Policing and the Coupling of Crime and Place

Malcolm Gladwell has researched a number of ways that our human nature can cause us problems in social interactions.  He assembled this collection of topics and published them under the title Talking to Strangers:What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.  As expected, this Gladwell book provides numerous insights and revelations and leaves the reader with much to think about.  It begins with a reminder of the interaction of Sandra Bland with a Texas patrolman that we all observed as its was endlessly replayed in the media.  Gladwell then examines the ways in which interacting with a stranger can go awry before returning at the end to finish with a reevaluation of that interaction.  Gladwell asks the reader to focus on three factors that affect human interactions.  He labels them as default to truth, the illusion of transparency, and coupling to circumstances. 

The first two are well known from psychological studies.  Unless we have indications to the contrary, we tend to assume that someone providing us with information is telling the truth.  Evolution seems to have wired this response into our subconscious as a way of facilitating social interactions.  Consider how difficult it would be to conduct business if the default assumption was that everyone was likely to be lying.  Transparency refers to the working assumption that we can understand the feelings and motivations of people by observing physical manifestations of their inner thoughts.  Evolution has also wired into our subconscious body language and facial expressions that convey information about emotion and motivation.  Again, transparency, the ability to interpret what others are feeling was designed to facilitate social interactions.  Natural selection has decided that these two tendencies are beneficial in general.  Gladwell’s book is dedicated to warning us that these traits can be disastrous when dealing with people who are determined to deceive or harm us, or if we are dealing with people that are outliers who do not express emotions in the customary manner.

Adolf Hitler and Bernie Madoff are examples of two people whose activities clearly sent signals that should have indicated to others that they were being deceptive and up to no good.  However, when default to truth and the illusion of transparency were applied to interpersonal interactions with them, they were successful in hiding their intentions.  The lesson learned is that what serves us well in most interactions leaves us ill prepared to deal with outliers such as these.  Those who avoided personal interactions were better able to determine criminal intent.  People like Hitler and Madoff must somehow be identified as requiring a suspension of those two traits and treatment with a much higher level of suspicion. 

Dealing with outliers is critical in our criminal justice system.  Police officers must often judge probable guilt or innocence; prosecutors must make similar judgements; the setting of bail by a judge requires a decision as to which defendants are flight risks and which are not.  Gladwell dwells on tests performed by the psychologist Tim Levine.  They involve scenarios in which participants, usually college students, are presented with the opportunity to cheat at an endeavor.  They are then filmed to ascertain if they cheated, and also filmed denying or admitting that they cheated.  The purpose is to determine whether an observer of the tapes can determine which of the participants are lying.  It seems we humans are not very good at making that determination. The default to truth tendency and failed readings of transparency lead us astray.

“We’re much better than chance at correctly identifying the students who are telling the truth.  But we’re much worse than chance at correctly identifying the students who are lying.”

“On average, the people he had watch…videos correctly identified liars 56 percent of the time.  Other psychologists have tried similar versions of the same experiment.  The average for all of them? 54 percent.  Just about everyone is terrible: police officers, judges, therapists—even CIA officers running big spy networks overseas. Everyone…”

“We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion.  We do the opposite.  We start by believing.  And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”

These results suggest that when anyone falls into the hands of our criminal justice system, they may end up being evaluated by people who are not very good at discretionary decisions about guilt or innocence.

How then is a policing agency to identify those who should receive special and perhaps discriminatory treatment without disturbing the overall healthy functioning of society?  This is where the concept of coupling with circumstances can be of assistance.

“Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”

Gladwell indicates two criminologists who identified coupling between crime and location.  The first was David Weisburd who participated in a study of a high-crime district in Brooklyn, the 72nd Precinct.

“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 community 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 in town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime’.”

“’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.”

Weisburd then teamed with Lawrence Sherman in the late 1980s to discover that what was observed in his Brooklyn district was also observed in other urban areas.  They first studied Minneapolis and concluded that “3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls.”

“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…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…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…crime is tied to very specific places and contexts.”

This is an effect that is not well understood, but the fact that it does exist should play a significant role in determining how police forces use their resources.  Gladwell points out that studies have shown this coupling of behaviors with places and circumstances applies to other social issues in addition to crime.

“They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior.  And that means that when you confront a stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you are confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.”

Gladwell then introduces the “Kansas City Experiments” and their results before the Sandra Bland incident can be revisited.  In 1970, Kansas City was planning on hiring more police officers and wondering how best to utilize them.  They brought in the criminologist George Kelling to assist them.  He conducted an experiment aimed at assessing the efficacy of three different modes of policing.  He selected a large segment of the city and divided it up into three areas.

“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 control 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.”

“Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of 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.”

These results were disappointing to Kansas City and to police departments around the nation, and these dismal results came in just as crime rates were climbing.  Fortunately, Kansas City decided they would give policing experiments a try again.  Twenty years later, in the early 1990s they hired Lawrence Sherman, the same criminologist who had worked with Weisburd in discovering the intense concentration of crime.  He had the benefit of that knowledge and focused on a small, high-crime section.

“They chose as their testing ground Patrol District 144: a small 0.64-square-mile neighborhood…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.”

Sherman’s view was that crime and guns were associated.  He would focus on methods for finding guns in hope that success would lower crime rates.  He was ultimately successful because he chose to try a very aggressive form of policing in that area involving a small number of specially trained officers.  His approach recognized that searching homes for guns or frisking individuals was impractical and illegal, but stopping and searching cars could be easily justified.

“Traffic codes in the U.S. (and in fact in most countries) give police officers literally hundreds of reasons to stop a motorist.”

The experiment employed only four officers in two squad cars operating only at night when crime was most likely.

“Use whatever pretext you can find in the traffic code to pull them over.  If you’re still suspicious, search the car and confiscate any weapon you find.  The officers worked every night from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week, for 200 consecutive days.  And what happened?  Outside District 144, where police business was conducted as usual, crime remained as bad as ever.  But inside 144?  All of the new focused police work cut gun crimes—shootings, murders, woundings—in half.”

Sherman’s work provided a model that could be copied by other police departments.

“And what was the principle 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.”

Aggressive tactics should be restricted to high-crime areas where residents were likely to appreciate the approach as providing them added safety.  In low-crime areas officers were to retreat to the default to truth assumption.  Aggressive policing in low crime areas would only lead to resentment of the tactics and of the police.

But what lesson did police departments learn?  That aggressive policing works, therefore aggressive policing was everyone’s duty—everywhere.  Traffic stops also became the method of choice for addressing illegal immigrants and drug trafficking.  Gladwell tells us that there are now 55,000 traffic stops per day in the United States.  He writes that traffic stops in North Carolina went from 400,000 a year to 800,000 over a span of seven years.

“How many extra guns and drugs did the North Carolina Highway Patrol find with those [extra] 400,000 searches?  Seventeen.  Is it really worth alienating and stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?”

Gladwell begins and ends with a discussion of the Sandra Bland incident.  He believes it must be viewed not as an unfortunate interaction between two individuals, but rather as an indication of something terribly wrong in our society.

“I said at the beginning of this book that I was not willing to put the death of Sandra Bland aside.  I have now watched the videotape of her encounter with Brian Encinia more times than I can count—and each time I do, I become angrier and angrier over the way the case was ‘resolved.’  It was turned into something much smaller than it really was: a bad police officer and an aggrieved young black woman.  That’s not what it was.  What went wrong that day on FM 1098 in Prairie View, Texas, was a collective failure.  Someone wrote a training manual that foolishly encouraged Brian Encinia to suspect everyone, and he took it to heart.  Somebody else higher up in the chain of command at the Texas Highway Patrol misread the evidence and thought it was a good idea to have him and his colleagues conduct Kansas City stops in a low-crime neighborhood.  Everyone in his world acted on the presumption that the motorists driving up and down the streets of their corner of Texas could be identified and categorized on the basis of the tone of their voice, fidgety movements, and fast-food wrappers.  And behind every one of those ideas are assumptions that too many of us share—and too few of us have ever bothered to reconsider.”

Gladwell leaves the Sandra Bland incident with that thought, but after reading everything that he presented, one suspects that there is even a bit farther to go with this incident.  When Bland seems to be arguing with Encinia about what she has to do and what she doesn’t have to do, Encinia escalates the situation by demanding that she get out of the car.  That seemed excessive and unnecessary, but it turns out that type of response was also part of his training.

“And what does Tactics for Criminal Patrol instruct the police officer to do under these conditions? ‘Too many cops today seem afraid to assert control, reluctant to tell anyone what to do.  People are allowed to move as they want, to stand where they want, and then officers try to adapt to what the suspect does.’  Encinia isn’t going to let that happen.”

Isn’t that a rather macho approach to dealing with Texas citizens, the kind of approach that a gun-totting master of his realm would take to heart?  It has often been pointed out that the world would be a better place if police departments put more social workers into uniforms and fewer people who enjoy being armed and ready for action.  Apparently, the social workers don’t show up but plenty of the others answer the hiring calls.

Sherman was inundated with calls from other police departments when news of his successful tactics went out.  He also wrote up a report describing his approach.  How could so many departments get it so wrong?  My suspicion is that they got it wrong because they wanted to get it wrong.  Why be concerned about the feelings of the citizenry when you can be a gun-totting master of your realm?  Perhaps there is yet another piece that Gladwell can produce on the subject.

Is there any evidence that we are populating our police forces with the wrong type of people?  Consider the scariest words Donald Trump has ever spoken.

“I can tell you I have the support of the police…”