Weisburd and Sherman say they have trotted out their maps and numbers, trying to convince their peers of the Law of Crime Concentration, to little effect. Back in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn where he began his work, after a long day roaming the neighborhood, Weisburd would turn to the police officers he had been walking with and say, “Isn’t it strange how we’re returning again and again to the same blocks?” They would look at him blankly.
“I was in a meeting with the deputy commissioner [of police] in Israel,” Weisburd recalls.
Someone at the meeting said, “Well, David finds that crime doesn’t just move around the corner. And that would suggest that you ought to become more focused.” This guy turned around and he said, “My experience tells me that that’s just not true. I don’t believe that.” That was the end of that.3
Is something wrong with Israel’s deputy commissioner of police? Not at all. Because his reaction is no different from the behavior of the highway patrol in North Carolina, or the Golden Gate Bridge Authority, or the literary scholars who speak confidently of Sylvia Plath’s doomed genius. There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger’s behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands.
So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency?
You get Sandra Bland.
1 Wilson first experimented with preventive patrol when he was the chief of police in Wichita, Kansas. He would later hold the same post in Chicago.
2 To deal with that hurdle, for example, Gallagher developed all kinds of tricks. He and his partner would approach someone they thought was carrying a gun. They’d corner him, so he was feeling a little defensive. Then Gallagher would identify himself: I’m a police officer.
“When you stop a man with a gun, 99 out of 100 times he’s going to do the same thing,” Gallagher told a reporter years ago. “He’s going to turn the side that the gun’s on away from you—either several inches, just a quick turn of the hip, or halfway around. And the hand and arm are going to come naturally in the direction of the gun,” in an instinctive protective motion. “At that point you don’t have to wait to see if he goes under the shirt for the gun or if he’s just going to keep it covered,” he said. “At that point you have all the right in the world to do a frisk.”
3 One of Weisburd’s former students, Barak Ariel, went so far as to test resistance to the coupling idea in the Derry region of Northern Ireland. Law-enforcement officers in Derry are asked to identify specific troubled areas of their beats that they think are going to require additional police presence. Their predictions are called “waymarkers.” Ariel wondered: how closely do the police officers’ waymarkers match up with the hot spots where crime actually happens in Derry? I think you can guess. “The majority of streets included in ‘Waymarkers’ were neither ‘hot’ nor ‘harmful,’ resulting in a false positive rate of over 97 percent,” Ariel concluded. This means that 97 percent of the blocks identified by police officers as being dangerous and violent were not dangerous and violent at all. The officers who drew these waymarkers were not sitting behind a desk, remote from the direct experience of the streets. This was their turf. These were crimes they investigated and criminals they arrested. Yet somehow they could not see a fundamental pattern in the location of the strangers they were arresting.
Chapter Twelve
Sandra Bland
1.
At 4:27 on the afternoon of July 10, 2015, Sandra Bland was pulled over by a Texas State Trooper on FM 1098 in Waller County, Texas. She was driving a silver Hyundai Azera with Illinois license plates. She was twenty-eight years old and had just come from her hometown of Chicago to start a new job at Prairie View University. The name of the officer was Brian Encinia. He parked behind her, then approached Bland’s Hyundai slowly along the curbside, leaning in to speak to her through the open passenger window.
Brian Encinia: Hello, ma’am. We’re the Texas Highway Patrol, and the reason for your stop is because you failed to signal the lane change. Do you have your driver’s license and