George Kelling was a criminologist whom the Kansas City Police Department hired in the 1970s to test whether O.W. Wilson’s preventative patrol method of policing could effectively reduce crime. Ultimately, Kelling’s experiment failed to establish preventative patrol as an effective means of reducing crime. Gladwell explains how this failure was due, in part, to Kelling’s failure to account for where the majority of crime took place—his preventative patrol failed because he did not send additional patrol units to a focused area known for its higher rates of crime.
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George Kelling Character Timeline in Talking to Strangers
The timeline below shows where the character George Kelling appears in Talking to Strangers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter Eleven: Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments
...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...
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Kelling’s experiment was revolutionary. Until then, policing was more of an art than a science, and...
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