the bridge would simply take their life some other way.5 But that’s absolutely wrong. Suicide is coupled.
The first set of mistakes we make with strangers—the default to truth and the illusion of transparency—has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.
4.
Brooklyn’s 72nd Precinct covers the neighborhood surrounding Greenwood Cemetery, from Prospect Expressway in the north to Bay Ridge in the south. In the narrow strip between the western perimeter of the cemetery and the waterfront, a series of streets run downhill toward the water. A crumbling, elevated freeway meanders down the middle. Today, it is a gentrifying neighborhood. Thirty years ago, when David Weisburd spent a year walking up and down those streets, it was not.
“This was a different world,” Weisburd remembers. “This was a scary place. You’d go into an apartment building, there’d be refrigerators in the hall, garbage would be in the halls. Apartment buildings would have backyards five feet deep in garbage. There were people on the streets who would scare the hell out of you.”
Weisburd was a criminologist by training. He had done his dissertation at Yale University on violent behavior among settlers in the West Bank in Israel. He was born in Brooklyn. After leaving Yale, he got a job working on a research project back in his old borough.
The study was based out of the precinct house on Fourth Avenue, a squat, modernist box that looked as if it were designed to repel an invading army. There were nine officers involved, each assigned to a beat of ten to thirty blocks. “Their job was to walk around those beat areas and to interact with the public, and to develop ways of doing something about the problems,” Weisburd said. He was the observer and note-taker, responsible for writing up what was learned. Four days a week, for a year, he tagged along. “I would always wear a suit and tie, and I had a police identification card. People in the street thought I was the detective and I would say, ‘Oh no.’”
He had been studying crime in a library. Now he was at ground level, walking side by side with beat cops. And right from the beginning, something struck him as odd. Common sense had always held that crime was connected to certain neighborhoods. Where there were problems such as poverty, drugs, and family dysfunction, there was crime: The broad conditions of economic and social disadvantage bred communities of lawlessness and disorder.
In Los Angeles, that neighborhood was South Central. In Paris, it was the outer suburbs. In London, places like Brixton. Weisburd was in New York’s version of one of those neighborhoods—only the neighborhood wasn’t at all what he had imagined: “What I found was, quite quickly, that after we got to know the area, we spent all our time on one or two streets,” he says. “It was the bad neighborhood of town, [but] most of the streets didn’t have any crime.”
After a while it seemed almost pointless to walk every street in his patrol area, since on most of them nothing ever happened. He didn’t understand it. Criminals were people who operated outside social constraint. They were driven by their own dark impulses: mental illness, greed, despair, anger. Weisburd had been taught that the best way to understand why criminals did what they did was to understand who they were. “I call it the Dracula model,” Weisburd said. “There are people and they’re like Dracula. They have to commit crime. It’s a model that says that people are so highly motivated to commit crime, nothing else really matters.”
Yet if criminals were like Dracula, driven by an insatiable desire to create mayhem, they should have been roaming throughout the 72nd. The kinds of social conditions that Draculas feed on were everywhere. But the Draculas weren’t everywhere. They were only on particular streets. And by “streets” Weisburd meant a single block—a street segment. You could have one street segment with lots of crime and the next, literally across an intersection, was fine. It was that specific. Didn’t criminals have legs? Cars? Subway tokens?
“So that then begins a sort of rethinking of my idea of criminology,” Weisburd said. “Like most other people, my studies were about people. I said, maybe we ought to be more concerned with places.”