Police officers are no different from the rest of us. They want to feel that their efforts are important, that what they do matters, that their hard work will be rewarded. What happened in District 144 provided exactly what the profession of law enforcement had been searching for: validation.
“Officers who recovered a firearm received favorable notoriety from their peers, almost to the point that recovery of a firearm came to be a measure of success,” Shaw wrote in his account of the program. “Officers could frequently be heard making statements such as ‘I’ve just got to get a gun tonight,’ or ‘I haven’t gotten a gun yet; tonight will be the night!’”
In 1991 the New York Times ran a front-page story on the miracle in Kansas City. Larry Sherman says that over the next few days his phone rang off the hook: 300 police departments around the country bombarded him with requests for information on how he had done it. One by one, police departments around the country followed suit. To give one example, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol went from 400,000 to 800,000 traffic stops a year in the space of seven years.
The Drug Enforcement Agency used “Operation Pipeline” to teach tens of thousands of local police officers across the United States how to use Kansas City–style traffic stops to catch drug couriers. Immigration officials started using police stops to catch undocumented immigrants. Today, police officers in the United States make something like twenty million traffic stops a year. That’s 55,000 a day. All over the United States, law enforcement has tried to replicate the miracle in District 144. The key word in that sentence is tried. Because in the transition from Kansas City to the rest of the country, something crucial in Lawrence Sherman’s experiment was lost.
4.
The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers, where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.
And what was the principal implication of coupling? That law enforcement didn’t need to be bigger; it needed to be more focused. If criminals operated overwhelmingly in a few concentrated hot spots, those crucial parts of the city should be more heavily policed than anywhere else, and the kinds of crime-fighting strategies used by police in those areas ought to be very different from those used in the vast stretches of the city with virtually no crime at all.
“If crime is concentrated on a few percent of the city streets,” Weisburd asked, “why the hell are you wasting resources everywhere? If it’s coupled to those places and doesn’t move easily, even more so.” The coupling theorists believed they had solved the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventive patrol. How do you effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring more police officers, or by turning the entire city into a surveillance state. You do it by zeroing in on those few specific places where all the crime is.
But think back to those statistics from North Carolina. If you go from 400,000 traffic stops in one year to 800,000 seven years later, does that sound like focused and concentrated policing? Or does that sound like the North Carolina State Highway Patrol hired a lot more police officers and told everyone, everywhere, to pull over a lot more motorists? The lesson the law-enforcement community took from Kansas City was that preventive patrol worked if it was more aggressive. But the part they missed was that aggressive patrol was supposed to be confined to places where crime was concentrated. Kansas City had been a coupling experiment.
Weisburd and Sherman say they have trotted out their maps and numbers, trying to convince their peers of the Law of Crime Concentration, to little effect. Back in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn where he began his work, after a long day roaming the neighborhood, Weisburd would turn to the police officers he had been walking with and say, “Isn’t it strange how we’re returning again and again to the same blocks?” They would look at him blankly.
“I was in a meeting with the deputy commissioner [of police] in Israel,” Weisburd recalls.
Someone at the meeting said, “Well, David finds that crime doesn’t just move around the corner. And that would suggest that you ought to become more focused.” This guy turned around and he said, “My experience tells me that that’s just not true. I don’t believe that.” That was the end of that.3
Is something wrong with Israel’s deputy commissioner of police? Not at all. Because his reaction is no different from the behavior of the highway patrol in North Carolina, or the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, or the literary scholars who speak confidently of Sylvia Plath’s doomed genius. There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.
So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency?
You get Sandra Bland.
1 Wilson first experimented with preventive patrol when he was the chief of police in Wichita, Kansas. He would later hold the same post in Chicago.
2 To deal with that hurdle, for example, Gallagher developed all kinds of tricks. He and his partner would approach someone they thought was carrying a gun. They’d corner him, so he was feeling a little defensive. Then Gallagher would identify himself: I’m a police officer.
“When you stop a man with a gun, 99 out of 100 times he’s going to do the same thing,” Gallagher told a reporter years ago. “He’s going to turn the side that the gun’s on away from you—either several inches, just a quick turn of the hip, or halfway around. And the hand and arm are going to come naturally in the direction of the gun,” in an instinctive protective motion. “At that point you don’t have to wait to see if he goes under the shirt for the gun or if he’s just going to keep it covered,” he said. “At that point you have all the right in the world to do a frisk.”
3 One of Weisburd’s former students, Barak Ariel, went so far as to test resistance to the coupling idea in the Derry region of Northern Ireland. Law-enforcement officers in Derry are asked to identify specific troubled areas of their beats that they think are going to require additional police presence. Their predictions are called “waymarkers.” Ariel wondered: how closely do the police officers’ waymarkers match up with the hot spots where crime actually happens in Derry? I think you can guess. “The majority of streets included in ‘Waymarkers’ were neither ‘hot’ nor ‘harmful,’ resulting in a false positive rate of over 97 percent,” Ariel concluded. This means that 97 percent of the blocks identified by police officers as being dangerous and violent were not dangerous and violent at all. The officers who drew these waymarkers were not sitting behind a desk, remote from the direct experience of the streets. This was their turf. These were crimes they investigated and criminals they arrested. Yet somehow they could not see a fundamental pattern in the location of the strangers they were arresting.