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Wolfgang's Law - Part Two · Revisionist History

0:21
Speaker 1: When the arteries that feed your heart become constricted or
0:24
Speaker 1: blocked with plaque, the flow of blood that brings oxygen
0:27
Speaker 1: to the heart muscle starts to dwindle. You get chest pains,
0:32
Speaker 1: a feeling of pressure, tightness. If the plaque ruptures or
0:35
Speaker 1: a clot blocks the artery, you can suffer a heart
0:38
Speaker 1: attack or heart failure, a chronic weakening of the heart tissue, fatigue,
0:42
Speaker 1: shortness of breath. So what heart surgeons have done for
0:46
Speaker 1: over half a century is a workaround. Cut open the
0:49
Speaker 1: whole chest, make a long incision down the length of
0:52
Speaker 1: the sternum, pull back the ribs, hook the heart up
0:55
Speaker 1: to an external pump, then sew a new artery directly
0:59
Speaker 1: onto the heart, bypassing the blockage. Cardiac bypass surgery.
1:05
Speaker 2: What we do is actually pretty complicated. There are a
1:08
Speaker 2: lot of ways to foul up a heart operation. You've
1:11
Speaker 2: got to get it right. There are There are 500
1:14
Speaker 2: steps in this operation, and probably 300 of them can
1:18
Speaker 2: turn it south in an important way.
1:23
Speaker 1: That's John Puskas, a cardiac surgeon at Emory University in Atlanta.
1:29
Speaker 1: In the late 1990s, a handful of doctors around the
1:32
Speaker 1: world started experimenting with a new approach. Minimally invasive cardiac surgery,
1:38
Speaker 1: MIX for short. Don't cut open the whole chest. Just
1:42
Speaker 1: make three small incisions between two ribs. Open up a
1:46
Speaker 1: small hole. Put in a tiny camera so you can see.
1:49
Speaker 1: And don't use an external pump. Keep the heart going
1:52
Speaker 1: the whole time. And then, working only through that tiny hole,
1:56
Speaker 1: using long instruments, delicately sew a new artery in place,
2:00
Speaker 1: bypassing the one that's blocked. In the beginning, even for Puskas,
2:05
Speaker 1: it felt impossible.
2:07
Speaker 3: After I'd done ten, I swore I would never do another.
2:11
Speaker 1: But soon somebody created a robot that made the sewing
2:14
Speaker 1: a lot easier. The instruments got better. Practice made surgeons
2:19
Speaker 1: more comfortable. And it became clear that the minimally invasive
2:23
Speaker 1: approach was much better than the old approach. The patient
2:27
Speaker 1: is often out of the hospital in a couple of
2:29
Speaker 1: days instead of a week. They can recover in two
2:32
Speaker 1: weeks instead of six weeks. Less infections, less bleeding, less
2:37
Speaker 1: time in the ICU. Within a short time, Puskas and
2:40
Speaker 1: his fellow pioneers became convinced that the rest of their
2:43
Speaker 1: profession would quickly follow their lead. If we give the
2:48
Speaker 1: simplest explanation for your enthusiasm 30 years ago, it was
2:53
Speaker 1: you did this operation and you were like, you said
2:56
Speaker 1: to yourself, oh, wow, that was better for the patient.
2:58
Speaker 1: Is that why? And you thought that that should be enough.
3:01
Speaker 1: Is that what you were thinking at the time? Yes.
3:04
Speaker 3: I mean, that should. What more do you need?
3:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
3:07
Speaker 3: To me, that was intuitively obvious and highly motivating.
3:11
Speaker 1: So what actually happened? I'm curious, first of all, so
3:15
Speaker 1: where are we now? If I need a cardiac bypass
3:18
Speaker 1: operation somewhere at a major hospital in the United States,
3:21
Speaker 1: what percentage of those are going to be done using
3:24
Speaker 1: minimally invasive techniques? Where are we in the adoption curve?
3:27
Speaker 4: 2%. Wait, 2%?
3:28
Speaker 3: 2%, maybe 3%.
3:28
Speaker 1: Oh, I thought it would be 50%.
3:30
Speaker 5: Oh, no.
3:36
Speaker 3: Not even close. No, not even close.
3:40
Speaker 2: It's unlikely that I will live long enough to see
3:43
Speaker 2: it 50.
3:44
Speaker 1: What year did you do your first operation of that sort, roughly?
3:48
Speaker 3: First like that? 97 or 8.
3:53
Speaker 1: So 30 years ago.
3:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.
3:57
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
4:00
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is another
4:05
Speaker 1: episode tied to my new book, The American Way of Killing,
4:08
Speaker 1: about why the homicide problem in the United States is
4:11
Speaker 1: so much worse than everywhere else in the Western world.
4:18
Speaker 1: In the last episode, I told the story of what
4:20
Speaker 1: is happening right now in Baltimore, historically one of America's
4:24
Speaker 1: most dangerous cities that seems improbably on its way to
4:29
Speaker 1: being not that dangerous at all. Baltimore is a city
4:33
Speaker 1: is a case study in the astonishing effectiveness of what
4:36
Speaker 1: is called focused deterrence, an idea that turns the traditional
4:41
Speaker 1: notion about crime fighting on its head. But this, part two,
4:47
Speaker 1: is about a much bigger issue, which seemingly comes up
4:51
Speaker 1: all the time whenever groups or societies or companies are
4:56
Speaker 1: presented with new and better ways of doing things, which
4:59
Speaker 1: is that new ideas take longer to get accepted than
5:02
Speaker 1: they should Because when was the focus deterrence strategy first tried?
5:10
Speaker 1: In 1995. At almost the exact moment that John Puskas
5:14
Speaker 1: and his fellow pioneers began experimenting with their new approach
5:18
Speaker 1: to cardiac bypass. Back in the mid-90s, a criminologist named
5:33
Speaker 1: David Kennedy and two of his colleagues visited the gang
5:37
Speaker 1: unit of the Boston Police Department in the city's troubled
5:41
Speaker 1: Roxbury neighborhood.
5:43
Speaker 6: What we saw in the general street dynamic and talking
5:48
Speaker 6: to the cops and talking to kids on probation and
5:53
Speaker 6: what people said a lot was that we're just withdrawing.
5:57
Speaker 6: It's so bad out there that it's dangerous to have friends.
6:02
Speaker 6: It's dangerous to be in relationships. It's dangerous to go outside.
6:08
Speaker 6: It's dangerous to leave the block. We are just cutting
6:11
Speaker 6: ourselves off and hunkering down.
6:15
Speaker 1: But the group of cops and outreach workers they talked
6:17
Speaker 1: to told them that their problem in Boston was the
6:20
Speaker 1: result of a very small number of young men who
6:23
Speaker 1: were having arguments, who were trapped in cycles of revenge
6:27
Speaker 1: and retaliation. We know exactly who they are, the police
6:30
Speaker 1: officers said. The killings are predictable.
6:34
Speaker 6: They were the population that were the, you know, 1%
6:40
Speaker 6: of their age group across the city that was at
6:43
Speaker 6: the core of what was going on.
6:46
Speaker 1: It was Wolfgang's Law, the law we talked about in
6:49
Speaker 1: the previous episode, all over again.
6:52
Speaker 6: Everything in social science says the way this stuff works
6:58
Speaker 6: is it's extremely concentrated and it's extremely networked. But none
7:04
Speaker 6: of that had been carried into thinking and policy.
7:10
Speaker 1: Kennedy and his colleagues then worked with the people they
7:13
Speaker 1: met in Boston to create something called Operation Ceasefire. Find
7:18
Speaker 1: the small group of people at the heart of the
7:20
Speaker 1: violence epidemic. Talk with them. Work with them. Encourage them.
7:25
Speaker 1: Have someone from the community, someone they look up to,
7:28
Speaker 1: give them advice, a helping hand. Warn them that if
7:31
Speaker 1: they slip up, the law will come down hard And
7:34
Speaker 1: if they do slip up, make sure the law comes
7:36
Speaker 1: down hard. Boston is where the philosophy of focus deterrence
7:41
Speaker 1: was born.
7:42
Speaker 6: It worked remarkably well. It worked better than anything anybody
7:47
Speaker 6: had ever done before. And it worked dramatically better than
7:54
Speaker 6: we ever dreamed that it might. The people who did
7:59
Speaker 6: this were shocked by what happened.
8:05
Speaker 3: You were shocked by what happened.
8:06
Speaker 6: I was shocked by what happened. The cops, everybody, nobody
8:10
Speaker 6: could believe that what was clearly going on had happened.
8:15
Speaker 1: In 1995, there were 96 murders in Boston. Over the
8:20
Speaker 1: next four years, it went from 59 to 43, then
8:22
Speaker 1: to 35, and in 1999 to 31. 31, by the way,
8:24
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. At the time, Nobody had ever seen numbers
8:35
Speaker 1: that low in a big American city. So Kennedy and
8:39
Speaker 1: his colleagues began traveling the country, city to city, telling
8:44
Speaker 1: everyone that they should be doing what Boston was doing.
8:48
Speaker 1: Minneapolis put the plan together. Homicides plummeted.
8:52
Speaker 6: Almost a 90% reduction in homicide in Minneapolis over the
8:57
Speaker 6: first summer that it went into effect.
9:01
Speaker 7: And left it in the hands of the locals. Point proved,
9:07
Speaker 7: my God, Eureka. And by the end of the year,
9:10
Speaker 7: they had let it all fall apart.
9:14
Speaker 1: Homicides, in short order, went back up. Anthony Braga, his colleague,
9:20
Speaker 1: went to Stockton, California, which had a terrible gang problem.
9:24
Speaker 6: Same pattern, same intervention, same kind of success. Same kind
9:29
Speaker 6: of collapse a couple of years later.
9:32
Speaker 1: New Orleans, promising at first, then back to the old
9:36
Speaker 1: ways of doing things. City after city, same story over
9:40
Speaker 1: and again. And one of the places David Kennedy visited
9:44
Speaker 1: on that first round of proselytizing was Baltimore.
9:48
Speaker 5: Where did you go to Baltimore?
9:51
Speaker 2: 97.
9:52
Speaker 1: Oh, just right after Boston. Baltimore in the mid-1990s had
9:57
Speaker 1: one of the worst homicide problems in the United States.
10:00
Speaker 1: Baltimore had every incentive in the world to try something new.
10:05
Speaker 1: And a group of experts presented the city with evidence,
10:08
Speaker 1: hard evidence, about how to solve their problem. Kennedy and
10:13
Speaker 1: his colleagues gave the same speech to Baltimore that John Puskas,
10:16
Speaker 1: the cardiologist, was giving to his fellow surgeons. There's a much,
10:21
Speaker 1: much better way to do this. And when did Baltimore
10:25
Speaker 1: finally get around to putting that solution into practice? more
10:29
Speaker 1: than 20 years later.
10:30
Speaker 3: I mean, this is like, it's heartbreaking.
10:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
10:37
Speaker 1: We're talking about, you know, in the interim, thousands of
10:43
Speaker 1: people were hurt in Baltimore.
10:45
Speaker 6: I am not a good enough person not to think
10:50
Speaker 6: about writing the op-ed piece that says this is how
10:55
Speaker 6: many people died in Baltimore because of that.
11:01
Speaker 1: The last episode was about the Baltimore Miracle, how one
11:04
Speaker 1: of the most dangerous cities in America is solving its
11:07
Speaker 1: crime problem. This episode is about an equally pressing question.
11:13
Speaker 1: Why did it take so long? My new book, The
11:28
Speaker 1: American Way of Killing, has as one of its central
11:31
Speaker 1: themes that the conversation Americans have about criminal violence is dishonest.
11:37
Speaker 1: And by that, I mean something very specific. This is
11:40
Speaker 1: what I write. By dishonest, I don't mean that one
11:44
Speaker 1: or both sides in the fight over guns are deliberately lying.
11:48
Speaker 1: Dishonesty comes in many more subtle flavors than that. A
11:52
Speaker 1: conversation that starts with the best of intentions can become
11:56
Speaker 1: dishonest for any number of reasons. when either side pretends
12:00
Speaker 1: that something is consequential when it is not, when either
12:03
Speaker 1: side avoids the right conclusion because it is too difficult,
12:07
Speaker 1: or when either side blinds itself to the truth through
12:10
Speaker 1: laziness or indifference. The American conversation about guns is rife
12:17
Speaker 1: with these kinds of dishonesties. In the course of the book,
12:21
Speaker 1: I explore all the various ways in which Americans engage
12:25
Speaker 1: in this kind of dishonesty. But in this episode, I
12:29
Speaker 1: want to focus in on the second of those dishonesty definitions,
12:33
Speaker 1: when either side avoids the right conclusion because it is
12:37
Speaker 1: too difficult. We have a sense, I think, that people
12:41
Speaker 1: resist change because they aren't convinced that change is necessary.
12:46
Speaker 1: We need awareness of the problem. But is that true?
12:50
Speaker 1: The millionaire with a house on the beach in Florida
12:53
Speaker 1: who calls himself a climate skeptic is not really a
12:56
Speaker 1: climate skeptic. It's possible his home insurance has gone up
13:00
Speaker 1: tenfold in those 25 years. He's forcibly reminded of how
13:05
Speaker 1: real climate change is every time he looks at his
13:08
Speaker 1: bank account. He's not in denial of the problem. He
13:12
Speaker 1: just doesn't like the solution. He doesn't want to leave
13:15
Speaker 1: paradise and be forced to move inland. The fight for
13:19
Speaker 1: minimally invasive cardiac surgery has run into the same roadblock.
13:24
Speaker 1: Very few people in the world of cardiology are in
13:27
Speaker 1: denial about the problems with conventional cardiac bypass. You're cutting
13:32
Speaker 1: open someone's chest and pulling back their ribs. Under the
13:36
Speaker 1: best of circumstances, that's an invasive procedure with a whole
13:40
Speaker 1: host of associated complications and side effects. The resistance comes
13:45
Speaker 1: from the fact that most cardiac surgeons just don't like
13:49
Speaker 1: the solutions. Mix is harder. The chest is no longer
13:56
Speaker 1: wide open in front of the surgeon. Now the surgeon
13:59
Speaker 1: is working through a few tiny holes guided by a camera.
14:03
Speaker 1: It's an entirely new set of skills to master.
14:06
Speaker 2: I remember, now it's 20 years ago, a very famous,
14:11
Speaker 2: now deceased elder statesman of cardiac surgery, you know, listening
14:15
Speaker 2: to my presentation and then standing up. You know, we
14:18
Speaker 2: have a give and take after presentations at scientific meetings,
14:22
Speaker 2: which is a good thing. And he stands up and said, well,
14:25
Speaker 2: you know, Dr. Poskas has now managed to transfer the
14:28
Speaker 2: pain of surgery from the patient to the surgeon.
14:31
Speaker 1: But even that doesn't answer the question. Because since when
14:34
Speaker 1: are cardiac surgeons, the true cowboys of the operating room,
14:38
Speaker 1: afraid of something hard? The real issue goes deep within that.
14:44
Speaker 1: Mix isn't an improvement. It doesn't allow you to do
14:48
Speaker 1: what you already do, only better. It isn't like the
14:51
Speaker 1: transition from from a car that gets 20 miles to
14:53
Speaker 1: the gallon to a car that gets 40 miles to
14:56
Speaker 1: the gallon. It's a fundamentally different way of operating. In
15:02
Speaker 1: the old bypass surgery, the surgeon could see and touch
15:04
Speaker 1: everything right in front of him. And most of the
15:07
Speaker 1: time in those days, it was a him. He could
15:10
Speaker 1: direct traffic, and everyone else around the operating room just
15:14
Speaker 1: silently followed his lead. But with MIX, it's a totally
15:19
Speaker 1: different approach.
15:20
Speaker 2: You know, this is not men's singles tennis. It's really
15:24
Speaker 2: more akin to, you know, soccer. It is without a
15:28
Speaker 2: doubt a team sport. And it's not 11 men on
15:32
Speaker 2: the field, but it's three or four around that patient
15:35
Speaker 2: that have to coordinate their activities in an extreme way,
15:40
Speaker 2: in the sense that a millimeter here or there of
15:43
Speaker 2: my right hand affects my partner's left hand and the
15:47
Speaker 2: instruments that we're holding. And those instruments are being together
15:51
Speaker 2: pass through an incision that may be only four centimeters
15:54
Speaker 2: long and two centimeters wide, but it could be six
15:57
Speaker 2: or eight centimeters deep.
15:59
Speaker 3: And we're going to.
15:59
Speaker 2: Try to put 20 stitches to connect two arteries using
16:04
Speaker 2: suture that's finer than human hair at the bottom of
16:07
Speaker 2: that hole.
16:07
Speaker 3: And we're going to put.
16:09
Speaker 2: Those sutures in, 20 sutures into two arteries that are
16:13
Speaker 2: two and a half millimeters wide or two millimeters wide each,
16:17
Speaker 2: meaning the sutures are You'll be a tenth of a
16:19
Speaker 2: millimeter apart. And we've got to do that precisely, the
16:24
Speaker 2: three of us working in that hole. So it's not
16:28
Speaker 2: just what I want or what I'm psychologically or physically
16:32
Speaker 2: able to adapt to doing or embrace as a mandate
16:37
Speaker 2: for innovation. Can I bring my team along? Can I
16:42
Speaker 2: retrain them, retain them? and keep them engaged in the
16:48
Speaker 2: commitment to doing this operation in a new way that's
16:52
Speaker 2: harder for us and better for patients.
16:55
Speaker 1: What Puskas is talking about, the difficulty of moving a
16:58
Speaker 1: profession from tennis to soccer, is exactly the issue with
17:02
Speaker 1: focus deterrence. It's not simply a better way of doing policing.
17:07
Speaker 1: It's a completely new way of doing policing, where the
17:10
Speaker 1: police have to transition from being the principal driver of
17:13
Speaker 1: crime fighting to being one component of a larger crime-fighting team.
17:20
Speaker 1: In the last episode, we listened in on a management meeting,
17:23
Speaker 1: the weekly sessions in Baltimore's Western District, where about 25
17:27
Speaker 1: people gather in a room to discuss the most urgent
17:30
Speaker 1: cases of the moment. I want to go back to
17:32
Speaker 1: that meeting, to a case the group discussed near the
17:35
Speaker 1: end of the session.
17:38
Speaker 8: Moving on to the next referral, we have this young man.
17:43
Speaker 1: That's Reginald Williams. the man running the management meeting.
17:47
Speaker 8: He was an associate of a recent fatal shooting victim.
17:53
Speaker 8: And so we had some safety concerns, so we had
17:58
Speaker 8: to do a relocation right away.
18:00
Speaker 1: The young man, let's call him Lou, had a close
18:03
Speaker 1: friend who had just been murdered. And the police believed,
18:07
Speaker 1: through their analysis of the social dynamics of the crime,
18:10
Speaker 1: that Lou might be next. So they wanted to move
18:13
Speaker 1: Lou and his family to a residential hotel outside the
18:16
Speaker 1: city until the situation calmed down. But the plan isn't working.
18:22
Speaker 1: Lou doesn't want to go. Williams knows this because he
18:26
Speaker 1: has twice gone to see Lou himself.
18:28
Speaker 8: As this note says, on Monday, it was reported that
18:31
Speaker 8: he's a rude kid, he's aggressive, and he was disrespectful,
18:35
Speaker 8: and we had to go back in.
18:38
Speaker 3: Me and GVU went in and gave him a message again.
18:43
Speaker 8: Reiterated some things and the importance of him staying out
18:48
Speaker 8: of the city, separating himself from any activities that can
18:52
Speaker 8: get him jumped up. And because his mother was, she
18:55
Speaker 8: was pretty impatient when him at that point, she saw
18:58
Speaker 8: him putting him in a group home. But if you
19:01
Speaker 8: can give us updates and hopefully it's a positive update,
19:06
Speaker 8: what do you, what do you have for us?
19:12
Speaker 1: Now, Throughout the exchange that follows, I want to count
19:16
Speaker 1: the number of people who get involved in trying to
19:18
Speaker 1: rescue Lou. So, Reginald Williams is one. The GVU he
19:24
Speaker 1: mentions is the group violence unit. That's two officers from
19:28
Speaker 1: the Baltimore Police Department who came with him on his
19:31
Speaker 1: second visit. So that's two more people. We're at three.
19:36
Speaker 1: Williams turns to Hope, one of the outreach workers. She
19:39
Speaker 1: works for YAP, Youth Advocate Programs. Williams believes the whole
19:45
Speaker 1: family is in danger. They actually need to stay out
19:48
Speaker 1: of school, do their classes online, and in fact, get
19:52
Speaker 1: out of Baltimore entirely. It's Hope's responsibility to convince them
19:56
Speaker 1: to do that. She's having trouble.
20:00
Speaker 9: So this mom is overwhelmed. Honestly, they're not. They're still
20:06
Speaker 9: coming back and forth to the city. I think she's
20:08
Speaker 9: getting packed up. He's actually at school. We communicated to
20:12
Speaker 9: them that they, nobody should be going to school. She'll
20:16
Speaker 9: not be in the city. It's been communicated several times.
20:18
Speaker 9: So today we'll type up something and have her sign
20:22
Speaker 9: off on it.
20:23
Speaker 1: We are now up to four people working on the
20:25
Speaker 1: Lou case. Hope continues.
20:28
Speaker 9: We actually saw him yesterday at school. He was still
20:32
Speaker 9: kind of standoffish. He's just very disrespectful.
20:35
Speaker 1: Lou is still going. And yesterday he met with his
20:38
Speaker 1: life coach and two other teachers.
20:40
Speaker 10: Wait.
20:41
Speaker 1: Lou has a life coach? And two other teachers at
20:44
Speaker 1: the school are involved, trying to talk sense into him?
20:47
Speaker 1: That's number five, six, and seven. At that point, one
20:52
Speaker 1: of the Western District police officers, Sergeant Garrett, speaks up.
20:56
Speaker 1: He's been involved in the case as well. That's eight.
21:00
Speaker 1: Then an older man joins the conversation. He's one of
21:03
Speaker 1: what are known as a community moral voice.
21:06
Speaker 4: I spoke to the mom and I told her the
21:07
Speaker 4: importance of making sure that he remained at the hotel,
21:10
Speaker 4: he'd do virtual learning. As a matter of fact, I
21:13
Speaker 4: told her to make sure all the kids go through
21:15
Speaker 4: virtual learning. But again, like Hope was saying, she does
21:19
Speaker 4: not control that household. Her kids does. So it's very hard.
21:23
Speaker 4: And we're trying to get her parenting classes to help
21:26
Speaker 4: her navigate those many kids. But at this point, I'm
21:29
Speaker 4: not sure. They're not in compliance at all.
21:32
Speaker 1: We're up to nine. Hope speaks up again.
21:36
Speaker 9: And we did, like, we, because of the intensiveness of it,
21:40
Speaker 9: the seriousness of it, we connected her with every resource.
21:43
Speaker 9: I've sent letters to housing support to get her bumped
21:47
Speaker 9: up on the list and things, but I had to
21:49
Speaker 9: let her know, like.
21:50
Speaker 5: We're here to support you. You have to do these things.
21:53
Speaker 1: The older man mentioned parenting classes. Hope mentioned housing support.
21:58
Speaker 1: What is that? Another handful of people at a minimum?
22:02
Speaker 1: Soccer is 11 people to a side. This is more
22:05
Speaker 1: than a soccer team. We're now past a dozen professionals involved, minimum,
22:10
Speaker 1: for what, by the way, isn't even a murder case.
22:13
Speaker 1: Lou isn't a victim or a perpetrator. He's just someone
22:16
Speaker 1: who they think might one day be a victim or
22:18
Speaker 1: a perpetrator. This is the exact point that Poskas, the cardiologist,
22:24
Speaker 1: was making. Transitioning from tennis to soccer, from being the
22:28
Speaker 1: person who orchestrates an operation to being just one of
22:31
Speaker 1: a team, is really, really hard, even for people who
22:35
Speaker 1: are as motivated towards excellence as surgeons are. The transition
22:40
Speaker 1: requires not just a change in skills, but a change
22:44
Speaker 1: in identity. You have to agree to play a completely
22:48
Speaker 1: different role. And what is the one thing that professionals
22:51
Speaker 1: who have trained to inhabit a particular identity do not
22:55
Speaker 1: want to do? Change that identity. Now, keep in mind,
23:02
Speaker 1: Surgeons at least have a degree of autonomy in how
23:04
Speaker 1: they practice. If you are a senior cardiac surgeon at
23:08
Speaker 1: a big hospital and you want to learn how to
23:10
Speaker 1: do mix, you can do it. But in the case
23:14
Speaker 1: of homicide prevention, this fundamental change in identity needs the
23:18
Speaker 1: support of a whole layer of other people. The mayor
23:22
Speaker 1: has to agree, and so does the police commissioner and
23:25
Speaker 1: the city council and the DA and most of all
23:29
Speaker 1: the taxpayers of the city. who are being asked to
23:31
Speaker 1: support a team of more than a dozen people, police officers,
23:35
Speaker 1: outreach workers, moral voices, life coaches, parenting counselors, housing assistants,
23:40
Speaker 1: to convince Lou, who hasn't done anything yet except possibly
23:45
Speaker 1: be in harm's way, to move with his family to
23:48
Speaker 1: a hotel outside the city that the city is paying for. And,
23:53
Speaker 1: to cap it all off, Lou wants no part of
23:56
Speaker 1: any of this. When Has law and order, the most
24:00
Speaker 1: politically potent three words in American society, ever been used
24:05
Speaker 1: to describe a program like this? The detective, in our imagination,
24:10
Speaker 1: is supposed to solve the crime with the help of
24:13
Speaker 1: an eager young sidekick. He's not supposed to be on
24:16
Speaker 1: the phone with a parenting counselor, trying to talk sense
24:19
Speaker 1: to a mom in over her head.
24:26
Speaker 2: There's a reluctance to adopt these things and an eagerness
24:29
Speaker 2: to be able to prove that the old way is
24:31
Speaker 2: still the best way.
24:33
Speaker 1: Puskas grew up in a tiny town in Northern Ontario,
24:36
Speaker 1: mining country. He's an outsider. He said he was about
24:40
Speaker 1: to go to the funeral of one of his fellow
24:42
Speaker 1: mixed pioneers, a man named David Taggart, who he described
24:45
Speaker 1: as a short, bald Scotsman who wore a pair of
24:49
Speaker 1: dungarees and an Oxford cloth shirt to every surgical meeting
24:53
Speaker 1: when everyone else around him was wearing a suit and
24:56
Speaker 1: a tie. It's a lot easier to adopt a new
24:59
Speaker 1: identity when you aren't caught up in the value of
25:02
Speaker 1: the identity you already have.
25:05
Speaker 2: But fundamentally, you know, we should not expect at the
25:10
Speaker 2: end of our career to be operating exactly the way
25:13
Speaker 2: we did when we began our career. Otherwise, we haven't
25:16
Speaker 2: made any progress during our career. And so I really
25:21
Speaker 2: reject that notion of And, you know, I've been in
25:26
Speaker 2: heated debates and, you know, become a little bit more
25:31
Speaker 2: elder statesman myself in pointing out these obvious truths and
25:35
Speaker 2: asking people to sort of recognize and look inside themselves
25:38
Speaker 2: and say, hey, did you really think you would finish
25:41
Speaker 2: your career performing surgery the same way you began your career?
25:46
Speaker 3: If so, is that ethical? Is it even ethical?
25:50
Speaker 2: Not whether it's sensible or advantageous to you. Is it
25:53
Speaker 2: even ethical to think that way? I would argue it's not.
25:58
Speaker 2: That is not a consensus opinion in medicine.
26:03
Speaker 1: And nor, apparently, is it in crime prevention. What happened
26:22
Speaker 1: in Baltimore the first time around is that no one
26:25
Speaker 1: believed the criminologist David Kennedy and his team. The mayor
26:29
Speaker 1: at the time was focused on what was happening in
26:31
Speaker 1: New York City, where the police were just arresting everyone
26:34
Speaker 1: all the time. And he decided that approach made more sense.
26:40
Speaker 1: So he called Kennedy's team into his office the day
26:43
Speaker 1: after Christmas in 1999 and said, you're done. This was
26:49
Speaker 1: the world that the current mayor of Baltimore Brandon Scott
26:52
Speaker 1: grew up in.
26:54
Speaker 10: I'm 42 now. 18 of the 42 years that I've
26:57
Speaker 10: been alive, the city had 300 homicides, right? And many
27:02
Speaker 10: of those years, they were arresting almost 100,000 people.
27:07
Speaker 1: That's 100,000 arrests in a city of 600,000, which is insane.
27:15
Speaker 1: Do you know what that number is today?
27:16
Speaker 3: 17,000.
27:19
Speaker 1: Arresting everyone is a thing you do when you don't
27:21
Speaker 1: understand what your homicide problem actually is. No one did
27:26
Speaker 1: in those years, and no one was interested in why.
27:30
Speaker 10: Just seeing that, well, while the police were stopping me,
27:34
Speaker 10: the people that I knew in my neighborhood who had
27:36
Speaker 10: guns and who did all this stuff, they'd never seen
27:38
Speaker 10: me end up in handcuffs, right? So I was very,
27:42
Speaker 10: very keen to The way that they were doing it
27:47
Speaker 10: versus it actually making my neighborhood feel safe. Because I
27:51
Speaker 10: can tell you that didn't make me feel safer. It
27:53
Speaker 10: didn't make my parents feel like our neighborhood was safer.
27:56
Speaker 10: It damn sure didn't make my grandmother think that our
27:58
Speaker 10: neighborhood was safer because they were doing what they were doing.
28:04
Speaker 1: A decade or so later, there was a second attempt
28:07
Speaker 1: to bring focused deterrence to Baltimore. But the city didn't
28:11
Speaker 1: want to embrace it all the way. Focused deterrence is
28:14
Speaker 1: carrot and stick. gentle persuasion, and swift and predictable consequences.
28:19
Speaker 1: And the city wanted to do the second part, but
28:21
Speaker 1: not the first part, since the stick was the thing
28:24
Speaker 1: that they were most comfortable doing. They wanted to pretend
28:27
Speaker 1: to change without really changing. Then came the election of
28:32
Speaker 1: Scott in the fall of 2020.
28:34
Speaker 5: I think it's very different for me than my predecessors.
28:39
Speaker 1: Scott says that one of his aides, Andre Bundley, once
28:42
Speaker 1: made this argument to him.
28:44
Speaker 10: We were together at the end of last year, and
28:46
Speaker 10: he said, Brandon, you know I'm proud of you, but
28:48
Speaker 10: I want you to know something.
28:50
Speaker 3: And it's like, what?
28:51
Speaker 5: You know you're the first mayor to ever have to
28:54
Speaker 5: live through all the shit. And I said, what do
28:57
Speaker 5: you mean, Doc? He said, think about it. You'll get it.
29:00
Speaker 5: And then I did. And then I thought about it,
29:03
Speaker 5: and he's right.
29:05
Speaker 1: Scott began to list his predecessors one by one.
29:09
Speaker 5: So Mayor Young, he's an older black man, right?
29:12
Speaker 1: Bernard Young. grew up in the 1960s when Baltimore was
29:16
Speaker 1: a much calmer, more prosperous place. Before Young was Catherine Pugh.
29:22
Speaker 10: Mayor Pugh didn't grow up in Baltimore. She came to
29:24
Speaker 10: Baltimore and went to Morgan State, right? Her experiences, they're very,
29:29
Speaker 10: very different than mine.
29:32
Speaker 1: Before Pugh was Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Scott grew up in Park Heights.
29:37
Speaker 1: Park Heights was tough. Rawlings-Blake was from Ashburton.
29:42
Speaker 10: Ashburton and Park Heights are two different worlds still to
29:45
Speaker 10: this day. And her dad was one of the most
29:48
Speaker 10: powerful men in the Marylands. Assembly, God rest his soul, right?
29:52
Speaker 10: They're like family to me, but we grew up in
29:56
Speaker 10: a different world.
29:58
Speaker 1: Before Blake was Sheila Dixon, grew up middle class in
30:01
Speaker 1: the 60s. Before her, Martin O'Malley, white, from D.C., dad
30:05
Speaker 1: was a lawyer. Before O'Malley, Kurt Schmoke, three terms in office.
30:10
Speaker 1: Schmoke went to Yale, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
30:14
Speaker 1: Scott was the first mayor to have lived the failure
30:17
Speaker 1: of the status quo firsthand. Remember this from the last episode?
30:23
Speaker 10: We would just be outside and, you know, be sat
30:27
Speaker 10: down in handcuffs for no reason other than you were
30:29
Speaker 10: like black and outside, right?
30:31
Speaker 5: So that happened to me seven times.
30:34
Speaker 1: Seven?
30:34
Speaker 5: Seven different times, roughly.
30:37
Speaker 10: From the age of, 13 to 21, 22, right before
30:42
Speaker 10: I came to City Hall.
30:44
Speaker 1: None of his predecessors went through that.
30:47
Speaker 10: I knew that this was the only approach because they've
30:50
Speaker 10: tried everything else my entire life and it has not changed, right?
30:55
Speaker 10: When I was born, we had that problem. When I
30:58
Speaker 10: went to elementary school, we had that problem. When I
31:00
Speaker 10: went to middle school, we had that problem. High school, college,
31:03
Speaker 10: on the city council, it did not change. So why
31:07
Speaker 10: would I continue to do something that I know hasn't
31:10
Speaker 10: worked versus trying something that has worked everywhere but here?
31:17
Speaker 10: Everyone knows that this is my number one, two, three, four,
31:24
Speaker 10: fifth priority. Reducing violence through this comprehensive approach way is priority.
31:33
Speaker 5: One through five for me.
31:35
Speaker 10: And Everyone knowing that, I think, rises everyone, all of
31:40
Speaker 10: our people's attention to detail and knowing that, like, no
31:45
Speaker 10: matter what, you're going.
31:46
Speaker 3: To fucking do it.
31:46
Speaker 10: Because if you don't, the mayor is going to say,
31:48
Speaker 10: you're going to fucking do it or you're going to
31:49
Speaker 10: go work somewhere else.
31:52
Speaker 1: Here is the explanation for why it took 30 years
31:55
Speaker 1: for focus deterrence to take root. People don't change their minds.
32:00
Speaker 1: We keep hoping that they will because we're all born optimists,
32:04
Speaker 1: but people don't. Young and Pugh and Rawlings, Blake and
32:07
Speaker 1: Dixon and O'Malley and Schmoke all had a perspective on
32:10
Speaker 1: how to fight violence. And nothing was going to shake that.
32:15
Speaker 1: Even when someone showed up on their doorstep and said,
32:18
Speaker 1: look at Boston, you could do that here. So when
32:26
Speaker 1: does change happen? When one generation leaves and a different
32:30
Speaker 1: generation comes in that believes something different because they've lived
32:35
Speaker 1: something different. This is what the Nobel Prize winning physicist
32:39
Speaker 1: Max Planck meant when he famously said that science advances
32:43
Speaker 1: one funeral at a time. The old guard has to
32:48
Speaker 1: be dead and buried before the new guard has a chance.
32:52
Speaker 1: Listen again to Puskas. So you've gone to a lot
32:55
Speaker 1: of meetings and stood up and said, here's this new
32:57
Speaker 1: thing I'm trying, right?
32:58
Speaker 3: You've been doing this.
32:59
Speaker 1: For 20 years, maybe more. What happens when you say that?
33:03
Speaker 1: When you stand up, what's the response in the room?
33:07
Speaker 3: So the younger people seem more interested.
33:11
Speaker 2: And for a long time, Malcolm, I made the mistake
33:13
Speaker 2: of trying to convince my peers.
33:18
Speaker 3: That ship has sailed.
33:21
Speaker 2: The people that we're now focused on trying to change
33:24
Speaker 2: and to motivate are the youngest members of our profession.
33:29
Speaker 1: You can't convince your peers. That ship has sailed. All
33:33
Speaker 1: you can hope for is that the new people understand
33:36
Speaker 1: something that the old ones didn't. You plant a seed
33:40
Speaker 1: in 1997, and if you're lucky, it bears fruit 30
33:44
Speaker 1: years later. Build a better mousetrap, they told us, and
33:48
Speaker 1: the world will be the path to your door.
33:50
Speaker 2: I wish. I wish.
34:01
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Lucy
34:05
Speaker 1: Sullivan and Ben-Nadav Hafring. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Our
34:10
Speaker 1: executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Sam Rusick. Original
34:14
Speaker 1: music by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Jake Gorski.
34:19
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Gladwell.