Latest / Revisionist History / Wolfgang's Law - Part One

Transcript

Wolfgang's Law - Part One · Revisionist History

0:16
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:20
Speaker 2: Baltimore, Maryland. Charm City, as it used to be called.
0:24
Speaker 3: I always tell people that it was heaven and hell
0:27
Speaker 3: at the same time.
0:30
Speaker 2: In November of 2020, a man named Brandon Scott was
0:33
Speaker 2: elected mayor, 36 years old, one of the youngest mayors
0:37
Speaker 2: in Baltimore history.
0:38
Speaker 3: I was born in 1984, so my formative years are
0:40
Speaker 3: the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, which is In Baltimore,
0:47
Speaker 3: in urban America, in black urban America, time is literally
0:52
Speaker 3: the worst time to be born, right? It doesn't get
0:56
Speaker 3: born a little bit later. It's less born a little
1:00
Speaker 3: bit earlier.
1:00
Speaker 4: It's a lot different.
1:02
Speaker 2: Scott grew up in the Park Heights neighborhood, North Baltimore,
1:06
Speaker 2: out near Pimlico Racetrack.
1:08
Speaker 3: In my neighborhood, it was very violent, right? There was
1:11
Speaker 3: a lot of people dying, a lot of people being shot,
1:14
Speaker 3: a lot of, drug dealing, a lot of overdose, vacant housing.
1:20
Speaker 3: They were closing down our libraries and rec centers, all
1:25
Speaker 3: the things that we thought would help people get away
1:27
Speaker 3: from that life. And, you know, we would just be
1:32
Speaker 3: outside and, you know, be sat down in handcuffs for
1:36
Speaker 3: no reason other than you were like black and outside.
1:39
Speaker 3: So that happened to me seven times.
1:42
Speaker 1: Seven.
1:43
Speaker 3: Seven different times. Roughly from the age of 13 to 21, 22,
1:50
Speaker 3: right before I came to City Hall.
1:55
Speaker 2: How many people that you knew from growing up have
1:57
Speaker 2: you lost?
1:59
Speaker 3: Oh, man.
2:00
Speaker 4: Oh, shit. That's probably the hardest question I ever.
2:02
Speaker 3: I would have to sit down and try to think
2:04
Speaker 3: and write, but more than 10.
2:09
Speaker 2: In any given year over the past half century, Baltimore
2:12
Speaker 2: was up there with St.
2:13
Speaker 4: Louis.
2:13
Speaker 2: Detroit, and New Orleans for the dubious title of America's
2:17
Speaker 2: murder capital. Baltimore was the American city where the heroin
2:21
Speaker 2: epidemic never really went away. At one point, it had
2:25
Speaker 2: five police commissioners in seven years because nobody could handle
2:29
Speaker 2: the job. Someone who worked with the mayor's office told
2:32
Speaker 2: me he used to work with USAID in the northern
2:35
Speaker 2: triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the most homicidal
2:40
Speaker 2: countries in the world. He didn't think that there was
2:43
Speaker 2: anything in the U.S. like that until he came to Baltimore.
2:47
Speaker 2: Baltimore was where the wire was set. The single most
2:50
Speaker 2: famous cultural product of Baltimore is a television show about
2:54
Speaker 2: how dangerous and nasty Baltimore is. Not to mention the
2:59
Speaker 2: city's unofficial theme song, Randy Newman's Baltimore, which has as
3:04
Speaker 2: its chorus... Oh, Baltimore, it's hard just to live. In
3:29
Speaker 2: some years, that was an understatement. Mayor Scott took office
3:34
Speaker 2: at the end of 2020. There were 335 homicides in
3:39
Speaker 2: Baltimore that year, just shy of the all-time record. Scott
3:43
Speaker 2: made a pledge. He would reduce the murder rate.
3:47
Speaker 3: All of my staff did not want me to give
3:51
Speaker 3: a number. And I said, well, we have to give
3:53
Speaker 3: a number because if we don't give a number, then
3:56
Speaker 3: no one knows what the fuck we're working towards, right?
4:00
Speaker 2: He set the target at 15% every year. You were
4:05
Speaker 2: out there with that prediction.
4:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know people laughed, right? Like people laugh. We,
4:12
Speaker 3: you know, we have Sinclair, MAGA station and a newspaper here.
4:18
Speaker 3: MAGA 45 is what we like to call them. They
4:21
Speaker 3: were asking every single day, Mr.
4:24
Speaker 1: Mayor, Mr.
4:24
Speaker 3: Mayor, when is the city going to reach your goal?
4:27
Speaker 3: When are you going to see this 15% reduction?
4:33
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
4:37
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part
4:41
Speaker 2: of a handful of episodes I'm doing tied to the
4:44
Speaker 2: release of my latest book, The American Way of Killing,
4:47
Speaker 2: The Invention of an Epidemic, which is about why gun
4:51
Speaker 2: violence in the United States is so much worse than
4:55
Speaker 2: every other country in the West. I use the word
4:58
Speaker 2: invention in the subtitle because American violence is not an
5:02
Speaker 2: inherent condition. The U.S., didn't have to be this way.
5:07
Speaker 2: The argument of the book is that America's problems are self-created,
5:11
Speaker 2: the result of a series of social choices, historical legacies,
5:15
Speaker 2: weird legal concepts, and a fundamental misunderstanding of just what
5:20
Speaker 2: homicide is. In this, and the following episode next week,
5:28
Speaker 2: I want to describe how Americans can find a path
5:31
Speaker 2: out of this mess, and our case study, is Baltimore.
5:44
Speaker 2: I first went to Baltimore as a kid in the 1970s.
5:47
Speaker 2: Drove down from Canada with my friend Terry to see
5:50
Speaker 2: an Orioles game in the old Memorial Stadium. It was gritty.
5:54
Speaker 2: It had character. It was interesting. But the ensuing decades
5:58
Speaker 2: were not kind to the city. I sent my colleague
6:01
Speaker 2: Lucy Sullivan to Baltimore, to drive around the city's western district,
6:05
Speaker 2: the toughest part of Baltimore, with a local police officer
6:09
Speaker 2: to get a feel for what happened.
6:11
Speaker 5: This area I'm driving to right now is called Penn North.
6:14
Speaker 4: It's called Penn North?
6:15
Speaker 6: Yes.
6:16
Speaker 5: So the actual street, this is Pennsylvania Avenue.
6:19
Speaker 7: The street is north.
6:20
Speaker 2: She rode with Lieutenant Brian Ford, a 13-year veteran of
6:24
Speaker 2: the Baltimore PD.
6:27
Speaker 5: Usually you'd ride through here and it would be thousands
6:29
Speaker 5: and thousands of people right now.
6:31
Speaker 4: Thousands of people.
6:32
Speaker 1: Yes.
6:32
Speaker 4: There's like nobody out right now.
6:34
Speaker 8: This was like the mecca.
6:35
Speaker 6: Wow.
6:36
Speaker 5: Like every corner we would go to, you would have
6:38
Speaker 5: individuals on every single corner involved in illegal drug trade
6:43
Speaker 5: or some type of thing like that. But now we
6:45
Speaker 5: can actually focus on individuals that we need.
6:49
Speaker 7: To focus on.
6:50
Speaker 5: Back in the day, we would ride through and there
6:52
Speaker 5: would be a thousand people in mostly.
6:54
Speaker 9: A lot of corners.
6:55
Speaker 2: He turned back towards the Western District Station house, the
6:59
Speaker 2: district for short.
7:01
Speaker 5: Okay, so the district is right here. Back in the day,
7:04
Speaker 5: this corner was historical, very violent, and it was scary
7:08
Speaker 5: that the police station would be right there, and that's
7:11
Speaker 5: how bad the crime was.
7:12
Speaker 3: For a minute.
7:13
Speaker 4: It was scary for you, like you were like, this is.
7:15
Speaker 9: A scary corner.
7:16
Speaker 5: Yeah, so coming to work, you know, you had to
7:18
Speaker 5: make sure that you got in the district before something happened.
7:25
Speaker 2: In the Western District, the police were nervous walking across
7:28
Speaker 2: the street to their own police station. This is the
7:32
Speaker 2: Baltimore that Mayor Brandon Scott inherited and the city he
7:35
Speaker 2: pledged to turn around. After his first year in office,
7:39
Speaker 2: the murder count was 337, an increase from the previous year.
7:45
Speaker 2: People looked at Scott and rolled their eyes. Following year,
7:49
Speaker 2: no change. The skepticism grew. This was Baltimore. It wasn't
7:54
Speaker 2: Charm City anymore. It had new nicknames. Baltimore. Baltimore. Then,
8:01
Speaker 2: in 2023, a decrease of almost 21%. The next year,
8:07
Speaker 2: a decrease of 23%. In those two years, Baltimore did
8:12
Speaker 2: not turn into Paris. There was no massive gun control
8:15
Speaker 2: law passed in the state of Maryland. The National Guard
8:18
Speaker 2: did not camp out on the streets of the city. Then,
8:22
Speaker 2: in 2025, 133 homicides, a decrease of 31%. And this year,
8:30
Speaker 2: there's a chance the city will dip under 100 for
8:33
Speaker 2: the first time since the 1960s. What on earth happened
8:39
Speaker 2: in the city of Baltimore? Baltimore's homicide prevention effort is
8:54
Speaker 2: centered in the city's Western District, the area Lucy was
8:58
Speaker 2: riding around with Lieutenant Ford. More than a third of
9:01
Speaker 2: the people below the poverty line. A third of the
9:04
Speaker 2: houses empty. It's where much of the wire was set.
9:07
Speaker 2: Roughly 40,000 people. If you know Baltimore, it's just below
9:12
Speaker 2: Druid Hill Park. And in the heart of the Western District,
9:16
Speaker 2: there's a two-story red brick building. Looks like an old
9:20
Speaker 2: office building. Docs and Ministries.
9:23
Speaker 10: The church.
9:24
Speaker 2: It's a.
9:26
Speaker 6: Thursday morning. 25 or so people have gathered around a
9:28
Speaker 6: big square table. A mix of police officers, pastors, behavioral counselors,
9:35
Speaker 6: and outreach workers, plus the city council president.
9:53
Speaker 2: The meeting is run by a man named Reginald Williams.
9:57
Speaker 6: This is the agenda for today. It's the weekly stats,
10:00
Speaker 6: violence review cases, custom notification planning, and the service follow-up updates.
10:07
Speaker 6: Direct communication stats to date. These are the numbers.
10:11
Speaker 2: Williams is running through a slide deck up on a screen.
10:14
Speaker 2: Each slide is devoted to a different person. He calls
10:17
Speaker 2: on a police officer to talk about a homicide from
10:20
Speaker 2: a few days earlier.
10:21
Speaker 6: We're going to pass it to Detective Sykes, and she's
10:25
Speaker 6: going to give us the incident.
10:30
Speaker 9: So the units responded to a call of a shooting.
10:33
Speaker 9: Medics were already on scene. Unfortunately, the victim was pronounced
10:38
Speaker 9: from a gunshot wound.
10:41
Speaker 2: The management meeting, as it's called, is the hub of
10:44
Speaker 2: Baltimore's crime-fighting strategy. It happens every week, lasts about an hour.
10:50
Speaker 2: It grew out of a collaboration between the city and
10:53
Speaker 2: the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
10:57
Speaker 2: Scott invited the crime lab to Baltimore when he took office.
11:02
Speaker 2: In mid-2021, they conducted what they call a problem analysis,
11:07
Speaker 2: a detailed statistical picture of who was being shot and
11:11
Speaker 2: why in the Western District. What they found was that
11:15
Speaker 2: the people doing the shooting fit a clear pattern. They
11:19
Speaker 2: were overwhelmingly between 16 and 34 years old, male and Black. 81%
11:24
Speaker 2: of them had been involved with the criminal justice system
11:28
Speaker 2: at some point in their lives. The average was 12
11:32
Speaker 2: previous arrests. And most of the violence was group-related, meaning
11:37
Speaker 2: that the people involved in the shootings overwhelmingly belonged to
11:41
Speaker 2: a very tight-knit social circle. Shooter and victim usually knew
11:46
Speaker 2: each other, often too well. By their estimate, the Western
11:50
Speaker 2: District had 18 criminally active groups Just one of those groups,
11:54
Speaker 2: operating out of the Poe Homes housing development, had been
11:58
Speaker 2: involved in 13 shootings over the previous year and a half.
12:03
Speaker 2: How many people in total were they talking about in
12:05
Speaker 2: those 18 groups? Roughly 700. I want to pause on
12:11
Speaker 2: that number for a moment, because it's impossible to make
12:14
Speaker 2: sense of the management meeting without understanding its significance. There
12:19
Speaker 2: are 40,000 people in the Western District. The conventional way
12:23
Speaker 2: of thinking is that you design a policing strategy to
12:26
Speaker 2: cover all 40,000. You spread your resources over the whole population.
12:33
Speaker 2: But the Crime Labs analysis concluded something very different. If
12:36
Speaker 2: what you are concerned about is gun violence, the problem
12:40
Speaker 2: is actually just 700 people. 18 relatively tight-knit social groups,
12:46
Speaker 2: of whom one, the group in the Poe Homes, is
12:49
Speaker 2: a very serious problem right now. So, Detective Sykes reports
12:55
Speaker 2: on a murder from earlier that week, young man dead
12:59
Speaker 2: from a gunshot wound. Williams, the person running the meeting,
13:03
Speaker 2: pulls the room. Did anyone know the victim? That question
13:09
Speaker 2: is not a shot in the dark, because if the
13:11
Speaker 2: universe of people who you have to know in the
13:14
Speaker 2: Western District is just 700, then chances are that a
13:18
Speaker 2: group of 25 well-connected people really can know almost everybody.
13:22
Speaker 2: 700 is how large a typical middle school is. Could
13:27
Speaker 2: 25 teachers from a middle school know at least something
13:30
Speaker 2: about all their students? Probably. 700 is a manageable number.
13:36
Speaker 2: Someone speaks up. Says he taught him at the Youth
13:40
Speaker 2: Opportunity Center. A good kid. Someone else, someone named Termite,
13:45
Speaker 2: a woman in her 50s in a hijab and sunglasses,
13:48
Speaker 2: said she went to the scene to find out more
13:50
Speaker 2: about why it happened.
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Speaker 4: We went there yesterday. They were very tight-lipped. We hung
13:55
Speaker 4: around for hours because I know everybody, so I know them.
13:58
Speaker 4: I know the kids. I know them, but nobody's talking.
14:05
Speaker 2: One of the arguments of my new book, The American
14:08
Speaker 2: Way of Killing, is that the conversation about gun violence
14:11
Speaker 2: in the United States is crippled by a series of misconceptions.
14:16
Speaker 2: For example, people think America is over-policed. Too many cops.
14:22
Speaker 2: Is that true? Well, take Los Angeles and Berlin. They're
14:26
Speaker 2: the same size. Los Angeles has roughly 8,500 police officers.
14:32
Speaker 2: How many does Berlin have?
14:33
Speaker 4: 18,000.
14:36
Speaker 2: And that's typical. Western European cities have far larger police
14:41
Speaker 2: departments than American cities do. There are a long list
14:45
Speaker 2: of surprising facts like this. And what the crime lab
14:48
Speaker 2: found in Baltimore is one of the most important of them.
14:51
Speaker 2: Because this kind of concentration of violence isn't unusual. It's
14:57
Speaker 2: actually the norm. The first person to stumble upon this
15:01
Speaker 2: fact was Marvin Wolfgang, one of the most important criminologists
15:05
Speaker 2: of the 20th century. He was an old-school shoe-leather sociologist.
15:10
Speaker 2: He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and embedded himself
15:14
Speaker 2: with the Philadelphia Police Department. He would come to police
15:18
Speaker 2: headquarters after his day of teaching ended, sometimes working until
15:21
Speaker 2: 2 a.m.
15:23
Speaker 1: I wanted to get a more observable impression of the
15:29
Speaker 1: homicide squad and the work that they did.
15:33
Speaker 2: Wolfgang was interviewed for the American Society of Criminology's Oral
15:36
Speaker 2: History Project shortly before he died in 1998.
15:41
Speaker 1: So for three years, I rode around with them, commonly.
15:46
Speaker 1: on Friday and Saturday evenings, the period of the highest
15:50
Speaker 1: homicide rates.
15:52
Speaker 2: And in the late 1960s, he did a study that
15:55
Speaker 2: no one had ever done before. He gathered the names
15:59
Speaker 2: of every single boy born in the city of Philadelphia
16:02
Speaker 2: in 1945 who had continued to live in the city
16:05
Speaker 2: until the age of 18. A total of 9,945 people.
16:11
Speaker 2: And then painstakingly went back through years of police records. Remember,
16:16
Speaker 2: this is in the days before anything was digitized, to
16:19
Speaker 2: see what percentage of those 9,945 ended up getting in
16:24
Speaker 2: trouble with the law. His answer? Six percent. A tiny fraction.
16:32
Speaker 2: Let's call this Wolfgang's Law.
16:36
Speaker 1: That's six percent out of the total birth cohort of
16:39
Speaker 1: 10,000 boys. who were responsible for so many crimes. I mean,
16:43
Speaker 1: all but one of the homicides, three-quarters of the rapes
16:46
Speaker 1: and robberies and so forth. There were 627 boys out
16:49
Speaker 1: of 10,000 had committed over 50% of all the offenses.
16:51
Speaker 1: In Baltimore's Western District, it's 700 out of 40,000. In
16:54
Speaker 1: Philadelphia's 1945 cohort, it's 627 boys out.
16:58
Speaker 2: Of 10,000. Let's do another example. Chicago. The criminologist Andrew
17:14
Speaker 2: Papachristos did a version of Wolfgang's analysis for Chicago's West Side.
17:22
Speaker 9: Now, why?
17:23
Speaker 2: First of all, when you observed this, did this surprise you?
17:26
Speaker 4: How concentrated it was surprised me.
17:29
Speaker 8: You know, when you look at these numbers, even when
17:32
Speaker 8: you look at the larger co-offending network, you're talking about
17:35
Speaker 8: five to six percent of a neighborhood's population. But when
17:39
Speaker 8: you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's less
17:43
Speaker 8: than a percent. You're talking about, you know, on the
17:46
Speaker 8: west side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we were working,
17:48
Speaker 8: it was about 50,000 people. You're talking about 400 individuals.
17:51
Speaker 2: 400 out of 50,000. Let's look at New Orleans, another
17:58
Speaker 2: one of the most dangerous American cities. One recent analysis
18:02
Speaker 2: found that one half of 1% of the city's population
18:06
Speaker 2: was present at half the city's shootings. Is this a
18:11
Speaker 2: purely American phenomenon? No, it's everywhere. David Kennedy, the criminologist
18:18
Speaker 2: who I think has been more important than anyone in
18:21
Speaker 2: furthering the insights of Wolfgang, says that he was recently
18:24
Speaker 2: in Sweden, working with local law enforcement in an area
18:27
Speaker 2: of Stockholm that has seen a surge in violent crime.
18:31
Speaker 2: The Swedes were despairing.
18:33
Speaker 7: The police folks took us to Ground Zero for work.
18:37
Speaker 7: the crime issues that had made this a vulnerable area.
18:43
Speaker 9: And two older.
18:44
Speaker 7: Businessmen talked to us and said, it's really bad. We're
18:49
Speaker 7: not sure we're going to be able to keep our
18:51
Speaker 7: businesses open. People don't want to come here. People are afraid.
18:54
Speaker 7: It's a litany of horrors. And then they said, it's
18:59
Speaker 7: 30 kids.
19:02
Speaker 2: 30 out of a community of 50,000 people. But Kennedy
19:07
Speaker 2: was skeptical. Based on his work in other cities, he
19:10
Speaker 2: thought even that number was too high. He asked them,
19:14
Speaker 2: are you sure?
19:15
Speaker 7: You know, we don't. But what we're used to seeing
19:19
Speaker 7: in situations like this is it's not even 30 people.
19:24
Speaker 7: It's usually a much smaller number of drivers. And then
19:28
Speaker 7: they have their network around them. Does that sound right?
19:32
Speaker 7: The four of them went off and talked to each other.
19:34
Speaker 7: And they came back and they said, yeah. It's five
19:36
Speaker 7: guys we know and one guy in Turkey.
19:43
Speaker 2: The very same week the management meeting took place, the
19:45
Speaker 2: biotech company Moderna announced the successful results of a new
19:49
Speaker 2: anti-cancer vaccine. It was for patients with advanced melanoma. The
19:54
Speaker 2: news electrified the medical community, not just because melanoma is
19:59
Speaker 2: one of the hardest of all cancers to treat, but
20:01
Speaker 2: because the vaccine was personal. Patients have their tumor analyzed
20:07
Speaker 2: and an individualized vaccine is created to perfectly counter the
20:11
Speaker 2: genetic makeup of their disease. This is the next great
20:17
Speaker 2: revolution in medicine. The transition from creating population-wide treatments, drugs
20:23
Speaker 2: that have to be broad enough to help everyone with
20:26
Speaker 2: a disease, to precision treatments, tailored to treat one patient
20:31
Speaker 2: at a time. What Wolfgang's Law tells us is that
20:34
Speaker 2: the same revolution can happen in fighting violence. If the
20:38
Speaker 2: problem in the Western District is centered on 700 people,
20:43
Speaker 2: then you don't have to do population-level crime-fighting where you
20:46
Speaker 2: battle some amorphous menace. You can do individualized crime prevention.
20:52
Speaker 2: Put every case up on the screen at the management
20:55
Speaker 2: meeting and try and make sense of it. Williams put
21:08
Speaker 2: a photo of another young man up on the screen.
21:11
Speaker 2: He was connected to a different shooting.
21:14
Speaker 6: We are concerned because his associate is a recent homicide
21:17
Speaker 6: victim and he has a background in clues hanging and violations.
21:22
Speaker 2: The young man had a criminal history. Now, his friend
21:25
Speaker 2: had been killed. The worry was that he might retaliate.
21:30
Speaker 2: This is the second crucial part of the Baltimore strategy.
21:34
Speaker 2: Criminologists make a distinction between two kinds of violence. Instrumental
21:39
Speaker 2: violence is violence employed in the service of some rational purpose.
21:43
Speaker 2: carefully thought out end. I shoot you because I'm defending
21:47
Speaker 2: my drug turf. Or I'm robbing a bank. Instrumental violence
21:52
Speaker 2: is what we see on crime shows on TV or
21:54
Speaker 2: read about in thrillers. I think most of us think
21:58
Speaker 2: that this is what homicide is. But it isn't. In reality,
22:03
Speaker 2: most homicide is expressive, which is violence that arises out
22:07
Speaker 2: of strong emotions. People settling personal feuds with violence. Cycles
22:12
Speaker 2: of revenge and and retaliation, conflict between people who know
22:16
Speaker 2: each other well. I have a whole chapter on this
22:19
Speaker 2: in The American Way of Killing, because it fundamentally changes
22:23
Speaker 2: the way we ought to address criminal violence. What the
22:27
Speaker 2: police were worried about in this instance was exactly this,
22:31
Speaker 2: a classic case of expressive violence. The friend of the
22:35
Speaker 2: victim was deeply upset and might retaliate. And what they
22:40
Speaker 2: were doing in the management meeting was trying to understand
22:42
Speaker 2: why where that kind of strong emotion might lead. They
22:47
Speaker 2: were trying to use their understanding of the social context
22:50
Speaker 2: of the crime to make a prediction. Who was friends
22:53
Speaker 2: with the shooter? Who was enemies with the shooter? Who
22:56
Speaker 2: was friends with the victim? Who was grieving? Who might
22:59
Speaker 2: try and turn that grief into violence? Here's Jeremy Biddle,
23:05
Speaker 2: who works for the Penn Crime Lab and has been
23:07
Speaker 2: a key part of the Baltimore Project.
23:10
Speaker 9: For example, someone's house is shut. And this is something
23:13
Speaker 9: that happens far too often. Somebody is being hunted. It's
23:18
Speaker 9: playing out on social media. Their house gets shut up
23:20
Speaker 9: where their family lives. The life-saving intervention work is that
23:25
Speaker 9: trusted mentor, whomever, that can show up at that doorstep
23:31
Speaker 9: at nine o'clock at night and offer the family kind
23:35
Speaker 9: of a safe alternative. And then the coordinated action of the.
23:39
Speaker 2: Just so I understand, in that instance, you see, we observe,
23:43
Speaker 2: we know about an existing sort of toxic group dynamic.
23:49
Speaker 2: We know that the cascade has been set in motion.
23:52
Speaker 2: We see it playing out on social media. So we
23:55
Speaker 2: go to the, we make an assumption about who the
23:57
Speaker 2: next victim is. We go to their home and say,
24:00
Speaker 2: we'll get you out of there.
24:02
Speaker 9: Oftentimes, it's not even as much of an assumption because
24:05
Speaker 9: the target is named. People are explicitly saying who they
24:09
Speaker 9: are hunting for on social media. So there is sometimes
24:14
Speaker 9: best educated guesswork, but oftentimes it's pretty clear. You just
24:18
Speaker 9: have to pay attention. And I think that's really the
24:20
Speaker 9: crux of it. Cities oftentimes don't pay this kind of close, pragmatic,
24:25
Speaker 9: operational attention to violence to be able to tell from
24:30
Speaker 9: recent violence what kind of future violence might percolate.
24:34
Speaker 2: So the focus of the meetings is on the young man.
24:38
Speaker 2: He's at risk of doing something reckless. Does anyone know
24:41
Speaker 2: his father, Williams asks? Someone does. Brother Angola.
24:46
Speaker 10: I guarantee you I can reach out to his father
24:47
Speaker 10: and reach him through his father.
24:50
Speaker 6: Could you do that?
24:50
Speaker 9: Yes.
24:51
Speaker 3: All right.
24:53
Speaker 6: Can you do that today?
24:55
Speaker 10: Yeah, I can step out and do it.
24:57
Speaker 6: Are you going to try to reach the father? Are
24:59
Speaker 6: you going to try to set something up for tomorrow?
25:02
Speaker 6: Or do you tomorrow all the time? We're going to
25:05
Speaker 6: go in the morning. But if his son is here,
25:08
Speaker 6: then we probably can talk to him via FaceTime.
25:10
Speaker 4: What are you going to ask when you call?
25:12
Speaker 9: Like, what are you going to ask him?
25:13
Speaker 10: Well, I'm going to let him know he already knows
25:14
Speaker 10: my position as being a moral voice, and I have
25:17
Speaker 10: a little rapport with him so I can reach out
25:19
Speaker 10: and let him know that I'm trying to reach his son.
25:21
Speaker 10: And my reason for reaching his son is to express
25:24
Speaker 10: all this.
25:25
Speaker 3: Okay.
25:25
Speaker 8: All right.
25:26
Speaker 6: Let us know.
25:27
Speaker 4: Thank you.
25:29
Speaker 2: Let's pause again. Note the nature of this intervention. What
25:34
Speaker 2: we're used to in discussions about violent crime prevention is
25:38
Speaker 2: police officers sitting around a table talking about how many
25:41
Speaker 2: people they were arresting. Police exercising the power that only
25:45
Speaker 2: they possess to take away freedom. But in the entire
25:49
Speaker 2: hour-long management meeting, the word arrest was never used. Most
25:54
Speaker 2: people at the management meeting, like Brother Angola and Termite,
25:58
Speaker 2: the woman who went to the scene of the crime,
26:00
Speaker 2: weren't police officers. They didn't carry guns. They were community fixtures, connectors.
26:07
Speaker 2: Termite ran a program for seniors, connecting them with young people.
26:11
Speaker 2: She mediated disputes in her public housing complex. She was
26:16
Speaker 2: deeply religious and thought her mission was to help people.
26:20
Speaker 6: Termite, she's known in Westport. She knows everyone in Westport
26:24
Speaker 6: and Brooklyn and just southern Baltimore, pretty much all of Baltimore.
26:28
Speaker 9: That's Termite.
26:29
Speaker 6: So we rely on Termite a lot.
26:33
Speaker 2: She spent years working at a recreational center in Baltimore.
26:36
Speaker 2: She was a practitioner of soft power.
26:42
Speaker 4: Every weekend, me and my husband would go find the kids.
26:44
Speaker 4: We knew the kids that weren't going to eat. Well,
26:47
Speaker 4: Monday through Friday, I would cook and take food down
26:50
Speaker 4: there for all the kids to eat so that it
26:53
Speaker 4: don't look like you're calling anybody specifically out. So I
26:57
Speaker 4: would cook different dinners every night out of my own pocket.
27:01
Speaker 4: And Fridays, On Saturdays and Sundays, we would find the
27:04
Speaker 4: kids that we knew for a fact. We would make
27:07
Speaker 4: sure they eat as well.
27:09
Speaker 2: After the management meeting, Lucy went to Termite's home to
27:12
Speaker 2: speak with her. And Termite told her the following story.
27:16
Speaker 2: She was out to dinner with her husband on her
27:18
Speaker 2: day off when she got a call from her old boss,
27:21
Speaker 2: a man named Warren.
27:23
Speaker 4: My husband looking at me like I'm crazy and I'm
27:25
Speaker 4: just like, Okay, well, I'm like, daughter, go ahead. I'm
27:28
Speaker 4: going to get warm and bring me back up. You
27:29
Speaker 4: got to answer that.
27:30
Speaker 9: It's a bed.
27:31
Speaker 4: It's a bed. A woman and a man were fighting.
27:34
Speaker 4: The man bust a woman in the head while her
27:36
Speaker 4: nephew was running around looking for him with a gun.
27:39
Speaker 2: Here we have the outlines of the quintessential lead-up to
27:42
Speaker 2: a homicide, a grievance between two people who know each
27:46
Speaker 2: other that has spiraled out of control.
27:49
Speaker 4: So I was like, well, first things first, let's go
27:51
Speaker 4: to the hospital and check the status. Because I do
27:54
Speaker 4: the hospital thing so much, they know who I am.
27:57
Speaker 4: So I was able to get in the back and
27:59
Speaker 4: talk to the aunt. And she was like, tell him
28:01
Speaker 4: we cool. We're going to be right back together. I'm good.
28:04
Speaker 4: I'm good.
28:04
Speaker 2: I'm good.
28:05
Speaker 4: I hit him first. So make a long story short,
28:08
Speaker 4: we found the kid. And so they were all trying
28:11
Speaker 4: to talk to him. He would not talk to none
28:13
Speaker 4: of them. So I said, I gave him space. And
28:17
Speaker 4: then I said, when I felt like he was a
28:19
Speaker 4: little vulnerable, I said, he was like, I don't know
28:21
Speaker 4: who they playing with. I said, let me talk to
28:23
Speaker 4: you for a minute. He said, yes, ma'am. And so
28:27
Speaker 4: I knew right there I had him. So I said, listen,
28:30
Speaker 4: I just came from the hospital. Your aunt is okay.
28:32
Speaker 4: She said, tell you that she's going back with him.
28:36
Speaker 4: She was like, they both was drinking and it got
28:38
Speaker 4: out of hand. She's okay. I said, let me, he
28:41
Speaker 4: was like, but that's my, I said, but she's okay.
28:45
Speaker 4: I said, can you do me a favor and not
28:49
Speaker 4: do anything harsh to get yourself in trouble?
28:54
Speaker 2: She's not threatening him or arresting him. She's just talking
28:58
Speaker 2: to him. And why does he respond to her?
29:03
Speaker 6: Listen.
29:05
Speaker 4: I said, I'm not thinking about the man. I'm thinking
29:07
Speaker 4: about you. I said, could you just let this go?
29:11
Speaker 4: Your aunt is okay. And he said, he looked me
29:14
Speaker 4: in my eyes and he said to me, I'm going
29:16
Speaker 4: to let this go because I owe you. And I looked,
29:20
Speaker 4: I said, you don't owe me anything. He said, I do.
29:23
Speaker 4: He said, I remember my mother not having, I remember
29:27
Speaker 4: not having a lot when I was young. He said,
29:30
Speaker 4: but I remember one day it was school time and
29:35
Speaker 4: you bought me my first pair of Jordans and all
29:37
Speaker 4: my school uniforms and a coat. And he was like,
29:41
Speaker 4: I never forgot that. Now, if you ask me, do
29:44
Speaker 4: I remember?
29:45
Speaker 9: I don't.
29:46
Speaker 4: Because this stuff is natural to me. But I saved
29:50
Speaker 4: a life that night.
29:57
Speaker 2: The young man listens to Termite because she has moral
30:00
Speaker 2: standing in his eyes. Years ago, she gave him a
30:03
Speaker 2: pair of sneakers, which she doesn't even remember doing. I said,
30:08
Speaker 2: Let me talk to you a minute. He said, yes, ma'am.
30:12
Speaker 2: And so I knew right there that I had him.
30:18
Speaker 2: This is how you go from 350 homicides a year
30:22
Speaker 2: to maybe, if Baltimore's lucky, under 100. A conversation like
30:26
Speaker 2: that with a person like that. Baltimore is showing the
30:31
Speaker 2: world how it's done. But is the world interested in
30:38
Speaker 2: That's next week.
30:47
Speaker 7: Almost a 90% reduction in homicide in Minneapolis over the
30:52
Speaker 7: first summer that it went into effect. And left it
30:57
Speaker 7: in the hands of the locals. Point proved, my God, Eureka.
31:03
Speaker 7: And by the end of the year, they had let
31:05
Speaker 7: it all fall apart. Same pattern, same intervention, same kind
31:10
Speaker 7: of success, same kind of collapse a couple of years later.
31:20
Speaker 2: Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird
31:23
Speaker 2: Lawrence and Ben Nadaf-Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Our
31:27
Speaker 2: executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Sam Rusick. Original
31:32
Speaker 2: music by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Jake Gorski.
31:38
Speaker 2: I'm Malcolm Gladwell