mentioned the biggest example of how our inability to understand suicide costs lives: roughly 40,000 Americans commit suicide every year, half of whom do so by shooting themselves. Handguns are the suicide method of choice in the United States—and the problem with that, of course, is that handguns are uniquely deadly. Handguns are America’s town gas. What would happen if the U.S. did what the British did, and somehow eradicated its leading cause of suicide? It’s not hard to imagine. It would uncouple the suicidal from their chosen method. And those few who were determined to try again would be forced to choose from far-less-deadly options, such as overdosing on pills, which is fifty-five times less likely to result in death than using a gun. A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from thwarted suicides. That’s a lot of people.
4 Suicides happen on the Golden Gate with such devastating regularity that in 2004 filmmaker Eric Steel put a video camera at either end of the bridge and wound up filming twenty-two suicides over the course of the year. In the death that served as the signature case study in Steel’s subsequent documentary, The Bridge, his camera followed a thirty-four-year-old man named Gene Sprague for ninety-three minutes as he paced back and forth across the bridge before jumping to his death. If you stand on the bridge long enough, you can expect to see someone try to jump off.
5 Thirty-four percent, in fact, predicted that everyone thwarted at the bridge would simply switch to another method.
6 Take a look at a map Weisburd made of Seattle (page 369). Those dots are Seattle’s crime “hot spots.” If you talk to someone from Seattle, they will tell you their city has some bad areas. But the map tells you that statement is false. Seattle does not have bad neighborhoods; it has a handful of problematic blocks scattered throughout the city. What distinguishes those problematic blocks from the rest of the city? A jumble of factors, acting in combination. Hot spots are more likely to be on arterial roads, more likely to have vacant lots, more likely to have bus stops, more likely to have residents who don’t vote, more likely to be near a public facility such as a school. The list of variables—some of which are well understood and many of which are not—goes on. And because most of those variables are pretty stable, those blocks don’t change much over time.
Chapter Eleven
Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments
1.
A century ago, a legendary figure in American law enforcement named O. W. Wilson came up with the idea of “preventive patrol.”1 Wilson believed that having police cars in constant, unpredictable motion throughout a city’s streets would deter crime. Any would-be criminal would always have to wonder if a police car was just around the corner.
But think about it. When you walk down the street of your neighborhood, do you feel like the police are just around the corner? Cities are vast, sprawling places. It’s not obvious that a police force—even a large police force—could ever create the feeling that they were everywhere.
This was the question facing the Kansas City Police Department in the early 1970s. The department was about to hire extra police officers, but it was divided over how to deploy them. Should they follow Wilson’s advice—and have them drive randomly around the city? Or assign them to specific locations—such as schools or difficult neighborhoods? To resolve the question, the city hired a criminologist named George Kelling.
“One group said riding around in cars doesn’t improve anything, it doesn’t do anything,” Kelling remembers. “Another group said it’s absolutely essential. That was the standoff. Then I was brought in.”
Kelling’s idea was to select fifteen beats from the southern part of the city and divide them into three groups. It was a big area: thirty-two square miles, 150,000 people, good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, and even a little farmland on the fringes. One of the three groups would be the control group. Police work would continue there as it always had. In the second neighborhood, Kelling would have no preventive patrol at all; police officers would respond only when called. In the third neighborhood, he would double and in some cases triple the number of squad cars on the streets.
“Nothing like this had ever been done in policing,” Kelling remembers. “This was 1970. Nothing had been written about police tactics.…This was at a very primitive stage in policing.” People