David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.
    All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself. That’s why the story of Stella is not all that surprising. Anyone who has ever sat in a classroom knows that it is important for teachers to earn the respect of their students.
    What is harder to understand, however, is the importance of these same principles when it comes to law and order. We know our parents and our teachers, so it makes sense that legitimacy should matter a lot inside the home or the school. But the decision about whether to rob a bank or shoot someone seems like it belongs to a very different category, doesn’t it? That’s what Leites and Wolf meant when they said that fighting criminals and insurgents “requires neither sympathy nor mysticism.” They were saying that at that level, the decision to obey the law is a function of a rational calculation of risks and benefits. It isn’t personal. But that’s precisely where they went wrong, because getting criminals and insurgents to behave turns out to be as dependent on legitimacy as getting children to behave in the classroom.

4.
    Let me give you an example. It involves an experiment that has been going on for the past few years in the New York City neighborhood of Brownsville. Brownsville is home to just over a hundred thousand people, and it lies in the eastern part of Brooklyn, past the elegant brownstones of Park Slope and the synagogues of Crown Heights. 1 For more than a century, it has been among the most destitute corners of New York City. There are eighteen public housing projects in Brownsville, more than in any other part of the city, and they dominate the skyline: block upon block of bleak, featureless brick-and-concrete developments. As the crime rate in New York City fell dramatically over the past twenty years, Brownsville always remained a step behind, plagued by groups of teenagers who roamed the streets, mugging passersby. From time to time, the police would flood the streets with extra officers. But the effect was never more than temporary.
    In 2003, a police officer named Joanne Jaffe took over as head of the city’s Housing Bureau, the group with primary responsibility for the Brownsville projects. She decided to try something new. Jaffe began by making a list of all of the juveniles in Brownsville who had been arrested at least once in the previous twelve months. That search yielded 106 names, corresponding to 180 arrests. Jaffe’s assumption was that anyone arrested for a mugging had probably committed somewhere between twenty and fifty other crimes that never came to the attention of the police, so by her rule of thumb, her 106 juveniles were responsible for as many as five thousand crimes in the previous year.
    She then put together a task force of police officers and had them contact every name on the list. “We said to them, ‘You’re in the program,’” Jaffe explained. “‘And the program is that we’re going to give you a choice. We want to do everything we can to get you back in school, to help you get a high school diploma, to bring services to your family, find out what’s needed in the household. We will provide job opportunities, educational opportunities, medical—everything we can. We want to work with you. But the criminal conduct has to stop. And if it doesn’t stop and you get arrested for anything, we’re going to do everything to keep you in jail. I don’t care how minor it is. We are going to be all over you.’”
    The program was called J-RIP, for Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program. There was nothing complicated about it—at least on the surface. J-RIP was standard-issue, high-intensity modern policing. Jaffe put her J-RIP task force in a trailer in the parking lot of a housing project, not off in a station house somewhere. She made every surveillance tool available to