Wolfgang's Law - Part One

Over the last few years homicide rates in Baltimore have plummeted. A city once labeled America’s murder capital is seeing a reprieve that seems nothing short of miraculous. What happened? This week, Malcolm takes a look at what Baltimore is doing to save lives. To learn more about the organization Termite founded, visit: https://switchinglanesadultandyouth.org/ You can order The American Way of Killing at Gladwell.com http://Gladwell.com or wherever books are sold. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode. Available on Plus and Pro Plans.

• 0:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over

• 1:23Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 2:14Speaker 02

  Pushkin.

• 2:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  Baltimore, Maryland, Charmed City, as it used to be called.

• 2:22Speaker 03

  I always tell people that it was heaven and hell at the same time.

• 2:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  In November of 2020, a man named Brandon Scott was elected mayor, 36 years old, one of the youngest mayors in Baltimore history.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  I was born in 1984, so my formative years are the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, which, if you're in Baltimore and in urban America, in black urban America, time is literally the worst time to be born, right? It doesn't get, born a little bit later is less, born a little bit earlier is a lot different.

• 3:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Scott grew up in the Park Heights neighborhood, North Baltimore, out near Pimlico Racetrack.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  In my neighborhood, it was very violent, right? There was a lot of people dying, a lot of people being shot, a lot of drug dealing, a lot of overdose, vacant housing. They were closing down our libraries and rec. centers, all the things that we thought would help people get away from that life. And, you know, we would just be outside and, you know, be sat down in handcuffs for no reason other than you were like black and outside. So that, that happened to me seven times.

• 3:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Seven?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Seven different times, roughly from the age of 13 to 21, 22, right before I came to City Hall.

• 3:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  How many people that you knew from growing up have you lost?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Oh, shit, that's, that's probably the hardest question I ever, I would have to sit down and try to think and write, but more than 10.

• 4:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  In any given year over the past half century, Baltimore was up there with St. Louis, Detroit, and New Orleans for the dubious title of America's murder capital. Baltimore was the American city where the heroin epidemic never really went away. At one point, it had five police commissioners in seven years because nobody could handle the job. Someone who worked with the mayor's office told me he used to work with USAID in the northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the most homicidal countries in the world. He didn't think that there was anything in the US like that until he came to Baltimore. Baltimore was where the wire was set. The single most famous cultural product of Baltimore is a television show about how

• 4:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  dangerous and nasty Baltimore is.

• 4:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not to mention the city's unofficial theme song, Randy Newman's Baltimore, which has as its chorus.

• 5:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Oh, Baltimore, it's hard just to live. In some years, that was an understatement.

• 5:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Mayor Scott took office at the end of 2020. There were 335 homicides in Baltimore that year, just shy of the all-time record. Scott made a pledge, he would reduce the murder rate.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  All of my staff did not want me to give a number. And I said, well, we have to give a number because if we don't give a number, then no one knows what the fuck we're working towards, right?

• 5:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  He set the target at 15% every year. You were out there with that prediction.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, people laughed, right? Like, people laugh. We, you know, we have Sinclair MAGA station and a newspaper here, MAGA 45 is what we like to call them. They were asking every single day, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Mayor, when is this city going to reach your goal? When are you going to see this 15% reduction?

• 6:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part of a handful of episodes I'm doing tied to the release of my latest book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic, which is about why gun violence in the United States is so much worse than every other country in the West. I use the word invention in the subtitle because American violence is not an inherent condition. The US didn't have to be this way. The argument of the book is that America's problems are self-created, the result of a series of social choices, historical legacies, weird legal concepts, and a fundamental

• 7:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  misunderstanding of just what homicide is.

• 7:22Malcolm Gladwell?

  In this, in the following episode next week, I want to describe how Americans can find a path out of this mess. And our case study is Baltimore.

• 7:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  I first went to Baltimore as a kid in the 1970s, drove down from Canada with my friend Terry to see an Orioles game in the old Memorial Stadium. It was gritty, it had character, it was interesting. But the ensuing decades were not kind to the city. I sent my colleague Lucy Sullivan to Baltimore to drive around the city's Western District, the toughest part of Baltimore, with a local police officer to get a feel for what happened.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  This is the area I'm driving you right now, it's called Penn North.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  It's called Penn North.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Yes, so the actual street, this is Pennsylvania Avenue, the street is north.

• 8:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  She rode with Lieutenant Brian Ford, a 13-year veteran of the Baltimore PD.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Usually you'd ride through here and it would be thousands and thousands of people right now.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  Thousands of people?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  There's like nobody out right now.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  This was like the mecca.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Like, every corner we would go to, it would have individuals on every single corner, involved in illegal drug trade or some type of thing like that. But now we can actually focus on individuals that we need to focus on. Back, back in the day, we would ride through and it would be a thousand people, mostly a lot of them.

• 8:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  He turned back towards the Western District Station House, the District for short.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  Okay, so the District is right here. Back in the day, this, this corner was historical, very violent, and it was scary that the police station would be right there and that's, that's how bad the crime was for a minute.

• 9:11Speaker 05

  It was scary, like for you, like you were like, this is a scary corner.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  So coming to, coming to work, you know, yeah, to make sure that you got in the District before something happened.

• 9:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the Western District, the police were nervous walking across the street to their own police station. This is the Baltimore that Mayor Brandon Scott inherited and the city he pledged to turn around. After his first year in office, the murder count was 337, an increase from the previous year. People looked at Scott and rolled their eyes.

• 9:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Following year, no change. The skepticism grew. This was Baltimore, it wasn't Charmed City anymore. It had new nicknames, Bodymore, Baltimoreg. Then, in 2023, a decrease of almost 21%. The next year, a decrease of 23%. In those two years, Baltimore did not turn into Paris. There was no massive gun control law passed in the state of Maryland. The National Guard did not camp out on the streets of the city. Then, in 2025, 133 homicides, a decrease of 31%.

• 10:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  And this year, there's a chance the city will dip under 100 for the first time since the 1960s. What on earth happened in the city of Baltimore?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control.

• 11:31Speaker 00

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• 11:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet, if I do,

• 12:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners. Subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 13:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 13:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Baltimore's homicide prevention effort is centered in the city's Western District. The area Lucy was riding around with Lieutenant Ford. More than a third of the people below the poverty line. A third of the house is empty. It's where much of the wire was set. Roughly 40,000 people. If you know Baltimore, it's just below Jewett Hill Park.

• 13:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  And in the heart of the Western District, there's a two-story red brick building. Looks like an old office building. Docs and ministries. The church without walls.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  Good morning to everyone. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Hey.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Good to see everyone. Today, this group balance production started a coordination meeting.

• 14:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's a Thursday morning. 25 or so people have gathered around a big square table, a mix of police officers, pastors, behavioral counselors, and outreach workers, plus the city council president. The meeting is run by a man named Reginald Williams.

• 14:29Speaker 06

  This is the agenda for today. It's the weekly stats, violent review cases, custom notification planning, and the service follow-up updates. The recommendation stats to date. These are the numbers.

• 14:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  Williams is running through a slide deck up on a screen. Each slide is devoted to a different person. He calls on a police officer to talk about a homicide from a few days earlier.

• 14:55Speaker 06

  We're going to pass it to Detective Sykes, and she's going to give us the incident.

• 15:03Speaker 07

  So the units responded to a call of a shooting. Medics were already on scene. Unfortunately, the victim was pronounced from a gunshot wound.

• 15:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  The management meeting, as it's called, is the hub of Baltimore's crime fighting strategy. It happens every week, lasts about an hour. It grew out of a collaboration between the city and the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Scott invited the Crime Lab to Baltimore when he took office. In mid-2021, they conducted what they call a problem analysis, a detailed statistical picture of who was being shot and why in the Western District. What they found was that the people doing the shooting fit a clear pattern. They were overwhelmingly between 16 and 34 years old, male and black.

• 15:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  81% of them had been involved with the criminal justice system at some point in their lives. The average was 12 previous arrests. And most of the violence was group-related, meaning that the people involved in the shootings overwhelmingly belonged to a very tight-knit social circle. Shooter and victim usually knew each other, often too well. By their estimate, the Western District had 18 criminally active groups. Just one of those groups, operating out of the Poe Homes housing development, had been involved in 13 shootings over the previous year and a half. How many people in total were they talking about in those 18 groups? Roughly 700.

• 16:43Malcolm Gladwell?

  I want to pause on that number for a moment because it's impossible to make sense of the management meeting without understanding its significance. There are 40,000 people in the Western District. The conventional way of thinking is that you design a policing strategy to cover all 40,000. You spread your resources over the whole population. But the Crime Lab's analysis concluded something very different. If what you are concerned about is gun violence, the problem is actually just 700 people. 18 relatively tight-knit social groups, of whom one, the group in the Poe Homes, is a very serious problem right now.

• 17:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  So Detective Sykes reports on a murder from earlier that week. Young man dead from a gunshot wound. Williams, the person running the meeting, pulls the room. Did anyone know the victim? That question is not a shot in the dark because if the universe of people who you have to know in the Western District is just 700, then chances are that a group of 25 well-connected people really can know almost everybody. 700 is how large a typical middle school is. Could 25 teachers from a middle school know at least something about all their students? Probably. 700 is a manageable number.

• 18:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Someone speaks up, says he taught him at the Youth Opportunity Center. A good kid. Someone else, someone named Termite, a woman in her 50s in a hijab and sunglasses, said she went to the scene to find out more about why it happened.

• 18:25Speaker 05

  We went there yesterday. They were very tight-lipped. We hung around for hours because I know everybody, so I know them. I know the kids, I know them, but nobody's talking.

• 18:38Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the arguments of my new book, The American Way of Killing, is that the conversation about gun violence in the United States is crippled by a series of misconceptions. For example, people think America is overpoliced. Too many cops. Is that true? Well, take Los Angeles and Berlin. They're the same size. Los Angeles has roughly 8,500 police officers. How many does Berlin have? 18,000. And that's typical. Western European cities have far larger police departments than American cities do. There are a long list of surprising facts like this. And what the Crime Lab found in Baltimore

• 19:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  is one of the most important of them because this kind of concentration of violence isn't unusual. It's actually the norm. The first person to stumble upon this fact was Marvin Wolfgang, one of the most important criminologists of the 20th century. He was an old-school shoe-leather sociologist. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and embedded himself with the Philadelphia Police Department. He would come to police headquarters after his day of teaching ended, sometimes working until 2:00 AM. I wanted to get a more...

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Observable impression of the homicide squad and the work that they did.

• 20:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wolfgang was interviewed for the American Society of Criminology's Oral History Project shortly before he died in 1998.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  So for three years, I rode around with them, commonly on Friday and Saturday evenings, the period of the highest homicide rates.

• 20:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  And in the late 1960s, he did a study that no one had ever done before. He gathered the names of every single boy born in the city of Philadelphia in 1945, who had continued to live in the city until the age of 18, a total of 9,945 people. And then painstakingly went back through years of police records, remember, this is in the days before anything was digitized, to see what percentage of those 9,945 ended up getting in trouble with the law. His answer, 6%, a tiny fraction. Let's call this Wolfgang's Law.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  That's 6% out of the total birth cohort of 10,000 boys, who were responsible for so many crimes, I mean, all but one of the homicides, three quarters of the rapes and robberies and so forth. There were 627 boys out of 10,000 had committed over 50% of all the offenses.

• 21:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  In Baltimore's Western District, it's 700 out of 40,000. In Philadelphia's 1945 cohort, it's 627 boys out of 10,000. Let's do another example, Chicago. The criminologist Andrew Papakristos did a version of Wolfgang's analysis for Chicago's West Side.

• 21:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Now, why, first of all, when you observed this, did this surprise you?

• 21:59Speaker 04

  How concentrated it was surprised me. You know, when you look at these numbers, even when you look at the larger co-offending network, you're talking about 5% 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, you know, on the West Side of Chicago, one of the neighborhoods we were working, there's about 50,000 people, you're talking about 400 individuals.

• 22:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  400 out of 50,000. Let's look at New Orleans, another one of the most dangerous American cities. One recent analysis found that one-half of 1% of the city's population was present at half the city's shootings. Is this a purely American phenomenon? No, it's everywhere. David Kennedy, the criminologist who I think has been more important than anyone in further in the insights of Wolfgang, says that he was recently in Sweden, working with local law enforcement in an area of Stockholm that has seen a surge in violent crime. The Swedes were despairing.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  The police folks took us to ground zero for the crime issues that had made this a vulnerable area. And two older businessmen talked to us and said, it's really bad. We're not sure we're going to be able to keep our businesses open. People don't want to come here. People are afraid. It's a litany of horrors. And then they said, it's 30 kids.

• 23:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  30 out of a community of 50,000 people. But Kennedy was skeptical. Based on his work in other cities, he thought even that number was too high. He asked them, are you sure?

• 23:49Speaker 02

  You know, we don't. But what we're used to seeing in situations like this is it's not even 30, 30 people. It's usually a much smaller number of drivers, and then they have their network around them. Does that sound right? The four of them went off and talked to each other, and they came back and they said, yeah, it's five guys we know and one guy in Turkey.

• 24:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  The very same week the management meeting took place, the biotech company Moderna announced the successful results of a new anti-cancer vaccine. It was for patients with advanced melanoma. The news electrified the medical community, not just because melanoma is one of the hardest of all cancers to treat, but because the vaccine was personal. Patients have their tumor analyzed and an individualized vaccine is created to perfectly counter the genetic makeup of their disease.

• 24:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is the next great revolution in medicine, the transition from creating population-wide treatments, drugs that have to be broad enough to help everyone with a disease, to precision treatments tailored to treat one patient at a time. What Wolfgang's Law tells us is that the same revolution can happen in fighting violence. If the problem in the Western District is centered on 700 people, then you don't have to do population-level crime fighting, where you battle some amorphous menace. You can do individualized crime prevention, put every case up on the screen at the management meeting, and try and make sense of it.

• 25:36Speaker 06

  All right.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  All right, so moving on.

• 25:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Williams put a photo of another young man up on the screen. He was connected to a different shooting.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  We are concerned because his associate is a recent homicide victim, and he has a background in closing violations.

• 25:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  The young man had a criminal history. Now, his friend had been killed. The worry was that he might retaliate.

• 26:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is the second crucial part of the Baltimore strategy. Criminologists make a distinction between two kinds of violence. Instrumental violence is violence employed in the service of some rational, carefully thought-out end. I shoot you because I'm defending my drug turf, or I'm robbing a bank. Instrumental violence is what we see on crime shows on TV or read about in thrillers. I think most of us think that this is what homicide is, but it isn't. In reality, most homicide is expressive, which is violence that arises out of strong emotions, people settling personal feuds with violence, cycles of revenge and retaliation,

• 26:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  conflict between people who know each other well. I have a whole chapter on this in The American Way of Killing, because it fundamentally changes the way we ought to address criminal violence. What the police were worried about in this instance was exactly this, a classic case of expressive violence. The friend of the victim was deeply upset and might retaliate. And what they were doing in the management meeting was trying to understand where that kind of strong emotion might lead. They were trying to use their understanding of the social context of the crime to make a prediction. Who was friends with the shooter? Who was enemies with the shooter? Who was friends with the victim? Who was grieving?

• 27:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  Who might try and turn that grief into violence?

• 27:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's Jeremy Biddle, who works for the Penn Crime Lab and has been a key part of the Baltimore Project.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  For example, someone's house is shot, and this is something that happens far too often. Somebody is being hunted, it's playing out on social media, their house gets shot up where their family lives. The lifesaving intervention work is that trusted mentor, whomever, that can show up at that doorstep at 9 o'clock at night and offer the family kind of a safe alternative. And then the coordinated action of the--

• 28:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  Just so I understand, in that instance, you see, we observe, we know about an existing sort of toxic group dynamic. We know that the cascade has been set in motion. We see it playing out on social media. So we go to the, we make an assumption about who the next victim is. We go to their home and say, we'll get you out of there.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, it's not even as much of an assumption because the target is named. People are explicitly saying who they are hunting for on social media. So there is sometimes best-educated guesswork, but oftentimes, it's pretty clear. You just have to pay attention. And I think that's really the crux of it. Cities oftentimes don't pay this kind of close, pragmatic, operational attention to violence, to be able to tell from recent violence what kind of future violence might percolate.

• 29:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  So, the focus of the meeting is on the young man. He's at risk of doing something reckless. Does anyone know his father, Williams asks? Someone does, Brother Angola.

• 29:18Speaker 06

  I guarantee you, I can reach out to his father and reach him through his father. Could you do that? Yes. All right. Wait, what, can you do that today? Yeah, I can step out and do it.

• 29:30Speaker 06

  Are you going to try to, you're going to reach the father, you're going to try to something up for tomorrow, or do you-- Tomorrow, what time? We're going to go in the morning. But if his son is here, then we probably can talk to him via FaceTime.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  What are you going to ask when you call? Like, what are you going to ask?

• 29:46Speaker 06

  Well, I'm going to let him know, he already knows my position as being a moral voice, and I have a little rapport with him, so I can reach out and let him know that I'm trying to reach his son. And my reason for reaching his son is to express all this. Okay. Okay. All right, let us know. Thank you.

• 30:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Let's pause again. Note the nature of this intervention. What we're used to in discussions about violent crime prevention is police officers sitting around a table, talking about how many people they are arresting, police exercising the power that only they possess to take away freedom. But in the entire hour-long management meeting, the word arrest was never used. Most people at the management meeting, like Brother Angola and Termite, the woman who went to the scene of the crime, weren't police officers. They didn't carry guns. They were community fixtures, connectors. Termite ran a program for seniors, connecting them with young people.

• 30:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  She mediated disputes in her public housing complex. She was deeply religious and thought her mission was to help people.

• 30:53Speaker 06

  Termite is, she's known in Westport, she knows everyone in Westport and Brooklyn and just Southern Baltimore, pretty much all of Baltimore, that's Termite. So we rely on Termite a lot.

• 31:05Malcolm Gladwell?

  She spent years working at a recreational center in Baltimore. She was a practitioner of soft power.

• 31:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Every weekend, me and my husband would go find the kids. We knew the kids that weren't going to eat. Well, Monday through--

• 31:20Speaker 05

  Friday, I will cook and take food down there for all the kids to eat. So that it don't look like you're calling anybody specifically out. So I will cook different dinners every night out of my own pocket. And Fridays, on Saturdays and Sundays, we will find the kids that we knew for fair. We will make sure they eat as well.

• 31:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  After the management meeting, Lucy went to Termite's home to speak with her. And Termite told her the following story. She was out to dinner with her husband on her day off when she got a call from her old boss, a man named Warren.

• 31:55Speaker 05

  My husband looking at me like I'm crazy. And I'm just like, okay, well, I'm like, daughter, go ahead. I'm gonna get Warren, bring me back up. You gotta answer that. It's a bad, it's bad. A woman and a man were fighting. The man busted a woman in the head while her nephew was running around looking for him with a gun.

• 32:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here we have the outlines of the quintessential lead up to a homicide. A grievance between two people who know each other that has spiraled out of control.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  So I was like, well, first things first, well, let's go to the hospital and check the status. Because I do the hospital thing so much, they all, they know who I am. So I was able to get in the back and talk to the aunt. And she was like, tell him we cool. We gonna be right back together, this, that, and the other. I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. I hear him first, da, da, da, da, da. So make a long story short, we found the kid. And so they were all trying to talk to him. He would not talk to none of them. So I say, I gave him space. And then I said, when I felt like he was a little vulnerable, I said, he was like, I don't know who they playing with. I said, let me talk to you for a minute. He said, yes, ma'am. And so I knew right there I had him. So I said, listen, I just came from the hospital. Your aunt is okay.

• 33:05Speaker 05

  She said, tell you that she's going back with him. She was like, they both was drinking and it got out of hand. She's okay. I said, let me, he was like, but that's my, I said, but she's okay. I said, can you do me a favor? And not do anything harsh to get yourself in trouble?

• 33:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  She's not threatening him or arresting him. She's just talking to him. And why does he respond to her? Listen.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  I said, I'm not thinking about the man. I'm thinking about you. I said, could you just let this go? Your aunt is okay. And he said, he looked me in my eyes and he said to me, I'm gonna let this go because I owe you. And I looked, I said, you don't owe me anything. He said, I do. He said, I remember my mother not having, I remember not having a lot when I was young. He said, but I remember one day, it was school time, and you bought me my first pair of Jordans and all my school uniforms and a coat. And he was like, I never forgot that. Now, if you ask me, do I remember? I don't. Because this stuff is an astral to me.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  But I saved the life that night.

• 34:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  The young man listens to Termite because she has moral standing in his eyes. Years ago, she gave him a pair of sneakers, which she doesn't even remember doing. I said, let me talk to you a minute. He said, yes, ma'am. And so I knew right there that I had him. This is how you go from 350 homicides a year to maybe, if Baltimore's lucky, under 100. A conversation like that with a person like that. Baltimore is showing the world how it's done. But is the world interested? That's next week.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Almost a 90% reduction in homicide in Minneapolis over the first summer that it went into effect. And left it in the hands of the locals, you know? Point proved, my God, Eureka. And by the end of the year, they had let it all fall apart. Same pattern, same intervention, same kind of success, same kind of collapse a couple of years later.

• 35:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan with Nina Bird Lawrence and Ben Nadaf Hafry. Our editor is Karen Chikurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Sam Rusak. Original music by Luis Guerra. Mixing and mastering by Jake Gorsky. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 36:25Speaker 05

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• 37:05Speaker 05

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• 37:12Speaker 00

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers only at blockers.fm.