David and Goliath

Rosemary Lawlor is a Catholic woman who lived through the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The Troubles began in the late 1960s and raged on for over three decades, embroiling the country in a violent conflict between the Protestant majority (which was unofficially backed by the British military) and the Catholic community. In 1969, Gladwell explains, Lawlor and her husband had just had a baby and moved into their new home in Belfast, but they were soon forced to leave because their neighborhood was no longer safe for Catholics. Consequently, they slipped out one night and tricked a cab driver into taking them to Ballymurphy, a Catholic neighborhood in West Belfast, where they stayed with Lawlor’s parents. The following year, the conflict escalated, with acts of grave violence taking place more frequently on the open streets. Lawlor and her husband continued to hide out in Ballymurphy.

While at her parents in Ballymurphy one day, Lawlor hears a woman named Harriet Carson walking through the streets and calling out to the residents, urging them to come outside. She informs them that the residents of another nearby Catholic neighborhood called Lower Falls are in trouble. Responding to a tip that there are illegal weapons in the neighborhood, British forces have put the entirety of Lower Falls under a curfew, forbidding families from leaving their homes. Harriet Carson explains that children are going hungry because families are running out of food. This enrages the people of Ballymurphy, who take to the streets and make their way to Lower Falls.

Gladwell considers the nature of “insurgencies,” turning to a report written by two economists named Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr. in the aftermath of World War II. In their report, Rebellion and Authority, they argue that people in positions of authority don’t need to think about how the people they’re trying to control feel about them. Rather, they simply need to respond harshly when insurgents break the law. Gladwell notes that Ian Freeland—the British general assigned to handle the conflict in Northern Ireland—is somebody who took this message to heart by ordering his troops to respond to adversity with great force, so as to teach insurgents a lesson.

Gladwell uses an educational example to illustrate the mistake the British made in their attempt to enforce law and order in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. He references video footage of a kindergarten classroom in disarray. In the video, the teacher fails to engage the vast majority of the students because she’s focused on helping just one child read aloud. As this happens, the other students begin to fidget and blatantly break the rules, but the teacher doesn’t do anything. Gladwell uses this to suggest that, though many people think of authority as “a response to disobedience,” this dynamic can actually invert itself—disobedience is sometimes a response to authority. What the teacher fails to do, Gladwell upholds, is figure out how to stop her students from misbehaving in the first place.

In another classroom video, a teacher hands out homework and proceeds to read every single word on the worksheet. This bores her students, who immediately lose interest. When one boy begins to complete the homework, the teacher admonishes him. Gladwell suggests that this punishment is ineffective because it will do nothing but make the child frustrated and cynical of the value of the rules. This is known as the “principle of legitimacy,” a theory which upholds that people will only heed authority if they feel as if they “have a voice” in the context of that authority. It also suggests that the rules must remain consistent in order for people to respect them and that they also have to be perceived as fair. According to Gladwell’s argument, this theory applies to insurgents just as much as it applies to schoolchildren. 

To further illustrate the principle of legitimacy, Gladwell tells the story of a police officer named Joanne Jaffe. When Jaffe became the head of New York City’s Housing Bureau, it was her job to address the extremely high crime rate in Brownsville, Brooklyn. To do this, she compiled a list of every juvenile offender in Brownsville who’d been arrested for mugging in the past year. The list had 106 names, and Jaffe applied herself to establishing a connection with these young people. To do this, she assembled a team of officers who reached out to every person on the list and explained to them that their information had been added to the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program (J-RIP). The officers explained that they would do everything they could to help the “J-RIPpers” succeed in life, but that they’d also crack down on them if they were caught committing another crime.

Jaffe’s task force set up trailers in the parking lots outside the housing developments where the J-RIP members live. They keep close watch on them and make sure they know it, too, so that they think twice before breaking the law. At first, this method doesn’t work because families refuse to let the officers into their homes and lives. However, things change when an officer and his colleagues decide one Thanksgiving to put their personal money together to buy a turkey for the family of one particularly misbehaved young man. This young man, Gladwell explains, is considered something of a lost cause, but the officers decide to make this gesture because there are a number of other children in the same family, so they hope to get through to them before they follow in their brother’s footsteps.  

Jaffe loves her team’s idea to buy a turkey for one of the members of J-RIP so much that she gets her boss to give her the funds to do this for all the families in the program. This has a profound effect, as the families welcome the officers into their homes and show them great appreciation. The reason Jaffe does this, Gladwell notes, is because she doesn’t think the people of Brownsville see the police as a “legitimate” form of authority. After all, almost every young person in the J-RIP program has a father, brother, or cousin in jail, making it hard for them to see the law as fair and right. Moreover, this bleak reality makes it all too difficult for the members of J-RIP to believe that police officers would ever actually care about their wellbeing. 

Jaffe starts hosting toy drives for J-RIP families at Christmastime. Slowly but surely, she and the other officers develop meaningful relationships with the kids on their list and their family members, doing whatever they can to make their lives easier. As a result, the crime rate in Brownsville falls significantly. Within three years, robbery-related arrests of J-RIP members decreases to under 50 per year from over 350 per year. In turn, Jaffe demonstrates that Leites and Wolf were wrong when they wrote in Rebellion and Authority that it doesn’t matter what people think of those trying to control them. In reality, it matters a great deal. 

During and leading up to the Troubles, Gladwell explains, Protestant “Loyalists” (as they’re known) march through the streets every July to celebrate their long-ago victory against the Catholics. In doing so, they burn images of the Pope and shout out various chants disparaging the Catholic community. When the residents of Lower Falls see the British Army entering the neighborhood to search for weapons, then, they are all too ready for some kind of intervention, but they aren’t sure if they can embrace the British authorities. The British Army originally came to Northern Ireland to serve as “an impartial referee between Protestant[s] and Catholic[s],” but England is a mostly Protestant country, so it’s hard for the Catholics of Lower Falls to feel as if the British Army is there to enforce a form of law and order that will actually benefit them. 

General Freeland, Gladwell suggests, tries to enforce the law in Northern Ireland without stopping to consider whether or not he has the “legitimacy” to do so. In fact, Gladwell asserts that Freeland doesn’t have this legitimacy, since he represents a powerful force that the Catholics see as biased against them. Instead of acknowledging this, though, Freeland decides to meet any kind of resistance with extreme force, resulting in 25 deaths in 1970. That year, Rosemary Lawlor’s brother is shot and killed by the British Army because they suspect he’s a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Even when Lawlor tells this story to Gladwell decades later, she says she’s still distraught and was angry for a very long time.

In Lower Falls, the priest is the most respected individual in the community. When the British Army comes to search the neighborhood for weapons, everyone flocks to the church, but this doesn’t stop the British from entering and spending 45 minute searching it for weapons, eventually emerging with multiple guns and a trove of explosives. By this point, a crowd has gathered around the church. A riot breaks out, and when the soldiers turn to leave, some of the angry residents throw stones at their retreating vehicles. In response, the soldiers stop and turn around, shooting tear gas into the crowd. This only further infuriates the residents. Why, Gladwell wonders, did the soldiers turn around? They could have continued on, but they came back to fight. This, he says, is because they’ve been ordered to meet resistance with force. 

On the night of the conflict at Lower Falls, 337 people are arrested and 60 are wounded. Several are even killed. Eventually, Freeland calls for backup and institutes a curfew, forcing everyone into their homes. Within days, the residents are starving, so Harriet Carson rallies Catholics in Ballymurphy, urging them to bring food to the people of Lower Falls. A steady stream of women come outside and pack their baby-strollers with bread and other necessities. When they reach Lower Falls, the British soldiers don’t know how to respond, not wanting to attack a group of women. Still, a group of soldiers meet the women with force and start pulling their hair and fighting with their fists. However, so many women have joined Harriet and the others that they eventually outnumber the soldiers. Before long, one of the soldiers orders the others to give up, and the British Army lifts the curfew.