Revisionist History - Wolfgang's Law - Part One

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Over the last few years homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted. A city once labeled America’s murder capital is seeing a reprieve that seems nothing short of miraculous. What happened? This week, Malcolm takes a look at what Baltimore is doing to save lives.  To learn more about the organization Termite founded, visit: https://switchinglanesadultandyouth.org/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S. has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American Way of Killing at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

Pushkin. Baltimore, Maryland. Charmed City, as it used to be called. I always tell people that it was heaven and hell at the same time. In November of 2020, a man named Brandon Scott was elected mayor, 36 years old, one of the youngest mayors in Baltimore history. I was born in 1984. So my former years are the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s,

which in Baltimore and in urban America and black urban America time is literally the worst time to be born, right? It doesn't get born a little bit later, less, born a little bit earlier, it's a lot different. Scott grew up in the Park Heights neighborhood, North Baltimore, out near Pimlico Racetrack. in my neighborhood, it was very violent, right? There was a lot of people dying, a lot of people being shot, a lot of drug dealing, a lot of overdose, vacant housing. They were closing down our libraries and rec centers, all the things that we thought would help people get away from that life.

And, you know, we would just be outside and, you know, be sat down in handcuffs for no reason other than you were like black. and outside. So that, that happened to me seven times. Seven. Seven different time, roughly from the age of 13 to 21, 22, right before I came to City Hall. How many people that you knew from growing up have you lost? Oh, man. Oh, shit, that's, that's probably the hardest question I ever. I would have to sit down and try to think and write, but more than 10. In any given year over the past half century, Baltimore was up there with St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans for the dubious title of America's murder capital. Baltimore was the American city where the heroin epidemic never really went away.

At one point, it had five police commissioners in seven years because nobody could handle the job. Someone who worked with the mayor's office told me he used to work with USAID in the northern triangle of Guatemala. Honduras and El Salvador, the most homicidal countries in the world. He didn't think that there was anything in the U.S. like that, until he came to Baltimore. Baltimore was where the wire was set. The single most famous cultural product of Baltimore is a television show about how dangerous and nasty Baltimore is. Not to mention the city's unofficial theme song, Randy Newman's Baltimore, which has as its chorus.

Oh, Baltimore, it's a song. It's hard just to live. In some years, that was an understatement. Mayor Scott took office at the end of 2020. There were 335 homicides in Baltimore that year, just shy of the all-time record. Scott made a pledge. He would reduce the murder rate.

All of my staff did not want me to give a number. And I said, well, we have to give a number because if we don't give a number, then no one knows what the fuck we're working towards, right? He set the target at 15% every year. You were out there with that prediction. Yeah, no, people laughed, right? Like, people laugh.

We, you know, we have Sinclair MAGA station and newspaper here. Maga 45 is what we like to call them. They were asking every single day, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, is the city going to reach your goal? When is you going to see this 15% reduction? My name is Malcolm Globwell. You're listening to Revisionous History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part of a handful of episodes I'm doing tied to the release of my latest book, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic, which is about why gun violence in the United States is so much worse than every other country in the West.

I use the word invention in the subtitle because American violence is not an inherent condition. The U.S. didn't have to be this way. The argument of the book is that America's problems are self-created, the result of a series of social choices, historical legacies, weird legal concepts, and a fundamental misunderstanding of just what homicide is. In this and the following episode next week, I want to describe how Americans can find a path out of this mess. And our case study is Baltimore.

I first went to Baltimore as a kid in the 1970s, drove down from Canada with my friend Terry to see an Orioles game in the old Memorial Stadium. It was gritty, it hit character, it was interesting. But the ensuing decades were not kind to the city. I sent my colleague Lucy Sullivan to Baltimore to drive around, the city's western district, the toughest part of Baltimore, with a local police officer, to get a feel for what happened. This area I'm driving you right now, it's called Penn North.

It's called Penn North. Yes. So the actual street, this is Pennsylvania Avenue, the street is north. She rode with Lieutenant Brian Ford, a 13-year veteran of the Baltimore PD. Usually you drive through here and it would be thousands of thousands of people right now. Thousands of people? Yes. There's like nobody out.

This was like the Mecca. Like, every corner we would go to, we would have individuals on every single corner involving an illegal drug trade or some type of thing like that. But now we can actually focus on individuals that we need to focus on. Back of the day, we would ride through,

and there would be a thousand people and mostly a lot of things on it. He turned back towards the Western District Station House, the district, for short. Okay, so the district is right here. Back in the day, this corner was historical, very violent, and it was scary that the police station would be right there, and that's how bad the crime was for a minute.

It was scary, like, for you, like, you were like, this was a scary corner. So coming to work, you know, yeah, to make sure that you got in the district before something happened. In the Western District, the police were nervous walking across the street to their own police station. This is the Baltimore that Mayor Brandon Scott inherited, and the city he pledged to turn around.

After his first year in office, the murder count was 337, an increase from the previous year. People looked at Scott and rolled their eyes. Following year, no change. The skepticism grew. This was Baltimore. It wasn't Charmed City anymore.

It had new nicknames, Bodhymour, Baltimore. Then, in 2023, a decrease of almost 21%. The next year, a decrease of 23%. In those two years, Baltimore did not turn into Paris. There was no massive gun control law passed in the state of Maryland. The National Guard did not camp out on the streets of the city. Then, in 2025, 133 homicides, a decrease of 31%.

And this year, there's a chance the city will dip on or 100 for the first time since the 1960s. What on earth happened in the city of Baltimore? Music you love, radio stations, everywhere you go, the podcasts everyone's talking about, all in one place, and it's free. I heart radio, whatever you want to hear. Listen anytime, anywhere. Music, radio, podcasts, unlimited audio, it's on the free I-Hurt Radio app.

Let's go! One app, no subscription. Welcome Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, Investigates America's Gun Violence Crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S. has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix. what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American Way of Killing at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks

or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Baltimore's homicide prevention effort is centered in the city's western district. The area Lucy was riding around with Lieutenant Ford, more than a third of the people below the poverty line, a third of the houses empty. It's where much of the wire was set. Roughly 40,000 people. If you know Baltimore, it's just below Druid Hill Park.

And in the heart of the Western District, there's a two-story red brick building. Looks like an old office building, Doxa Ministries, the church without walls. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Hey. It's good to see everyone. Today, this group Brown's production started to coordination meeting. It's a Thursday morning. 25 or so people have gathered around a big square table,

a mix of police officers, pastors, behavioral counselors, and outreach workers, plus the city council president. The meeting is run by a man named Reginald Williams. This agenda for today is the weekly stats, violence review cases, custom notification planning, and the service follow-up updates. The recommendation stats to date, Williams is running through a slide deck up on a screen.

Each slide is devoted to a different person. He calls on a police officer to talk about a homicide from a few days earlier. We're going to pass it to Detective Sykes, and she's going to give us the incident. So the units responded to a call of a shooting. Medics were already on scene. Unfortunately, the victim was pronounced from a gunshot. wound. The management meeting, as it's called, is the hub of Baltimore's crime-fighting strategy.

It happens every week, lasts about an hour. It grew out of a collaboration between a city and the crime and justice policy lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Scott invited the crime lab to Baltimore when he took office. In mid-2020, they conducted what they call a problem analysis, A detailed statistical picture of who was being shot and why in the Western District. What they found was that the people doing the shooting fit a clear pattern. They were overwhelmingly between 16 and 34 years old, male and black. 81% of them had been involved with the criminal justice system at some point in their lives. The average was 12 previous arrests.

And most of the violence was group-related. meaning that the people involved in the shootings overwhelmingly belonged to a very tight-knit social circle. Shooter and victim usually knew each other, often too well. By their estimate, the Western District had 18 criminally active groups. Just one of those groups operating out of the Poe-Homes housing development had been involved in 13 shootings over the previous year and a half. How many people in total were they talking about in those 18 groups?

roughly 700. I want to pause on that number for a moment because it's impossible to make sense of the management meeting without understanding its significance. There are 40,000 people in the Western District. The conventional way of thinking is that you design a policing strategy to cover all 40,000.

You spread your resources over the whole population. But the crime labs analysis concluded something very different. If what you are concerned about is gun violence, the problem is actually just 700 people, 18 relatively tight-knit social groups of whom one, the group in the Poe Homes, is a very serious problem right now. So, Detective Sykes reports on a murder from earlier that week, young man dead from a gunshot wound. Williams, the person running the meeting, polls the room. Did anyone know the victim? That question is not a shot in the dark,

because if the universe of people who you have to know in the Western District is just 700, then chances are that a group of 25 well-connected people really can know almost everybody. 700 is how large a typical middle school is. Could 25 teachers from a middle school know at least something about all their students? Probably. 700 is a manageable number.

Someone speaks up, says he taught him at the Youth Opportunity Center, a good kid. Someone else, someone named Termite, a woman in her 50s in a hijab and sunglasses, said she went to the scene to find out more about why it happened. We went there yesterday. They were very tight-lipped. We hung around for hours because I know everybody, so I know them. I know the kids. I know them, but nobody's talking. One of the arguments of my new book, The American Way of Killing, is that the conversation about gun violence in the United States is crippled by a series of misconceptions.

For example, people think America is over-policed. Too many cops. Is that true? Well, take Los Angeles and Berlin. They're the same size. Los Angeles has roughly 8,500 police officers. How many does Berlin have? 18,000. And that's typical. Western European cities have far larger police departments than American cities do. There are a long list of surprising facts like this, and what the crime lab found in Baltimore is one of the most important of them, because this kind of concentration of violence isn't unusual. It's actually the norm. The first person to stumble upon this fact was Marvin Wolfgang, one of the most important criminologists of the 20th century.

He was an old school shoe leather sociologist. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and embedded himself with the Philadelphia Police Department. He would come to police headquarters after his day of teaching ended, sometimes working until 2 a.m. I wanted to get a more observable impression of the homicide squad and the work that they did.

Wolfgang was interviewed for the American Society of Criminology's Oral History Project shortly before he died in 1998. So for three years, I wrote around with them, commonly on Friday and Saturday evenings, the period of the highest homicide rates. And in the late 1960s, he did a study that no one had ever done before. He gathered the names of every single boy born in the city of Philadelphia, in 1945, who had continued to live in a city until the age of 18, a total of 9,945 people. And then painstakingly went back through years of police records.

Remember, this is in the days before anything was digitized, to see what percentage of those 9,945 ended up getting in trouble with the law? His answer? 6%. a tiny fraction. Let's call this Wolfgang's Law. At 6% out of the total birth cohort of 10,000 boys who were responsible for so many crimes.

I mean, all but one of the homicides, three-quarters of the rapes and robberies and so forth. They were 627 boys out of 10,000 had committed over 50% of all the fences. In Baltimore's Western District, it's 700 out of 40,000. In Philadelphia's 1945 cohort, it's 627 boys out of 10,000.

Let's do another example, Chicago. The criminologist Andrew Papacristos did a version of Wolfgang's analysis for Chicago's West Side. Now, why? First of all, when you observed this, did this surprise you? How concentrated it was surprised me? You know, when you look at these numbers,

Even when you look at the larger co-offending network, you're talking about 5 to 6% 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, you know, in the west side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we were working is about 50,000 people. You're talking about 400 individuals. 400 out of 50,000. Let's look at New Orleans, another one of the most dangerous American cities. One recent analysis found that one-half of one percent of the city's population was present at half the city's shootings.

Is this a purely American phenomenon? No, it's everywhere. David Kennedy, the criminologist who I think has been more important than anyone in furthering the insights of Wolfgang, says that he was recently in Sweden, working with local law enforcement in an area of Stockholm that has seen a surge in violent crime. The Swedes were despairing. The police folks took us to ground zero for the crime issues that had made this a vulnerable there. And two older businessmen talked to us and said, it's really bad. We're not sure we're going to be able to keep our businesses open. People don't want to come here. People are afraid. It's a litany of horrors. And then they said, it's 30.

kids. 30, out of a community of 50,000 people. But Kennedy was skeptical. Based on his work in other cities, he thought even that number was too high. He asked them, are you sure? You know, we don't, but what we're used to seeing in situations like this is it's not even 30, 30 people. It's usually a much smaller number of drivers, and then they have their network around. them is, does that sound right? The four of them went off and talked to each other, and they came

back and they said, yeah, it's five guys we know and one guy in Turkey. The very same week the management meeting took place, the biotech company, Moderna, announced the successful results of a new anti-cancer vaccine. It was for patients with advanced melanoma. The news electrified the medical community, not just because melanoma is one of the hardest of all cancers to treat, but because the vaccine was personal. Patients have their tumor analyzed, and an individualized vaccine is created to perfectly counter the genetic makeup of their disease.

This is the next great revolution in medicine, the transition from creating population-wide treatments, drugs that have to be brought enough to help everyone with a disease, to precision treatments, tailored to treat one patient at a time. What Wolfgang's law tells us is that the same revolution can happen in fighting violence.

If the problem in the Western District is centered on 700 people, then you don't have to do population-level crime-fighting where you battle some amorphous menace. You can do individualized crime prevention. Put every case up on the screen at the management meeting and try and make sense of it.

All right. All right, so moving on. Williams put a photo of another young man up on the screen. He was connected to a different shooting. We are concerned because his associate is a recent homicide victim, and he has a background including invalions. The young man had a criminal history. Now his friend had been killed.

The worry was that he might retaliate. This is the second crucial part of the Baltimore strategy. Criminologists make a distinction between two. kinds of violence. Instrumental violence is violence employed in the service of some rational, carefully thought-out end. I shoot you because I'm defending my drug turf, or I'm robbing a bank. Instrumental violence is what we see on crime shows on TV or read about in thrillers. I think most of us think that this is what homicide is, but it isn't. In reality, most homicide is expressive, which is violence that arises out of strong emotions,

people settling personal feuds with violence, cycles of revenge and retaliation, conflict between people who know each other well. I have a whole chapter on this in the American Way of Killing, because it fundamentally changes the way we ought to address criminal violence. What the police were worried about in this instance was exactly this, a classic case of expressive violence. The friend of the victim was deeply upset and might retaliate.

And what they were doing in the management meeting was trying to understand where that kind of strong emotion might lead. They were trying to use their understanding of the social context of the crime to make a prediction. Who was friends with the shooter? Who was enemies with the shooter? Who was friends with the victim? Who was grieving?

Who might try and turn that grief into violence? Here's Jeremy Biddle, who works for the Penn Crime Lab, and has been a key part of the Baltimore Project. For example, someone's house is shot, and this is something that happens far too often. Somebody is being hunted. It's playing out on social media. Their house gets shut up where their family lives.

The life-saving intervention work is that trusted, you know, mentor, whomever, that can show up at that doorstep at 9 o'clock at night. and offer the family kind of a safe alternative. And then the coordinate into action of the... Just so I understand it in that instance, you see, we observe, we know about an existing sort of toxic group dynamic. We know that the cascade has been set in motion. We see it playing out on social media.

So we go to the, we make an assumption about who the next victim is. We go to their home and say, we'll get you out of there. Oftentimes it's not even as much of an assumption because the target is named. People are explicitly saying who they are hunting for on social media. So there is sometimes best educated guesswork, but oftentimes it's pretty clear. You just have to pay attention. And I think that's really the crux of it. Cities oftentimes don't pay this kind of close, pragmatic, operational attention to violence

to be able to tell from recent violence what kind of future. your violence might percolate. So, the focus of the meeting is on the young man. He's at risk of doing something reckless. Does anyone know his father, Williams asks? Someone does. Brother Angola. I guarantee you I can reach out to his father and reach him through his father.

Could you do that? Yes. All right. What, can you do that today? Yeah, I can step out and do it. Are you going to try to, you're going to reach the father? You're going to try to something up for tomorrow? Or do you tomorrow will time?

We're going to go in the morning. But if this son is here, then we probably can talk to him via FaceTime. What are you going to ask when you call? Like, what are you going to ask? Well, I'm going to know. He already know my position as being a moral voice, and I have a little rapport with him, so I can reach out and let him know that I'm trying to reach his son. And my reason for reaching the sun is to express all this.

Okay. All right. Let us know. Thank you. Let's pause again. note the nature of this intervention. What we're used to in discussions about violent crime prevention is police officers sitting around a table

talking about how many people they were arresting, police exercising the power that only they possess to take away freedom. But in the entire hour-long management meeting, the word arrest was never used. Most people at the management meeting, like Brother Angola and Termite, the woman who went to the scene of the crime,

Weren't police officers. They didn't carry guns. They were community fixtures, connectors. Termite ran a program for seniors, connecting them with young people. She mediated disputes in her public housing complex. She was deeply religious and thought her mission was to help people. Termite is, she's known in Westport. She knows everyone in Westport and Brooklyn and just southern Baltimore.

Pretty much all of Baltimore. That's termite. So we rely on tournament a lot. She spent years working at a recreational center in Baltimore. She was a practitioner of soft power. Every weekend, me and my husband would go find the kids. We knew the kids that weren't going to eat. Well, Monday through Friday, I would cook and take food down there for all the kids to eat

so that it don't look like you're calling anybody pacifically out. So I would cook different dinners every night out of my own pocket. Friday's on Saturdays and Sunday, we would find the kids that we knew for a fair. We would make sure they eat as well. After the management meeting, Lucy went to Termite's home to speak with her, and Termite told her the following story. She was out to dinner with her husband on her day off when she got a call from her old boss, a man named Warren.

My husband looking at me like, I'm crazy, and I'm just like, okay, well, I'm like, do what he'll get one to bring me back up. You got an incident. It's a bed. bed. A woman and a man were fighting. The man bust a woman in the head while her nephew was running around looking for him with a God. Here we have the outlines of the quintessential lead-up to a homicide, a grievance between two people who know each other that has spiraled out of control. So I was like, well, first things first one, let's go to the hospital and check the status.

Because I do the hospital things so much, they all, they know who I am. So I was able to get in the back and talk to the aunt. And she was able to be. like, tell him we're cool. We're going to be right back together, this, and the third. I'm good, I'm good, I hear him first. Da-da-da-da-da. So make a long story short, we found the kid. And so they were all trying to talk to him. He would not talk to none of them. So I said, I gave him space. And then I said, when I felt like he was a little vulnerable, I said, he was like, because I don't know who they play. I said, let me talk to you for a man. He said, yes, ma'am. And so I knew right there, I had him. So I said, listen, I just came from the hospital. Your aunt is okay.

She said, tell you that she's going back with him. She was like they both was drinking and they got out of hand. She's okay. I said, let me, he was like, but that's my, I said, but she's okay. I said, can you do me a favor and not do anything harsh to get yourself in trouble? She's not threatening him or arresting him. She's just talking to him. And why does he respond to her?

Listen. I said, I'm not thinking about the man. I'm thinking about you. I said, could you just let this go? Your aunt is okay. And he said to, he looked me in my eyes and he said to me, I'm going to let this go because I owe you. And I look, I say, you don't owe me anything.

He said, I do. He said, I remember my mother not having. I remember not having a lot. when I was young. He said, but I remember one day, it was school time, and you brought me my first pair of Jordans and all my school uniforms and a coat. And he was like, I never forgot that. Now, if you asked me, do I remember? I don't, because this stuff is natural to me. But I saved the life that night. The young man listens to termite because she has moral standing in his eyes. years ago she gave him a pair of sneakers, which she doesn't even remember doing.

I said, let me talk to you a minute. He said, yes, ma'am. And so I knew right there that I had him. This is how you go from 350 homicides a year to maybe, if Baltimore's lucky, under a hundred. A conversation like that with a person like that. Baltimore is showing the world how it's done. But is the world interested? That's the next week. Almost a 90% reduction in homicide in Minneapolis over the first summer that it went into effect.

And left it in the hands of the locals. Point proved, my God, Eureka. And by the end of the year, they had let it all fall apart. Same pattern, same intervention, same kind of success. Same kind of collapse a couple of years later. Revisionist history is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence and Ben Nadaff Halfrey. Our editor is Karen Chkirgy. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Sam Russick. Original music by Luis Gera, mixing and mastering by Jake Gorski.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S. has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American Way of Killing at Pushkin.fm. or at audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

world.