Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Talking to Strangers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Default to Truth
Limitations of Transparency
Coupling Theory and Context
Self vs. Stranger
Summary
Analysis
1. A century ago, renowned law enforcement officer O.W. Wilson invented the idea of “preventative patrol.” Wilson’s theory was that the constant presence of patrol cars would reduce crime. In the early 1970s, the Kansas City Police Department decided to test Wilson’s theory of preventative patrol. They hired criminologist George Kelling to research the best way of implementing this revolutionary method of policing. Kelling’s approach was to divide the city into three groups. The first group would be the control group, continuing police work as usual; the second group would have no preventative patrol, and officers would respond only when called; the third group would double or triple its patrol squads.
We can interpret O.W. Wilson’s theory of “preventative patrol” within the context of coupling theory. The central premise of preventative patrol is that by manipulating the conditions of a particular area (i.e., increasing the police presence) law enforcement could dissuade would-be criminals from committing crimes. This logic assumes that crime is a coupled behavior rather than a displaced behavior: criminals aren’t instinctually drawn to commit crimes—they commit crimes when the circumstances provide the opportunity for them to do so.
Themes
Kelling’s experiment was revolutionary. Until then, policing was more of an art than a science, and a lot of people thought lack of cooperation from officers not wanting to be guinea pigs in Kelling’s project would sabotage the experiment. Nevertheless, Kelling proceeded with his experiment, which lasted for a year. In the end, crime statistics were virtually identical across all three groups, and citizens in the preventative patrol group didn’t report feeling any more secure. Kelling published his study as the U.S. was in the midst of a crime surge. As police departments around the country desperately tried to reduce local crime, they wondered what method of policing to implement in place of preventative patrolling. In 1990, Kansas City homicide rates were more than three times the national average. With nothing left to lose, Kansas City decided to try a second experiment.
The failure of Kelling’s experiment seems to suggest that crime isn’t a coupled behavior, as Kelling’s findings reveal no discernable link between an increased patrol presence and a decreased rate of crime. However, Kelling’s experiment fails to account for the relationship between crime and place that Weisburd and Lawrence’s research establishes in the previous chapter. When Kelling divided the city into three groups, did he do so with regard to certain characteristics of the three sections, or did he select the boundaries arbitrarily? Knowing more about the crime statistics of a focused area can help us determine how to reduce crime more effectively.
Themes
2. Lawrence Sherman targeted guns as what fueled Kansas City crime. He assigned teams to go door to door in District 144, the city’s most violent area. The teams would introduce themselves, educate the community on gun violence, and provide residents with a number they could call to report gun violence anonymously. A criminology graduate student, James Shaw, accompanied the officers to assess the success of the program. Shaw’s findings revealed that community members were enthusiastic about the program.
Unlike Kelling’s failed efforts to reduce crime in Kansas City, Sherman’s experiment targeted a focused area of the city infamous for its high rates of gun violence. Sherman’s emphasis on place seems to draw inspiration from Weisburd and Sherman’s research on the relationship between crime and place in Minneapolis.
Themes
Despite the hotline’s popularity, the experiment ultimately failed. Shaw’s findings determined that District 144’s problems didn’t arise from its residents not wanting help—it was because frightened residents never left their houses. And because they didn’t leave their houses, Shaw concluded, they had no way of knowing who had guns and who didn’t.
The failure of Sherman’s first experiment represents a common mistake Gladwell suggests we make in our interactions with strangers. When we fail to look beyond our own experiences and see things from the stranger’s perspective, we compromise our ability to understand and help them. In Sherman’s experiment, the physical isolation of District 144’s residents prevents them from knowing their neighbors and reducing crime in their community.
Themes
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The experiment’s next project was to train officers to spot concealed weapons. This project borrowed from theories developed by a New York City police officer named Robert T. Gallagher, who discovered a trend in criminals carrying guns tucked into their waistband— it caused a slight unevenness in their stride on the gun side of the body. Gun carriers also tend to glance down toward their concealed weapons instinctively. Gallagher traveled to Kansas City to help train officers to spot concealed weapons. However, this experiment failed, too.
Gladwell doesn’t provide any explanation for why this second strategy failed. One possible explanation is that Gallagher’s method subscribes to the myth of transparency, relying on assumption that all people who carry concealed weapons give themselves away with subtle but predictable body language.
Themes
3. Kansas City’s final effort involved a loophole in the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects citizens form “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The amendment prevents officers from searching citizens’ houses without a warrant, and from frisking people on the street without “reasonable suspicion.” However, the amendment provides minimal protections for motorists, whom officers are legally allowed to apprehend for even the most trivial of reasons: speeding, running a red light, and malfunctioning lights are all fair game, explains legal scholar David Harris. Additionally, explains Harris, officers can stop motorists who are otherwise acting lawfully for behavior the officer considers “unreasonable.”
The loophole at the center of this final effort to reduce crime in Kansas City encourages police to abandon humanity’s fundamental bias toward truth and apprehend motorists for minor offenses that wouldn’t generate “reasonable suspicion” under normal circumstances. This third attempt to reduce crime operates under the assumption that every motorist could be a criminal until proven otherwise.
Themes
Gladwell describes a related Supreme Court case involving a North Carolina motorist whom an officer deemed “suspicious” due to a broken brake light. However, North Carolina law permits the operation of vehicles with one broken light, so long as the other works. The driver took the officer to court, and the court sided with the officer, claiming that the officer’s mere “thought” that driving with one broken light was illegal was enough to warrant a traffic stop. In short, there is no limit to the list of legal reasons an officer can use to validate a traffic stop. Once the motorist is stopped, the officer has the right to search the car if they “believe the motorist might be armed and dangerous.”
This Supreme Court case is an extreme example of the freedom law enforcement have to determine which behaviors they can legally determine to be “suspicious.” Even though the motorist in the case wasn’t doing anything illegal, the Supreme Court concluded that the mere fact that the police officer mistakenly “thought” the motorist was behaving unlawfully provided sufficient cause for the officer to cast suspicion on the motorist and initiate a traffic stop. So far, Gladwell has advocated against approaching the world with heightened skepticism. Because people are usually honest and well-intentioned, it makes more sense to approach many situations in our daily lives with trust rather than doubt. On the other hand, coupling theory also teaches us the importance of context. Kansas City’s abnormally high crime rates make it impossible to assess the city as one would assess a typical American city. Within the context of Kansas City’s high concentration of crime, Gladwell’s advice to default to truth becomes less logical.
Themes
So, Kansas City took advantage of this legal loophole, using increased traffic stops as opportunities to search the vehicles of “suspicious-looking drivers” for weapons. The results of the experiment were remarkable. Outside of District 144, crime remained the same. Inside, gun crimes were reduced by half. Over the first seven months of the experiment, patrol cars issued roughly 5.45 traffic citations and 2.23 arrests per shift. The final Kansas City experiment kept officers in constant motion and validated their efforts to protect the community. After the New York Times ran a front-page story about the experiments, police departments around the country began to implement the new strategy. Over the course of seven years, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol increased their annual traffic stop count from 400,000 to 800,000.
The third phase of the Kansas City experiment reaffirms Sherman and Weisburd’s findings about the link between crime and place. The effectiveness of increased traffic stops varied according to the concentration of crime in a given area. In locations with a high concentration of crime, increased traffic stops resulted in a drastic decrease in gun crimes. In contrast, increased traffic stops in areas that already saw relatively low levels of crime resulted in a negligible reduction in crime.
Themes
4. Gladwell points out that Lawrence Sherman of the Kansas City experiment is the same Sherman who worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis. They were friends who both taught at Rutgers under department head Ronald Clarke, whose research on suicide Gladwell covers in the previous chapter. While these three men’s interests vary, all three are alike in their focus on coupling. To Gladwell, coupling’s relevance within law enforcement is simple: it means that cities don’t need more law enforcement, they need their law enforcement to be “more focused.” In short, crime hot spots need to have a heavier police presence.
The success of Sherman’s experiment presents further evidence of the link between crime and place, reaffirming the notion that crime is a coupled behavior. An understanding of the crucial link between crime and place is what made Sherman’s Kansas City experiment succeed while Kelling’s earlier effort failed. Thus, we can speculate that police department who disregard place will see less successful results than Sherman saw in Kansas City.
Themes
The Kansas City experiment proved that preventative patrol works only if it is applied aggressively, to a focused area. When other cities began their own version of the experiment, they implemented aggressive preventative policing over an unconcentrated area. As a result, officers could spend their entire shift patrolling the same neighborhood and have nothing to do, and nobody wanted to believe in Weisburd and Sherman’s Law of Crime Concentration.
Police departments that disregarded the relationship between crime and place and failed to confine preventative patrol operations to “focused and concentrated” areas weren’t able to replicate the success Sherman saw in Kansas City. Police departments around the world failed to appreciate the role that place and context played in the Kansas City experiment. This suggests that many of modern policing’s flaws can be attributed to a misunderstanding of how preventative patrol actually works.
Themes
Gladwell attributes law enforcement’s unwillingness to practice concentrated policing on humanity’s misconceptions about coupling, or “the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context.” Furthermore, when we combine our misunderstandings about coupling with “the problems of default to truth and transparency,” we open the door for cases similar to the Sandra Bland incident to occur.
Gladwell suggests that Sandra Bland’s encounter with Brian Encinia is what happens when a society that fails to grasp its flawed strategies for talking to strangers uses those flawed strategies to create flawed policing practices. In so doing, Gladwell alludes to the idea that we need to reassess the way we respond to instances of police brutality and misconduct. Bad policing isn’t a coincidence: it’s a reflection of the ideals of the society it serves.
Themes
