couldn’t. “That’s exactly it,” she said. “The environment doesn’t always speak to what’s going on. In our pilot study, one of the streets we selected was a violent hot spot. The police officer and clinician were like, ‘No way is this a violent hot spot.’ All the homes are well kept. It’s this beautiful street. I went and checked to make sure. I thought maybe there was something wrong with our data. I have this officer saying no way is this a violent hot spot, and it is. You can’t always tell.”
The lesson of an afternoon driving around Baltimore with Claire White was that it is really easy to make mistakes about strangers. Baltimore is a city where the homicide rate is many times the national average. The simplest thing in the world is to look at the abandoned buildings and the poverty and the drug dealers calling out their codes, then write off those areas and everyone in them. But the point of the Law of Crime Concentration is that most of the streets in “those areas” are perfectly fine. The hot spot is a spot, not a region. “We focus on all the bad people,” White said of Baltimore’s reputation, “but in reality there’s mostly good people.” Our ignorance of the unfamiliar is what fuels our fear.
“Cal seemed pleased…I turned back”: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 175, 179, 181.
as high as the suicide rate for women…has ever been: See Figure 3 in Kyla Thomas and David Gunnell, “Suicide in England and Wales 1861–2007: A time-trends analysis,” International Journal of Epidemiology 39, issue 6 (2010): 1464–75, doi/10.1093/ije/dyq094.
Weisburd’s Jersey City map: See Figure 2 in David Weisburd et al., “Does Crime Just Move Around the Corner? A Controlled Study of Spatial Displacement and Diffusion of Crime Control Benefits.” Criminology 44, no. 3 (08, 2006): 549–92. doi: dx.doi.i.ezproxy.nypl/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2006.00057.x.
“I would park illegally…like moths to an electric light bulb”: Anne Sexton, “The Barfly Ought to Sing,” TriQuarterly no. 7 (1996): 174–75, quoted in Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 107. Also from the Middlebrook biography: “to be prepared to kill herself,” p. 165; “She stripped…asleep in familiar arms” and “surprised by her suicide,” p. 397; “For Ernest Hemingway…that fear,” “woman’s way out,” “I’m so fascinated…dying perfect,” and “a Sleeping Beauty,” all from p. 216.
Chart of suicide methods by fatality rate: “Lethality of Suicide Methods,” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, January 6, 2017, hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-fatality, accessed March 17, 2019.
“Sleepmonger, deathmonger…I’m on a diet from death”: Anne Sexton, “The Addict,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Open Road Media, 2016), p. 165.
Look at how suicides from carbon-monoxide poisonings declined in the years after 1975. It’s just like the chart of British suicides at the end of the town-gas era. See Figure 4 in Neil B. Hampson and James R. Holm, “Suicidal carbon monoxide poisoning has decreased with controls on automobile emissions,” Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, Inc. 42 (2): 159-64, March 2015.
Chapter Eleven: Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments
“Many of us…knew much about”: George Kelling et al., “The Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment: A Summary Report” (Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 1974), p. v, policefoundation/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Kelling-et-al.-1974-THE-KANSAS-CITY-PREVENTIVE-PATROL-EXPERIMENT.pdf.
“This country’s social problems…progress is very small”: Alan M. Webber, “Crime and Management: An Interview with New York City Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown,” Harvard Business Review 63, issue 3 (May–June 1991): 100, hbr/1991/05/crime-and-management-an-interview-with-new-york-city-police-commissioner-lee-p-brown.
“A four-year-old boy…sickening, outrageous”: George Bush, “Remarks to the Law Enforcement Community in Kansas City, Missouri,” January 23, 1990, in George Bush: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, January 1–June 30, 1990, p. 74.
The description of Kansas City’s Patrol District 144 is from Lawrence Sherman et al., “The Kansas City Gun Experiment,” National Institute of Justice, January 1995, ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/kang.pdf; new strategy halves gun crimes in District 144, Exhibit 4, p. 6; statistics for 200 days of Gun Experiment, p. 6.
“The police went…‘would ever come’”: James Shaw, “Community Policing Against Crime: Violence and Firearms” (PhD dissertation, University of Maryland College Park, 1994), p. 118; “Not unlike residents…can’t see anything,” pp. 122–23; statistics for seven months of Kansas City Gun Experiment, p. 136; “Officers who recovered…‘will be the night!’” pp. 155–56.
“When you stop…to do a frisk” (in footnote): Erik Eckholm, “Who’s Got a Gun? Clues Are in the Body Language,” New York Times, May 26, 1992, nytimes/1992/05/26/nyregion/who-s-got-a-gun-clues-are-in-the-body-language.html.
“There are moving violations…personal judgment”: David A. Harris, “Driving While Black and All Other Traffic Offenses: The Supreme Court and Pretextual Traffic Stops,” Journal of Criminal Law