murray.doc
from The New Yorker
February 13, 2006
DEPT. OF SOCIAL SERVICES
Million-Dollar Murray
Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage.
by Malcolm Gladwell
1.
Murray Barr was a bear of a
man, an ex-marine, six feet
tall and heavyset, and when
he fell down—which he did
nearly every day —it could
take two or three grown men
to pick him up. He had
straight black hair and olive
skin. On the street, they
called him Smokey. He was
missing most of his teeth.
He had a wonderful smile.
People loved Murray.
His chosen drink was vodka.
Beer he called “horse piss.”
On the streets of downtown
Reno, where he lived, he
could buy a two-hundred-
and-fifty-millilitre bottle of
cheap vodka for a dollar-
fifty. If he was flush, he
could go for the seven-
hundred-and-fifty-millilitre
bottle, and if he was broke
he could always do what
many of the other homeless
people of Reno did, which is
to walk through the casinos
and finish off the half-empty
glasses of liquor left at the
gaming tables.
“If he was on a runner, we
could pick him up several
times a day,” Patrick O’Bryan,
who is a bicycle cop in
downtown Reno, said. “And
he’s gone on some amazing
runners. He would get picked
up, get detoxed, then get back
out a couple of hours later and
start up again. A lot of the
guys on the streets who’ve
been drinking, they get so
angry. They are so incredibly
abrasive, so violent, so
abusive. Murray was such a
character and had such a great
sense of humor that we
somehow got past that. Even
when he was abusive, we’d
say, ‘Murray, you know you
love us,’ and he’d say, ‘I
know’—and go back to
swearing at us.”
“I’ve been a police officer for
fifteen years,” O’Bryan’s
partner, Steve Johns, said. “I
picked up Murray my whole
career. Literally.”
Johns and O’Bryan pleaded
with Murray to quit drinking.
A few years ago, he was
assigned to a treatment
program in which he was
under the equivalent of
house arrest, and he thrived.
He got a job and worked
hard. But then the program
ended. “Once he graduated
out, he had no one to report
to, and he needed that,”
O’Bryan said. “I don’t know
whether it was his military
background. I suspect that it
was. He was a good cook.
One time, he accumulated
savings of over six thousand
dollars. Showed up for work
religiously. Did everything
he was supposed to do. They
said, ‘Congratulations,’ and
put him back on the street.
He spent that six thousand
in a week or so.”
Often, he was too
intoxicated for the drunk
tank at the jail, and he’d get
sent to the emergency room
at either Saint Mary’s or
Washoe Medical Center.
Marla Johns, who was a
social worker in the
emergency room at Saint
Mary’s, saw him several
times a week. “The
ambulance would bring him
in. We would sober him up,
so he would be sober enough
to go to jail. And we would
call the police to pick him
up. In fact, that’s how I met
my husband.” Marla Johns
is married to Steve Johns.
“He was like the one
constant in an environment
that was ever changing,” she
went on. “In he would come.
He would grin that half-
toothless grin. He called me
‘my angel.’ I would walk in
the room, and he would
smile and say, ‘Oh, my
angel, I’m so happy to see
you.’ We would joke back
and forth, and I would beg
him to quit drinking and he
would laugh it off. And when
time went by and he didn’t
come in I would get worried
and call the coroner’s office.
When he was sober, we
would find out, oh, he’s
working someplace, and my
husband and I would go and
have dinner where he was
working. When my husband
and I were dating, and we
were going to get married,
he said, ‘Can I come to the
wedding?’ And I almost felt
like he should. My joke was
‘If you are sober you can
come, because I can’t afford
your bar bill.’ When we
started a family, he would
lay a hand on my pregnant
belly and bless the child. He
really was this kind of light.”
In the fall of 2003, the Reno
Police Department started
an initiative designed to
limit panhandling in the
downtown core. There were
articles in the newspapers,
and the police department
came under harsh criticism on
local talk radio. The
crackdown on panhandling
amounted to harassment, the
critics said. The homeless
weren’t an imposition on the
city; they were just trying to
get by. “One morning, I’m
listening to one of the talk
shows, and they’re just
trashing the police
department and going on
about how unfair it is,”
O’Bryan said. “And I thought,
Wow, I’ve never seen any of
these critics in one of the
alleyways in the middle of the
winter looking for bodies.”
O’Bryan was angry. In
downtown Reno, food for the
homeless was plentiful: there
was a Gospel kitchen and
Catholic Services, and even
the local McDonald’s fed the
hungry. The panhandling was
for liquor, and the liquor was
anything but harmless. He
and Johns spent at least half
their time dealing with people
like Murray; they were as
much caseworkers as police
officers. And they knew they
weren’t the only ones
involved. When someone
passed out on the street, there
was a “One down” call to the
paramedics. There were four
people in an ambulance, and
the patient sometimes stayed
at the hospital for days,
because living on the streets
in a state of almost constant
intoxication was a reliable way
of getting sick. None of that,
surely, could be cheap.
O’Bryan and Johns called
someone they knew at an
ambulance service and then
contacted the local hospitals.
“We came up with three
names that were some of our
chronic inebriates in the
downtown area, that got
arrested the most often,”
O’Bryan said. “We tracked
those three individuals
through just one of our two
hospitals. One of the guys
had been in jail previously,
so he’d only been on the
streets for six months. In
those six months, he had
accumulated a bill of a
hundred thousand dollars—
and that’s at the smaller of
the two hospitals near
downtown Reno. It’s pretty
reasonable to assume that
the other hospital had an
even larger bill. Another
individual came from
Portland and had been in
Reno for three months. In
those three months, he had
accumulated a bill for sixty-
five thousand dollars. The
third individual actually had
some periods of being sober,
and had accumulated a bill
of fifty thousand.”
The first of those people was
Murray Barr, and Johns and
O’Bryan realized that if you
totted up all his hospital
bills for the ten years that he
had been on the streets—as
well as substance-abuse-
treatment costs, doctors’
fees, and other expenses—
Murray Barr probably ran
up a medical bill as large as
anyone in the state of
Nevada.
“It cost us one million
dollars not to do something
about Murray,” O’Bryan
said.
2.
Fifteen years ago, after the
Rodney King beating, the
Los Angeles Police
Department was in crisis. It
was accused of racial
insensitivity and ill
discipline and violence, and
the assumption was that
those problems had spread
broadly throughout the rank
and file. In the language of
statisticians, it was thought
that L.A.P.D.’s troubles had
a “normal” distribution—
that if you graphed them the
result would look like a bell
curve, with a small number
of officers at one end of the
curve, a small number at the
other end, and the bulk of
the problem situated in the
middle. The bell-curve
assumption has become so
much a part of our mental
architecture that we tend to
use it to organize experience
automatically.
But when the L.A.P.D. was
investigated by a special
commission headed by
Warren Christopher, a very
different picture emerged.
Between 1986 and 1990,
allegations of excessive force
or improper tactics were
made against eighteen
hundred of the eighty-five
hundred officers in the
L.A.P.D. The broad middle
had scarcely been accused of
anything. Furthermore, more
than fourteen hundred
officers had only one or two
allegations made against
them—and bear in mind that
these were not proven
charges, that they happened
in a four-year period, and that
allegations of excessive force
are an inevitable feature of
urban police work. (The
N.Y.P.D. receives about three
thousand such complaints a
year.) A hundred and eighty-
three officers, however, had
four or more complaints
against them, forty-four
officers had six or more
complaints, sixteen had eight
or more, and one had sixteen
complaints. If you were to
graph the troubles of the
L.A.P.D., it wouldn’t look like
a bell curve. It would look
more like a hockey stick. It
would follow what
statisticians call a “power law”
distribution—where all the
activity is not in the middle
but at one extreme.
The Christopher
Commission’s report
repeatedly comes back to what
it describes as the extreme
concentration of problematic
officers. One officer had been
the subject of thirteen
allegations of excessive use of
force, five other complaints,
twenty-eight “use of force
reports” (that is, documented,
internal accounts of
inappropriate behavior), and
one shooting. Another had
six excessive-force
complaints, nineteen other
complaints, ten use-of-force
reports, and three shootings.
A third had twenty-seven
use-of-force reports, and a
fourth had thirty-five.
Another had a file full of
complaints for doing things
like “striking an arrestee on
the back of the neck with the
butt of a shotgun for no
apparent reason while the
arrestee was kneeling and
handcuffed,” beating up a
thirteen-year-old juvenile,
and throwing an arrestee
from his chair and kicking
him in the back and side of
the head while he was
handcuffed and lying on his
stomach.
The report gives the strong
impression that if you fired
those forty-four cops the
L.A.P.D. would suddenly
become a pretty well-
functioning police
department. But the report
also suggests that the
problem is tougher than it
seems, because those forty-
four bad cops were so bad
that the institutional
mechanisms in place to get
rid of bad apples clearly
weren’t working. If you
made the mistake of
assuming that the
department’s troubles fell
into a normal distribution,
you’d propose solutions that
would raise the performance
of the middle—like better
training or better hiring—
when the middle didn’t need
help. For those hard-core
few who did need help,
meanwhile, the medicine
that helped the middle
wouldn’t be nearly strong
enough.
In the nineteen-eighties,
when homelessness first
surfaced as a national issue,
the assumption was that the
problem fit a normal
distribution: that the vast
majority of the homeless
were in the same state of
semi-permanent distress. It
was an assumption that bred
despair: if there were so
many homeless, with so
many problems, what could
be done to help them? Then,
fifteen years ago, a young
Boston College graduate
student named Dennis
Culhane lived in a shelter in
Philadelphia for seven weeks
as part of the research for
his dissertation. A few
months later he went back,
and was surprised to
discover that he couldn’t
find any of the people he
had recently spent so much
time with. “It made me
realize that most of these
people were getting on with
their own lives,” he said.
Culhane then put together a
database—the first of its
kind—to track who was
coming in and out of the
shelter system. What he
discovered profoundly
changed the way
homelessness is understood.
Homelessness doesn’t have a
normal distribution, it turned
out. It has a power-law
distribution. “We found that
eighty per cent of the
homeless were in and out
really quickly,” he said. “In
Philadelphia, the most
common length of time that
someone is homeless is one
day. And the second most
common length is two days.
And they never come back.
Anyone who ever has to stay
in a shelter involuntarily
knows that all you think about
is how to make sure you never
come back.”
The next ten per cent were
what Culhane calls episodic
users. They would come for
three weeks at a time, and
return periodically,
particularly in the winter.
They were quite young, and
they were often heavy drug
users. It was the last ten per
cent—the group at the farthest
edge of the curve—that
interested Culhane the most.
They were the chronically
homeless, who lived in the
shelters, sometimes for years
at a time. They were older.
Many were mentally ill or
physically disabled, and when
we think about homelessness
as a social problem—the
people sleeping on the
sidewalk, aggressively
panhandling, lying drunk in
doorways, huddled on subway
grates and under bridges—it’s
this group that we have in
mind. In the early nineteen-
nineties, Culhane’s database
suggested that New York
City had a quarter of a
million people who were
homeless at some point in
the previous half decade —
which was a surprisingly
high number. But only about
twenty-five hundred were
chronically homeless.
It turns out, furthermore,
that this group costs the
health-care and social-
services systems far more
than anyone had ever
anticipated. Culhane
estimates that in New York
at least sixty-two million
dollars was being spent
annually to shelter just those
twenty-five hundred hard-
core homeless. “It costs
twenty-four thousand
dollars a year for one of
these shelter beds,” Culhane
said. “We’re talking about a
cot eighteen inches away
from the next cot.” Boston
Health Care for the
Homeless Program, a
leading service group for the
homeless in Boston, recently
tracked the medical
expenses of a hundred and
nineteen chronically
homeless people. In the
course of five years, thirty-
three people died and seven
more were sent to nursing
homes, and the group still
accounted for 18,834
emergency-room visits—at a
minimum cost of a thousand
dollars a visit. The
University of California, San
Diego Medical Center
followed fifteen chronically
homeless inebriates and
found that over eighteen
months those fifteen people
were treated at the hospital’s
emergency room four
hundred and seventeen
times, and ran up bills that
averaged a hundred
thousand dollars each. One
person—San Diego’s
counterpart to Murray
Barr—came to the
emergency room eighty-
seven times.
“If it’s a medical admission,
it’s likely to be the guys with
the really complex
pneumonia,” James
Dunford, the city of San
Diego’s emergency medical
director and the author of
the observational study,
said. “They are drunk and
they aspirate and get vomit
in their lungs and develop a
lung abscess, and they get
hypothermia on top of that,
because they’re out in the
rain. They end up in the
intensive-care unit with
these very complicated
medical infections. These
are the guys who typically
get hit by cars and buses and
trucks. They often have a
neurosurgical catastrophe as
well. So they are very prone
to just falling down and
cracking their head and
getting a subdural
hematoma, which, if not
drained, could kill them, and
it’s the guy who falls down
and hits his head who ends
up costing you at least fifty
thousand dollars. Meanwhile,
they are going through
alcoholic withdrawal and have
devastating liver disease that
only adds to their inability to
fight infections. There is no
end to the issues. We do this
huge drill. We run up big lab
fees, and the nurses want to
quit, because they see the
same guys come in over and
over, and all we’re doing is
making them capable of
walking down the block.”
The homelessness problem is
like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop
problem. It’s a matter of a few
hard cases, and that’s good
news, because when a
problem is that concentrated
you can wrap your arms
around it and think about
solving it. The bad news is
that those few hard cases are
hard. They are falling-down
drunks with liver disease and
complex infections and
mental illness. They need time
and attention and lots of
money. But enormous sums of
money are already being spent
on the chronically homeless,
and Culhane saw that the kind
of money it would take to
solve the homeless problem
could well be less than the
kind of money it took to
ignore it. Murray Barr used
more health-care dollars, after
all, than almost anyone in the
state of Nevada. It would
probably have been cheaper to
give him a full-time nurse and
his own apartment.
The leading exponent for the
power-law theory of
homelessness is Philip
Mangano, who, since he was
appointed by President Bush
in 2002, has been the
executive director of the U.S.
Interagency Council on
Homelessness, a group that
oversees the programs of
twenty federal agencies.
Mangano is a slender man,
with a mane of white hair
and a magnetic presence,
who got his start as an
advocate for the homeless in
Massachusetts. In the past
two years, he has
crisscrossed the United
States, educating local
mayors and city councils
about the real shape of the
homelessness curve. Simply
running soup kitchens and
shelters, he argues, allows
the chronically homeless to
remain chronically
homeless. You build a
shelter and a soup kitchen if
you think that homelessness
is a problem with a broad
and unmanageable middle.
But if it’s a problem at the
fringe it can be solved. So
far, Mangano has convinced
more than two hundred
cities to radically reëvaluate
their policy for dealing with
the homeless.
“I was in St. Louis recently,”
Mangano said, back in June,
when he dropped by New
York on his way to Boise,
Idaho. “I spoke with people
doing services there. They
had a very difficult group of
people they couldn’t reach
no matter what they offered.
So I said, Take some of your
money and rent some
apartments and go out to
those people, and literally go
out there with the key and
say to them, ‘This is the key
to an apartment. If you
come with me right now I
am going to give it to you,
and you are going to have
that apartment.’ And so they
did. And one by one those
people were coming in. Our
intent is to take homeless
policy from the old idea of
funding programs that serve
homeless people endlessly
and invest in results that
actually end homelessness.”
Mangano is a history buff, a
man who sometimes falls
asleep listening to old
Malcolm X speeches, and
who peppers his remarks
with references to the civil-
rights movement and the
Berlin Wall and, most of all,
the fight against slavery. “I
am an abolitionist,” he says.
“My office in Boston was
opposite the monument to
the 54th Regiment on the
Boston Common, up the
street from the Park Street
Church, where William
Lloyd Garrison called for
immediate abolition, and
around the corner from
where Frederick Douglass
gave that famous speech at
the Tremont Temple. It is
very much ingrained in me
that you do not manage a
social wrong. You should be
ending it.”
3.
The old Y.M.C.A. in
downtown Denver is on
Sixteenth Street, just east of
the central business district.
The main building is a
handsome six-story stone
structure that was erected in
1906, and next door is an
annex that was added in the
nineteen-fifties. On the
ground floor there is a gym
and exercise rooms. On the
upper floors there are several
hundred apartments—brightly
painted one-bedrooms,
efficiencies, and S.R.O.-style
rooms with microwaves and
refrigerators and central
airconditioning—and for the
past several years those
apartments have been owned
and managed by the Colorado
Coalition for the Homeless.
Even by big-city standards,
Denver has a serious
homelessness problem. The
winters are relatively mild,
and the summers aren’t nearly
as hot as those of neighboring
New Mexico or Utah, which
has made the city a magnet for
the indigent. By the city’s
estimates, it has roughly a
thousand chronically
homeless people, of whom
three hundred spend their
time downtown, along the
central Sixteenth Street
shopping corridor or in
nearby Civic Center Park.
Many of the merchants
downtown worry that the
presence of the homeless is
scaring away customers. A
few blocks north, near the
hospital, a modest, low-
slung detox center handles
twenty-eight thousand
admissions a year, many of
them homeless people who
have passed out on the
streets, either from liquor
or—as is increasingly the
case—from mouthwash. “Dr.
——Dr. Tich, they call it—is
the brand of mouthwash
they use,” says Roxane
White, the manager of the
city’s social services. “You
can imagine what that does
to your gut.”
Eighteen months ago, the
city signed up with
Mangano. With a mixture of
federal and local funds, the
C.C.H. inaugurated a new
program that has so far
enrolled a hundred and six
people. It is aimed at the
Murray Barrs of Denver, the
people costing the system
the most. C.C.H. went after
the people who had been on
the streets the longest, who
had a criminal record, who
had a problem with
substance abuse or mental
illness. “We have one
individual in her early
sixties, but looking at her
you’d think she’s eighty,”
Rachel Post, the director of
substance treatment at the
C.C.H., said. (Post changed
some details about her
clients in order to protect
their identity.) “She’s a
chronic alcoholic. A typical
day for her is she gets up
and tries to find whatever ‘s
going to drink that day. She
falls down a lot. There’s
another person who came in
during the first week. He
was on methadone
maintenance. He’d had
psychiatric treatment. He
was incarcerated for eleven
years, and lived on the
streets for three years after
that, and, if that’s not
enough, he had a hole in his
heart.”
The recruitment strategy
was as simple as the one that
Mangano had laid out in St.
Louis: Would you like a free
apartment? The enrollees
got either an efficiency at the
Y.M.C.A. or an apartment
rented for them in a building
somewhere else in the city,
provided they agreed to
work within the rules of the
program. In the basement of
the Y, where the racquetball
courts used to be, the
coalition built a command
center, staffed with ten
caseworkers. Five days a
week, between eight-thirty
and ten in the morning, the
caseworkers meet and
painstakingly review the
status of everyone in the
program. On the wall
around the conference table
are several large white
boards, with lists of doctor’s
appointments and court
dates and medication
schedules. “We need a
staffing ratio of one to ten to
make it work,” Post said. “You
go out there and you find
people and assess how ‘re
doing in their residence.
Sometimes we’re in contact
with someone every day.
Ideally, we want to be in
contact every couple of days.
We’ve got about fifteen people
we’re really worried about
now.”
The cost of services comes to
about ten thousand dollars
per homeless client per year.
An efficiency apartment in
Denver averages $376 a
month, or just over forty-five
hundred a year, which means
that you can house and care
for a chronically homeless
person for at most fifteen
thousand dollars, or about a
third of what he or she would
cost on the street. The idea is
that once the people in the
program get stabilized they
will find jobs, and start to pick
up more and more of their
own rent, which would bring
someone’s annual cost to the
program closer to six
thousand dollars. As of today,
seventy-five supportive
housing slots have already
been added, and the city’s
homeless plan calls for eight
hundred more over the next
ten years.
The reality, of course, is
hardly that neat and tidy. The
idea that the very sickest and
most troubled of the homeless
can be stabilized and
eventually employed is only a
hope. Some of them plainly
won’t be able to get there:
these are, after all, hard
cases. “We’ve got one man,
he’s in his twenties,” Post
said. “Already, he has
cirrhosis of the liver. One
time he blew a blood alcohol
of .49, which is enough to
kill most people. The first
place we had he brought
over all his friends, and they
partied and trashed the
place and broke a window.
Then we gave him another
apartment, and he did the
same thing.”
Post said that the man had
been sober for several
months. But he could
relapse at some point and
perhaps trash another
apartment, and they’d have
to figure out what to do with
him next. Post had just been
on a conference call with
some people in New York
City who run a similar
program, and they talked
about whether giving clients
so many chances simply
encourages them to behave
irresponsibly. For some
people, it probably does. But
what was the alternative? If
this young man was put
back on the streets, he
would cost the system even
more money. The current
philosophy of welfare holds
that government assistance
should be temporary and
conditional, to avoid
creating dependency. But
someone who blows .49 on a
Breathalyzer and has
cirrhosis of the liver at the
age of twenty-seven doesn’t
respond to incentives and
sanctions in the usual way.
“The most complicated
people to work with are
those who have been
homeless for so long that
going back to the streets just
isn’t scary to them,” Post
said. “The summer comes
along and they say, ‘I don’t
need to follow your rules.’ ”
Power-law homelessness
policy has to do the opposite
of normal-distribution social
policy. It should create
dependency: you want
people who have been
outside the system to come
inside and rebuild their lives
under the supervision of
those ten caseworkers in the
basement of the Y.M.C.A.
That is what is so perplexing
about power-law homeless
policy. From an economic
perspective the approach
makes perfect sense. But
from a moral perspective it
doesn’t seem fair.
Thousands of people in the
Denver area no doubt live
day to day, work two or
three jobs, and are
eminently deserving of a
helping hand—and no one
offers them the key to a new
apartment. Yet that’s just
what the guy screaming
obscenities and swigging Dr.
Tich gets. When the welfare
mom’s time on public
assistance runs out, we cut
her off. Yet when the
homeless man trashes his
apartment we give him
another. Social benefits are
supposed to have some kind
of moral justification. We give
them to widows and disabled
veterans and poor mothers
with small children. Giving
the homeless guy passed out
on the sidewalk an apartment
has a different rationale. It’s
simply about efficiency.
We also believe that the
distribution of social benefits
should not be arbitrary. We
don’t give only to some poor
mothers, or to a random
handful of disabled veterans.
We give to everyone who
meets a formal criterion, and
the moral credibility of
government assistance
derives, in part, from this
universality. But the Denver
homelessness program
doesn’t help every chronically
homeless person in Denver.
There is a waiting list of six
hundred for the supportive-
housing program; it will be
years before all those people
get apartments, and some
may never get one. There isn’t
enough money to go around,
and to try to help everyone a
little bit—to observe the
principle of universality—isn’t
as cost-effective as helping a
few people a lot. Being fair, in
this case, means providing
shelters and soup kitchens,
and shelters and soup
kitchens don’t solve the
problem of homelessness. Our
usual moral intuitions are
little use, then, when it comes
to a few hard cases. Power-law
problems leave us with an
unpleasant choice. We can
be true to our principles or
we can fix the problem. We
cannot do both.
4.
A few miles northwest of the
old Y.M.C.A. in downtown
Denver, on the Speer
Boulevard off-ramp from I-
25, there is a big electronic
sign by the side of the road,
connected to a device that
remotely measures the
emissions of the vehicles
driving past. When a car
with properly functioning
pollution-control equipment
passes, the sign flashes
“Good.” When a car passes
that is well over the
acceptable limits, the sign
flashes “Poor.” If you stand
at the Speer Boulevard exit
and watch the sign for any
length of time, you’ll find
that virtually every car
scores “Good.” An Audi A4
—”Good.” A Buick Century—
“Good.” A Toyota Corolla—
“Good.” A Ford Taurus—
“Good.” A Saab 9-5—
“Good,” and on and on, until
after twenty minutes or so,
some beat-up old Ford
Escort or tricked-out
Porsche drives by and the
sign flashes “Poor.” The
picture of the smog problem
you get from watching the
Speer Boulevard sign and
the picture of the
homelessness problem you
get from listening in on the
morning staff meetings at
the Y.M.C.A. are pretty
much the same. Auto
emissions follow a power-
law distribution, and the air-
pollution example offers
another look at why we
struggle so much with
problems centered on a few
hard cases.
Most cars, especially new
ones, are extraordinarily
clean. A 2004 Subaru in
good working order has an
exhaust stream that’s just
.06 per cent carbon
monoxide, which is
negligible. But on almost
any highway, for whatever
reason—age, ill repair,
deliberate tampering by the
owner—a small number of
cars can have carbon-
monoxide levels in excess of
ten per cent, which is almost
two hundred times higher.
In Denver, five per cent of
the vehicles on the road
produce fifty-five per cent of
the automobile pollution.
“Let’s say a car is fifteen
years old,” Donald Stedman
says. Stedman is a chemist
and automobile-emissions
specialist at the University
of Denver. His laboratory
put up the sign on Speer
Avenue. “Obviously, the
older a car is the more likely
it is to become broken. It’s
the same as human beings.
And by broken we mean any
number of mechanical
malfunctions—the
computer’s not working
anymore, fuel injection is
stuck open, the catalyst ‘s not
unusual that these failure
modes result in high
emissions. We have at least
one car in our database which
was emitting seventy grams of
hydrocarbon per mile, which
means that you could almost
drive a Honda Civic on the
exhaust fumes from that car.
It’s not just old cars. It’s new
cars with high mileage, like
taxis. One of the most
successful and least publicized
control measures was done by
a district attorney in L.A. back
in the nineties. He went to
LAX and discovered that all of
the Bell Cabs were gross
emitters. One of those cabs
emitted more than its own
weight of pollution every
year.”
In Stedman’s view, the current
system of smog checks makes
little sense. A million
motorists in Denver have to
go to an emissions center
every year—take time from
work, wait in line, pay fifteen
or twenty-five dollars—for a
test that more than ninety per
cent of them don’t need. “Not
everybody gets tested for
breast cancer,” Stedman says.
“Not everybody takes an AIDS
test.” On-site smog checks,
furthermore, do a pretty bad
job of finding and fixing the
few outliers. Car enthusiasts—
with high-powered, high-
polluting sports cars—have
been known to drop a clean
engine into their car on the
day they get it tested. Others
register their car in a faraway
town without emissions
testing or arrive at the test
site “hot”—having just come
off hard driving on the
freeway—which is a good
way to make a dirty engine
appear to be clean. Still
others randomly pass the
test when they shouldn’t,
because dirty engines are
highly variable and
sometimes burn cleanly for
short durations. There is
little evidence, Stedman
says, that the city’s regime of
inspections makes any
difference in air quality.
He proposes mobile testing
instead. Twenty years ago,
he invented a device the size
of a suitcase that uses
infrared light to instantly
measure and then analyze
the emissions of cars as they
drive by on the highway. The
Speer Avenue sign is
attached to one of Stedman’s
devices. He says that cities
should put half a dozen or so
of his devices in vans, park
them on freeway off-ramps
around the city, and have a
police car poised to pull over
anyone who fails the test. A
half-dozen vans could test
thirty thousand cars a day.
For the same twenty-five
million dollars that Denver’s
motorists now spend on on-
site testing, Stedman
estimates, the city could
identify and fix twenty-five
thousand truly dirty vehicles
every year, and within a few
years cut automobile
emissions in the Denver
metropolitan area by
somewhere between thirty-
five and forty per cent. The
city could stop managing its
smog problem and start
ending it.
Why don’t we all adopt the
Stedman method? There’s
no moral impediment here.
We’re used to the police
pulling people over for
having a blown headlight or
a broken side mirror, and it
wouldn’t be difficult to have
them add pollution-control
devices to their list. Yet it
does run counter to an
instinctive social preference
for thinking of pollution as a
problem to which we all
contribute equally. We have
developed institutions that
move reassuringly quickly
and forcefully on collective
problems. Congress passes a
law. The Environmental
Protection Agency
promulgates a regulation.
The auto industry makes its
cars a little cleaner, and—
presto—the air gets better.
But Stedman doesn’t much
care about what happens in
Washington and Detroit.
The challenge of controlling
air pollution isn’t so much
about the laws as it is about
compliance with them. It’s a
policing problem, rather
than a policy problem, and
there is something
ultimately unsatisfying
about his proposed solution.
He wants to end air
pollution in Denver with a
half-dozen vans outfitted
with a contraption about the
size of a suitcase. Can such a
big problem have such a
small-bore solution?
That’s what made the findings
of the Christopher
Commission so unsatisfying.
We put together blue-ribbon
panels when we’re faced with
problems that seem too large
for the normal mechanisms of
bureaucratic repair. We want
sweeping reforms. But what
was the commission’s most
memorable observation? It
was the story of an officer with
a known history of doing
things like beating up
handcuffed suspects who
nonetheless received a
performance review from his
superior stating that he
“usually conducts himself in a
manner that inspires respect
for the law and instills public
confidence.” This is what you
say about an officer when you
haven’t actually read his file,
and the implication of the
Christopher Commission’s
report was that the L.A.P.D.
might help solve its problem
simply by getting its police
captains to read the files of
their officers. The L.A.P.D.’s
problem was a matter not of
policy but of compliance. The
department needed to adhere
to the rules it already had in
place, and that’s not what a
public hungry for institutional
transformation wants to hear.
Solving problems that have
power-law distributions
doesn’t just violate our moral
intuitions; it violates our
political intuitions as well.
It’s hard not to conclude, in
the end, that the reason we
treated the homeless as one
hopeless undifferentiated
group for so long is not
simply that we didn’t know
better. It’s that we didn’t
want to know better. It was
easier the old way.
Power-law solutions have
little appeal to the right,
because they involve special
treatment for people who do
not deserve special
treatment; and they have
little appeal to the left,
because their emphasis on
efficiency over fairness
suggests the cold number-
crunching of Chicago-school
cost-benefit analysis. Even
the promise of millions of
dollars in savings or cleaner
air or better police
departments cannot entirely
compensate for such
discomfort. In Denver, John
Hickenlooper, the city’s
enormously popular mayor,
has worked on the
homelessness issue tirelessly
during the past couple of
years. He spent more time
on the subject in his annual
State of the City address this
past summer than on any
other topic. He gave the
speech, with deliberate
symbolism, in the city’s
downtown Civic Center
Park, where homeless
people gather every day with
their shopping carts and
garbage bags. He has gone
on local talk radio on many
occasions to discuss what
the city is doing about the
issue. He has commissioned
studies to show what a drain
on the city’s resources the
homeless population has
become. But, he says, “there
are still people who stop me
going into the supermarket
and say, ‘I can’t believe
you’re going to help those
homeless people, those
bums.'”
5.
Early one morning a year
ago, Marla Johns got a call
from her husband, Steve. He
was at work. “He called and
woke me up,” Johns
remembers. “He was choked
up and crying on the phone.
And I thought that
something had happened
with another police officer. I
said, ‘Oh, my gosh, what
happened?’ He said, ‘Murray
died last night.’ ” He died of
intestinal bleeding. At the
police department that
morning, some of the
officers gave Murray a
moment of silence.
“There are not many days
that go by that I don’t have a
thought of him,” she went
on. “Christmas comes— and
I used to buy him a
Christmas present. Make
sure he had warm gloves
and a blanket and a coat.
There was this mutual
respect. There was a time
when another intoxicated
patient jumped off the
gurney and was coming at me,
and Murray jumped off his
gurney and shook his fist and
said, ‘Don’t you touch my
angel.’ You know, when he
was monitored by the system
he did fabulously. He would
be on house arrest and he
would get a job and he would
save money and go to work
every day, and he wouldn’t
drink. He would do all the
things he was supposed to do.
There are some people who
can be very successful
members of society if
someone monitors them.
Murray needed someone to be
in charge of him.”
But, of course, Reno didn’t
have a place where Murray
could be given the structure
he needed. Someone must
have decided that it cost too
much.
“I told my husband that I
would claim his body if no one
else did,” she said. “I would
not have him in an unmarked
grave.”
© 2006 Malcolm Gladwell