The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows| Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

Summary

Highlights

• The feeling of insecurity in New York City during the early 1990s was palpable; residents took various precautions to feel safe. 🚶‍♂️
• Malcolm Gladwell revisits the broken windows theory and its role in New York City's transformation in the 1990s. 🔍
• Despite the popularity of stop-and-frisk, research shows it wasn't the major factor in driving down crime rates. 📉
• Social network analysis reveals that crime is highly concentrated within small networks, changing the approach to policing. 🔗
• Community-led efforts to improve neighborhoods, like the cleaning up of vacant lots in Philadelphia, show promising results in reducing crime. 🏗️

Key Takeaways

• The broken windows theory wasn't the sole reason for New York City's crime drop in the 1990s. 🪟
• Stop-and-frisk practices, based on the broken windows theory, were deemed unconstitutional and not as effective as once believed. 🚫
• Targeted policing on specific individuals or groups is more effective in reducing crime than broad sweeps. 🎯
• Community improvements, like maintaining vacant lots, can significantly reduce violent crime. 🌿
• Gladwell reflects on his earlier assumptions and acknowledges past errors in his conclusions. 🤔

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 06:36: Introduction and Personal Reflection The chapter 'Introduction and Personal Reflection' discusses cultural habits of people going out in New York in 1993. The conversation touches on the practical aspects of fashion and security by mentioning how people would wear fanny packs and adjust them for visibility and safety during nights out.
• 06:36 - 15:00: Origins of Broken Windows Policing The chapter titled "Origins of Broken Windows Policing" begins with a personal recollection. The speaker interrupts to share a memory where they used to carry keys between their fingers while moving around in New York City during their 20s. This was a precautionary measure in case they were attacked. The speaker reflects on past times by mentioning friends, Peggy and Erica, with whom they used to spend time after moving to the city.
• 15:00 - 26:00: Critique and Legal Challenge to Stop-and-Frisk The chapter discusses the common practice among friends in the 90s of organizing safe ways to get home after a night out. This often involved conversations about who had money for a cab and the circumstances under which it was safe to take the subway late at night, especially on weekends.
• 26:00 - 40:00: Analysis and Rethinking Crime Strategies The chapter discusses the crime landscape in New York City during the late 20th century, specifically highlighting the dangerous environment of the subway system in the 1990s. It mentions the adventurous spirit people had when traveling in groups at night and points out the high crime rates of the era as exemplified by the number of murders in 1990.
• 40:00 - 50:00: Philadelphia and the Impact of Urban Renewal This chapter delves into the atmosphere of Philadelphia during the period of urban renewal. It highlights the pervasive feeling of being surrounded by crime, impacting residents' daily routines and social interactions. The fear of walking alone, especially for women, led to the practice of always having someone accompany you, whether it was a friend or a date, regardless of the circumstances. These safety concerns were an inherent part of living in the city during that time.
• 50:00 - 51:30: Conclusion The conclusion reflects on the transition from a feeling of vulnerability and cautiousness to one of safety and independence. Despite initially having precautions, with time, it became safer as evidenced by the drop in murder rates by 1997 or 1998. The narrator reminisces about living in a walk-up on Bank, highlighting personal experiences of security enhancement over time.

The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows| Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 bushin 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 yeah you 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
• 00:30 - 01:00 absolutely well I actually I'm GNA interrupt I remember I just had a flash of remember Keys we all had keys and I used around with keys so that each one what what would I have actually done if someone had attacked me I would put my keys between my fingers so that 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
• 01:00 - 01:30 the 9s we were all young and foot loose 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 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 are in a large group
• 01:30 - 02:00 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 f it felt very collegial we did things as a group yeah and 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
• 02:00 - 02:30 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 right I people would walk me home just because I 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 you had to walk the woman home right which is like so
• 02:30 - 03:00 insanely awkward you're like 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 on uh on that in that um walk up on Bank
• 03:00 - 03:30 Street my bedroom window overlooked the fire escape and I had previously been too scared to open my window yeah at night and then I started to open my window at night so that technically someone could have walked up down the fire up the fire strap and walked in but I was like it's fine now I can [Music] sleep my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my
• 03:30 - 04:00 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 9s did New York become one of the safest cities in America in 1996 I wrote an article for the New York magazine trying to explain
• 04:00 - 04:30 this puzzle 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
• 04:30 - 05:00 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-some self in the eye and ask was I [Music] right back in the 90s I used to go to New York University's Library all the time to look for ideas BST a big squat Redstone building on Washington Square
• 05:00 - 05:30 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 hm16 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 ghettos and neighborhood effects on dropping out and
• 05:30 - 06:00 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 the news is filled with feature stories on cck epidemics epidemics of gang violence and epidemics of teenage childbearing the term is used Loosely in popular parlaments but turns out to be remarkably
• 06:00 - 06:30 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
• 06:30 - 07:00 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
• 07:00 - 07:30 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 a little things he 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
• 07:30 - 08:00 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 he's we got a we
• 08:00 - 08:30 got a problem now you can do one of two things you can ignore the problem and say gee I'm such a big um fuzzy headed liberal that I'm going to walk away from it and we're going to make believe they have no problem that's New York City in the 1980 that's New York City with 2,000 murders that's New York City with 500,000 uh crimes you have to pay attention to people urinating on the streets and you have to get people to stop urinating on the streets that's
• 08:30 - 09:00 that that's moving toward civilization that's moving toward decency that's what I that's 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 Ser of 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 real elected in '97 by huge margin under
• 09:00 - 09:30 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 in New Yorker in those years and finally get a mayor who said enough you can't jump Subway turn Styles and smoke dope on the corner and harass pedestrians but Giuliani wasn't just making an argument for civility that it was more Pleasant to live in a city
• 09:30 - 10:00 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
• 10:00 - 10:30 Tipping Point for a British program called the culture show and he talked to a public defender in the Bronx named Kate Ruben 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 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 the claims I made in the Tipping Point had far more reach
• 10:30 - 11:00 than I ever imagined some people you know knew that it wasn't his idea but that he had popularized it they 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
• 11:00 - 11:30 right 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' locked himself out of his apartment I was uh leaving my apartment to actually go to school
• 11:30 - 12:00 uh heading 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 plain closed police officers suddenly emerged there had been reports of burglaries in the neighborhood and here were two young men trying to get get into a locked Department we were stopped uh we were
• 12:00 - 12:30 first uh 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 um again it
• 12:30 - 13:00 just the whole experience uh is 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 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 [Music] freedom Floyd becomes the face of a massive class action lawsuit Floyd V the
• 13:00 - 13:30 city of New York challenging the nypd's policy of stoping 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 most consequential court cases
• 13:30 - 14:00 in the city's history a lot of people at the time and I I think you know not without reason said wow this is going to compromise Public Safety this is Aaron chelin 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 and really show people that they were being proactive so that might embolden more gun carrying more more violence more homicide when Chalin says that at the time a lot of people thought
• 14:00 - 14:30 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 you don't have a choice that was the calculus even the
• 14:30 - 15:00 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 stopping 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
• 15:00 - 15:30 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
• 15:30 - 16:00 happens crime Falls we we we ended stop request from frisk in New York uh we we you know that went down by 90 or 95% depending on which numbers you look at um and and yet we we had this incredible incredible 50% 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 DEC Vision was the perfect natural
• 16:00 - 16:30 experiment for broken windows all you have to do is compare before with after the amazing thing about New York um is that if you look at 2010 New York City had a banner year in terms of homicide it had it was one of the lowest homicide rates in in 40 years in the city's history in 2010 and he would have said wow 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 York compared to 2010
• 16:30 - 17:00 between 2010 and 2019 New York is 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
• 17:00 - 17:30 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
• 17:30 - 18:00 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 to figure out where to stay I've heard it's
• 18:00 - 18:30 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 jady 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
• 18:30 - 19:00 compared to where I come from it's disgusting and violent there but I take rest back to Chalin and the question at hand and so you know it 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 stopping Frisk and Administration will issue hundreds of
• 19:00 - 19:30 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 3:00 in the morning sometimes I lie awake and I think oh God did he read The Tipping Point too
• 19:30 - 20:00 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
• 20:00 - 20:30 my first book on its silver anniversary there were parts that I love it felt like rediscovering some lost friend Hush Puppies 6 deges of Lois Weisberg Paul R's ride there also parts that mystified me did I really write an entire chapter on the children's TV show Blues glues 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
• 20:30 - 21:00 begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named Andrew Pap Christos people talk about gun violence as a as a epidemic or disease and it is in many fronts but really I wanted to take it seriously was like oh if it's an epidemic is it a bloodborne 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 colds um it's actually transmitted through behaviors and I just try to figure out ways that science might kind of boost or
• 21:00 - 21:30 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
• 21:30 - 22:00 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's 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
• 22:00 - 22:30 which come from a separate source of of data right um 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 is bright red for example and
• 22:30 - 23:00 then what you see is that these bright red dots all Winger 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 Christo's Maps the risk of
• 23:00 - 23:30 contagion extended 3 de 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 this is crucial so I've got my I've got my uh social network map and I'm overlaying
• 23:30 - 24:00 I'm sticking in all of the shootings into the and I noticed the shootings are clustering so we have this triangle of Joe Andy Malcolm and Malcolm gets shot um and so once we observe that Malcolm gets shot what you're saying is that the likelihood of someone in my someone connected to me also getting shot
• 24:00 - 24:30 increases skyrockets absolutely and you're saying that the the connection the the risk is skyrocketing within between one and three degrees that's the that's the where risk is the highest yeah once you get past kind of three degrees it really levels it goes down and levels off 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
• 24:30 - 25:00 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 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 it'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 being driven by everyone
• 25:00 - 25:30 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 crime was something embedded
• 25:30 - 26:00 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 Hy Stacks why would that be an effective crime fighting strategy Aaron Chalin the criminologist says that one of the main reasons crime
• 26:00 - 26:30 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 indiscriminant 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 in neighborhoods that are driving the shooting what can we do to identify those people
• 26:30 - 27:00 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 we find that um when there's a
• 27:00 - 27:30 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 percent percentage of people do the majority of the work I talked about how this
• 27:30 - 28:00 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 100 young men in the hopes of finding a gun on one of
• 28:00 - 28:30 them I was wrong I'm [Music] sorry so I don't know feel free to ask us any questions or 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 where are we headed so we're we're going to be driving in like the West Philadelphia area green works for the
• 28:30 - 29:00 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 2 hours we talked about vacant Lots 30,000 there's over 30,000 vacant parsels in the city of the live yeah 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 green
• 29:00 - 29:30 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 people started using the lots and what you say people started using them how are they using well um people kids were playing football um people would have qes on the SES uh horses raising on vacant Lots
• 29:30 - 30:00 horses horses in the history of the program they've cleaned up 177,000 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-me intervention it's brok broken windows only not broken
• 30:00 - 30:30 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 has 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 fence out front
• 30:30 - 31:00 vision's history is produced by n bird Lawrence with Ben deaf halfrey and Lucy Sullivan our editor is Karen shakery factchecking by Sam russik original scoring by Luis Gara mastering by Echo Mountain engineering by Sarah buger and Nina bird Lawrence production support from Luke lemond our executive producer is Jacob Smith special thanks to Sarah next and as always L Hefe got to come
• 31:00 - 31:30 I'm malol glao