class action lawsuit the

13:09

City of New York, challenging the

13:11

NYPDS policy of stop and frisk,

13:15

and in twenty thirteen, Floyd

13:17

wins. In a shocking ruling, a

13:19

federal judge said the NYPD's use

13:21

of stopping frisk was unconstitutional,

13:24

effectively ending the broken windows

13:26

era in New York City policing. Yes,

13:29

it still happens today, but not in the

13:31

way that they did ten years ago, not even

13:33

remotely close. It's no exaggeration

13:36

to say that this was one of the

13:38

most consequential court cases

13:40

in the city's history.

13:42

A lot of people at the time, and I think,

13:44

you know, not without reason, said wow, this is

13:47

going to compromise public safety.

13:49

This is Aaron Chalfin, who's part of a group

13:51

of criminologists who have devoted themselves

13:53

to understanding what exactly happened

13:55

in New York.

13:56

The police are no longer going to be able to make

13:58

a lot of stops and really show people

14:01

that they were being proactive, so that might

14:03

embolden more gun carrying, more violence,

14:05

more homicide.

14:06

When Cholfin says that at the time, a

14:09

lot of people thought ending stop and frisk was

14:11

going to lead to crime going back up, he

14:13

means everyone, city government,

14:16

the police force, pundits of every variety.

14:18

That's what I thought too. What everyone was

14:20

saying in effect was this, Yes, doing

14:23

hundreds of thousands of police stops

14:25

a year of young men like David Floyd,

14:27

who maybe doing nothing more than helping out a friend

14:30

is unfortunate, but being killed

14:33

is a lot worse. And since

14:35

this is what's keeping the crime rate down,

14:38

we don't have a choice. That was

14:40

the calculus. Even the judge

14:42

in the Floyd case begins her ruling

14:44

by making the same point I

14:47

emphasize at the outset, as I

14:49

have throughout the litigation, that this case

14:52

is not about the effectiveness of stopping

14:54

frisk in deterring or combating

14:56

crime. This Court's mandate

14:58

is solely to judge the constitutionality

15:01

of police behavior, not its

15:03

effectiveness as a law enforcement

15:05

tool. She goes on, many

15:08

police practices may be useful for fighting

15:10

crime, preventive detention or

15:12

coerced confessions, for example, but

15:15

because they are unconstitutional, they

15:17

cannot be used no matter how

15:19

effective. She's basically

15:22

saying, there's a good chance that crime

15:24

is going to go back up because of my ruling. But

15:26

the Constitution is the constitution.

15:29

Even the people who hated broken

15:32

windows thought that it worked,

15:35

but then the very thing that absolutely

15:38

no one expected to happen happens.

15:42

Crime falls.

15:44

We ended stop question FRESC in

15:46

New York. We know that went down by

15:48

ninety or ninety five percent, depending on which

15:50

numbers you look at, and

15:53

yet we have this incredible, incredible

15:55

fifty percent decline in homicide.

15:58

In social science, a natural

16:00

experiment is when the real world provides

16:02

you with a clean way of measuring the truth or

16:04

falsity of a given proposition.

16:07

The Floyd decision was the perfect

16:09

natural experiment for broken windows.

16:12

All you have to do is compared before with

16:15

after.

16:16

The amazing thing about New York is

16:18

that if you look at twenty ten, New York City had

16:20

a banner year in terms of homicide.

16:22

It had.

16:22

It was one of the lowest homicide rates in forty

16:25

years in the city's history in twenty ten, and

16:27

you would have said, well, like, great progress,

16:29

let's just keep it up. Let's keep up the good work.

16:32

Incredibly, by twenty nineteen, the year

16:34

before the pandemic right, homicides

16:36

went down by fifty percent in New York compared

16:38

to twenty ten. Between twenty ten and twenty nineteen,

16:41

New York is unique in

16:43

that it had another great homicide decline

16:45

at a time when homicides were really flat nationally.

16:48

This is hands down one

16:51

of the strangest and craziest urban

16:53

transformations ever. Just

16:55

to give you a sense, if New York City's

16:57

crime rate in nineteen ninety had

17:00

just stayed the same, didn't change for

17:02

the next thirty five years, the city would

17:04

have had an additional sixty two

17:06

thousand homicides, most

17:08

of them in all likelihood young men of

17:10

color. Sixty two

17:12

thousand young men currently walking

17:15

around New York would be dead.

17:17

And by twenty nineteen, New York is almost

17:20

as safe as Paris. With respect to homicide

17:22

rates, New York is closer to Paris than it

17:24

is to other US cities, even like Boston, which

17:26

is another safe city. Right, it's incredible.

17:32

You know how those billionaires left New York

17:34

City from Miami during the pandemic, saying

17:36

they couldn't deal with the taxes and the crime.

17:39

Well, the violent crime rate in New

17:41

York City after that second wave is

17:43

half that of Miami. If you're really

17:46

worried about crime, you should be selling your

17:48

waterfront home in Coral Gables before

17:50

someone murders you and move

17:52

somewhere much safer like

17:55

the Bronx. Or here's

17:57

another. JD. Vance, the junior senator

18:00

from Ohio, tweets this in

18:02

twenty twenty one, serious

18:05

question. I have to go to New York soon, and

18:07

I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I've

18:09

heard it's disgusting and violent there.

18:12

But is it like Walking Dead Season one

18:14

or season four? I

18:16

know, I know there's a whole cottage industry

18:19

of unearthing crazy things. J. D. Vance

18:21

once said, But Vance is

18:23

from just outside Cincinnati. The

18:26

violent crime rate in Cincinnati at

18:28

the exact moment he wrote that tweet was

18:30

twice the violent crime rate in New York

18:33

City. Serious question, Senator.

18:35

I have to go to your hometown soon, and I'm

18:38

trying to figure out where to stay because

18:40

compared to where I come from, it's disgusting

18:42

and violent there. But

18:45

I digress back to Chelfin

18:47

and the question at hand.

18:49

And so you know, it does give you the sense

18:52

that making loss and loss of these stops

18:54

was not the key ingredient.

18:55

It does, doesn't it. We conducted

18:58

a natural experiment and the results

19:00

are in. It wasn't broken

19:03

windows, it wasn't stop

19:05

and frisk.

19:07

My administration will issue hundreds

19:09

of millions of dollars in federal grants to

19:11

reward cities and towns and return

19:14

to proven crime fighting methods, including

19:16

stop and frisk and broken

19:19

windows policing. We did that with Rudy

19:21

Giuliani was so successful.

19:24

At three o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I

19:26

lie awake and I think, oh God,

19:29

did he read The Tipping Point too.

19:47

I don't reread any of my books once I've

19:49

written them, particularly ones from twenty

19:52

five years ago, like the Tipping Point. I

19:54

mean, why would I do? I want

19:56

to wear the clothes I wore in the year two thousand,

19:59

No, I don't do I even want to see

20:01

pictures of myself from two thousand, not

20:04

particularly so. I didn't

20:06

reread The Tipping Point until I made

20:08

the decision last year to

20:10

revisit my first book on its silver

20:12

anniversary. There were

20:14

parts that I love. It felt like rediscovering

20:17

some lost friend, Hush Puppies,

20:20

Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, Paul

20:22

Revere's Ride. There are also parts

20:24

that mystified me. Did I really write

20:27

an entire chapter on the children's

20:29

TV show Blues Clues? But

20:32

the crime chapter was the only place where

20:34

I said I would write that so

20:37

differently today. Today,

20:40

if I were rewriting, I'd begin with

20:42

the work of a sociologist in Chicago named

20:45

Andrew Papachristos.

20:46

People talk about gun violence as an

20:48

epidemic or disease, and it is in many

20:51

fronts, but really I wanted to take it seriously.

20:53

It was like, ohkay, if it's an epidemic, is

20:55

it a bloodborne pathogen or is it an airborne

20:57

pathogen? And actually, thank God, it's

21:00

not an airborne pathogen.

21:01

Right.

21:01

You don't catch a bullet like you catch a cold.

21:04

It's actually transmitted through behaviors.

21:06

And I just try to figure out ways that

21:08

science might kind of boost or amplify

21:11

those insights.

21:12

Papa Cristos took every single arrest

21:14

over more than six years in Chicago, so

21:17

hundreds of thousands of arrests, and

21:19

he made something called a network map.

21:22

All right, first you see it happens in groups, and

21:24

then like, okay, what about individuals? All

21:26

right, well does it concentrate? What about

21:29

exposure? What about time?

21:33

So if Andy and Malcolm are arrested together

21:35

for shooting someone, then Andy and

21:37

Malcolm are two dots on the map, connected

21:39

by a line. And if Malcolm then

21:41

is arrested with Joe as a line

21:44

connecting Malcolm to Joe,

21:46

Malcolm and Joe are one degree, or,

21:48

to use Papa Cristos's favorite term,

21:51

one handshake apart, Joe

21:53

and Andy two handshakes apart.

21:56

You do that for years and years of Chicago

21:58

arrest data, and you get a truly enormous

22:01

map.

22:02

You have this very very

22:04

large network, right,

22:07

and then what you do is you sprinkle in the

22:09

victimizations, which come from a separate source

22:12

of data, right. They

22:14

come from homicide records, they come from shooting files,

22:16

police public health.

22:17

He took the names of everyone who had been shot

22:20

over the same period and look to

22:22

see how many of those names were

22:24

in his network map. And

22:26

what he found was the victims

22:29

were already there, and they were

22:31

clustered together.

22:33

You just matched the data, and every

22:35

place where there's a shooting, the

22:37

victims bright red, for example,

22:40

And then what you see is that these

22:43

bright red dots all

22:46

lingered together. I'll clump together, right

22:48

like your kid took a handful of Christmas

22:50

ornaments and like threw to the tree, and they're all on one

22:53

spot.

22:53

It looks just like the social maps epidemil

22:56

just used to construct for the spread of HIV

22:58

in the nineteen eighties. If someone

23:00

in your social circle got infected with HIV,

23:03

then your chances of becoming infected with HIV

23:06

increased. In Papa Cristo's

23:08

maps, the risk of contagion extended

23:11

three degrees. If Malcolm gets

23:13

shot, Andy is at risk, and so

23:15

is Joe, and so are any people Andy

23:17

and Joe were arrested with.

23:19

Like other social networks, the

23:22

impact of these shootings tends

23:24

to go about two or three handshakes

23:27

and then it starts to kind of drop off. So these

23:29

clusters are fairly dense and

23:31

they stick around.

23:32

So hold on, this is this is crucial. So

23:35

I've got my I've got my social

23:38

network map, and I'm overlaying.

23:40

I'm sticking in all of the shootings

23:43

into the and I've noticed that the shootings

23:45

are clustering. So

23:48

we have this triangle of

23:50

Joe, Andy, Malcolm,

23:53

and Malcolm gets

23:55

shot. And

23:59

so once we observe

24:02

that Malcolm gets shot, what you're saying is that

24:04

the likelihood of someone in my

24:07

someone connected to me also gets shot.

24:10

Increases skyrockets

24:12

absolutely.

24:13

And you're saying that the connection the

24:16

risk is skyrocketing within between

24:19

one in three.

24:21

Degrees, that's the

24:23

where risk is the highest. Once

24:25

you get past kind of three degrees, it really

24:28

levels. It goes down in levels.

24:30

When do you observe this? Did this surprise you?

24:32

How concentrated it was surprised me. You

24:35

know, when you look at these numbers, even

24:38

when you look at the larger co funding network,

24:40

you're talking about five to six

24:42

percent of a neighborhood's population. But

24:45

when you start looking at where the violence concentrates,

24:47

it's less than it's less than a percent. You're

24:50

talking about, you know, on the West Side of Chicago,

24:52

one of the neighborhoods we were working, it's about fifty thousand

24:55

people. You're talking about four hundred

24:57

individuals.

24:59

Four hundred individuals on

25:01

the entire West Side of Chicago. The

25:04

crime problem on the West Side of Chicago

25:07

isn't being driven by everyone. It's

25:09

being driven by a tiny subset

25:11

of people within a dense social

25:13

network where someone close to them

25:16

has already been a victim of gun violence.

25:19

The West Side of Chicago is not a dangerous

25:21

place. Highly specific

25:24

networks of people within the West

25:26

Side of Chicago are dangerous places.

25:29

The same pattern holds true in New York

25:31

City. Why wasn't stop and frisk

25:33

an effective strategy in the end, because

25:36

it assumed that violent crime was something

25:38

embedded within an entire community,

25:41

and it's not. Even the NYPD's

25:44

own numbers said so. In

25:46

one eight year span, New York City

25:48

police officers frisked two point

25:50

three million people and

25:53

found weapons in one

25:55

point five percent of those stops. They

25:59

were looking for needles in haystacks.

26:01

Why would that be an effective crime fighting

26:03

strategy. Aaron

26:05

Chaufin, the criminologist, says that

26:08

one of the main reasons crime fell so dramatically

26:10

in New York after Stop and Frisk ended,

26:13

was that the NYPD took those lessons to

26:15

heart. They switched from the kind

26:17

of indiscriminate policing found

26:19

in Stop and Frisk to precision

26:21

policing. They started focusing

26:24

on hotspots, deploying police

26:26

to the specific places where crime

26:28

was the worst.

26:30

More targeted investigations, more

26:32

thinking about who are the shooters, who

26:34

are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving

26:37

the shootings. What can we do to identify

26:39

those people incapacitate those people. So

26:42

when we think about good policing, and we think

26:44

in particular about homicide, it's

26:46

a very small number of people who drive the problem.

26:48

It's a couple thousand people in a city of

26:51

eight and a half million, and you

26:54

know, making lots of low level rests, maybe

26:56

you'll find some more guns and things like

26:58

that, but it's probably a much better use

27:00

of resources to focus, focus, focus, focus

27:03

on the drivers of violence. And when

27:05

you do that. In my paper, we find

27:08

that when there's a major

27:10

gang takedown around a public housing development,

27:13

in the next eighteen months, homicides are

27:15

down by about thirty percent.

27:16

Thirty percent. Fighting

27:19

an epidemic means focusing on the

27:21

few not the many, And

27:24

by the way, who made this argument as

27:26

loudly as anyone I did.

27:28

In the Tipping Point, I called it the law

27:30

of the few, and it took up a third of

27:33

the book. When it comes to epidemics,

27:35

I wrote a tiny percentage of

27:37

people to the majority of the work. I

27:40

talked about how this principle plays out

27:42

in outbreaks of infectious disease, in

27:44

the spread of fashion trends in word

27:46

of mouth. I described in great detail

27:49

the kinds of people who make those special few,

27:51

on and on. But

27:54

then when it came to crime, I

27:56

suddenly forgot all about the laws the few

27:59

and endorsed an idea that that a really good

28:01

way to control an epidemic was to stop

28:03

and frisk a hundred young men in

28:05

the hopes of finding a gun on one

28:07

of them.

28:10

I was wrong. I'm

28:13

sorry.

28:19

So I don't know Fieldford asks any questions.

28:21

There's one more thing I would do if I were rewriting

28:23

the crime chapter. I would talk about

28:26

Philadelphia and about a day I spent

28:28

recently driving around the city with a guy named

28:30

Keith Green. So where are we headed?

28:33

So we're going to be driving

28:36

in like the West Philadelphia.

28:38

Area, GreenWorks for the Pennsylvania Horticultural

28:41

Society, a group that was founded

28:43

in eighteen twenty seven and is best

28:45

known for putting on the world's largest indoor flower

28:47

show. And for two hours

28:50

we talked about vacant lots thirty

28:52

thousand.

28:52

Yeah, because over thirty thousand portions

28:55

in the city of the world.

28:56

Yeah, there were blocks we drove past

28:58

that had two or even three vacant lots.

29:01

Every block seemed to have at least one. In

29:04

the past, they were overgrown with weeds, covered

29:06

in trash, home to rats and raccoons

29:08

and pots. And what Green's group

29:10

has done is to systematically

29:13

work its way through the city, cleaning

29:15

up the lots, planting grass, putting

29:17

up low fences.

29:18

And we started seeing a dramatic

29:21

change. Lots were being maintained,

29:24

people starting people started using the lots.

29:26

And when you see people started using

29:28

the how are they used.

29:29

To well, people

29:33

with kids were playing football, people

29:36

were having barbecues on the sites. Uh

29:39

horses or raising on vacant lots

29:42

horses.

29:43

In the history of the program, they've cleaned

29:46

up seventeen thousand lots.

29:49

Charles Brannis, the pioneer of the work,

29:51

let us starty to see if cleaning up vacant lots

29:53

lowered the homicide rate. When

29:55

you fixed up a neighborhood, what happened to gun

29:57

violence? It went down twenty

30:00

nine percent. Now,

30:02

what's the best way to describe this kind of

30:04

anti crime intervention. It's broken

30:07

windows only. Not broken

30:09

windows as a grand metaphor, as

30:11

a hysterical leap that sees a man urinating

30:14

on a sidewalk and says we have no choice

30:16

but to lock him up. No broken

30:19

windows as a literal call

30:21

to action. You see the lot full

30:24

of weeds and trash, and you pick up

30:26

the garbage and mow the grass and

30:28

put a fence out front.

30:43

Religion's History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence

30:45

with ben at Af Haffrey and Lucy

30:47

Sullivan. Our editor is

30:49

Karen Schakerji. Fact checking by

30:51

Sam Russick, Original scoring

30:54

by Luis Kerra, mastering by Echo

30:56

Mountain, Engineering by Sarah Buguer

30:58

and Nina Bird Lawrence. Production support

31:01

from Luke LeMond. Our

31:03

executive producer is Jacob Smith.

31:06

Special thanks to Sarah Nix and

31:09

as always, hell Hafe Gotta

31:11

come. I'm Malcolm Glappa.