Pushkin. This year at Pushkin, we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on bespoke content.
But the ad space is incredibly noisy.
How do we ensure our content reaches the right audience?
That's where LinkedIn ads come in.
You can precisely target professionals by job title, company, and more, making sure your message lands with the right people.
Cut through the noise and reach your ideal audience.
Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at LinkedIn .com slash Malcolm.
Terms and conditions apply.
The most innovative companies are going further with T -Mobile for business.
Together with Delta, they're putting 5G into the hands of ground staff, so they can better assist on -the -go travelers with real -time information.
From the Delta Sky Club to the Jet Bridge, this is elevating customer experience.
This is Delta with T -Mobile for business.
Take your business further at T -Mobile dot com slash now.
I'm taking a trip to Texas this November, two quick nights across Dallas and Houston, and then on to Austin for the Texas Book Festival.
If you too have a trip coming up, you might want to consider hosting your home on Airbnb.
Whether it's for a few short nights or a few weeks, you can host your home for however long it will be sitting empty.
It's an easy and smart way to make some extra money.
Your home might be worth more than you think.
Find out how much at Airbnb dot com slash host.
What did it mean to go out on a Saturday or Friday night in 1993 in New York?
It was kind of like a given, you know?
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.
Did you really do that?
Well, I actually didn't interrupt.
I remember I just had a flash of, remember keys?
We all had keys. And I used to walk around 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 so that if someone attacked me, I would ready.
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.
Back in the 90s, we were all young and footloose and on edge.
I seem to remember that at the end of every evening, there was a discussion about everyone We all had to talk about everyone's plan for getting home.
Do you remember this?
And if you didn't, who didn't didn't have money for a cab?
Did anyone, under what circumstances would you take the subway on a Friday night after dinner?
If you were in a large group.
Only if you were in a large group.
A large group, and it was like a little adventure.
So six people would all get on the subway late at night, and you felt like you were being adventurous.
Yeah, thinking back on it, it felt very collegial.
We did things as a group.
Yeah. You were never left alone.
The New York City of that era was one of the most dangerous big cities in America.
The subway was filthy.
There was graffiti everywhere.
There were 2 ,262 murders in New York in 1990.
More than six a day.
Were we personally at risk?
I don't know, but it felt like crime was all around us.
You know, someone would always say, hey, don't worry, I'm walking you home.
We were never allowed to walk alone.
Even on a … That's right.
People would walk me home, just because you didn't want to be by yourself, as a woman.
When you went on a date, even if it was a disaster, you had to walk the woman home.
Which is so insanely awkward.
You're like, ugh. What are you?
We were, you know, independent women.
But once the sun went down, you never walked alone.
Let's talk about how it gets better.
I just remember that all of a sudden, all of the precautions seemed to go out the window.
Right. And it's true.
Statistically, we know by 97 or 98, the murder rate has dropped.
I remember this. I had a bedroom when I was living in that walk up on Bank Street.
My bedroom window overlooked the fire escape.
And I had previously been too scared to open my window at night.
And then I started to open my window at night.
So that technically someone could have walked up to fire escape and walked in.
But I was like, it's fine now.
I can sleep. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
This is part of a series introducing my new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, now available everywhere.
And in this episode, I'm looking back at the question that got me started on Tipping Points 25 years ago.
How in the 90s did New York become one of the safest cities in America?
In 1996, I wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine trying to explain this puzzle.
It was called The Tipping Point.
That article led to my first book, called The Tipping Point, where I offered a more complete explanation.
The success of The Tipping Point led to another book and another and another.
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.
And now I've written a sequel to that first book.
Did I mention that it's had in bookstores everywhere?
It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point.
And in that spirit, I've decided to go back and conduct an audit of my conclusions from 25 years ago.
To look at my 30 something self in the eye and ask, was I right?
Back in the 90s, I used to go to New York University's library all the time to look for ideas.
Boast. A big squat redstone building on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.
This was before Google, so I was my own search engine.
I'd wander the stacks for hours.
And one day I was on the fifth floor in the HM1 .A6 aisle, and I started leafing through the bank issues of the American Journal of Sociology from 1991.
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.
A choice of words no one would use today.
This is how it started.
The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos.
The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics, epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing.
The term is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt.
The word epidemic to Crane wasn't a metaphor, it was a literal description.
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.
Same rules, same patterns.
And when I read that first paragraph, I thought, oh my God, this is exactly what happened in New York City.
We had a real live epidemic of crime, and what is the hallmark of an epidemic?
A tipping point. The moment when everything changes, all at once.
That moment when I left my window open because I suddenly felt safe, was our tipping point.
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.
The police department's commitment to broken windows policing.
Broken windows was a theory that small crimes were invitations for large crimes.
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.
And so what do you do?
You don't let people get away with the little things.
It was taking the concept of an epidemic and applying it to crime.
Lawlessness wasn't random, 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.
If somebody urinates in public, the person is telling you, I got a big problem.
This is what broken windows theory is all about.
The biggest champion of this idea was Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City at the time.
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.
You have to pay attention to people urinating on the street, and you have to get people to stop urinating on the street.
That's moving toward civilization.
That's moving toward decency.
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, 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.
Giuliani was elected in 1993 and re -elected in 97 by a huge margin.
Under his watch, the city was revitalized.
People who had fled for the suburbs came back.
Huge parts of Brooklyn were gentrified.
Central Park was cleaned up.
I cannot tell you how gratifying it was to be a New Yorker in those years and finally get a mayor who said, enough.
You can't jump subway turnstiles and smoke dope on the corner and harass pedestrians.
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.
He was making a more extravagant claim.
That arresting the guy urinating on the street was the reason why the murder rate dropped.
And I believed him.
Malcolm Gladwell is about to publish a book.
Whenever it happens, huge things occur.
About ten years ago, the journalist John Ronson did a retrospective on the tipping point for a British program called The Culture Show.
And he talked to a public defender in the Bronx named Kate Rubin.
I would go around and I would talk to people in New York City, and the liberal people, progressive people, would say, oh, well, you know, we've had this miracle in New York.
And some people would say, oh, yeah, Malcolm Gladwell's idea of broken windows.
I didn't watch any of this at the time, even though Ronson interviewed me for the segment too.
But I found it while working on this episode.
And it made me realize that claims I made in the tipping point had far more reach than I ever imagined.
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 and his book, The Tipping Point.
I would never try to speak to what his intent was, but I think the impact that he had was to serve as basically a marketing force for this idea.
He truly popularized it.
So, once again, was I right?
If you asked someone to name a genius, virtually everyone would give you the same answer.
Albert Einstein, the genius of all geniuses, he's most famous for his general and special theories of relativity.
And even children today know his renowned equation, E equals mc squared.
And yet there's one thing that even the great Albert Einstein would have trouble understanding today, mattresses.
Think about it. There's so many styles, so many sizes, so many companies selling them, and so many seemingly good deals this time of year.
It's enough to make your brain hurt.
Fortunately, there's one simple thing you can do to understand everything you need to know about choosing a mattress.
Visit the Saatva blog.
It has entries like how to test a mattress, what makes a luxury mattress, best Cyber Monday deals, and even the best mattress for sex, plus loads of other buying guides.
Whatever question you have about mattresses, you'll find the answer at the Saatva blog.
It is, in a word, genius.
Visit the Saatva sleep blog at Saatva .com slash blog.
That's S -A -A -T -V -A slash blog.
For many of us, the holiday season means more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more of your personal information in more places you can't control.
It only takes one innocent mistake, even if it's not your mistake to expose you to identity theft.
Not to worry, LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss by yourself, even if you keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements.
If your identity is stolen, your own U .S.-based restoration specialist will fix it guaranteed.
The last thing you want to do this holiday season is face drained accounts, fraudulent loans, or other financial losses from identity theft all alone.
Gift yourself the peace of mind that comes with LifeLock and spend more time doing more of the holiday things you love.
Visit lifelock .com slash pushkin and save up to 40 percent your first year.
That's 40 percent off at lifelock .com slash pushkin.
LifeLock for the threats you can't control.
T -Mobile for Business recently teamed up with Malcolm Gladwell for a new episode of Revisionist History to talk about how 5G is enabling the use of AI to deliver transformative and sometimes lifesaving innovation.
Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here.
Today, I wanted to share a very special conversation I had recently.
Posted by my good friends at T -Mobile for Business about how AI is changing our world.
Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve.
When we think about emergency events and really at the majority of the world, the primary toolset that firefighters use is a radio to communicate their status to the outside operation.
Pretty reasonable to expect that people can become disoriented.
So when I realized that technology was important, was when I realized that many of the most vexing healthcare challenges that we saw in my own family, we realized that there was just significant lack of resources.
You know, from a T -Mobile for Business perspective, like how can we take this incredible best in the nation 5G network and how can we harness some very specific capabilities.
Listen to this episode of Revisionist History on the iHeartRadio app, available now.
On the afternoon of February 27, 2008, a young man named David Floyd left his apartment on Beach Avenue in the Bronx.
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.
I was leaving my apartment to actually go to school.
Heading to school, I had my book bag on, you know, everything.
That normal students do as they're going to school.
This is Floyd speaking in an interview with the civil rights group Race Forward.
The landlord was Floyd's godmother.
So Floyd went back inside to her apartment to get a ring of keys.
And as he and the tenant tried to figure out which key worked in the door, three plainclothes police officers suddenly emerged.
There had been reports of burglaries in the neighborhood, and here were two young men trying to get into a locked apartment.
We were stopped. We were frisked.
We were, of course, told to put our hands up to stay where we were.
This was how the police put broken windows into practice.
Don't let the little things pass you by.
Be aggressive. Check for weapons.
Drugs. Maybe you find them.
Maybe you don't. But if you do that enough times, then young men leave their guns and drugs at home.
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.
And, again, it was just the whole experience.
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, 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.
Floyd becomes the face of a massive class -action lawsuit, Floyd v.
the City of New York, challenging the NYPD's policy of stop and frisk.
And in 2013, Floyd wins.
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.
Yes, it still happens today, but not in the way that it did ten years ago, not even remotely close.
It's no exaggeration to say that this was one of the most consequential court cases in the city's history.
A lot of people at the time, and I think, you know, not without reason, said, well, this is going to compromise public safety.
This is Aaron Chalfin, who's part of a group of criminologists who have devoted themselves to understanding what exactly happened in New York.
The police are no longer going to be able to make a lot of stops and really show people that they're being proactive, so that might embolden more gun carrying, more violence, more homicide.
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, he means everyone.
City government, the police force, pundits of every variety, that's what I thought, too.
What everyone was saying, in effect, was this.
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, but being killed is a lot worse.
And since this is what's keeping the crime rate down, we don't have a choice.
That was the calculus.
Even the judge in the Floyd case begins her ruling by making the same point.
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.
This court's mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool.
She goes on, 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.
Even the people who hated broken windows thought that it worked.
But then, the very thing that absolutely no one expected to happen, happens.
Crime falls. We ended the stop and frisk in New York.
That went down by 90 % or 95%, depending on which numbers you look at.
And yet, we had this incredible, incredible 50 % decline in homicide.
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.
The Floyd decision was the perfect natural experiment for broken windows.
All you have to do is compare before with after.
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.
And you would have said, wow, great progress.
Let's just keep it up.
Let's keep up the good work.
Incredibly, by 2019, the year before the pandemic, homicides went down by 50 % in New York compared to 2010.
Between 2010 and 2019, New York is unique in that it had another great homicide decline, at a time when homicides were really flat nationally.
This is, hands down, one of the strangest and craziest urban transformations ever.
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.
Most of them, in all likelihood, young men of color.
62 ,000 young men currently walking around New York would be dead.
And by 2019, New York is almost as safe as Paris with respect to homicide rates.
New York is closer to Paris than it is to other US cities, even like Boston, which is another safe city, right?
It's incredible. 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?
Well, the violent crime rate in New York City after that second wave is half that of Miami.
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.
Or, here's another, J .D.
Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, tweets this in 2021.
Serious question. I have to go to New York soon, and I'm trying to figure out where to stay.
I've heard it's disgusting and violent there, but is it like Walking Dead season one or season four?
I know, I know. There's a whole cottage industry of unearthing crazy things J .D.
Vance once said, but Vance is from just outside Cincinnati.
The violent crime rate in Cincinnati, at the exact moment he wrote that tweet, was twice the violent crime rate in New York City.
Serious question, Senator.
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.
But I take rest. Back to Chalfen and the question at hand.
And so, you know, it does give you the sense that making lots and lots of these stops was not the key ingredient.
It does, doesn't it?
We conducted a natural experiment, and the results are in.
It wasn't broken windows.
It wasn't stop and frisk.
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.
We did that with Rudy Giuliani.
It was so successful.
At three o 'clock in the morning, sometimes I lie awake and I think, oh God, did he read the tipping point too?
T -Mobile for Business recently teamed up with Malcolm Gladwell for a new episode of Revisionist History to talk about how 5G is enabling the use of AI to deliver transformative and sometimes lifesaving innovation.
Hello, hello, Malcolm Gladwell here.
Today I wanted to share a very special conversation I had recently hosted by my good friends at T -Mobile for Business about how AI is changing our world.
Tell us about the problem you're trying to solve.
When we think about emergency events and really at the majority of the world, the primary tool set that firefighters use is a radio to communicate their status to the outside operation.
Pretty reasonable to expect that people can become disoriented.
So when I realized that technology was important, was when I realized that many of the most vexing healthcare challenges that we saw in my own family, we realized that there was just significant lack of resources.
You know, from a T -Mobile for Business perspective, like how can we take this incredible best in the nation 5G network and how can we harness some very specific capabilities.
Listen to this episode of Revisionist History on the iHeartRadio app, available now.
This year at Pushkin, we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on creating bespoke content.
Whether it's a custom episode in partnership with a brand or a creative ad campaign, we want to be sure that our content reaches people.
But the ad space is incredibly noisy.
How do we ensure our content reaches the right audience?
That's where LinkedIn ads come in.
With LinkedIn ads, you can precisely reach professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant as you will have direct access to a billion members, 130 million decision makers and 10 million C -level executives.
You can target your audience by job title, industry, company and more, ensuring your ads reach the right people for your business.
Start building the right relationships and reach your audience in a respectful environment with LinkedIn ads.
We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next LinkedIn ads campaign.
Go to linkedin .com slash malcom to claim your credit.
That's linkedin .com slash malcom.
Terms and conditions apply.
Picture this, you're in the garage, your favorite room in the house, and you're tuning up your engine with parts you found on eBay.
Every piece is locking perfectly into place.
You step back to admire your work, hands covered in grease, and because you're committed to driving that thing further than the odometer can even handle, you start thinking to yourself, you know what?
I could probably also use some new brakes, some shocks and struts.
This baby deserves a new air filter.
So you head right back to eBay.
You can find any part you need there, it's unreal.
From wipers and headlights to cold air intakes, exhaust systems, and even that turbo you've had on your mind.
eBay is the stocked garage of your dreams.
And you've got eBay guaranteed fit.
Because eBay knows DIY fixes can be major, and mods are always intense.
So you need to know those parts are guaranteed to fit every time.
Before you dive in, wrench first.
And then the off -gen see water apart, and it doesn't fit, send it back.
Simple as that. You know what you love more than your car itself is driving it.
You're serious when it comes to engine maintenance, and locked in when you're headed into a build.
And that's exactly why you start with eBay.
Minor fix or complete overhaul, you want to get your ride back on the road.
And you've got eBay guaranteed fit.
So eBay created my garage, where all you have to do is add your ride's info to get the exact parts that fit.
When you see that green check, you're a click away.
From that part, clicking perfectly into place.
So now that you know all that, imagine standing at that open garage door looking at that car you love more than anything.
Knowing that anything is possible.
Whether it's keeping it on the road forever, or turning it into something that's never been on the road before.
Because with eBay, your garage just got a whole lot bigger.
Get all the parts you need at prices you'll love.
Guaranteed to fit every time.
eBay. Things. People.
Love. I don't reread any of my books once I've written them.
Particularly ones from 25 years ago, like The Tipping Point.
I mean, why would I?
Do I want to wear the clothes I wore in the year 2000?
No, I don't. Do I even want to see pictures of myself from 2000?
Not particularly. So I didn't reread The Tipping Point until I made the decision last year to revisit my first book on its silver anniversary.
There were parts that I love.
It felt like rediscovering some lost friend.
Hush puppies. Six degrees of Lois Weisberg.
Paul Revere's Ride.
There were also parts that mystified me.
Did I really write an entire chapter on the children's TV show Blues Clues?
But the crime chapter was the only place where I said, I would write that so differently today.
Today, if I were rewriting, I'd begin with the work of a sociologist in Chicago named Andrew Papakristos.
People talk about gun violence as an epidemic or disease, and it is in many fronts, but really, I wanted to take it seriously.
I was like, oh, if it's an epidemic, is it a blood -borne pathogen, or is it an airborne pathogen?
And actually, thank God it's not an airborne pathogen, right?
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.
Papakristos took every single arrest over more than six years in Chicago.
So hundreds of thousands of arrests.
And he made something called a network map.
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? 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.
And if Malcolm then is arrested with Joe, there's a line connecting Malcolm to Joe.
Malcolm and Joe are one degree, or to use Papakristos' favorite term, one handshake apart.
Joe and Andy, two handshakes apart.
You do that for years and years of Chicago arrest data, and you get a truly enormous map.
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?
They come from homicide records.
They come from shooting files, police, public health.
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.
And what he found was the victims were already there and they were clustered together.
You just match the data and every place where there's a shooting, the victims bright red, for example.
And then what you see is that these bright red dots all linger together, all clumped together, right?
Like your kid took a handful of Christmas ornaments and like threw it to the tree and they're all in one spot.
It looks just like the social maps epidemiologists used to construct for the spread of HIV in the 1980s.
If someone in your social circle got infected with HIV, then your chances of becoming infected with HIV increased.
In Papa Cristo's maps, the risk of contagion extended three degrees.
If Malcolm gets shot, Andy is at risk and so is Joe.
And so are any people Andy and Joe were arrested with.
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.
So hold on. This is crucial.
So I've got my social network map and I'm overlaying, I'm sticking in all of the shootings into the...
And I've noticed that the shootings are clustering.
So we have this triangle of Joe, Andy, Malcolm.
And Malcolm gets shot.
And so once we observe that Malcolm gets shot, what you're saying is that the likelihood of someone connected to me also getting shot increases.
Skyrockets, absolutely.
And you're saying that the risk is skyrocketing between one and three degrees?
That's where risk is the highest.
Once you get past kind of three degrees, it really goes down and levels off.
When you observed this, did this surprise you?
How concentrated it was surprised me?
When you look at these numbers, even when you look at the larger co -offending network, you're talking about five to 6 % of a neighborhood's population.
But when you start looking at where the violence concentrates, it's less than a percent.
You're talking about, on the west side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we were working is about 50 ,000 people.
You're talking about 400 individuals.
400 individuals on the entire west side of Chicago.
The crime problem on the west side of Chicago isn't being driven by everyone.
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.
The west side of Chicago is not a dangerous place.
Highly specific networks of people within the west side of Chicago are dangerous places.
The same pattern holds true in New York City.
Why wasn't stop -and -frisk an effective strategy in the end?
Because it assumed that violent crime was something embedded within an entire community.
And it's not. Even the NYPD's own numbers said so.
In one eight -year span, New York City police officers frisked 2 .3 million people and found weapons in 1 .5 % of those stops.
They were looking for needles in haystacks.
Why would that be an effective crime -fighting strategy?
Aaron Chalfen, 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.
They switched from the kind of indiscriminate policing found in stop -and -frisk to precision policing.
They started focusing on hot spots, deploying police to the specific places where crime was the worst.
More targeted investigations, more thinking about who are the shooters, who are the major players in neighborhoods that are driving the shootings, what can we do to identify those people, incapacitate those people.
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.
It's a couple thousand people in a city of eight and a half million.
And making lots of low -level arrests, maybe you'll find some more guns and things like that, but it's probably a much better use of resources to focus, focus, focus, focus on the drivers of violence.
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%.
Thirty percent. Fighting an epidemic means focusing on the few, not the many.
And by the way, who made this argument as loudly as anyone?
I did, in the tipping point.
I called it the law of the few, and it took up a third of the book.
When it comes to epidemics, I wrote, a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.
I talked about how this principle plays out in outbreaks of infectious disease, in the spread of fashion trends, in word of mouth.
I described in great detail the kinds of people who make those special few, on and on.
But then, when it came to crime, I suddenly forgot all about the laws of 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.
I was wrong. I'm sorry.
So, I don't know, feel free to ask us any questions.
There's one more thing I would do if I were rewriting the crime chapter.
I would talk about Philadelphia and about a day I spent recently driving around the city with a guy named Keith Green.
So, where are we headed?
So, we're going to be driving in, like, the West Philadelphia area.
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.
And for two hours, we talked about vacant lots.
30 ,000 vacant parts?
Yeah. There's over 30 ,000 vacant portions in the city of Louisville.
There were blocks we drove past that had two or even three vacant lots.
Every block seemed to have at least one.
In the past, they were overgrown with weeds, covered in trash, home to rats and raccoons and possums.
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.
And we started seeing a dramatic change.
Lots were being maintained.
People started, people started using the blocks and...
Well, you said people started using them.
How were they used to them?
Well, people, kids were playing football.
People were having barbecues on the sites, horses raising on vacant lots.
In the history of the program, they've cleaned up 17 ,000 lots.
Charles Brandis, the pioneer of the work, let us study to see if cleaning up vacant lots lowered the homicide rate.
When you fixed up a neighborhood, what happened to gun violence?
It went down 29%. Now, what's the best way to describe this kind of anti -crime intervention?
It's broken windows.
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.
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.
Original history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence with Ben Dedaf -Haffrey and Lucy Sullivan.
Our editor is Karen Schakurgy, fact -checking by Sam Russack.
Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Echo Mountain, engineering by Sarah Bruguera and Nina Bird Lawrence.
Production support from Lou Clamond.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Special thanks to Sarah Nix and, as always, El Jefe, gotta come.
I'm Martin Glabong.
How are you? Good. Has someone been walking around outside your house?
Don't rely on revisionist history from your neighbors.
Try myQ Home Monitoring.
MyQ is a revolutionary approach to home security that goes beyond monitoring.
With myQ, you get safe access control to the most sacred space of all.
Your home. Take the myQ Smart Garage Video Keypad.
It lets you create unique PIN codes for your kids, dog walkers, family members, and more, offering a safer and easier alternative to keys.
Whether you're home or traveling, myQ keeps your loved ones' belongings and home safe.
Use code GLADWELL for 10 % off at myq .com.
For many of us, the holiday season means more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more of your personal information in more places you can't control.
It only takes one innocent mistake, even if it's not your mistake to expose you to identity theft.
Not to worry, LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points every second and alerts you to threats you could miss by yourself, even if you keep an eye on your bank and credit card statements.
If your identity is stolen, your own U .S.-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed.
The last thing you want to do this holiday season is face drained accounts, fraudulent loans, or other financial losses from identity theft all alone.
Gift yourself the peace of mind that comes with LifeLock and spend more time doing more of the holiday things you love.
Visit lifelock .com slash pushkin and save up to 40 % your first year.
That's 40 % off at lifelock .com slash pushkin.
LifeLock for the threats you can't control.
The holiday season is back, which means it's a time for giving.
Subaru and its retailers believe in giving back to those who need it most.
For the past 17 years, Subaru has made the act of buying a Subaru during the holiday season an act of love.
When you purchase or lease a new Subaru during the Subaru Share the Love event, Subaru and its retailers donate a minimum of $300 to charity.
By the end of this year's event, Subaru and its retailers will have donated nearly $320 million to national and hometown charities.
To learn more, go to Subaru .com slash share.
Subaru, more than a car company.
