The Tipping Point Revisited: Broken Windows

Transcript

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Speaker 44 What did it mean to go out on a Saturday or Friday night in 1993 in New York?

Speaker 46 It was kind of like a given, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 46 You wear a fanny pack, and once you're out on the streets, you turn it around so it's in front of you so you can see it.

Speaker 47 Did you really do that?

Speaker 46 Absolutely.

Speaker 46 I actually, I need to interrupt. I remember I just had a flash of, remember keys? We all had keys.
And I used to walk around.

Speaker 46 with keys so that each one, what would I have actually done if someone had attacked me? I would put my keys between my fingers

Speaker 46 so that that if someone attacked me, I was ready.

Speaker 49 Not long ago, I called up two friends who I used to hang out with when I first moved to New York City in my 20s, Peggy and Erica.

Speaker 41 Back in the 90s, we were all young and foot loose

Speaker 51 and on edge.

Speaker 35 I seem to remember that

Speaker 48 At the end of every evening, there was a discussion about everyone had to, we all had to talk about everyone's plan for getting home.

Speaker 1 Do you remember this?

Speaker 48 And if you didn't, who did and didn't have money for a cab?

Speaker 54 Did we, did anyone, under what circumstances would you take the subway on a Friday night after

Speaker 47 dinner?

Speaker 58 If you were in a large group.

Speaker 46 Only if you're in a large group. A large group.

Speaker 58 And it was like a little adventure.

Speaker 46 So six people would all get on the subway late at night and you felt like you were being adventurous.

Speaker 46 Yeah, thinking back on it,

Speaker 46 it felt very collegial. We did things as a group.
Yeah,

Speaker 46 you were never left alone.

Speaker 60 The New York City of that era was one of the most dangerous big cities in America.

Speaker 47 The subway was filthy.

Speaker 61 There was graffiti everywhere.

Speaker 62 There were 2,262 murders in New York in 1990, more than six a day.

Speaker 47 Were we personally at risk?

Speaker 63 I don't know, but it felt like crime was all around us.

Speaker 46 You know, someone would always say, hey, don't worry, I'm walking you home. We were never allowed to walk alone.
Yeah, even on a...

Speaker 46 Right. People would walk me home just because you didn't want to be by yourself as a woman.

Speaker 64 When you went out on a date, even if it was a disaster,

Speaker 47 you had to walk the woman home. Right.
Which is like so insanely awkward. You're like, oh, yeah.

Speaker 46 We were, you know, independent women, but once the sun went down, you never walked alone.

Speaker 35 Let's talk about how it gets better.

Speaker 61 I just remember that all of a sudden, all of the precautions seemed to go out the window.

Speaker 56 Right.

Speaker 13 And it's true.

Speaker 44 Statistically, we know by 97 or 98, the murder rate has dropped.

Speaker 47 I remember this.

Speaker 9 I had a bedroom when I was living

Speaker 57 in that walk up on Bank Street.

Speaker 9 My bedroom window overlooked the fire escape.

Speaker 55 And I had previously been too scared to open my window at night.

Speaker 44 And then I started to open my window at night. So that technically someone could have walked up down the fire, up the fire escape and walked in.

Speaker 56 But I was like, it's fine now.

Speaker 57 I can sleep.

Speaker 47 My name is Malcolm Globwell.

Speaker 25 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 68 This is part of a series introducing my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, now available everywhere.

Speaker 62 And in this episode, I'm looking back at the question that got me started on tipping points 25 years ago.

Speaker 62 How in the 90s did New York become one of the safest cities in America?

Speaker 45 In 1996, I wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine trying to explain this puzzle.

Speaker 49 It was called The Tipping Point.

Speaker 9 That article led to my first book called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation.

Speaker 48 The success of The Tipping Point led to another book and another and another.

Speaker 47 I wouldn't be here today talking to you were it not for my obsession way back when about what happened to crime in New York in the 1990s.

Speaker 44 And now I've written a sequel to that first book, did I mention that it's had in bookstores everywhere?

Speaker 68 It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Speaker 25 And in that spirit, I've decided to go back and conduct an audit of my conclusions from 25 years ago.

Speaker 43 To look at my 30-something self in the eye and ask,

Speaker 47 was I right?

Speaker 42 Back in the 90s, I used to go to New York University's library all the time to look for ideas.

Speaker 40 Bobst, a big squat redstone building on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

Speaker 61 This was before Google, so I was my own search engine.

Speaker 43 I'd wander the stacks for hours.

Speaker 42 And one day, I was on the fifth floor in the HM1.a6 aisle.

Speaker 61 And I started leafing through the bank issues of the American Journal of Sociology from 1991.

Speaker 64 And I found a paper written by a professor named Jonathan Crane entitled, The Epidemic Theory of Ghettos and Neighborhood Effects on Dropping Out and Teenage Childbearing.

Speaker 55 A choice of words no one would use today.

Speaker 57 This is how it started.

Speaker 70 The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos.

Speaker 18 The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenaged childbearing.

Speaker 48 The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.

Speaker 52 The word epidemic to Crane wasn't a metaphor.

Speaker 35 It was a literal description.

Speaker 41 His point was that if you look closely at how those problems spread, how and why they go up and down, it looks exactly like the way viruses spread.

Speaker 47 Same rules, same patterns. And when I read that first paragraph, I thought, oh my God,

Speaker 54 this is exactly what happened in New York City.

Speaker 64 We had a real live epidemic of crime.

Speaker 41 And what is the hallmark of an epidemic?

Speaker 59 A tipping point.

Speaker 42 The moment when everything changes all at once.

Speaker 57 That moment when I left my window open because I suddenly felt safe was our tipping point.

Speaker 13 And so, front and center, in my first book, was a description of what I saw as the reason why New York's epidemic suddenly tipped.

Speaker 23 The police department's commitment to broken windows policing.

Speaker 54 Broken windows was a theory that small crimes were invitations for large crimes.

Speaker 61 That if you let people get away with little things, then you were signaling that it was okay to cross the line into bigger things, like serious acts of violence.

Speaker 23 And so what do you do?

Speaker 47 You don't let people get away with the little things.

Speaker 48 It was taking the the concept of an epidemic and applying it to crime. Lawlessness wasn't random.

Speaker 47 It was something you could catch from those around you, the same way you can catch a cold from a warm, stuffy room full of four-year-olds.

Speaker 74 If somebody urinates in public, the person is telling you, I got a big problem.

Speaker 74 This is what broken windows theory is all about.

Speaker 3 The biggest champion of this idea was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City at the time.

Speaker 55 Here he is at a press conference in the mid-90s, a few years into the broken windows experiment, where in a span of just a minute and a half, he references public urination eight times.

Speaker 74 I mean, if some guy is urinating in public,

Speaker 74 we got a problem. Now, you can do one of two things.
You can ignore the problem and say, gee, I'm such a big fuzzy-headed liberal that I'm going to walk away from it.

Speaker 74 And we're going to make believe they have no problem. That's New York City in the 1980s.
That's New York City with 2,000 murders. That's New York City with 500,000 crimes.

Speaker 74 You have to pay attention to people urinating on the streets. And you have to get people to stop urinating on the streets.

Speaker 74 That's moving towards civilization. That's moving toward decency.

Speaker 74 That's what I mean by a decent society that people want to invest in. People want their children to live in.
You've got to pay attention to somebody urinating on the street. It may be a minor thing.

Speaker 74 It may be a serious thing, but you cannot ignore it. You have to deal with it.
It is against the law to urinate in public.

Speaker 69 Giuliani was elected in 1993 and re-elected in 97 by a huge margin.

Speaker 35 Under his watch, the city was revitalized.

Speaker 13 People who had fled for the suburbs came back. Huge parts of Brooklyn were gentrified.

Speaker 53 Central Park was cleaned up.

Speaker 63 I cannot tell you how gratifying it was to be a New Yorker in those years and finally get a mayor who said, enough.

Speaker 23 You can't jump subway turnstiles and smoke dope on the corner and harass pedestrians.

Speaker 55 But Giuliani wasn't just making an argument for civility, that it was more pleasant to live in a city where the streets were clean and the police were alert to every sign of disorder.

Speaker 64 He was making a more extravagant claim that arresting the guy urinating on the street was the reason why the murder rate dropped.

Speaker 47 And I believed him.

Speaker 17 Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish a book. Whenever it happens, huge things occur.

Speaker 50 About 10 years ago, the journalist John Ronson did a retrospective on the tipping point for a British program called The Culture Show.

Speaker 66 And he talked to a public defender in the Bronx named Kate Rubin.

Speaker 58 I would go around and I would talk to people in New York City, and they liberal people, progressive people, would say, oh, well, you know, we've had this miracle in New York.

Speaker 58 And some people would say, oh, yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's idea, broken windows.

Speaker 16 I didn't watch any of this at the time, even though Ronson interviewed me for the segment too.

Speaker 50 But I found it while working on this episode.

Speaker 48 And it made me realize the claims I made in the tipping point had far more reach than I ever imagined.

Speaker 58 Some people, you know, knew that it wasn't his idea, but that he had popularized it. They'd read about it in the New Yorker or in his book, The Tipping Point.

Speaker 58 I would never try to speak to what his intent was, but I think the impact that he had was to serve as

Speaker 58 basically a marketing force for this idea. He truly popularized it.

Speaker 67 So, once again, was I right?

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Speaker 42 On the afternoon of February 27th, 2008, a young man named David Floyd left his apartment on Beach Avenue in the Bronx.

Speaker 3 As he walked down the pathway next to his building, he ran into the tenant who lived downstairs, who said he'd locked himself out of his apartment.

Speaker 76 I was leaving my apartment to actually go to school.

Speaker 76 Heading to school, I had my book bag on, you know, everything that normal students do as they're going to school.

Speaker 61 This is Floyd speaking in an interview with the civil rights group race forward.

Speaker 42 The landlord was Floyd's godmother, so Floyd went back inside to her apartment to get a ring of keys.

Speaker 42 And as he and the tenant tried to figure out which key worked in the door, three plainclothes police officers suddenly emerged.

Speaker 52 There had been reports of burglaries in the neighborhood, and here were two young men trying to get into a locked apartment.

Speaker 76 We were stopped.

Speaker 76 We were first.

Speaker 76 We were, of course, told to put our hands up, to stay where we were.

Speaker 50 This was how the police put broken windows into practice.

Speaker 13 Don't let the little things pass you by.

Speaker 50 Be aggressive.

Speaker 54 Check for weapons, drugs.

Speaker 24 Maybe you find them.

Speaker 35 Maybe you don't.

Speaker 69 But if you do that enough times, then young men leave their guns and drugs at home.

Speaker 65 Floyd had actually been stopped the previous April while walking down the street, followed by three officers in a van who jumped out and confronted him.

Speaker 76 And again, it was just the whole experience.

Speaker 76 It's humiliating, it's embarrassing, and really, you know, it doesn't matter what kind of person you are, how tough you are, whatever.

Speaker 76 It's a scary thing because you don't know what is going to happen with your life. You don't know what's going to happen with your freedom.

Speaker 43 Floyd becomes the face of a massive class action lawsuit, Floyd v.

Speaker 61 The City of New York, challenging the NYPD's policy of stop and frisk.

Speaker 25 And in 2013, Floyd wins.

Speaker 44 In a shocking ruling, a federal judge said the NYPD's use of stop and frisk was unconstitutional, effectively ending the broken windows era in New York City policing.

Speaker 57 Yes, it still happens today, but not in the way that it did 10 years ago.

Speaker 31 Not even remotely close.

Speaker 20 It's no exaggeration to say that this was one of the most consequential court cases in the city's history.

Speaker 78 A lot of people at the time, and I think, you know, not without reason, said, well, this is going to compromise public safety.

Speaker 9 This is Aaron Chalfin, who's part of a group of criminologists who have devoted themselves to understanding what exactly happened in New York.

Speaker 78 The police are no longer going to be able to make a lot of stops and really show people that they were being proactive. So that might embolden more gun carrying, more violence, more homicide.

Speaker 55 When Chalfin says that at the time, a lot of people thought ending Stop and Frisk was going to lead to crime going back up.

Speaker 45 He means everyone.

Speaker 61 City government, the police force, pundits of every variety.

Speaker 35 That's what I thought too.

Speaker 3 What everyone was saying in effect was this.

Speaker 79 Yes, doing hundreds of thousands of police stops a year of young men like David Floyd who may be doing nothing more than helping out a friend is unfortunate.

Speaker 65 But being killed is a lot worse.

Speaker 48 And since this is what's keeping the crime rate down, we don't have a choice.

Speaker 67 That was the calculus.

Speaker 62 Even the judge in the Floyd case begins her ruling by making the same point.

Speaker 35 I emphasize at the outset, as I have throughout the litigation, that this case is not about the effectiveness of stop and frisk in deterring or combating crime.

Speaker 54 This court's mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool.

Speaker 71 She goes on, Many police practices may be useful for fighting crime.

Speaker 3 preventive detention, or coerced confessions, for example, but because they are unconstitutional, they cannot be used, no matter how effective.

Speaker 48 She's basically saying, there's a good chance that crime is going to go back up because of my ruling, but the Constitution is the Constitution.

Speaker 47 Even the people who hated broken windows thought that it worked.

Speaker 55 But then, the very thing that absolutely no one expected to happen happens.

Speaker 47 Crime falls.

Speaker 78 We ended stop questioning Frisk in New York.

Speaker 78 That went down by 90 or 95%, depending on which numbers you look at.

Speaker 78 And yet we had this incredible, incredible 50% decline in homicide.

Speaker 35 In social science, a natural experiment is when the real world provides you with a clean way of measuring the truth or falsity of a given proposition.

Speaker 48 The Floyd decision was the perfect natural experiment. for broken windows.

Speaker 61 All you have to do is compare before

Speaker 35 with after.

Speaker 78 The amazing thing about New York is that if you look at 2010, New York City had a banner year in terms of homicide. It was one of the lowest homicide rates in 40 years in the city's history in 2010.

Speaker 78 And you would have said, wow, like great progress. Let's just keep it up.
Let's keep up the good work.

Speaker 78 Incredibly, by 2019, the year before the pandemic, right, homicides went down by 50% in New York compared to 2010. Between 2010 and 2019, New York is unique.

Speaker 78 in that it had another great homicide decline at a time when homicides were really flat nationally.

Speaker 25 This is, hands down, one of the strangest and craziest urban transformations ever.

Speaker 51 Just to give you a sense, if New York City's crime rate in 1990 had just stayed the same, didn't change for the next 35 years, the city would have had an additional 62,000 homicides.

Speaker 72 Most of them, in all likelihood, young men of color.

Speaker 41 62,000 young men currently walking around New York would be dead.

Speaker 78 And by 2019, New New York is almost as safe as Paris with respect to homicide rate. New York is closer to Paris than it is to other U.S.
cities, even like Boston, which is another safe city, right?

Speaker 78 It's incredible.

Speaker 42 You know how those billionaires left New York City from Miami during the pandemic, saying they couldn't deal with the taxes and the crime?

Speaker 43 Well, the violent crime rate in New York City after that second wave is half that of Miami.

Speaker 23 If you're really worried about crime, you should be selling your waterfront home in Coral Gables before someone murders you and move somewhere much safer, like the Bronx.

Speaker 19 Or, here's another.

Speaker 13 J.D. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, tweets this in 2021.

Speaker 13 Serious question.

Speaker 59 I have to go to New York soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay.

Speaker 42 I've heard it's disgusting and violent there, but is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4?

Speaker 51 I know, I know.

Speaker 42 There's a whole cottage industry of unearthing crazy things, J.D. Vance once said.

Speaker 13 But Vance is from just outside Cincinnati.

Speaker 48 The violent crime rate in Cincinnati at the exact moment he wrote that tweet was twice the violent crime rate in New York City.

Speaker 61 Serious question, Senator.

Speaker 53 I have to go to your hometown soon and I'm trying to figure out where to stay because compared to where I come from, it's disgusting and violent there.

Speaker 57 But I digress.

Speaker 50 Back to Chalfin and the question at hand.

Speaker 78 And so, you know, it does give you the sense that making lots and lots of these stops was not the key ingredient.

Speaker 47 It does, doesn't it?

Speaker 48 We conducted a natural experiment and the results are in.

Speaker 51 It wasn't broken windows.

Speaker 40 It wasn't stop and frisk.

Speaker 80 My administration will issue hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to reward cities and towns and return to proven crime-fighting methods, including stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing.

Speaker 80 We did that with Rudy Giuliani. It was so successful.

Speaker 51 At three o'clock in the morning sometimes I lie awake and I think, oh God,

Speaker 50 did he read the tipping point too?

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Speaker 47 Hey there, Malcolm Glabo here.

Speaker 32 I was just in London.

Speaker 5 I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles.

Speaker 66 Through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for Espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out in Proofrock Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

Speaker 24 Then I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 51 It's been open for about a hundred and fifty years.

Speaker 3 You can feel the history in the floorboards.

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Speaker 43 I don't reread any of my books once I've written them, particularly ones from 25 years ago, like the tipping point.

Speaker 47 I mean, why would I?

Speaker 10 Do I want to wear the clothes I wore in the year 2000?

Speaker 47 No, I don't.

Speaker 3 Do I even want to see pictures of myself from 2000?

Speaker 47 Not particularly.

Speaker 40 So I didn't reread the tipping point until I made the decision last year to revisit my first book on its silver anniversary.

Speaker 47 There were parts that I love.

Speaker 48 It felt like rediscovering some lost friend.

Speaker 28 Hush puppies, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg, Paul Revere's Ride.

Speaker 47 There are also parts that mystified me.

Speaker 26 Did I really write an entire chapter on the children's TV show Blues Clues?

Speaker 47 But the crime chapter was the only place where I said, I would write that so differently today.

Speaker 55 Today, if I were rewriting, I'd begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named Andrew Papakristos.

Speaker 78 People talk about gun violence as an epidemic or disease, and it is in many fronts, but really I wanted to take it seriously.

Speaker 78 It was like, oh yeah, if it's an epidemic, is it a blood-borne pathogen or is is it an airborne pathogen? And actually, thank God, it's not an airborne pathogen, right?

Speaker 78 You don't catch a bullet like you catch a cold. It's actually transmitted through behaviors.
And I just tried to figure out ways that science might kind of boost or amplify those insights.

Speaker 13 Papa Christos took every single arrest over more than six years in Chicago.

Speaker 65 So hundreds of thousands of arrests.

Speaker 68 And he made something.

Speaker 41 called a network map.

Speaker 78 All right. First you see it happens in groups.
And then like, okay, what about individuals? All right. Well, does it concentrate? What about exposure? What about time?

Speaker 48 So if Andy and Malcolm are arrested together for shooting someone, then Andy and Malcolm are two dots on the map connected by a line.

Speaker 3 And if Malcolm then is arrested with Joe, there's a line connecting Malcolm to Joe.

Speaker 47 Malcolm and Joe are one degree or, to use Papa Christos' favorite term, one handshake apart.

Speaker 63 Joe and Andy, two handshakes apart.

Speaker 47 You do that for years and years of Chicago arrest data, and you get a truly enormous map.

Speaker 78 You have this very, very large network, right? And then what you do is you sprinkle in the victimizations, which come from a separate source of data, right?

Speaker 78 They come from homicide records, they come from shooting files, police, public health.

Speaker 52 He took the names of everyone who had been shot over the same period and looked to see how many of those names were in his network map.

Speaker 47 And what he found was the victims were already there and they were clustered together.

Speaker 78 You just match the data and every place where there's a shooting, the victims bright red, for example.

Speaker 78 And then what you see is that these bright red dots all linger together, all clumped together, right? Like your kid.

Speaker 78 took a handful of Christmas ornaments and like threw it at the tree and they're all in one spot.

Speaker 25 It looks just like the social maps epidemiologists used to construct for the spread of HIV in the 1980s.

Speaker 24 If someone in your social circle got infected with HIV, then your chances of becoming infected with HIV increased.

Speaker 54 In Papacristo's maps, the risk of contagion extended three degrees.

Speaker 18 If Malcolm gets shot, Andy is at risk, and so is Joe.

Speaker 54 And so are any people Andy and Joe were arrested with.

Speaker 78 Like other social networks, the impact of these shootings tends to go about two or three handshakes, and then it starts to kind of drop off. So these clusters are fairly dense and they stick around.

Speaker 47 So hold on.

Speaker 65 This is this is crucial.

Speaker 41 So

Speaker 42 I've got my social network map and I'm overlaying, I'm sticking in all of the shootings into the and I notice the shootings are clustering.

Speaker 66 So we have this triangle of Joe, Andy, Malcolm.

Speaker 55 And

Speaker 48 Malcolm gets shot.

Speaker 55 And so

Speaker 64 once we observe that Malcolm gets shot, what you're saying is that the likelihood of someone in my, someone connected to me also getting shot increases.

Speaker 78 Skyrockets. Absolutely.

Speaker 42 And you're saying that the connection, the risk is skyrocketing within between one and three

Speaker 52 degrees?

Speaker 78 That's where risk is the highest.

Speaker 78 Once you get past kind of three degrees, it really levels, it goes down and levels up.

Speaker 61 When you observed this, did this surprise you?

Speaker 78 How concentrated it was surprised me.

Speaker 78 You know, when you look at these numbers, even when you look at the larger co-offending network, you're talking about five to six percent of a neighborhood's population.

Speaker 78 But when you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's less than it's less than a percent.

Speaker 78 You're talking about, you know, in the west side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we're working, there's about 50,000 people. You're talking about 400 individuals.

Speaker 42 400 individuals on the entire west side of Chicago.

Speaker 61 The crime problem on the west side of Chicago isn't being driven by everyone.

Speaker 48 It's being driven by a tiny subset of people within a dense social network where someone close to them has already been a victim of gun violence.

Speaker 13 The west side of Chicago is not a dangerous place.

Speaker 65 Highly specific networks of people within the west side of Chicago are dangerous places.

Speaker 54 The same pattern holds true in New York City.

Speaker 13 Why wasn't stop and frisk an effective strategy in the end?

Speaker 59 Because it assumed that violent crime was something embedded within an entire community.

Speaker 49 And it's not.

Speaker 20 Even the NYPD's own numbers said so.

Speaker 66 In one eight-year span, New York City police officers frisked 2.3 million people and found weapons in 1.5% of those stops.

Speaker 42 They were looking for needles in haystacks. Why would that be an effective crime-fighting strategy?

Speaker 42 Aaron Chalfin, the criminologist, says that one of the main reasons crime fell so dramatically in New York after Stop and Frisk ended was that the NYPD took those lessons to heart.

Speaker 25 They switched from the kind of indiscriminate policing found in Stop and Frisk to precision policing.

Speaker 24 They started focusing on hotspots, deploying police to the specific places where crime was the worst.

Speaker 78 More targeted investigations, more thinking about who are the shooters, who are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving the shootings.

Speaker 78 What can we do to identify those people, incapacitate those people?

Speaker 78 So, when we think about good policing, and we think in particular about homicide, it's a very small number of people who drive the problem.

Speaker 78 It's a couple thousand people in a city of eight and a half million. And, you know, making lots of low-level arrests.
Maybe you'll find some more guns and things like that.

Speaker 78 But it's probably a much better use of resources to focus, focus, focus, focus on the drivers of violence.

Speaker 78 And when you do that, in my paper, we find that when there's a major gang takedown around a public housing development, in the next 18 months, homicides are down by about 30%.

Speaker 73 30%.

Speaker 48 Fighting an epidemic means focusing on the few, not the many.

Speaker 68 And by the way, who made this argument as loudly as anyone?

Speaker 47 I did.

Speaker 13 In the tipping point.

Speaker 34 I called it the Law of the Few, and it took up a third of the book.

Speaker 23 When it comes to epidemics, I wrote, a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

Speaker 55 I talked about how this principle plays out in outbreaks of infectious disease, in the spread of fashion trends, in word of mouth.

Speaker 54 I described in great detail the kinds of people who make those special few.

Speaker 47 On and on.

Speaker 62 But then, when it came to crime, I suddenly forgot all about the law of the few and endorsed an idea that said a really good way to control an epidemic was to stop and frisk a hundred young men in the hopes of finding a gun on one of them.

Speaker 47 I was wrong.

Speaker 51 I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 So, Adam, feel free to ask us any questions or

Speaker 44 rewriting the crime chapter.

Speaker 61 I would talk about Philadelphia and about a day I spent recently driving around the city with a guy named Keith Green.

Speaker 1 So where are we headed? So

Speaker 1 we're going to be driving in like the West Philadelphia area.

Speaker 77 Green works for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, a group that was founded in 1827 and is best known for putting on the world's largest indoor flower show.

Speaker 18 And for two hours we talked about vacant lots.

Speaker 77 30,000 vacant parcels.

Speaker 1 There's over 30,000 vacant parcels in the city of Philadelphia. Yeah.

Speaker 35 There were blocks we drove past that had two or even three vacant lots. Every block seemed to have at least one.

Speaker 18 In the past, they were overgrown with weeds, covered in trash, home to rats and raccoons and possums.

Speaker 61 And what Green's group has done is to systematically work its way through the city, cleaning up the lots, planting grass, putting up low fences.

Speaker 1 And we started seeing a dramatic change. Blocks were being maintained.

Speaker 1 People started using their blocks.

Speaker 1 What you say people started using of how were they using them?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 people with kids were playing football.

Speaker 1 People were having barbecues on the sites.

Speaker 1 Horses grazing on vacant lots. Horses.
Horses.

Speaker 13 In the history of the program, they've cleaned up 17,000 lots.

Speaker 42 Charles Brannis, the pioneer of the work, led a study to see if cleaning up vacant lots lowered the homicide rate.

Speaker 13 When you fixed up a neighborhood, what happened to gun violence?

Speaker 49 It went down 29%.

Speaker 50 Now, what's the best way to describe this kind of anti-crime intervention?

Speaker 62 It's broken windows.

Speaker 54 Only not broken windows as a grand metaphor, as a hysterical leap that sees a man urinating on a sidewalk and says we have no choice but to lock him up.

Speaker 47 No, broken windows as a literal call to action. You see the lot full of weeds and trash and you pick up the garbage and mow the grass and put a fence out front.

Speaker 9 Visionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Ben Dadaf Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Speaker 13 Fact-checking.

Speaker 49 by Sam Russick.

Speaker 9 Original scoring by Luis Guerra.

Speaker 41 Mastering by Echo Mountain.

Speaker 13 Engineering by Sarah Bruguer and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Speaker 16 Production support from Luke LeMond.

Speaker 25 Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Speaker 65 Special thanks to Sarah Nix, and as always, El Jefe Graticom.

Speaker 67 I'm Malcolm Glapo.

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