he finished his stint in Brooklyn, Weisburd decided to team up with Larry Sherman, another young criminologist. Sherman had been thinking along these lines as well. “I was inspired, at the time, by the AIDS map of the country,” Sherman remembers, “which showed that fifty census tracks out of fifty thousand had over half of the AIDS cases in the United States.” AIDS didn’t look to him like a contagious disease roaming wildly and randomly across the land. It looked to him like an interaction between certain kinds of people and certain very specific places, an epidemic with its own internal logic.
Gathering the kind of data necessary to study the geographical component of crime wasn’t easy. Crime had always been reported by precinct—by the general geographical area where it occurred. But Weisburd had just walked the 72nd Precinct, and he knew an area that nonspecific wouldn’t help them. They needed addresses. Luckily, Sherman knew the police chief in Minneapolis, who was willing to help. “We chose Minneapolis because how could you find someone crazy enough to allow us to do what we wanted to do?” Weisburd said with a laugh.
Sherman crunched the numbers and found something that seemed hard to believe: 3.3 percent of the street segments in the city accounted for more than 50 percent of the police calls. Weisburd and his graduate students at Rutgers University then put a map of Minneapolis on the wall, and pasted little strips of paper wherever they found there had been a crime. The unbelievable finding was now impossible to dismiss. From his days walking the 72nd, Weisburd had expected some concentration of crime, but not this. “When Larry and I were talking about it, it was like, ‘Oh my God!’”
In Boston right around the same time, another criminologist did a similar study: Half the crime in the city came from 3.6 percent of the city’s blocks. That made two examples. Weisburd decided to look wherever he could: New York. Seattle. Cincinnati. Sherman looked in Kansas City, Dallas. Anytime someone asked, the two of them would run the numbers. And every place they looked, they saw the same thing: Crime in every city was concentrated in a tiny number of street segments. Weisburd decided to try a foreign city, somewhere entirely different—culturally, geographically, economically. His family was Israeli, so he thought Tel Aviv. Same thing. “I said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that! Why should it be that five percent of the streets in Tel Aviv produce fifty percent of the crime? There’s this thing going on, in places that are so different.’” Weisburd refers to this as the Law of Crime Concentration.6 Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.
6.
So: Sylvia Plath. In her thinly disguised autobiography, The Bell Jar, Plath’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, describes her descent into madness. And she thinks about suicide precisely as Ronald Clarke (who made the link between town gas and suicide) suggests she would. She is incredibly sensitive to the question of how she’ll take her own life. “If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?” Esther asks Cal, a young man she’s lying next to on a beach.
Cal seemed pleased. “I’ve often thought of that. I’d blow my brains out with a gun.” I was disappointed. It was just like a man to do it with a gun. A fat chance I had of laying my hands on a gun. And even if I did, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what part of me to shoot at.
That very morning Esther had tried to hang herself with the silk cord of her mother’s bathrobe, and it hadn’t worked. “But each time I would get the cord so tight I could feel a rushing in my ears and a flush of blood in my face, my hands would weaken and let go, and I would be all right again.” She and Cal swim for the shore. She decides to try to drown herself—and dives for the bottom of the sea.
I dived and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork.
The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy