Joanne Jaffe Character Analysis

Joanne Jaffe is a police officer who, when put in charge of New York City’s Housing Bureau, institutes a new way of addressing juvenile crime in the neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn. Brownsville is notorious for its high crime rate, so Jaffe compiles a list of all juvenile offenders arrested in the last year for mugging, then reaches out to each and every one of them and speaks to their families, saying that they’ve been enrolled in the Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program (J-RIP). This means that the police will keep close tabs on these young people, though they’ll also do whatever they can to help them succeed. Before long, this approach begins to work, especially when Jaffe and her officers start bringing Thanksgiving turkeys to J-RIPpers’ houses and holding toy drives at Christmas. Within three years, the crime rate among J-RIPpers plummets. Gladwell attributes this to Jaffe’s understanding that it matters what people think of authority figures. Rather than trying to assert power without caring what young people think of law enforcement, Jaffe goes out of her way to build meaningful relationships, proving that Leites and Wolf were wrong to think that authority figures can succeed without listening to the people over whom they hope to preside.