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The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows · Revisionist History

• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Pushkin. What did it mean to go out on a
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Saturday or Friday night in nineteen ninety three in New York.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: It was kind of like a given.
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: You know, you wear a fanny pack and once you
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: are on the streets, you turn it around so it's
• 0:36
  Speaker 3: in front of.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: You so you can see it.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Did you really do that?
• 0:39
  Speaker 4: Absolutely?
• 0:40
  Speaker 5: Well?
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: I actually I did interrupt, but I remember I just
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: had a flash of remember keys. We all had.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Keys, and I used to around with keys.
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: So that each one. What would I have actually done
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: if someone had attacked me? I would put my keys
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: between my fingers.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that someone atactly I was ready. Not long ago,
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I called up two friends so I used to hang
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: out with when I first moved to New York City
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: in my twenties, Peggy and Erica. Back in the nineties,
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: we were all young and footloose and on edge. I
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: seem to remember that at the end of every evening
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: there was a discussion about everyone had to We all
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: had to talk about everyone's plan for getting home. Do
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: you remember this? And if you didn't, who did? And
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: didn't have money for a cab? Did anyone under what
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: circumstances would you take the subway on a Friday night after.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Dinner if you were in a large group.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Only if you're in a large group, a large group.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: And it was like a little adventure. So six people
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: would all get on the subway late at night, and
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: you felt like you were being adventurous.
• 1:49
  Speaker 6: Yeah, thinking back on it, it felt very collegial.
• 1:52
  Speaker 4: We did things as a group.
• 1:54
  Speaker 7: Yeah, you were never left alone.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: The New York City of that era was one of
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the most dangerous big cities in America. The subway was filthy,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: there was graffiti everywhere. There were two thousand, two hundred
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: and sixty two murders in New York and eighteen ninety
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: more than six a day. Were we personally at risk?
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: I don't know, but it felt like crime was all
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: around us.
• 2:18
  Speaker 3: You know.
• 2:18
  Speaker 4: Someone would always say, Hey, don't worry, I'm walking you home.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: We were never allowed to walk along.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, even on it right, people would walk me home
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: just because you didn't want to be by yourself.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: As a won when you went on on a date,
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: even if it was a disaster, you had to walk.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: You had to walk the woman home, right, which is
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: like so insanely awkward.
• 2:39
  Speaker 7: You're like, we were, you know, independent women but once
• 2:46
  Speaker 7: the sun went down, you never walked alone.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: Let's tell about how it gets better. I just remember
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: that all of a sudden, all of the precautions seemed
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: to go out the window right, and it's shoe. Statistically,
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: we know by ninety seven or ninety eight the murder
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: rate has dropped. I remember this. I had a bedroom
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: when I was living on that in that walk up
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: on Bank Street. My bedroom window overlooked the fire escape,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: and I had previously been too scared to open my
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: window at night, And then I started to open my
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: window at night, so that technically someone could have walked
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: up down up to fire escape and walked in. But
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: I was like, it's fine, now I can sleep. My
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part of
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: a series introducing my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: now available everywhere. And in this episode, I'm looking back
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: that the question that got me started on tipping points
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: twenty five years ago. How in the nineties did New
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: York become one of the safest cities in America. In
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, I wrote an article for The New
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: York and Mega trying to explain this puzzle. It was
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: called The Tipping Point. That article led to my first book,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: The success of The Tipping Point led to another book
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: and another. I wouldn't be here today talking to you
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: were it not for my obsession way back when about
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: what happened to crime in New York in the nineteen nineties.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: And now I've written a sequel to that first book.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: Did I mention that it's at in bookstores everywhere. It's
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: called Revenge of the Tipping Point. And in that spirit,
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: I've decided to go back and conduct an audit of
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: my conclusions from twenty five years ago, to look at
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: my thirty something self in the eye and ask was
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: I right Back in the nineties. I used to go
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: to New York University's library all the time to look
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: for ideas, bopes. A big squat redstone building on Washington
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: Square in Greenwich Village. This was before Google, so I
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: was my own search engine. I'd wander the stacks for hours,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and one day I was on the fifth floor in
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: the HM one Dot, a sixth aisle and I started
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: leafing through the bank issues of the American Journal of
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Sociology from nineteen ninety one, and I found a paper
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: written by a professor named Jonathan Crane entitled the Epidemic
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Theory of Ghettos and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: teenage Childbearing. A choice of words no one would use today.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: This is how it started. The word epidemic is commonly
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics,
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenaged childbearing. The
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: to be real remarkably apt. The word epidemic to Crane
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: wasn't a metaphor, It was a literal description. His point
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: was that if you look closely at how those problems spread,
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: how and why they go up and down, it looks
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: exactly like the way viruses spread, same rules, same patterns.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: And when I read that first paragraph, I thought, oh
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: my god, this is exactly what happened in New York City.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: We had a real, live epidemic of crime. And what
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: is the hallmark of an epidemic, a tipping point, the
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: moment when everything changes all at once. That moment when
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: I left my window open because I suddenly felt safe
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: was our tipping point, and so front and center in
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: my first book was a description of what I saw
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: as the reason why New York's epidemic suddenly tipped the
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: police department's commitment to broken windows. Policing broken windows was
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: a theory that small rhymes or invitations for large crimes.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: That if you let people get away with little things,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: then you were signaling that it was okay to cross
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the line into bigger things, like serious acts of violence.
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: And so what do you do? You don't let people
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: get away with the little things. He was taking the
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: concept of an epidemic and applying it to crime. Lawlessness
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: wasn't random. It was something you could catch from those
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: around you, the same way you can catch a cold
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: from a warm, stuffy room full of four year olds.
• 7:40
  Speaker 8: If somebody urinates in public, the person is telling you
• 7:44
  Speaker 8: I got a big problem. This is what broken windows
• 7:48
  Speaker 8: theory is all about.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: The biggest champion of this idea was Rudy Giulioni, the
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: mayor of New York City at the time. Here he
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: is at a press conference in the mid nineties, a
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: few years into the Broken Windows experiment, where in a
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: span of just a minute and a half he references
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: public urination eight times.
• 8:07
  Speaker 8: I mean, if some guy is urinated in public, we
• 8:11
  Speaker 8: got a problem. Now you can do one of two things.
• 8:14
  Speaker 8: You can ignore the problem and say, gee, I'm such
• 8:16
  Speaker 8: a big, fuzzy headed liberal that I'm going to walk
• 8:19
  Speaker 8: away from it, and you're gonna make believe they have
• 8:22
  Speaker 8: no problem. That's New York City in the nineteen eighties.
• 8:25
  Speaker 8: That's New York City with two thousand murders. That's New
• 8:28
  Speaker 8: York City with five hundred thousand crimes. You have to
• 8:32
  Speaker 8: pay attention to people urinating on the streets, and you
• 8:35
  Speaker 8: have to get people to stop urinating on the streets.
• 8:39
  Speaker 8: That's moving towards civilization, that's moving toward decency. That's what
• 8:44
  Speaker 8: I mean by a decent society that people want to
• 8:47
  Speaker 8: invest in, people want their children to live in. You've
• 8:50
  Speaker 8: got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street.
• 8:53
  Speaker 8: It may be a minor thing, it may be a
• 8:55
  Speaker 8: serious thing, but you cannot ignore it. You have to
• 8:58
  Speaker 8: deal with it. It is against the law to urinate
• 9:02
  Speaker 8: in public.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Giuliani was elected in nineteen ninety three and re elected
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: in ninety seven by a huge margin. Under his watch,
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: the city was revitalized. People who had fled for the
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: suburbs came back. Huge parts of Brooklyn were gentrified. Central
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: Park was cleaned up. I cannot tell you how gratifying
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: it was to be a New Yorker in those years
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: and finally get a mayor who said enough, you can't
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: jump subway turnstiles and smoke dope on the corner and
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: harassed pedestrians. But Giuliani wasn't just making an argument for civility,
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: that it was more pleasant to live in a city
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: where the streets were clean and the police were alert
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: to every sign of disorder. He was making a more
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: extravagant claim that arresting the guy urinating on the street
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: was the reason why the murder rate dropped, and I
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: believed him. Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish a book.
• 10:02
  Speaker 7: Whenever it happens, huge things occur.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: About ten years ago, the journalist John Ronson did a
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: retrospect dive on the tipping Point for a British program
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: called The Culture Show, and he talked to a public
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: defender in The Bronx named Kate Rubin No.
• 10:16
  Speaker 6: I would go around and I would talk to people
• 10:18
  Speaker 6: in New York City, and the liberal people progressive people
• 10:22
  Speaker 6: would say, oh, well, you know, we've had this miracle
• 10:24
  Speaker 6: in New York and some people would say, oh, yeah,
• 10:26
  Speaker 6: Malcolm Gladwell's idea broken windows.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: I didn't watch any of this at the time, even
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: though Ronson interviewed me for the segment too. But I
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: found it while working on this episode, and it made
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: me realize the claims I made in The Tipping Point
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: had far more reach than I'd ever imagined.
• 10:41
  Speaker 6: Some people knew that it wasn't his idea, but that
• 10:44
  Speaker 6: he had popularized it. They'd read about it in The
• 10:46
  Speaker 6: New Yorker and his book, The Tipping Point. I would
• 10:49
  Speaker 6: never try to speak to what his intent was, but
• 10:52
  Speaker 6: I think the impact that.
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: He had was to serve as.
• 10:57
  Speaker 6: Basically a marketing force for this idea. He truly popularized.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: It, so once again was right. On the afternoon of
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: February twenty seventh, two thousand and eight, a young man
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: named David Floyd left his apartment on Beach Avenue in
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: the Bronx. As he walked down the pathway next to
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: his building. He ran into the tenant to live downstairs,
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: who said he'd locked himself out of his apartment.
• 11:35
  Speaker 9: I was leaving my apartment to actually go to school.
• 11:39
  Speaker 9: Heading to school, I had my book bag on, you know,
• 11:42
  Speaker 9: everything that normal students do as they're going to school.
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: Missus Floyd, speaking in an interview with the Civil Rights Group,
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: raced forward. The landlord was Floyd's godmother, so Floyd went
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: back inside to her apartment to get a ring of keys,
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: and as he and the tenant tried to figure out
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: which key worked in the door, three plane clothes police
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: officers suddenly emerged. There have been reports of burglars in
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: the neighborhood, and here were two young men trying to
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: get into a locked up department.
• 12:09
  Speaker 9: We were stopped. We were first. We were of course
• 12:14
  Speaker 9: told to put our hands up to stay where we were.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: This was how the police put broken windows into practice.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Don't let the little things pass you by. Be aggressive.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Check for weapons, drugs. Maybe you find them, maybe you don't.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: But if you do that enough times, then young men
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: leave their guns and drugs at home. Floyd had actually
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: been stopped the previous April while walking down the street,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: followed by three officers in a van who jumped out
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: and confronted him.
• 12:40
  Speaker 9: And again, it's just the whole experience. It's humiliating, it's embarrassing,
• 12:47
  Speaker 9: and really, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of
• 12:50
  Speaker 9: person you are, how tough you are, whatever, it's a
• 12:53
  Speaker 9: scary thing because you don't know what is going to
• 12:56
  Speaker 9: happen with your life. You don't know what's going to
• 12:58
  Speaker 9: happen with your freedom.
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: Floyd becomes the face of a massive class action lawsuit
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Floyd the City of New York, challenging the NYPDS policy
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: of stop and frisk, and in twenty thirteen, Floyd wins.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: In a shocking ruling, a federal judge said the NYPD's
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: use of stopping frisk was unconstitutional, effectively ending the broken
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: windows era in New York City policing. Yes, it still
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: happens today, but not in the way that they did
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: ten years ago, not even remotely close. It's no exaggeration
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: to say that this was one of the most consequential
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: court cases in the city's history.
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: A lot of people at the time, and I think,
• 13:44
  Speaker 4: you know, not without reason, said wow, this is going
• 13:47
  Speaker 4: to compromise public safety.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: This is Aaron Chelfin, who's part of a group of
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: criminologists who have devoted themselves to understanding what exactly happened
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: in New York.
• 13:56
  Speaker 4: The police are no longer going to be able to
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: make a lot of stops and really show people that
• 14:01
  Speaker 4: they were being proactive, so that might embolden more gun carrying,
• 14:04
  Speaker 4: more violence, more homicide.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: When Cholfin says that at the time, a lot of
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: people thought ending stop and frisk was going to lead
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: to crime going back up, he means everyone, city government,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: the police force, pundits of every variety. That's what I
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: thought too. What everyone was saying in effect was this, Yes,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: doing hundreds of thousands of police stops a year of
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: young men like David Floyd, who maybe doing nothing more
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: than helping out a friend is unfortunate, but being killed
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: is a lot worse. And since this is what's keeping
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: the crime rate down, we don't have a choice. That
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: was the calculus. Even the judge in the Floyd case
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: begins her ruling by making the same point I emphasize
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: at the outset, as I have throughout the litigation, that
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: this case is not about the effectiveness of stopping frisk
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: in deterring or combating crime. This Court's mandate is solely
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: as a law enforcement tool. She goes on many police
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: practices maybe useful for fighting crime, preventive detention or coerced confessions,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: for example, but because they are unconstitutional, they cannot be
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: used no matter how effective. She's basically saying, there's a
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: good chance that crime is going to go back up
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: because of my ruling. But the Constitution is the constitution.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: Even the people who hated broken windows thought that it worked,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: but then the very thing that absolutely no one expected
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: to happen happens. Crime falls.
• 15:44
  Speaker 4: We ended stop question frisk in New York. We know
• 15:47
  Speaker 4: that went down by ninety or ninety five percent, depending
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: on which numbers you look at, and yet we had
• 15:54
  Speaker 4: this incredible, incredible fifty percent to climb in homicide.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: In social science, a natural experiment is when the real
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: world provides you with a clean way of measuring the
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: truth or falsity of a given proposition. The Floyd decision
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: was the perfect natural experiment for broken windows. All you
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: have to do is compared before with after.
• 16:16
  Speaker 4: The amazing thing about New York is that if you
• 16:19
  Speaker 4: look at twenty ten, New York City had a banner
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: year in terms of homicide.
• 16:22
  Speaker 8: It had.
• 16:22
  Speaker 4: It was one of the lowest homicide rates in forty
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: years in the city's history in twenty ten, and you
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: would have said, well, like, great progress, let's just keep
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: it up. Let's keep up the good work. Incredibly, by
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: twenty nineteen, the year before the pandemic right, homicides went
• 16:36
  Speaker 4: down by fifty percent in New York compared to twenty ten.
• 16:39
  Speaker 4: Between twenty ten and twenty nineteen, New York is unique
• 16:43
  Speaker 4: in that it had another great homicide decline at a
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: time when homicides were really flat nationally.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: This is hands down one of the strangest and craziest
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: urban transformations ever. Just to give you a sense, if
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: New York City's crime rate in nineteen ninety had just
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: stayed the same, didn't change for the next thirty five years,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the city would have had an additional sixty two thousand homicides,
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: most of them in all likelihood young men of color.
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: Sixty two thousand young men currently walking around New York
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: would be dead.
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: And by twenty nineteen, New York is almost as safe
• 17:20
  Speaker 4: as Paris with respect to homicide rate. It's New York
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: is closer to Paris than it is to other US cities,
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: even like Boston, which is another safe city. Right, it's incredible.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: You know how those billionaires left New York City from
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: Miami during the pandemic, saying they couldn't deal with the
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: taxes and the crime. Well, the violent crime rate in
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: New York City after that second wave is half that
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: of Miami. If you're really worried about crime, you should
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: be selling your waterfront home in Coral Gables before someone
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: murders you and move somewhere much safer like the Bronx.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Or here's another. JD. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio,
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: tweets this in twenty twenty one, serious question. I have
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: to go to New York soon, and I'm trying to
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: figure out where to stay. I've heard it's disgusting and
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season one
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: or season four? I know, I know there's a whole
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: cottage industry of unearthing crazy things. J. D. Vance once said,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: but Vance is from just outside Cincinnati. The violent crime
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: rate in Cincinnati at the exact moment he wrote that
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: tweet was twice the violent crime rate in New York City.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Serious question, Senator. I have to go to your hometown soon,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: and I'm trying to figure out where to stay because
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: compared to where I come from, it's disgusting and violent there.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: But I digress back to Chalfin and the question at hand.
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: And so you know, it does give you the sense
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: that making loss and loss of these stops was not
• 18:54
  Speaker 4: the key ingredient.
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: It does, doesn't it. We conducted a natural experiment and
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the results are in. It wasn't broken windows, it wasn't
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: stop and frisk.
• 19:07
  Speaker 5: My administration will issue hundreds of millions of dollars in
• 19:10
  Speaker 5: federal grants to reward cities and towns and return to
• 19:14
  Speaker 5: proven crime fighting methods, including stop and frisk and broken
• 19:19
  Speaker 5: windows policing. We did that with Rudy Giuliani was so successful.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: At three o'clock in the morning. Sometimes I lie awake
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: and I think, oh God, did he read The Tipping
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Point too. I don't reread any of my books once
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: I've written them, particularly ones from twenty five years ago,
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: like the Tipping Point. I mean, why would I do?
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: I want to wear the clothes I wore in the
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: year two thousand, No, I don't do I even want
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: to see pictures of myself from two thousand, not particularly so.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: I didn't reread The Tipping Point until I made the
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: decision last year to revisit my first book on its
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: silver anniversary. There were parts that I love. It felt
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: like rediscovering some lost friend, Hush Puppies, Six Degrees of
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Lois Weisberg, Paul Revere's Ride. There are also parts that
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: mystified me. Did I really write an entire chapter on
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the children's TV show Blues Clues? But the crime chapter
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: was the only place where I said I would write
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: that so differently today Today, if I were rewriting, I'd
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Andrew Papachristos.
• 20:46
  Speaker 7: People talk about gun violence as an epidemic or disease,
• 20:50
  Speaker 7: and it is in many fronts, but really I wanted
• 20:52
  Speaker 7: to take it seriously, like, ohay, if it's an epidemic,
• 20:55
  Speaker 7: is it a bloodborne pathogen or is it an airborne pathogen?
• 20:58
  Speaker 7: And actually, thank God, it's not an airborne pathogen.
• 21:01
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 21:01
  Speaker 7: You don't catch a bullet like you catch a cold.
• 21:04
  Speaker 7: It's actually transmitted through behaviors. And I just try to
• 21:06
  Speaker 7: figure out ways that science might kind of boost or
• 21:10
  Speaker 7: amplify those insights.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: Papa Cristos took every single arrest over more than six
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: years in Chicago, so hundreds of thousands of arrests, and
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: he made something called a network map.
• 21:22
  Speaker 7: All right, first you see it happens in groups, and
• 21:24
  Speaker 7: then like, okay, what about individuals? All right, well does
• 21:27
  Speaker 7: it concentrate? What about exposure? What about time?
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: So if Andy and Malcolm are arrested together for shooting someone,
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: then Andy and Malcolm are two dots on the map,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: connected by a line. And if Malcolm then is arrested
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: with Joe as a line connecting Malcolm to Joe, Malcolm
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: and Joe are one degree, or, to use Papa Cristos's
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: favorite term, one handshake apart, Joe and Andy two handshakes apart.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: You do that for years and years of Chicago arrest data,
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: and you get a truly enormous map.
• 22:02
  Speaker 7: You have this very very large network, right, and then
• 22:07
  Speaker 7: what you do is you sprinkle in the victimizations, which
• 22:10
  Speaker 7: come from a separate source of data, right. They come
• 22:14
  Speaker 7: from homicide records, they come from shooting files, police public health.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: He took the names of everyone who had been shot
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: over the same period, and look to see how many
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: of those names were in his network map. And what
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: he found was the victims were already there, and they
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: were clustered together.
• 22:33
  Speaker 7: You just matched the data, and every place where there's
• 22:37
  Speaker 7: a shooting, the victims bright red, for example. And then
• 22:41
  Speaker 7: what you see is that these bright red dots all
• 22:46
  Speaker 7: lingered together. I'll clump together, right like your kid took
• 22:49
  Speaker 7: a handful of Christmas ornaments and like threw to the tree,
• 22:52
  Speaker 7: and they're all on one spot.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: It looks just like the social maps epidemil just used
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: to construct for the spread of HIV in the nineteen eighties.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: If someone in your social circle got infected with HIV,
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: then your chances of becoming infected with HIV increased. In
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: Papa Cristo's maps, the risk of contagion extended three degrees.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: If Malcolm gets shot, Andy is at risk, and so
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: is Joe, and so are any people Andy and Joe
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: were arrested with.
• 23:19
  Speaker 7: Like other social networks, the impact of these shootings tends
• 23:24
  Speaker 7: to go about two or three handshakes and then it
• 23:27
  Speaker 7: starts to kind of drop off. So these clusters are
• 23:30
  Speaker 7: fairly dense, and they stick around.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: So hold on, this is this is crucial. So I've
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: got my I've got my social network map, and I'm overlaying.
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: I'm sticking in all of the shootings into the and
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: I've noticed that the shootings are clustering. So we have
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: this triangle of Joe, Andy, Malcolm, and Malcolm gets shot.
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: And so once we observe that Malcolm gets shot, what
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: you're saying is that the likelihood of someone in my
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: someone connected to me also gets shot.
• 24:10
  Speaker 7: Increases skyrockets absolutely.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: And you're saying that the connection the risk is skyrocketing.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: Within between one and three.
• 24:21
  Speaker 7: Degrees, that's the where risk is the highest. Yeah, once
• 24:25
  Speaker 7: you get past kind of three degrees, it really levels.
• 24:28
  Speaker 7: It goes down and levels.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: When do you observe this? Did this surprise you?
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: How concentrated it was surprised me.
• 24:35
  Speaker 7: You know, when you look at these numbers, even when
• 24:38
  Speaker 7: you look at the larger co funding network, you're talking
• 24:40
  Speaker 7: about five to six percent of a neighborhood's population. But
• 24:45
  Speaker 7: when you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's
• 24:48
  Speaker 7: less than it's less than a percent. You're talking about,
• 24:51
  Speaker 7: you know, on the West Side of Chicago, one of
• 24:52
  Speaker 7: the neighborhoods we were working, it's about fifty thousand people.
• 24:55
  Speaker 7: You're talking about four hundred individuals.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: Four hundred individuals on the entire West Side of Chicago.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: The crime problem on the West Side of Chicago isn't
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: being driven by everyone. It's being driven by a tiny
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: subset of people within a dense social network where someone
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: close to them has already been a victim of gun violence.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: The West Side of Chicago is not a dangerous place.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: Highly specific networks of people within the West Side of
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Chicago are dangerous places. The same pattern holds true in
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: New York City. Why wasn't stop and frisk an effective
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: strategy in the end, because it assumed that violent crime
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: was something embedded within an entire community, and it's not.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Even the NYPD's own numbers said so. In one eight
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: year span, New York City police officers frisked two point
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: three million people and found weapons in one point five
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: percent of those stops. They were looking for needles in haystacks.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Why would that be an effective crime fighting strategy. Aaron Chaufin,
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: the criminologist, says that one of the main reasons crime
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: fell so dramatically in New York after Stop and Frisk ended,
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: was that the NYPD took those lessons to heart. They
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: switched from the kind of indiscriminate policing found in Stop
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: and Frisk to precision policing. They started focusing on hotspots,
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: deploying police to the specific places where crime was the worst.
• 26:30
  Speaker 4: More targeted investigations, more thinking about who are the shooters,
• 26:34
  Speaker 4: who are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving
• 26:36
  Speaker 4: the shootings, What can we do to identify those people
• 26:39
  Speaker 4: incapacitate those people. So when we think about good policing,
• 26:43
  Speaker 4: and we think in particular about homicide, it's a very
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: small number of people who drive the problem. It's a
• 26:49
  Speaker 4: couple thousand people in a city of eight and a
• 26:51
  Speaker 4: half million, And you know, making loss of low level rests,
• 26:56
  Speaker 4: maybe you'll find some more guns and things like that,
• 26:59
  Speaker 4: but it's probably a much better use of resources to focus, focus, focus,
• 27:02
  Speaker 4: focus on the drivers of violence. And when you do that.
• 27:07
  Speaker 4: In my paper, we find that when there's a major
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: gang takedown around a public housing development, in the next
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: eighteen months, homicides are down by about thirty percent.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: Thirty percent. Fighting an epidemic means focusing on the few,
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: not the many, and by the way, who made this
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: argument as loudly as anyone I did. In the Tipping Point,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: I called it the law the Few, and it took
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: up a third of the book. When it comes to epidemics,
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: I wrote, a tiny percentage of people do the majority
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: of the work. I talked about how this principle plays
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: out in outbreaks of infectious disease, in the spread of
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: fashion trends in word of mouth. I described in great
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: detail the kinds of people who make those special few,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: on and on. But then when it came to crime,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: I suddenly forgot all about the law of the few
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: and endorsed an idea that's that a really good way
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: to control an epidemic was to stop and frisk one
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: hundred young men in the hopes of finding a gun
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: on one of them. I was wrong. I'm sorry, So.
• 28:19
  Speaker 9: I don't know.
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: I Feelfred asked us any questions. There's one more thing
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: I would do if I were rewriting the crime chapter.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: I would talk about Philadelphia and about a day I
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: spent recently driving around the city with a guy named
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: Keith Green. So where are we headed?
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: So we're going to be driving in like the West
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: Philadelphia area.
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Green works for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, a group that
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: was founded in eighteen twenty seven and is best known
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: for putting on the world's largest indoor flower show. And
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: for two hours we talked about vacant lots thirty thousand.
• 28:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because over thirty thousand the portions in the city
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: of the world.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there were blocks we drove past that had two
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: or even three vacant lots. Every block seemed to have
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: at least one. In the past, they were overgrown with weeds,
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: covered in trash, home to rats and raccoons and pod
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: And what Green's group has done is to systematically work
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: its way through the city, cleaning up the lots, planting grass,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: putting up low fences.
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: And we started seeing a dramatic change. Lots were being maintained.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: People starting people started using their lots.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: And when you see people started using the how are
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: they used to.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: Well, people with kids were playing football, people would have
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: having barbecues on the sites, horses or raising on vacant
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: lots horses.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: In the history of the program, they've cleaned up seventeen
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: thousand loots. Charles Brannis, the pioneer of the work. Let
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: us study to see if cleaning up vacant lots lowered
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: the homicide rate. When you fixed up a neighborhood, what
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: happened to gun violence? It went down twenty nine percent. Now,
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: what's the best way to describe this kind of anti
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: crime intervention. It's broken windows only. Not broken windows as
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: a grand metaphor, as a hysterical leap that sees a
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: man urinating on a sidewalk and says we have no
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: choice but to lock him up. No, broken windows has
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: a literal call to action. You see the lot full
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: of weeds and trash, and you pick up the garbage
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: and mow the grass and put a fence out front.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Region's history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with ben
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: at Af Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Schakerji.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Fact checking by Sam Russick, Original scoring by Luis Kerra,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: mastering by Echo Mountain, Engineering by Sarah Bruger and Nina
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: Bird Lawrence. Production support from Luke LeMond. Our Executive producer
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix Always hell
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Hafe Gota Come, I'm Malcolm Glappa.