like O. W. Wilson had ideas and hunches. But police work was considered an art, not a science that could be evaluated like a new drug. Kelling says that many people told him his experiment would fail, “that the police simply weren’t ready for research. I wouldn’t be able to do it. They’d sabotage it.” But Kelling had the backing of the city’s police chief. The chief had spent the bulk of his career in the FBI, and he was shocked to learn how little police departments seemed to know about what they did. “Many of us in the department,” the chief would later admit, “had the feeling we were training, equipping, and deploying men to do a job neither we, nor anyone else, knew much about.” He told Kelling to go ahead.
Kelling ran the experiment for a year, meticulously collecting every statistic he could on crime in the three areas of the study. The result? Nothing. Burglaries were the same in all three neighborhoods. So were auto thefts, robberies, and vandalism. The citizens in the areas with beefed-up patrols didn’t feel any safer than the people in the areas with no patrols. They didn’t even seem to notice what had happened. “The results were all in one direction and that was, it doesn’t make any difference,” Kelling said. “It didn’t matter to citizen satisfaction, it didn’t matter to crime statistics, it just didn’t seem to matter.”
Every police chief in the country read the results. Initially, there was disbelief. Some urban police departments were still committed Wilsonites. Kelling remembers the Los Angeles Police Chief standing up at one national law-enforcement conference and saying, “If those findings are true, every officer in Kansas City was asleep at the switch because I can assure you that’s not how it is in Los Angeles.”
But slowly resistance gave way to resignation. The study came out as violent crime was beginning its long, hard, two-decade surge across the United States, and it fed into the growing feeling among people in law enforcement that the task before them was overwhelming. They had thought they could prevent crime with police patrols, but now the Kansas City PD had tested that assumption empirically, and patrols turned out to be a charade. And if patrols didn’t work, what did? Lee Brown, chief of the New York City Police Department, gave a famous interview in the middle of the crack epidemic in which he all but threw up his hands. “This country’s social problems are well beyond the ability of the police to deal with on their own,” Brown said. He had read George Kelling’s Kansas City report. It was hopeless. No matter how many police officers a city had, Brown said, “You could never have enough to use traditional policing techniques to deter crime.…If you don’t have a police officer to cover every part of the city all the time, the chance of an officer on patrol coming across a crime in progress is very small.”
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush came to Kansas City. He spent the morning in one of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods, then gave a speech to a group of local police officers. He tried to be upbeat. He failed. The homicide rate that year in Kansas City was three times the national average. It would go up again in 1991 and again in 1992, then once more in 1993. There wasn’t much to say. Halfway through his remarks, Bush was reduced to simply listing the terrible things happening on the city’s streets:
A four-year-old boy shot dead in a suspected crack house; an eleven-year-old kid gunned down outside another drug den, allegedly at the hands of a fourteen-year-old guard; in a downtown bar, a mother sells her baby for crack; and a firebombing leaves three generations dead, including a grandmother and three little kids—the headlines are horrifying, sickening, outrageous.
But in the early 1990s, twenty years after the first Kansas City experiment, Kansas City decided to try again. They hired another brilliant young criminologist named Lawrence Sherman. As they had with George Kelling, they gave him free rein. It was time for Kansas City Experiment Number Two. Why not? Nothing else was working.
2.
Lawrence Sherman thought the focus ought to be on guns. He believed the sheer number of guns in the city was what fueled its epidemic of violence. His plan was to try a number of ideas in sequence, rigorously evaluate their effectiveness—as Kelling had done—and pick a winner. He called