Revisionist History - The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm helped popularize a controversial approach to policing called “Broken Windows Theory” that is often credited for keeping crime rates down. Now, 25 years later, he goes back and audits his chapter on crime. Did he get it right? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What did it mean to go out on a Saturday or Friday night in 1993 in New York? It was kind of like a given, you know? You wear a fanny pack and once you're out on the streets, you turn it around so it's in front of you so you can see it. Did you really do that? Absolutely. Well, I actually, I didn't interrupt. I remember I just had a flash of, remember keys?

We all had keys. And I used to walk around with keys so that each one, what would I have actually done if someone had attacked me? I would put my keys between my fingers so that if someone attacked me I was ready. Not long ago, I called up two friends who I used to hang out with when I first moved to New York City in my 20s, Peggy and Erica. Back in the 90s, we were all young and footloose and on edge. I seem to remember that at the end of every evening, there was a discussion about everyone

had to, we all had to talk about everyone's plan for getting home. Do you remember this? Yeah. And if you didn't, who did and didn't have money for a cab? Did we, did anyone, under what circumstances would you take the subway on a Friday night after dinner? If you were in a large group. Only if you're in a large group.

A large group, and it was like a little adventure. So six people would all get on the subway late at night and you felt like you were being adventurous. Yeah, thinking back on it, it felt very collegial. We did things as a group. Yeah, we had to. You were never left alone. The New York City of that era

was one of the most dangerous big cities in America. The subway was filthy. There was graffiti everywhere. There were 2,262 murders in New York in 1990, more than six a day. Were we personally at risk? I don't know, but it felt like crime was all around us. You know, someone would always say,

hey, don't worry, I'm walking you home. We were never allowed to walk alone. Yeah, even on a- That's right, people would walk me home just because you didn't want to be by yourself as a woman. The pro, when you went on a date, even if it was a disaster, you had to walk the woman home. Right.

Which is like so insanely awkward. You're like, oh, yeah. We were, you know, independent women, but once the sun went down, you never walked alone. Let's talk about how it gets better. I just remember that all of a sudden, all of the precautions seem to go out the window. Right. And it's true, statistically we know by 97 or 98, the murder rate has dropped. I remember this, I had a bedroom when I was living in that walk up on Bank Street.

My bedroom window overlooked the fire escape and I had previously been too scared to open my window at night and then I started to open my window at night so that technically someone could have walked up to Fire Escape and walked in, but I was like, it's fine now. I can sleep. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part of a series introducing my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, now available

everywhere. And in this episode, I'm looking back at the question that got me started on tipping points 25 years ago. How in the 90s did New York become one of the safest cities in America? In 1996, I wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine trying to explain this puzzle. It was called The Tipping Point. That article led to my first book called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation. The success of The Tipping Point led to another book, and another, and another. I wouldn't be here today talking to you were it not for my obsession way back when about what happened

to crime in New York in the 1990s. And now I've written a sequel to that first book. Did I mention that it's out in bookstores everywhere? It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point. And in that spirit, I've decided to go back and conduct an audit of my conclusions from 25 years ago. To look at my 30-something self in the eye and ask, was I right?

Back in the 90s, I used to go to New York University's library all the time to look for ideas. Bobest. A big squat redstone building on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. This was before Google, so I was my own search engine. I'd wander the stacks for hours. And one day I was on the fifth floor in the HM1.A6 aisle and I started leafing through the bank issues of the American Journal of Sociology from 1991. And I found a paper written by a professor named Jonathan Crane, entitled, The Epidemic Theory of Ghettoes and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and Teenage Childbearing,

a choice of words no one would use today. This is how it started. The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. Epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenaged childbearing. The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt. The word epidemic to Crane wasn't a metaphor. It was a literal description. His point was that if you look closely at how those problems spread, how and why they

go up and down, it looks exactly like the way viruses spread. Same rules, same patterns. And when I read that first paragraph, I thought, oh my God, this is exactly what happened in New York City. We had a real live epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? A tipping point. The moment when everything changes all at once. That moment when I left my window open because I suddenly felt safe, was our tipping point.

And so, front and center in my first book was a description of what I saw as the reason why New York's epidemic suddenly tipped, the police department's commitment to broken windows policing. Broken windows was a theory that small crimes were invitations for large crimes, that if you let people get away with little things, then you were signaling that it was okay to cross the line into bigger things, like serious acts of violence. And so what do you do? You don't let people get away with the little things.

It was taking the concept of an epidemic and applying it to crime. Lawlessness wasn't random. It was something you could catch from those around you, the same way you can catch a cold from a warm stuffy room full of four-year-olds. If somebody urinates in public, the person is telling you, I got a big problem. This is what broken windows theory is all about. The biggest champion of this idea was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City at the time. Here he is at a press conference in the mid-90s, a few years into the Broken Windows

experiment, where in a span of just a minute and a half, he references public urination eight times. I mean, if some guy is urinating in public, we've got a problem. Now you can do one of two things. You can ignore the problem and say, gee, I'm such a big fuzzy-headed liberal that I'm going to walk away from it, and you're going to make believe there's no problem. That's New York City in the 1980s. That's New York City with 2,000 murders. That's New York City with 500,000 crimes. You have to pay attention to people urinating on the street and you have to get people to stop urinating on the street

that that that's moving toward civilization that's moving toward decency that's what i thought what i mean by a decent society that people want to invest in people want their children to live in you've got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street it may be a minor thing it may be a serious thing but you've got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street. It may be a minor thing, it may be a serious thing, but you cannot ignore it. You have to deal with it.

It is against the law to urinate in public. Giuliani was elected in 1993 and re-elected in 1997 by a huge margin. Under his watch, the city was revitalized. People who had fled for the suburbs came back. Huge parts of Brooklyn were gentrified. Central Park was cleaned up. I cannot tell you how gratifying it was to be a New Yorker in those years

and finally get a mayor who said, enough. You can't jump subway turnstiles and smoke dope on the corner and harassed pedestrians. But Giuliani wasn't just making an argument for civility, that it was more pleasant to live in a city where the streets were clean and the police were alert to every sign of disorder. He was making a more extravagant claim, that arresting the guy urinating on the street was the reason why the murder rate dropped. And I believed him. Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish a book. Whenever it happens, huge things occur.

About 10 years ago, the journalist John Ronson did a retrospective on the tipping point for a British program called The Culture Show. And he talked to a public defender in the Bronx named Kate Rubin. I would go around and I would talk to people in New York City. And they, liberal people, progressive people, would say, oh, well, you know, we've had this miracle in New York. And some people would say, oh, yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's idea of broken windows. I didn't watch any of this at the time, even though Ronson interviewed me for the segment, too. But I found it while working on this episode, and it made me realize that claims I made in The

Tipping Point had far more reach than I ever imagined. Some people knew that it wasn't his idea, but that he had popularized it. They'd read about it in The New Yorker and his book The Tipping Point. I would never try to speak to what his intent was. But I think the impact that he had was to serve as basically a marketing force for this idea. He truly popularized it. So, once again, was I right? Am I right? It's been said that nice skies finish last.

But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous, self-devouring egos. And we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire.

The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the afternoon of February 27th, 2008, a young man named David Floyd left his apartment on Beach Avenue in the Bronx. As he walked down the pathway next to his building, he ran into the tenant who lived downstairs who said he'd locked himself out of his apartment. I was leaving my apartment to actually go to school. I had my book bag on, you know, everything that normal students do as they're going to school.

This is Floyd speaking in an interview with the civil rights group Race Forward. The landlord was Floyd's godmother, so Floyd went back inside to her apartment to get a ring of keys. And as he and the tenant tried to figure out which key worked in the door, three plainclothes police officers suddenly emerged. There had been reports of burglaries in the neighborhood, and here were two young men trying to get into a locked apartment. We were stopped. We were frisked. We were of course told to put our hands up to stay where we were. This was how the police put broken windows into practice.

Don't let the little things pass you by. Be aggressive. Check for weapons, drugs. Maybe you find them, maybe you don't. But if you do that enough times, then young men leave their guns and drugs at home. Floyd had actually been stopped the previous April while walking down the street, followed by three officers in a van who jumped out and confronted him. And again, it was just the whole experience. It's humiliating. It's embarrassing. And really, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are, how tough you are, whatever. It's a scary thing because you don't know what is going to happen with your life.

You don't know what's going to happen with your freedom. Floyd becomes the face of a massive class action lawsuit, Floyd v. the city of New York, challenging the NYPD's policy of stop and frisk. And in 2013, Floyd wins. In a shocking ruling, a federal judge said the NYPD's use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional, effectively ending the broken windows era in New York City policing. Yes, it still happens today, but not in the way that it did 10 years ago, not even remotely

close. It's no exaggeration to say that this was one of the most consequential court cases in the city's history. A lot of people at the time, and I think not without reason, said, well, this is going to compromise public safety. This is Aaron Chalfin, who's part of a group of criminologists who have devoted themselves to understanding what exactly happened in New York. The police are no longer going to be able to make a lot of stops and really show people

that they were being proactive. So that might embolden more gun carrying, more violence, more homicide. When Chalfin says that at the time a lot of people thought ending stop and frisk was going to lead to crime going back up. He means everyone. City government, the police force, pundits of every variety. That's what I thought too. What everyone was saying in effect was this. Yes, doing hundreds of thousands of police stops a year of young men like David Floyd,

who may be doing nothing more than helping out a friend, is unfortunate. But being killed is a lot worse. And since this is what's keeping the crime rate down, we don't have a choice. That was the calculus. Even the judge in the Floyd case begins her ruling by making the same point. I emphasize at the outset,

as I have throughout the litigation, that this case is not about the effectiveness of stop and frisk in deterring or combating crime. This court's mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool." She goes on, Many police practices may be useful for fighting crime, preventive detention, or coerced confessions, for example, but because they are unconstitutional, they cannot be used, no matter how effective.

She's basically saying, there's a good chance that crime is going to go back up because of my ruling, but the Constitution is the Constitution. Even the people who hated broken windows thought that it worked. But then the very thing that absolutely no one expected to happen happens. Crime falls. We ended the stop-question frisk in New York. That went down by 90 or 95 percent depending on which numbers you look at. And yet we had this incredible, incredible 50 percent

decline in homicide. In social science, a natural experiment is when the real world provides you with a clean way of measuring the truth or falsity of a given proposition. The Floyd decision was the perfect natural experiment for broken windows. All you have to do is compare before with after. The amazing thing about New York is that if you look at 2010, New York City had a banner year in terms of homicide. It was one of the lowest homicide rates in 40 years in the city's history in 2010. And you would have said, well, like great progress, let's just keep it up. Let's keep up the good work. Incredibly, by 2019, the year before the pandemic, right, homicides went down by 50% in New York compared to 2010.

Between 2010 and 2019, New York is unique in that it had another great homicide decline at a time when homicides were really flat nationally. This is, hands down, one of the strangest and craziest urban transformations ever. Just to give you a sense, if New York City's crime rate in 1990 had just stayed the same, didn't change for the next 35 years, the city would have had an additional 62,000 homicides, most of them in all likelihood young men of color. 62,000 young men currently walking around New York would be dead. And by 2019, New York is almost as safe as Paris with respect to homicide rate. It's, New York is closer to Paris than it is to other US cities, even like Boston, which

is another safe city, right? It's incredible. You know how those billionaires left New York City from Miami during the pandemic, saying they couldn't deal with the taxes and the crime? Well, the violent crime rate in New York City after that second wave is half that of Miami. If you're really worried about crime, you should be selling your waterfront home in Coral Gables before someone murders you and move somewhere much safer, like the Bronx. Or here's another.

JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, tweets this in 2021. Serious question. I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I've heard it's disgusting and violent there, but is it like Walking Dead season 1 or season 4? I know, I know. There's a whole cottage industry of unearthing crazy things JD Vance once said. But Vance is from just outside Cincinnati. The violent crime rate in Cincinnati at the exact moment he wrote that tweet was twice

the violent crime rate in New York City. Serious question, Senator. I have to go to your hometown soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay because compared to where I come from, it's disgusting and violent there. But I digress. Back to Chalfin and the question at hand. And so, you know, it does give you the sense that making lots and lots of these stops was not the key ingredient.

It does, doesn't it? We conducted a natural experiment and the results are in. It wasn't broken windows. It wasn't stop and frisk. My administration will issue hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to reward cities and towns and return to proven crime-fighting methods, including stop and frisk and broken windows policing. We did that with Rudy Giuliani.

It was so successful. At three o'clock in the morning sometimes, I lie awake and I think, oh God, did he read the tipping point too? It's been said that nice skies finish last. But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine

stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos, and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire. The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I don't reread any of my books once I've written them, particularly ones from 25 years ago, like The Tipping Point. I mean, why would I? Do I want to wear the clothes I wore in the year 2000? No, I don't. Do I even want to see pictures of myself from 2000? Not particularly. So I didn't reread The Tipping Point until I made the decision last year to revisit my first book on its silver anniversary. last year to revisit my first book on its silver anniversary. They were parts that I love. It felt like rediscovering some lost friend. Hush Puppies, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, Paul Revere's Ride.

They're also parts that mystified me. Did I really write an entire chapter on the children's TV show Blue's Clues? But the crime chapter was the only place where I said, I would write that so differently today. Today, if I were rewriting, I'd begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named Andrew Papacristos. People talk about gun violence as an epidemic or disease, and it is in many fronts, but really I wanted to take it seriously.

I was like, oh yeah, if it's an epidemic, is it a blood-borne pathogen or is it an airborne pathogen? And actually, thank God, it's not an airborne pathogen, right? You don't catch a bullet like you catch a cold. It's actually transmitted through behaviors. And I just tried to figure out ways that science might kind of boost or amplify those insights. Papa Christos took every single arrest over more than six years in Chicago. So hundreds of thousands of arrests. And he made something called a network map.

All right, first you see it happens in groups and then like, okay, what about individuals? All right, well, does it concentrate? What about exposure? What about time? So if Andy and Malcolm are arrested together for shooting someone, then Andy and Malcolm are two dots on the map, connected by a line. And if Malcolm then is arrested with Joe,

there's a line connecting Malcolm to Joe. Malcolm and Joe are one degree or, to use Papa Christos' favorite term, one handshake apart. Joe and Andy, two handshakes apart. You do that for years and years of Chicago arrest data, and you get a truly enormous map. You have this very, very large network, right? And then what you do is you sprinkle in the victimizations, which come from a separate source of data, right?

They come from homicide records, they come from shooting files, police, public health. He took the names of everyone who had been shot over the same period and looked to see how many of those names were in his network map. And what he found was the victims were already there and they were clustered together. You just match the data and every place where there's a shooting, the victim's bright red, for example. And then what you see is that these bright red dots all linger together, all clump together, right? Like your kid took a handful of Christmas ornaments and like threw it at the tree and

they're all in one spot. It looks just like the social maps epidemiologists used to construct for the spread of HIV in the 1980s. If someone in your social circle got infected with HIV, then your chances of becoming infected with HIV increased. In Papa Cristo's maps, the risk of contagion extended three degrees. If Malcolm gets shot, Andy is at risk, and so is Joe. And so are any people Andy and Joe were arrested with. Like other social networks, the impact of these shootings tends to go about two or three handshakes,

and then it starts to kind of drop off. So these clusters are fairly dense, and they stick around. So hold on, this is crucial. So I've got my social network map and I'm overlaying, I'm sticking in all of the shootings into that. And I've noticed that the shootings are clustering. So we have this triangle of Joe, Andy, Malcolm, and Malcolm gets shot.

And so once we observe that Malcolm gets shot, what you're saying is that the likelihood of someone connected to me also getting shot increases. Skyrockets, absolutely. Are you saying that the connection, the risk is skyrocketing within between one and three degrees? That's where risk is the highest. Yeah. Once you get past kind of three degrees, it really goes down and levels off. When you observed this, did this surprise you? How concentrated it was surprised me? When you look at these numbers, even when you look at the larger co-offending network,

you're talking about five to six percent of a neighborhood's population. But when you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's less than a percent. You're talking about, on the west side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we were working, there's about 50,000 people, you're talking about 400 individuals. 400 individuals on the entire west side of Chicago. The crime problem on the west side of Chicago isn't being driven by everyone. It's being driven by a tiny subset of people within a dense social network where someone close to them has already been a victim of gun violence. The west side of Chicago is not a dangerous place. Highly specific networks of people within the west side of Chicago

are dangerous places. The same pattern holds true in New York City. Why wasn't stop and frisk an effective strategy in the end? Because it assumed that violent crime was something embedded within an entire community. And it's not. Even the NYPD's own numbers said so. In one eight-year span, New York City police officers frisked 2.3 million people and found weapons in 1.5% of those stops. They were looking for needles in haystacks. Why would that be an effective crime-fighting strategy? Aaron Chalfin, the criminologist, says that one of the main reasons crime fell so dramatically in New York after Stop and Frisk ended was that the NYPD took

those lessons to heart. They switched from the kind of indiscriminate policing found in Stop and Frisk to precision policing. They started focusing on hotspots, deploying police to the specific places where crime was the worst. More targeted investigations, more thinking about who are the shooters, who are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving the shootings? What can we do to identify those people and incapacitate those people? So when we think about good policing and we think in particular about homicide, it's a very small number of people who drive the problem. It's a couple thousand people in a city of eight and a half million. And, you know, making lots of low level arrests,

maybe you'll find some more guns and things like that, but it's probably a much better use of resources to focus, focus, focus, focus on the drivers of violence. And when you do that, in my paper, we find that when there's a major gang takedown around a public housing development in the next 18 months, homicides are down by about 30%. 30%. Fighting an epidemic means focusing on the few, not the many.

And by the way, who made this argument as loudly as anyone? I did. In the tipping point. I called it the law of the few, and it took up a third of the book. When it comes to epidemics, I wrote, A tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work. I talked about how this principle plays out in outbreaks of infectious disease, in the spread of fashion trends, in word of mouth. I described in great detail the kinds of people who make those special few on and on. But then, when it came to crime, I suddenly forgot all about the laws of few and endorsed

an idea that said a really good way to control an epidemic was to stop and frisk a hundred young men in the hopes of finding a gun on one of them. I was wrong. I'm sorry. So, I don't know, feel free to ask us any questions. There's one more thing I would do if I were rewriting the crime chapter. I would talk about Philadelphia, and about a day I spent recently driving around the city with a guy named Keith Green. So where are we headed? So we're going to be driving in the West Philadelphia area.

Green works for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, a group that was founded in 1827 and is best known for putting on the world's largest indoor flower show. And for two hours, we talked about vacant plots. 30,000 vacant plots? There's over 30,000 vacant plotsels? Yeah, because over 30,000 vacant parcels in the city of Olof. There were blocks we drove past that had two or even three vacant lots.

Every block seemed to have at least one. In the past, they were overgrown with weeds, covered in trash, home to rats and raccoons and possums. And what Greens Group has done is to systematically work its way through the city, cleaning up the lots, planting grass, putting up low fences. And we started seeing a dramatic change. Lots were being maintained. People started using the lots and... When you say people started using them, how were they used? Well, people with kids were playing football.

People were having barbecues on the sites. Horses grazing on vacant lots. Horses? Horses. In the history of the program, they've cleaned up 17,000 lots. Charles Branis, the pioneer of the work, led a study to see if cleaning up vacant lots lowered the homicide rate. When you fixed up a neighborhood, what happened to gun violence?

It went down 29%. Now what's the best way to describe this kind of anti-crime intervention? It's broken windows. Only not broken windows as a grand metaphor, as a hysterical leap that sees a man urinating on a sidewalk and says we have no choice but to lock him up? No. Broken windows as a literal call to action. You see the lot full of weeds and trash and you pick up the garbage and mow the grass and put a and sound front. Religious History is produced by Nina Byrd Lawrence with Ben Dadaf Haferi and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shakerjee, fact checking by Sam Russek. Original scoring by Luis Guerra,

mastering by Echo Mountain, engineering by Sarah Bruguera and Nina Byrd Lawrence. Production support from Lou Clamond. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Sarah Nix, and as always, El Jefe, Greta Come. I'm outroom Glappo.