Weisburd was a criminologist by training. He had done his dissertation at Yale University on violent behavior among settlers in the West Bank in Israel. He was born in Brooklyn. After leaving Yale, he got a job working on a research project back in his old borough.
The study was based out of the precinct house on Fourth Avenue, a squat, modernist box that looked as if it were designed to repel an invading army. There were nine officers involved, each assigned to a beat of ten to thirty blocks. “Their job was to walk around those beat areas and to interact with the public, and to develop ways of doing something about the problems,” Weisburd said. He was the observer and note-taker, responsible for writing up what was learned. Four days a week, for a year, he tagged along. “I would always wear a suit and tie, and I had a police identification card. People in the street thought I was the detective and I would say, ‘Oh no.’”
He had been studying crime in a library. Now he was at ground level, walking side by side with beat cops. And right from the beginning, something struck him as odd. Common sense had always held that crime was connected to certain neighborhoods. Where there were problems such as poverty, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was crime: The broad conditions of economic and social disadvantage bred communities of lawlessness and disorder.
In Los Angeles, that neighborhood was South Central. In Paris, it was the outer suburbs. In London, places like Brixton. Weisburd was in New York’s version of one of those neighborhoods—only the neighborhood wasn’t at all what he had imagined: “What I found was, quite quickly, that after we got to know the area, we spent all our time on one or two streets,” he says. “It was the bad neighborhood of town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime.”
After a while it seemed almost pointless to walk every street in his patrol area, since on most of them nothing ever happened. He didn’t understand it. Criminals were people who operated outside social constraint. They were driven by their own dark impulses: mental illness, greed, despair, anger. Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.”
Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. The kinds of social conditions that Draculas feed on were everywhere. But the Draculas weren’t everywhere. They were only on particular streets. And by “streets” Weisburd meant a single block—a street segment. You could have one street segment with lots of crime and the next, literally across an intersection, was fine. It was that specific. Didn’t criminals have legs? Cars? Subway tokens?
“So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology,” Weisburd said. “Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.”
5.
When he finished his stint in Brooklyn, Weisburd decided to team up with Larry Sherman, another young criminologist. Sherman had been thinking along these lines as well. “I was inspired, at the time, by the AIDS map of the country,” Sherman remembers, “which showed that fifty census tracks out of fifty thousand had over half of the AIDS cases in the United States.” AIDS didn’t look to him like a contagious disease roaming wildly and randomly across the land. It looked to him like an interaction between certain kinds of people and certain very specific places, an epidemic with its own internal logic.
Gathering the kind of data necessary to study the geographical component of crime wasn’t easy. Crime had always been reported by precinct—by the general geographical area where it occurred. But Weisburd had just walked the 72nd Precinct, and he knew an area that nonspecific wouldn’t help them. They needed addresses. Luckily, Sherman knew the police chief in Minneapolis, who was willing to help. “We chose Minneapolis because how could you find someone crazy enough to allow us to do what we wanted to do?” Weisburd said with a laugh.
Sherman crunched the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls. Weisburd and his graduate students at Rutgers University then put a map of Minneapolis on the wall, and pasted little strips of paper wherever they found there had been a crime. The unbelievable finding was now impossible to dismiss. From his days walking the 72nd, Weisburd had expected some concentration of crime, but not this. “When Larry and I were talking about it, it was like, ‘Oh my God!’”
In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.
6.
So: Sylvia Plath. In her thinly disguised autobiography, The Bell Jar, Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, describes her descent into madness. And she thinks about suicide precisely as Ronald Clarke (who made the link between town gas and suicide) suggests she would. She is incredibly sensitive to the question of how she’ll take her own life. “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Esther asks Cal, a young man she’s lying next to on a beach.
Cal seemed pleased. “I’ve often thought of that. I’d blow my brains out with a gun.” I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
That very morning Esther had tried to hang herself with the silk cord of her mother’s bathrobe, and it hadn’t worked. “But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.” She and Cal swim for the shore. She decides to try to drown herself—and dives for the bottom of the sea.
I dived and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.