5 Thirty-four percent, in fact, predicted that everyone thwarted at the bridge would simply switch to another method.
6 Take a look at a map Weisburd made of Seattle (page 369). Those dots are Seattle’s crime “hot spots.” If you talk to someone from Seattle, they will tell you their city has some bad areas. But the map tells you that statement is false. Seattle does not have bad neighborhoods; it has a handful of problematic blocks scattered throughout the city. What distinguishes those problematic blocks from the rest of the city? A jumble of factors, acting in combination. Hot spots are more likely to be on arterial roads, more likely to have vacant lots, more likely to have bus stops, more likely to have residents who don’t vote, more likely to be near a public facility such as a school. The list of variables—some of which are well understood and many of which are not—goes on. And because most of those variables are pretty stable, those blocks don’t change much over time.
Chapter Eleven
Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments
1.
A century ago, a legendary figure in American law enforcement named O. W. Wilson came up with the idea of “preventive patrol.”1 Wilson believed that having police cars in constant, unpredictable motion throughout a city’s streets would deter crime. Any would-be criminal would always have to wonder if a police car was just around the corner.
But think about it. When you walk down the street of your neighborhood, do you feel like the police are just around the corner? Cities are vast, sprawling places. It’s not obvious that a police force—even a large police force—could ever create the feeling that they were everywhere.
This was the question facing the Kansas City Police Department in the early 1970s. The department was about to hire extra police officers, but it was divided over how to deploy them. Should they follow Wilson’s advice—and have them drive randomly around the city? Or assign them to specific locations—such as schools or difficult neighborhoods? To resolve the question, the city hired a criminologist named George Kelling.
“One group said riding around in cars doesn’t improve anything, it doesn’t do anything,” Kelling remembers. “Another group said it’s absolutely essential. That was the standoff. Then I was brought in.”
Kelling’s idea was to select fifteen beats from the southern part of the city and divide them into three groups. It was a big area: thirty-two square miles, 150,000 people, good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and even a little farmland on the fringes. One of the three groups would be the control group. Police work would continue there as it always had. In the second neighborhood, Kelling would have no preventive patrol at all; police officers would respond only when called. In the third neighborhood, he would double and in some cases triple the number of squad cars on the streets.
“Nothing like this had ever been done in policing,” Kelling remembers. “This was 1970. Nothing had been written about police tactics.…This was at a very primitive stage in policing.” People like O. W. Wilson had ideas and hunches. But police work was considered an art, not a science that could be evaluated like a new drug. Kelling says that many people told him his experiment would fail, “that the police simply weren’t ready for research. I wouldn’t be able to do it. They’d sabotage it.” But Kelling had the backing of the city’s police chief. The chief had spent the bulk of his career in the FBI, and he was shocked to learn how little police departments seemed to know about what they did. “Many of us in the department,” the chief would later admit, “had the feeling we were training, equipping, and deploying men to do a job neither we, nor anyone else, knew much about.” He told Kelling to go ahead.
Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of the study. The result? Nothing. Burglaries were the same in all three neighborhoods. So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism. The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened. “The results were all in one direction and that was, it doesn’t make any difference,” Kelling said. “It didn’t matter to citizen satisfaction, it didn’t matter to crime statistics, it just didn’t seem to matter.”
Every police chief in the country read the results. Initially, there was disbelief. Some urban police departments were still committed Wilsonites. Kelling remembers the Los Angeles Police Chief standing up at one national law-enforcement conference and saying, “If those findings are true, every officer in Kansas City was asleep at the switch because I can assure you that’s not how it is in Los Angeles.”
But slowly resistance gave way to resignation. The study came out as violent crime was beginning its long, hard, two-decade surge across the United States, and it fed into the growing feeling among people in law enforcement that the task before them was overwhelming. They had thought they could prevent crime with police patrols, but now the Kansas City PD had tested that assumption empirically, and patrols turned out to be a charade. And if patrols didn’t work, what did? Lee Brown, chief of the New York City Police Department, gave a famous interview in the middle of the crack epidemic in which he all but threw up his hands. “This country’s social problems are well beyond the ability of the police to deal with on their own,” Brown said. He had read George Kelling’s Kansas City report. It was hopeless. No matter how many police officers a city had, Brown said, “You could never have enough to use traditional policing techniques to deter crime.…If you don’t have a police officer to cover every part of the city all the time, the chance of an officer on patrol coming across a crime in progress is very small.”
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush came to Kansas City. He spent the morning in one of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, then gave a speech to a group of local police officers. He tried to be upbeat. He failed. The homicide rate that year in Kansas City was three times the national average. It would go up again in 1991 and again in 1992, then once more in 1993. There wasn’t much to say. Halfway through his remarks, Bush was reduced to simply listing the terrible things happening on the city’s streets:
A four-year-old boy shot dead in a suspected crack house; an eleven-year-old kid gunned down outside another drug den, allegedly at the hands of a fourteen-year-old guard; in a downtown bar, a mother sells her baby for crack; and a firebombing leaves three generations dead, including a grandmother and three little kids—the headlines are horrifying, sickening, outrageous.
But in the early 1990s, twenty years after the first Kansas City experiment, Kansas City decided to try again. They hired another brilliant young criminologist named Lawrence Sherman. As they had with George Kelling, they gave him free rein. It was time for Kansas City Experiment Number Two. Why not? Nothing else was working.
2.
Lawrence Sherman thought the focus ought to be on guns. He believed the sheer number of guns in the city was what fueled its epidemic of violence. His plan was to try a number of ideas in sequence, rigorously evaluate their effectiveness—as Kelling had done—and pick a winner. He called a planning meeting with a group of the city’s senior police officers. They chose as their testing ground Patrol District 144: a small, 0.64-square-mile neighborhood of modest single-family homes, bounded to the south by 39th Street and to the west by Highway 71. District 144 was as bad as Kansas City got in the early 1990s. The homicide rate there was twenty times the national average. The area averaged one violent felony a day and twenty-four drive-by shootings a year. A third of the lots were vacant. Just a few months before, an officer had been on patrol through 144 when he saw some kids playing basketball in the street. He stopped, got out, and asked them to move. One of the players threw the basketball at his head, then two others jumped him. It was that kind of place.