02. TALKING TO STRANGERS by Malcolm Gladwell (1)

Chapter Eleven: Case Study: The Kansas City

Experiments

“Many of us…knew much about”: George Kelling et al., “The Kansas
City Preventive Patrol Experiment: A Summary Report” (Washington, DC:
Police Foundation, 1974), p. v, https://www.policefoundation.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/Kelling-et-al.-1974-THE-KANSAS-CITY-
PREVENTIVE-PATROL-EXPERIMENT.pdf.
“This country’s social problems…progress is very small”: Alan M.
Webber, “Crime and Management: An Interview with New York City
Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown,” Harvard Business Review 63, issue 3
(May–June 1991): 100, https://hbr.org/1991/05/crime-and-management-an-
interview-with-new-york-city-police-commissioner-lee-p-brown.
“A four-year-old boy…sickening, outrageous”: George Bush, “Remarks
to the Law Enforcement Community in Kansas City, Missouri,” January 23,
1990, in George Bush: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States,
January 1–June 30, 1990, p. 74.
The description of Kansas City’s Patrol District 144 is from Lawrence
Sherman et al., “The Kansas City Gun Experiment,” National Institute of
Justice, January 1995, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/kang.pdf; new
strategy halves gun crimes in District 144, Exhibit 4, p. 6; statistics for 200
days of Gun Experiment, p. 6.
“The police went…‘would ever come’”: James Shaw, “Community
Policing Against Crime: Violence and Firearms” (PhD dissertation,
University of Maryland College Park, 1994), p. 118; “Not unlike
residents…can’t see anything,” pp. 122–23; statistics for seven months of
Kansas City Gun Experiment, p. 136; “Officers who recovered…‘will be
the night!’” pp. 155–56.
“When you stop…to do a frisk” (in footnote): Erik Eckholm, “Who’s Got
a Gun? Clues Are in the Body Language,” New York Times, May 26, 1992,
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/26/nyregion/who-s-got-a-gun-clues-are-
in-the-body-language.html.

“There are moving violations…personal judgment”: David A. Harris,
“Driving While Black and All Other Traffic Offenses: The Supreme Court
and Pretextual Traffic Stops,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
87, issue 2 (1997): 558,
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=6913&context=jclc.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the officer: Heien v. North
Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 534 (2014),
https://www.leagle.com/decision/insco20141215960.
“I don’t know why…too simplistic for us”: Fox Butterfield, “A Way to
Get the Gunmen: Get the Guns,” New York Times, November 20, 1994,
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/20/us/a-way-to-get-the-gunmen-get-the-
guns.html.
In 1991 the New York Times: Don Terry, “Kansas City Police Go After
Own ‘Bad Boys,’” September 10, 1991,
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/10/us/kansas-city-police-go-after-own-
bad-boys.html.
For the rise in North Carolina traffic stops in the early 2000s, see Deborah
L. Weisel, “Racial and Ethnic Disparity in Traffic Stops in North Carolina,
2000–2001: Examining the Evidence,” North Carolina Association of
Chiefs of Police, 2014, http://ncracialjustice.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/Dr.-Weisel-Report.compressed.pdf.
One of Weisburd’s former students (in footnote): E. Macbeth and B.
Ariel, “Place-based Statistical Versus Clinical Predictions of Crime Hot
Spots and Harm Locations in Northern Ireland,” Justice Quarterly (August
2017): 22, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07418825.2017.1360379.

Chapter Twelve: Sandra Bland

“Dude, issue the…pulling her out?”: Nick Wing and Matt Ferner, “Here’s
What Cops and Their Supporters Are Saying about the Sandra Bland Arrest
Video,” HuffPost, July 22, 2015.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/cops-sandra-bland-
video_us_55afd6d3e4b07af29d57291d.
“An employee of the Department…extreme provocation”: Texas
Department of Public Safety General Manual, Chapter 5, Section 05.17.00,
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3146604-
DPSGeneralManual.html.
TSA haystack searches: DHS Press Office, “DHS Releases 2014 Travel and
Trade Statistics,” January 23, 2015,
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2015/01/23/dhs-releases-2014-travel-and-trade-
statistics, accessed March 2019.
“go beyond the ticket” and other Remsberg quotes: Charles Remsberg,
Tactics for Criminal Patrol: Vehicle Stops, Drug Discovery, and Officer
Survival (Northbrook, Ill.: Calibre Press, 1995), pp. 27, 50, 68. Also from
this source: “If you’re accused…the defendant’s case,” p. 70; “concealed
interrogation” and “As you silently analyze…incriminating evidence,” p.
166; and “Too many cops…what the suspect does,” pp. 83–84.
the driver was “stiff and nervous”: Heien v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct.
534 (2014), https://www.leagle.com/decision/insco20141215960.
When he approached the stopped car: Gary Webb, “DWB: Driving
While Black,” Esquire 131, issue 4 (April 1999): 118–27. Webb’s article
was really the first to document the growing use of Kansas City techniques.
It is superb—and chilling. At one point he sits down with a Florida officer
named Vogel who was a particularly aggressive proponent of proactive
searches. Vogel was proud of his sixth sense in spotting potential criminals.
Webb writes: Other indicators, [Vogel] said, are adornments like “earrings,
nose rings, eyelid rings. Those are things that are common denominators
with people who are involved with crimes. Tattoos would go along with
that,” particularly tattoos of “marijuana leaves.” Bumper stickers also give

him a feel for the soul of the driver. “Deadhead stickers are things that
almost—the people in those kinds of vehicles are almost always associated
with drugs.”
Give me a break.
a day from Brian Encinia’s career: Los Angeles Times Staff, “Citations by
Trooper Brian Encinia,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2015,
http://spreadsheets.latimes.com/citations-trooper-brian-encinia/.
“I was checking…yes sir” (and all Encinia/Renfro Q&A quotes from
Brian Encinia): Interview with Cleve Renfro (Texas Department of Public
Safety Lieutenant), October 8, 2015. Audio obtained by KXAN-TV of
Austin, https://www.kxan.com/news/investigations/trooper-fired-for-sandra-
bland-arrest-my-safety-was-in-jeopardy/1052813612, accessed April 2019.
“An operator shall use the signal…”: Texas Transportation Code, Title 7:
Vehicles and Traffic, Subtitle C: Rules of the Road, Chapter 545: Operation
and Movement of Vehicles, Sections 104, 105, p. 16,
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/?link=TN.
“In Western culture…the investigator”: John E. Reid et al., Essentials of
the Reid Technique: Criminal Investigation and Confessions (Sudbury,
Mass.: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2005), p. 98.
The Reid Manual is full of assertions about lie detection that are, to put it
plainly, nonsense. The Reid “system” teaches interrogators, for example, to
be alert to nonverbal cues, which have the effect of “amplifying” what a
suspect says. By nonverbal cues, they mean posture and hand gestures and
the like. As the manual states, on page 93, “hence the commonplace
expressions, ‘actions speak louder than words’ and ‘look me straight in the
eye if you’re telling the truth.’”
If you stacked all the scientific papers refuting this claim on top of each
other, they would reach the moon. Here is one of my favorite critiques,
from Richard R. Johnson, a criminologist at the University of Toledo.
(Johnson’s research can be found here: “Race and Police Reliance on
Suspicious Non-Verbal Cues,” Policing: An International Journal of Police
Strategies and Management 30, no. 2 [June 2007]: 277–90.)
Johnson went back and looked at old episodes of the half-hour television
documentary Cops. You may remember this show: it began in 1989 and still
airs today, making it one of the longest-running programs on American
television. A camera crew rides along with a police officer and films—

cinema verité–style, without narration—whatever happens on that particular
shift. (It’s strangely riveting, although it’s easy to forget that what you see
on a typical Cops show is heavily edited; police officers simply aren’t that
busy.) Johnson watched 480 old episodes of Cops. He was looking for
interactions between a police officer and a citizen in which the citizen was
on camera, from the waist up, for at least sixty seconds. He found 452
segments like that. Then he divided the segments into “innocent” and
“suspect,” based on the information provided in the show. Was this the
mother, child in arms, whose home had just been burglarized? Or was this
the teenager who ran the instant he saw the police, and was found with the
woman’s jewelry in his backpack? Then he subdivided his collection of
clips one more time by race—white, black, and Hispanic.
It should be pointed out that there is a small mountain of research on so-
called demeanor cues. But Johnson’s study is special because it was not
done in a college psychology lab. It’s real life.
Let’s start with what many police officers believe to be the most important
demeanor cue—eye contact. The Reid Technique’s training manual—the
most widely used guide for law enforcement—is clear on this: People who
are lying look away. Truthful suspects maintain eye contact.
So what does Johnson find when he examines this idea in the light of real-
world interactions on Cops? Are the innocent more likely to look an officer
in the eye than the guilty?
Johnson calculated the total number of seconds of eye contact per minute of
footage.
Black people who are perfectly innocent are actually less likely to look
police in the eye than black people who are suspected of a crime. Now let’s
look at white people:
The first thing to note here is that Caucasians on Cops, as a group, look
police officers in the eye far more than black people do. In fact, whites
suspected of a crime spend the most time, of all four groups, looking the
police officer in the eye. If you use gaze aversion as a cue to interpret
someone’s credibility, you’re going to be a lot more suspicious of black
people than white people. Far worse, you’re going to be most suspicious of
all of perfectly innocent African Americans.
OK. Let’s look at facial expressions. The Reid Technique teaches police
officers that facial expressions can provide meaningful clues to a suspect’s

inner state. Have I been found out? Am I about to be found out? As the
manual states:
“The mere fact of variation of expressions may be suggestive of
untruthfulness, where the lack of such a variation may be suggestive of
truthfulness” (Reid et al., Essentials of the Reid Technique, p. 99).
This is a version of the common idea that when someone is guilty or being
evasive, they smile a lot. Surveys of police officers show that people in law
enforcement are very attuned to “frequent smiling” as a sign that something
is awry. To use the language of poker, it’s considered a “tell.” Here is
Johnson’s Cops analysis of smiling. This time I’ve included Johnson’s data
on Hispanics as well.
Once again, the rule of thumb relied upon by many police officers has it
exactly backward. The people who smile the most are innocent African
Americans. The people who smile the least are Hispanic suspects. The only
reasonable conclusion from that chart is that black people, when they are on
Cops, smile a lot, white people smile a little bit less, and Hispanic people
don’t smile much at all.
Let’s do one more: halting speech. If someone is trying to explain
themselves, and they keep nervously stopping and starting, we take that as a
sign of evasion or deception. Right? So what does the Cops data say?
The African American suspects speak fluidly. The innocent Hispanics are
hemming and hawing nervously. If you do what the Reid manual says,
you’ll lock up innocent Hispanics and be fooled by guilty African
Americans.
Does this mean we simply need a better, more specific set of interpretation
rules for police officers? Watch out for the smooth-talking black guy. White
people who don’t smile are up to no good. No! That doesn’t work either,
because of the enormous variability Johnson uncovered.
Take a look, for example, at the range of responses that make up those
averages. Eye contact for innocent African Americans ranged from 7
seconds to 49.41 seconds. There are innocent black people who almost
never make eye contact, and innocent black people who make lots of eye
contact. The range for smiling for innocent black people is 0 to 13.34.
There are innocent black people who smile a lot—13.34 times per minute.
But there are also innocent black people who never smile. The “speech
disturbances” range for innocent Caucasians is .64 to 9.68. There are white

people who hem and haw like nervous teenagers, and white people who
speak like Winston Churchill. The only real lesson is that people are all
over the map when it comes to when and how much they smile, or look you
in the eye, or how fluidly they talk. And to try to find any kind of pattern in
that behavior is impossible.
Wait! I forgot one of the Reid Technique’s big clues: watch the hands!

During a response, a subject’s hands can do one of three things. They can
remain uninvolved and unmoving, which can be a sign that the subject lacks
confidence in his verbal response or is simply not talking about something
perceived as very significant. The hands can move away from the body and
gesture, which is called illustrating. Finally, the hands can come in contact
with some part of the body, which is referred to as adaptor behavior. (Reid
et al., p. 96).

What follows is an explanation of how hand movements do and don’t
contribute to our understanding of truthfulness. The Reid Technique
assumes there is a pattern to hand movement. Really? Here are Johnson’s
hand-movement data. This time I’ve included the range of responses—the
shortest recorded response in the second column and the longest in the third
column. Take a look:

Hand gestures per minute

Average time Shortest time Longest time
(in seconds) (in seconds) (in seconds)
00.00 58.46
African 28.39
00.00 56.00
American/innocent
00.00 58.00
African 23.98 31.00 56.00

American/suspect

Caucasian/innocent 07.89

Caucasian/suspect 17.43

Hispanic/innocent Average time Shortest time Longest time
Hispanic/suspect (in seconds) (in seconds) (in seconds)
Entire sample
22.14 23.00 57.00

31.41 13.43 53.33

23.68 00.00 58.46

If you can make sense of those numbers, you’re smarter than I am.
By the way, the weirdest of all Reid obsessions is this: “Changes in [foot]
bouncing behavior—whether it be a sudden start or stop—that occur in
conjunction with a verbal response can be a significant indication of
deception.…The feet are also involved in significant posture changes called
‘shifts in the chair.’ With this behavior, the subject plants his feet and
literally pushes his body up, slightly off the chair to assume a new posture.
Gross shifts in the chair of this nature are good indications of deception
when they immediately precede or occur in conjunction with a subject’s
verbal response” (Reid et al., Essentials of the Reid Technique, p. 98).
What? I happen to be someone who is constantly, nervously jiggling his
foot. I do it when I’m excited, or when I’m on a roll, or when I’m a little
jumpy after too much coffee. What on earth does this have to do with
whether or not I’m telling the truth?
One more shot at the Reid Technique. Let me just quote from Brian
Gallini’s devastating law-review article, “Police ‘Science’ in the
Interrogation Room: Seventy Years of Pseudo-Psychological Interrogation
Methods to Obtain Inadmissible Confessions,” Hastings Law Journal 61
(2010): 529. The passage is a description of a study done by Saul Kassin
and Christina Fong: “‘I’m Innocent!’: Effects of Training on Judgments of
Truth and Deception in the Interrogation Room,” Law and Human Behavior
23, no. 5 (October 1999): 499–516.

More substantively, Professors Kassin and Fong videotaped one group of
participants interrogated pursuant to the Reid method to determine whether
they committed a mock crime. A second group of participants, some of
whom were trained in the Reid method, watched the videos and opined on

(1) the guilt or innocence of each subject, and (2) their confidence in their
assessment of guilt or innocence. The results were as predictable as they
were disturbing: First, judgment accuracy rates were comparable to chance.
Second, “training in the use of verbal and nonverbal cues did not improve
judgment accuracy.” In an effort to explain why training did nothing to
improve judgment accuracy, the authors stated pointedly, “There is no solid
empirical basis for the proposition that these same cues reliably
discriminate between criminals and innocent persons accused of crimes
they did not commit.”

Finally, the authors reported, participants were overconfident in their
assessment of guilt or innocence. In the authors’ words:

[W]e found among both trained and naive participants that judgment
accuracy and confidence were not significantly correlated, regardless of
whether the measure of confidence was taken before, after, or during the
task. Further demonstrating the meta-cognitive problems in this domain
is that confidence ratings were positively correlated with the number of
reasons (including Reid-based reasons) articulated as a basis for
judgments, another dependent measure not predictive of accuracy.
Training had a particularly adverse effect in this regard. Specifically,
those who were trained compared to those in the naive condition were
less accurate in their judgments of truth and deception. Yet they were
more self-confident and more articulate about the reasons for their often
erroneous judgments.

“I apologize…these last couple of weeks…”: “Sandy Speaks—March 1,
2015,” YouTube, posted July 24, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=WJw3_cvrcwE, accessed March 22, 2019.
DOJ report on Ferguson, Missouri: United States Department of Justice
Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,”
March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-
releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.
African Americans are considerably more likely to be subjected to
traffic stops (in footnote): Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Moody, and

Donald Haider-Markel, How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
North Carolina State Highway Patrol statistics: “Open Data Policing: North
Carolina,” accessed March 2019, https://opendatapolicing.com/nc/,
accessed March 2019.
FM 1098 is not “a high-crime, high-drug area”: This crime map reflects
Waller County data from 2013 to 2017 collected by Baltimore-based crime
data aggregator SpotCrime, which sources data from local police
departments.

More on the dilemmas caused by haystack searches: Middle-aged women,
in most countries, are encouraged to get regular mammograms. But breast
cancer is really rare. Just under 0.5 percent of women who get a
mammogram actually have the disease. Looking for breast cancer is
therefore a haystack search.
Epidemiologist Joann Elmore recently calculated just what this means.
Imagine, she said, that a group of radiologists gave a mammogram to
100,000 women. Statistically, there should be 480 cancers in that 100,000.

How many will the radiologists find? 398. Believe me, for a task as difficult
as reading a mammogram, that’s pretty good.
But in the course of making those correct diagnoses, the radiologists will
also run up 8,957 false positives. That’s how haystack searches work: if you
want to find that rare gun in someone’s luggage, you’re going to end up
flagging lots of hair dryers.
Now suppose you want to do a better job of spotting cancers. Maybe getting
398 out of 480 cases isn’t good enough. Elmore did a second calculation,
this time using a group of radiologists with an extra level of elite training.
These physicians were very alert, and very suspicious—the medical
equivalent of Brian Encinia. They correctly identified 422 of the 480 cases
—much better! But how many false positives did that extra suspicion yield?
10,947. An extra two thousand perfectly healthy women were flagged for a
disease they didn’t have, and potentially exposed to treatment they didn’t
need. The highly trained radiologists were better at finding tumors not
because they were more accurate. They were better because they were more
suspicious. They saw cancer everywhere.
If you are a woman, which group of radiologists would you rather have read
your mammogram? Are you more concerned about the tiny chance that
you’ll have a cancer that will be missed, or the much larger probability that
you’ll be diagnosed with a cancer you don’t have? There’s no right or
wrong answer to that question. Different people have different attitudes
toward their own health, and toward risk. What’s crucial, though, is the
lesson those numbers teach us about haystack searches. Looking for
something rare comes with a price.

The author is grateful for permission to use the following copyrighted material:

Photos: Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles. Reprinted by permission of Paul Ekman, Ph.D./
Paul Ekman Group, LLC.

Photo: “Anger” from Job van der Schalk et al., “Moving Faces, Looking Places: Validation of
the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set (ADFES),” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 912.
Reproduced by permission of author.

Images: “Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure,” “Sample ROCF immediate recall drawings from the
Pre/Post-stress groups,” “Sample ROCF immediate recall drawings from the Stress Group,”
from Charles A. Morgan et al., “Stress-Induced Deficits in Working Memory and Visuo-
Constructive Abilities in Special Operations Soldiers,” Biological Psychiatry 60, no. 7 (2006):
722–29. Reproduced by permission of Dr. Charles A. Morgan III and Elsevier.

Excerpts from “Edge” [6l.], “Lady Lazarus” [2], “A Birthday Present” [6] from The Collected
Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the
Estate of Sylvia Plath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by
permission of Harper Collins.

Excerpt from “The Addict,” by Anne Sexton from Live or Die (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1966). Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Anne Sexton.

Graphs: “Relation between gas suicides in England and Wales and CO content of domestic gas,
1960–77”; “Crude suicide rates (per 1 million population) for England and Wales and the United
States, 1900–84”; “Suicides in England and Wales by domestic gas and other methods for
females twenty-five to forty-four years old” from Ronald V. Clarke and Pat Mayhew, “The
British Gas Suicide Story and Its Criminological Implications,” Crime and Justice 10 (1988):
79–116. Reproduced by permission of Ronald V. Clarke, Pat Mayhew, and the University of
Chicago Press.

Map: Weisburd Jersey city map from David Weisburd, et al., “Does Crime Just Move Around
The Corner? A Controlled Study of Spatial Displacement and Diffusion of Crime Control
Benefits,” Criminology 44, no. 3 (2006): 549–91. Reproduced by permission of David Weisburd
and the American Society of Criminology.

About the Author

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers: The
Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath.
He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and is a staff writer at The
New Yorker. He was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time
magazine and one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. Previously, he
was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business and
science, then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He
graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in
history. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He
lives in New York.

Also by Malcolm Gladwell

David and Goliath
What the Dog Saw

Outliers
Blink
The Tipping Point