The Tipping Point I Got Wrong | Malcolm Gladwell | TED

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TED


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00:04
I want to tell you a story
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about when I moved to New York City in 1993.
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I was 30 years old,
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and I was moving to what was known
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as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States.
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And every night,
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I would go out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night,
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and at the end of every night we would have a little conference
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and we would pool all of our money,
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and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home,
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because you couldn't go home on the subway by yourself
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and you couldn't walk home,
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and if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself
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at one o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night.
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That's what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York.
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I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village,
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and my bedroom faced the fire escape.
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And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning,
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I had to keep my window closed
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because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape
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into my apartment.
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And then one day I woke up and I realized that I wasn't scared anymore.
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And I kept the window open.
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And I realized that when I was going out with my friends,
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we weren't having that conference at the end of the evening anymore.
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We were just going home.
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This city that I had thought, we all thought,
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was one of the scariest in the United States
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wasn't scary anymore.
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And I remember at the time
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I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation.
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I couldn't understand it.
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It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people,
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same buildings, same institutions.
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Only nobody was murdering each other anymore.
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And I would call up criminologists
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and I would ask them, "What's your explanation?"
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And no one could give me a good explanation.
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And I remember one day -- I used to go to the NYU,
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New York University has a library called Bobst Library.
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I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas.
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And I remember one day I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section,
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HM-1A6,
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and I was reading back issues, yes, I was,
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back issues of the American Journal of Sociology,
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and I ran across an article from 1991
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by a guy named Jonathan Crane
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called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life.”
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And I'm going to read to you how it began.
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"The word epidemic is commonly used to describe
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the high incidence of social problems in ghettos.
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The news is filled with feature stories on crack epidemics,
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epidemics of gang violence, and epidemics of teenage childbearing.
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The term is used loosely in popular parlance,
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but turns out to be remarkably apt."
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And what Crane was saying
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is that if you look at these kinds of social problems,
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they behave, they come and they go,
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they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do.
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He was saying that that term epidemic is not a metaphor.
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It's a literal description.
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And I'll never forget when I read that little paragraph
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and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library,
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and, you know, it's a library.
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It's got that hush and that musty smell of books.
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And I'm reading this crazy article from 1991,
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and I remember thinking to myself,
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oh my God, that's what happened in New York.
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We had an epidemic of crime.
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And what is the hallmark of an epidemic?
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It's the tipping point.
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It's the moment when the epidemic order goes up all at once
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or crashes all at once.
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And so I wrote an article for "The New Yorker" magazine
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called "The Tipping Point,"
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which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York.
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And then I, because of that article,
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got a contract for a book called "The Tipping Point,"
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which did very well.
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And that book led to another book and another book and another book.
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And I am standing here today
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because of that moment in the library 25 years ago.
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(Applause)
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So "The Tipping Point," my first book, was about all kinds of things.
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I talked about Hush Puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking.
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But at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York.
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And in that chapter
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I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory,
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which was a very famous idea
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that had been pioneered by two criminologists
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called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s,
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very influential article,
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in which they argued that very small things in the environment
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can be triggers for larger crimes.
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That essentially small instances of disorder
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are tipping points for very serious things
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like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime.
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It was an epidemic theory of crime,
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and the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously.
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And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop
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was to say what this argument means
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is that we can't be passive anymore.
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We have to be proactive.
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We have to go out there
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and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile
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or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk,
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we've got to stop them.
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And if we see a young man walking down the street
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and he looks a little bit suspicious,
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we've got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons.
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That's how the NYPD interpreted
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the broken windows theory in New York.
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And my chapter was how millions of people around the world
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came to understand the crime drop in New York,
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that it was all broken windows.
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And here's the thing that I have come to understand
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about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York.
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I was wrong.
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I didn't understand this until quite recently,
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when I went back
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and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, "The Tipping Point,"
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that I would write a sequel.
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It's called "Revenge of the Tipping Point,"
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and I went back and, for the first time in a quarter century,
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I reread my original book.
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I'm not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it,
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and it was a uniquely complicated experience.
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It was like looking back at your high school yearbook.
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You know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of,
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"Wow, I look young,"
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and also, "Wow, I really wore that?"
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It was like that.
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And what I realized is that in the intervening years
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since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York,
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the theory of broken windows had been tested.
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There was a kind of classic natural experiment
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to see whether that theory worked.
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And the natural experiment was a court case,
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maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history
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called Floyd v City of New York.
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It involved a young man named David Floyd,
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who had been stopped a number of occasions by the NYPD
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and was the face of a class action lawsuit
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that said the practice of stopping young men,
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largely young men of color,
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just because they look a little suspicious to police
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is not constitutional.
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You can't do that, right?
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And to everyone's surprise,
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the Floyd lawsuit goes before a federal judge.
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And the federal judge rules in David Floyd's favor.
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And overnight, the broken windows era
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in New York City policing ends.
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And the NYPD goes from --
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In 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right.
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And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013,
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that number drops to less than 50,000.
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So this is the perfect natural experiment.
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You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd.
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Before Floyd,
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the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can.
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And after Floyd that goes away.
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They can't do that anymore, right?
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This is the perfect test case
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for whether you think that's why crime fell in New York.
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And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing,
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then your expectation has to be that after the Floyd case,
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when broken windows goes away,
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crime is going to go back up, right?
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And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case,
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everybody thought crime was going to go back up.
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The NYPD thought that,
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the city government thought that,
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the pundits thought that,
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even the judge who wrote the opinion
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saying that stop and frisk was unconstitutional,
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said in her opinion that she strongly suspected
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that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up.
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I thought crime was going to go back up, right?
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All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows.
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We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men,
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but what choice do we have, right?
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You know, if the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed,
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maybe we're better off with the former than the latter.
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This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right?
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So what happens after the Floyd case?
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Stop and frisk goes away
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and crime falls.
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In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second,
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even more miraculous decline, right?
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And what's interesting about this is, you know,
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when the first crime declined in the 1990s,
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you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States,
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not quite as steep as New York,
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but crime goes down everywhere.
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And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus.
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But New York gets rid of broken windows,
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and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again.
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To the point by 2019
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that New York City is as safe as Paris,
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which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime.
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And what we realize in that second crime decline
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is that it wasn't broken windows.
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It's not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall.
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Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful
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and selective application of police authority
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that causes crime to fall.
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Now, there's a couple of really puzzling things here.
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One is that people don't seem to have internalized the fact
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that New York underwent this second,
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even more dramatic crime fall.
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People still act like it's the year 2000
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when it comes to making sense of New York.
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You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys
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have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years.
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And they all say,
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when they're packing up their offices in New York,
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"We can't take the crime anymore."
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Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City.
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If they were really concerned about violent crime,
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they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered
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and move to the Bronx,
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where it is a whole lot safer.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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The other even more important thing, though,
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is that people act like stop and frisk actually worked.
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No one seems to have internalized the lesson
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of the great Floyd case natural experiment.
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If you listen to people -- I'm not going to name their names,
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but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office,
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they will say things like,
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"It's time to bring back stop and frisk and broken windows policing.
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It worked so well in New York."
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They're acting as if we didn't have
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that great moment of understanding in 2013.
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And for that, for that misunderstanding,
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I think I bear some of the blame.
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I was the one who wrote this book
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saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime.
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Now, how do I make sense of my mistake?
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Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses.
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You know, I can say I'm not a fortune teller.
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I didn't know that David Floyd was going to come along
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10 years after I wrote my book
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and give us this great test case in broken windows policing.
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You know, I could say that, you know,
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I was just writing what everybody believed back in the 1996 and 1997.
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But I don't think those excuses hold any water whatsoever.
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I think that journalists,
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writers need to be held to a higher standard, right?
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I wrote --
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(Applause)
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I told a story about how crime fell in New York,
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and I told the story like the story was over.
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And like I knew what the answer to this story was.
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And it wasn't over
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and I didn't know the answer, right?
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I wrote, "I know this is what happened,"
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and what I should have said is
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"This is what I believe happened now," right?
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And those words "I believe happened now"
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have to be at the center of any understanding
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of how the world works.
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We have to acknowledge that we are representing
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the position of this very moment,
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and that that position could change if the facts change, right?
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The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages,
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that will forever explain the way things are,
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but that's not possible,
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and no one should ever try.
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That was my mistake.
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And I'm sorry.
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(Applause)
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Monique Ruff-Bell: That was some mea culpa, Malcolm.
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And so I have a couple of questions for you.
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If you don't mind, I want to take you back 25 years
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to that version of yourself.
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And so you talked about how there was a sense of anxiety and fear
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about what crime was happening around that time.
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I grew up in New York around that time, 25 years ago.
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Being in my early 20s
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and having these experiences with my friends
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where they experienced unfortunate instances with stop and frisk,
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so much so they had anxiety, hurt and fear.
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And so when you were thinking about this and the support,
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did you ever think about what if they got it wrong,
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what if it was wrong
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and innocent people were going to have to experience this?
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What were your thoughts about that back then?
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Malcolm Gladwell: Well, I wasn't thinking about that.
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I mean, it's funny,
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I went, when I was sort of trying to figure out
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what I did wrong in that chapter,
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I went down to Philadelphia
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and I went and met with a group of doctors,
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all of them Black, at University of Pennsylvania,
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because they had done some really interesting work on crime,
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and I wanted to get their sense.
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And one of the doctors had read that chapter on crime.
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And she said, "You know, when I read your chapter on crime,
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you were exceedingly interested --"
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I opened that chapter with the famous story of Bernie Goetz,
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the guy who shot the kids on the subway.
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And she said, "Go back and reread the way you wrote that story,
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and you'll realize you spent a lot of time talking about the fear of the white guy,
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and you have two sentences on the kids.
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And the kids were every bit as damaged as the guy who shot them."
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And I realized, I think I was just in --
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like so many of us, I was in a little bubble,
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and I was seeing the problem from one perspective.
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And like many, you know,
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middle- and upper-class professionals in Manhattan,
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I wasn't thinking about the world
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through the eyes of someone in the Bronx or Brooklyn.
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And some of that has to do with youth,
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and some of that has to do with foolishness.
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And I'd like to think I'm a little wiser now.
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MRB: Right. So you had a quote --
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(Applause)
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"I told this story like I knew the answer and it wasn't over."
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How has that insight affected your thinking and your writing now?
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MG: I've tried to be, I mean, I realize when I look back at my younger self,
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I was way too certain about the ideas that I was putting forth.
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And I thought that if you wanted to win over an audience,
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you had to communicate certainty.
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And now I realize that's actually backwards,
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that you're more willing,
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you're more capable of winning over an audience
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when you admit to the uncertainty and the fragility of your position.
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People want that.
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They like that,
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they appreciate that spirit far more.
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And people are much more likely, I think,
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to be suspicious of someone who seems falsely certain.
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MRB: Well, we appreciate you bringing your thoughts to this platform
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and sharing that.
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And so thank you to Malcolm Gladwell for doing that.
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(Applause)
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