David And Goliath Part 6

"I have people out there 24/7," Jaffe said. "So when a J-RIPper is arrested, I'm willing to send in a team if I have to. I don't care if it's the Bronx, or the middle of the night. There have got to be dire consequences. They've got to know what's going to happen. It's got to be swift. If you get arrested, you're going to see my face."

She went on, "I tell them, 'You can slam the door when I come to your house. But I'll see you on the street. I'll say h.e.l.lo to you. I'll learn everything about you. You go from Brooklyn to the Bronx, I'll know what trains you take.' We say to someone, 'Johnnie, come into the J-RIP office tomorrow,' and Johnnie comes in, and we say, 'You were stopped in the Bronx last night. You got a summons.' He says, 'What?' 'You were with Raymond Rivera and Mary Jones.' 'How do you know that?' They started thinking we were all over the place. Since we had developed a folder on each kid, we'd show them what we had on them. We'd say, 'These are all your buddies. Here's all your information. Here are your pictures. We know you're part of this development. We know you might be a part of a crew. We know your world.' We started learning about where they're supposed to go to school, who they're hanging out with at school. When they're not in school, we get a call. So my J-RIP team goes out and wakes them up and says, 'Get up!'"

But this was only part of Jaffe's strategy. She also did things that don't sound like typical policing strategy. She spent a lot of time, for example, finding the right kind of officer to serve on the task force. "I couldn't put just any cop in there," she said, sounding more like a social worker than a police chief. "I had to have a cop that loves kids. I had to have a cop that didn't have an ounce of negativity about them, and who had the ability to help sway kids and push them in the right direction." To head the group, she finally settled on David Gla.s.sberg, a gregarious former narcotics officer with children of his own.

She was also obsessed, from the very beginning, with meeting the families of her J-RIPpers. She wanted to know them. It turned out to be surprisingly difficult. In her first attempt, she sent letters to every home, inviting the families to come to a local church for a group session. No one showed up. Then Jaffe and her team went door-to-door. Once again, they got nowhere. "We ended up going to each family, one hundred and six kids," she said. "They would say, 'f.u.c.k you. Don't come into my house.'"

The breakthrough finally came months into the program. "There's this one kid," Jaffe said. She made up a name for him: Johnnie Jones. "He was a bad kid. He was fourteen, fifteen then. He lived with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old sister. His mother lived in Queens. Even the mother hated us. There was no one for us to reach out to. So now, November of the first year, 2007, Dave Gla.s.sberg comes to my office, Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

"He says, 'All the guys, all the people on the team, chipped in and we bought Johnnie Jones and his family Thanksgiving dinner tonight.'

"And I said, 'You're kidding.' This was a bad kid.

"And he goes, 'You know why we did it? This is a kid that we're gonna lose but there are seven other kids in that family. We had to do something for them.'

"I had tears in my eyes. Then he said, 'Well, we have all these other families. What are we going to do?' It's ten a.m., day before Thanksgiving, and I said, 'Dave, what if I go to the police commissioner and see if I can get two thousand bucks and see if we can buy a turkey for every family? Could we do it?'"

She went upstairs to the executive level of police headquarters, and begged for two minutes with the police commissioner. "I said, 'This is what Dave Gla.s.sberg did with the team. I want to buy a hundred and twenty-five turkeys. Can I get money somewhere?' He said yes. Gla.s.sberg put his men on overtime. They found frozen turkeys and refrigerated trucks, and that night went door-to-door in the Brownsville projects. We put them in a bag, and we did a flyer: 'From our family to your family, Happy Thanksgiving.'"

Jaffe was sitting in her office at New York police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. She was in full uniform-tall and formidable, with a head of thick black hair and more than a hint of Brooklyn in her voice.

"We'd knock," she continued. "Momma or Grandma would open the door and say, 'Johnnie, the police are here'-just like that. I'd say, 'Hi, Mrs. Smith, I'm Chief Jaffe. We have something for you for Thanksgiving. We just want to wish you a happy Thanksgiving.' And they'd be, 'What is this?' And they'd say, 'Come in, come in,' and they would drag you in, and the apartments were so hot, I mean, and then, 'Johnnie, come here, the police are here!' And there's all these people running around, hugging and crying. Every family-I did five-there was hugging and crying. And I always said the same thing: 'I know sometimes you can hate the police. I understand all that. But I just want you to know, as much as it seems that we're hara.s.sing you by knocking on your door, we really do care, and we really do want you to have a happy Thanksgiving.'"

Now, why was Jaffe so obsessed with meeting her J-RIPpers' families? Because she didn't think the police in Brownsville were perceived as legitimate. Across the United States, an astonishing number of black men have spent some time in prison. (To give you just one statistic, 69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.) Brownsville is a neighborhood full of black male high school dropouts, which means that virtually every one of those juvenile delinquents on Jaffe's list would have had a brother or a father or a cousin who had served time in jail.2 If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard? What Jaffe realized when she came to Brownsville was that the police were seen as the enemy. And if the police were seen as the enemy, how on earth would she be able to get fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds-already embarked on a course of mugging and stealing-to change their ways? She could threaten them and warn them of the dire consequences of committing more crimes. But these were teenagers, stubborn and defiant by nature, who had already drifted into a life of crime. Why should they listen to her? She represented the inst.i.tution that had put their fathers and brothers and cousins in prison. She needed to win back the respect of the community, and to do that, she needed the support of the families of her J-RIPpers. Her little speech on that first Thanksgiving-I know sometimes you can hate the police. I understand all that. But I just want you to know, as much as it seems that we're hara.s.sing you by knocking on your door, we really do care, and we really do want you to have a happy Thanksgiving-was a plea for legitimacy. She was trying to get families who had been on the wrong side of the law-sometimes for generations-to see that the law could be on their side.

After the success with the turkeys, Jaffe started Christmas-toy giveaways. The J-RIP task force started playing basketball with their young charges. They took them out for sushi dinners. They tried to get them summer jobs. They drove them to doctor appointments. Then Jaffe started a Christmas dinner, where every J-RIPper was invited along with his entire family. "You know what I do at the Christmas dinner with my J-RIP kids?" Jaffe said. "They act all tough in front of their friends. So I hug each one of them. It's always 'Come on. Let's hug.'" Jaffe is not a small woman. She is strong and imposing. Imagine her approaching some skinny teenager with her arms wide open. A hug from her would swallow him up.

This sounds like something out of a bad Hollywood movie, doesn't it? Turkeys on Thanksgiving! Hugging and crying! The reason most police departments around the world haven't followed Jaffe's lead is that what she did doesn't seem right. Johnnie Jones was a bad kid. Buying food and toys for people like him seems like the worst form of liberal indulgence. If the police chief in your town announced, in the face of a major crime wave, that she was going to start hugging and feeding the families of the criminals roaming the streets, you'd be speechless-right? Well, take a look at what happened in Brownsville.

When Leites and Wolf wrote that "influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism," they meant that the power of the state was without limits. If you wanted to impose order, you didn't have to worry about what those whom you were ordering about thought of you. You were above that. But Leites and Wolf had it backwards. What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

That was the mistake General Freeland made in the Lower Falls. He didn't look at what was happening through the eyes of people like Rosemary Lawlor. He thought he'd ended the insurgency when he rode around the hushed streets of the Lower Falls like a British Raj on a tiger hunt. Had he bothered to drive up the street to Ballymurphy, where Harriet Carson was banging the lids of pots and saying, "Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered," he would have realized the insurgency was just beginning.

July in Northern Ireland is the height of what is known as "marching season," when the country's Protestant Loyalists organize parades to commemorate their long-ago victories over the country's Catholic minority. There are church parades, "arch, banner and hall" parades, commemorative band parades, and "blood and thunder" and "kick-the-Pope" flute band parades. There are parades with full silver bands, parades with bagpipes, parades with accordions, and parades with marchers wearing sashes and dark suits and bowler hats. There are hundreds of parades in all, involving tens of thousands of people, culminating every year in a ma.s.sive march on the twelfth of July that marks the anniversary of the victory by William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when Protestant control over Northern Ireland was established once and for all.

The night before the Twelfth, as it is known, marchers around the country hold street parties and build enormous bonfires.3 When the fire is at its height, the group chooses a symbol to burn. In past years, it has often been an effigy of the Pope or some hated local Catholic official. Here's how one Twelfth ditty goes, sung to the tune of "Clementine": Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, Stick a Catholic on the top, Put the Pope right in the middle, And burn the f.u.c.king lot.4 Northern Ireland is not a large country. Its cities are dense and compact, and as the Loyalists march by each summer in their bowler hats and sashes with flutes, they inevitably pa.s.s by the neighborhoods of the people whose defeat they are celebrating. The central artery of Catholic West Belfast is, in places, no more than a few minutes' walk from the street that runs through the heart of Protestant West Belfast. There are places in Belfast where the houses of Catholics back directly onto the backyards of Protestants, in such close proximity that each house has a giant metal grate over its backyard to protect the inhabitants against debris or petrol bombs thrown by their neighbors. On the night before the Twelfth, when Loyalists lit bonfires around the city, people in Catholic neighborhoods would smell the smoke and hear the chants and see their flag going up in flames.

In marching season, violence always erupts in Northern Ireland. One of the incidents that began the Troubles was in 1969 after two days of riots broke out when a parade pa.s.sed through a Catholic neighborhood. When the marchers went home, they went on a rampage through the streets of West Belfast, burning down scores of homes.5 The gun battles the following summer that so tried Freeland's patience also happened during Protestant marches. Imagine that every summer U.S. Army veterans from the Northern states paraded through the streets of Atlanta and Richmond to commemorate their long-ago victory in the American Civil War. In the dark years of Northern Ireland, when Catholic and Protestant were at each other's throats, that's what marching season felt like.

When the residents of the Lower Falls looked up that afternoon and saw the British Army descend on their neighborhood, they were then as desperate as anyone to see law and order enforced in Belfast. But they were equally anxious about how law and order would be enforced. Their world did not seem fair. The Twelfth, when either their flag or their Pope would be burned in giant bonfires, was only days away. The inst.i.tution charged with keeping both sides apart during marching season was the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But the RUC was almost entirely Protestant. It belonged to the other side. The RUC had done almost nothing to try to stop the riots the previous summer; a tribunal convened by the British government concluded, after the Protestant Loyalists had torched houses, that the RUC officers had "failed to take effective action." Journalists at the scene reported Loyalists going up to police officers and asking them if they could borrow their weapons. One of the reasons the British Army had been brought into Northern Ireland was to serve as an impartial referee between Protestant and Catholic. But England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country, so it seemed only natural to Northern Ireland's beleaguered Catholics that the sympathies of the soldiers would ultimately lie with the Protestants. When a big Loyalist march had run through Ballymurphy in the Easter before the curfew, British soldiers had stood between the marchers and the residents, ostensibly to act as a buffer. But the troops faced the Catholics on the sidewalk and stood with their backs to the Loyalists-as if they saw their job as to protect the Loyalists from the Catholics but not the Catholics from the Loyalists.

General Freeland was trying to enforce the law in Belfast, but he needed to first ask himself if he had the legitimacy to enforce the law-and the truth is, he didn't. He was in charge of an inst.i.tution that the Catholics of Northern Ireland believed, with good reason, was thoroughly sympathetic to the very people who had burned down the houses of their friends and relatives the previous summer. And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6 The great puzzle of Northern Ireland is why it took the British so long to understand this. In 1969, the Troubles resulted in thirteen deaths, seventy-three shootings, and eight bombings. In 1970, Freeland decided to get tough with thugs and gunmen, warning that anyone caught throwing gasoline bombs was "liable to be shot." What happened? The historian Desmond Hamill writes: The [IRA] retaliated by saying that they would shoot soldiers, if Irishmen were shot. The Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force-an extreme and illegal paramilitary unit-quickly joined in, offering to shoot a Catholic in return for every soldier shot by the IRA. The Times quoted a Belfast citizen saying: "Anyone who isn't confused here doesn't really understand what is going on."

That year, there were 25 deaths, 213 shootings, and 155 bombings. The British stood firm. They cracked down even harder-and in 1971, there were 184 deaths, 1,020 bombings, and 1,756 shootings. Then the British drew a line in the sand. The army inst.i.tuted a policy known as "internment." Civil rights in Northern Ireland were suspended. The country was flooded with troops, and the army declared that anyone suspected of terrorist activities could be arrested and held in prison, indefinitely, without charges or trial. So many young Catholic men were rounded up during internment that in a neighborhood like Ballymurphy, everyone had a brother or a father or a cousin in prison. If that many people in your life have served time behind bars, does the law seem fair anymore? Does it seem predictable? Does it seem like you can speak up and be heard? Things got even worse. In 1972, there were 1,495 shootings, 531 armed robberies, 1,931 bombings, and 497 people killed. One of those 497 was a seventeen-year-old boy named Eamon. Eamon was Rosemary Lawlor's little brother.7 "Eamon appeared at my door," Lawlor said. "He said to me, 'I'd love to stay here for a day or two.' And I said, 'Why don't you?' He said, 'Ma would have a fit. She would go ballistic.' Then he confided in myself and my husband that he was getting hara.s.sed by the British Army. Every time he was out, every corner he turned, everywhere he went, they were stopping him and they threatened him."

Was he actually working with the IRA? She didn't know, and she said it didn't matter. "We were all suspects in their eyes," she went on. "That's the way it was. And Eamon was shot, shot by a British soldier. Him and another fellow were having a smoke, and one shot rang out, and Eamon got it. He lived for eleven weeks. He died on the sixteenth of January, at seventeen and a half years of age." She began to tear up. "My father never worked again at the dock. My mother was destroyed, heartbroken. It's forty years ago this year. It's still rough."

Lawlor was a young wife and mother, living what she had expected would be a normal life in modern Belfast. But then she lost her home. She was threatened and hara.s.sed. Her relatives down the hill were imprisoned in their homes. Her brother was shot and killed. She never wanted any of it, nor asked for any of it, nor could even make sense of what happened. "That was my life, my whole new life," she said. "And then this was forced upon me. And I go, This is not right. D'you know? Here are my people I grew up with in school, being burnt out of their houses. The British Army that came in to protect us has now turned on us and is wracking and ruining. I became hooked. I don't mean that flippantly. I became that way because I can't sit in the house while this is going on. I can't be a nine-to-five mother.

"People call it the Troubles," she continued. "It was war! The British Army was out there with armored cars and weapons and you name it. That's a war zone we lived in. The British Army came in here with every means that they had available to put us down. And we were like rubber dolls-we'd just bounce back up again. Don't get me wrong. We got hurt on the way down. A lot of people had heartache. I suffered from anger for a long, long time, and I've apologized to my children for that. But the circ.u.mstances dictated that. It wasn't how I was. I wasn't born that way. This was forced upon me."

When General Freeland's men descended on the Lower Falls, the first thing the neighbors did was run to St. Peter's Cathedral, the local Catholic church just a few blocks away. The defining feature of the Lower Falls, like so many of the other Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast, was its religiosity. St. Peter's was the heart of the neighborhood. Four hundred people would attend ma.s.s at St. Peter's on a typical weekday. The most important man in the community was the local priest. He came running. He went up to the soldiers. The raid must be done quickly, he warned them, or there would be trouble.

Forty-five minutes pa.s.sed, and the soldiers emerged with their haul: fifteen pistols, a rifle, a Schmeisser submachine gun, and a cache of explosives and ammunition. The patrol packed up and left, turning onto a side street that would take them out of the Lower Falls. In the interim, however, a small crowd had gathered, and as the armored cars turned the corner, a number of young men ran forward and started throwing stones at the soldiers. The patrol stopped. The crowd grew angry. The soldiers responded with tear gas. The crowd grew angrier. Stones turned to petrol bombs and petrol bombs to bullets. A taxi driver said he had seen someone carrying a submachine gun heading for Balkan Street. The rioters set up roadblocks to slow the army's advance: a truck was set ablaze, blocking the end of the street. The soldiers fired even more tear gas, until the wind had carried it clear across the Lower Falls. The crowd grew angrier still.

Why did the patrol stop? Why didn't they just keep going? Lingering in the neighborhood is exactly what the priest told them not to do. The priest went back to the soldiers and pleaded with them again. If they stopped the tear gas, he said, he would get the crowd to stop throwing stones. The soldiers didn't listen. Their instructions were to get tough and be seen to get tough with thugs and gunmen. The priest turned back toward the crowd. As he did, the soldiers fired off another round of tear gas. The canisters fell at the feet of the priest, and he staggered across the street, leaning on a windowsill as he gasped for air. In a neighborhood so devout that four hundred people would show up for ma.s.s on a typical weekday, the British Army ga.s.sed the priest.

That was when the riot started. Freeland called in reinforcements. To subdue a community of eight thousand people-packed into tiny houses along narrow streets-the British brought in three thousand troops. And not just any troops. To a fiercely Catholic neighborhood, Freeland bought in soldiers from the Royal Scots-one of the most obviously and self-consciously Protestant regiments in the entire army. Army helicopters circled overhead, ordering the residents by megaphone to stay inside their homes. Roadblocks were placed at every exit. A curfew was declared, and a systematic house-by-house search began. Twenty- and twenty-one-year-old soldiers, still smarting from the indignity of being pelted with stones and petrol bombs, forced their way into home after home, punching holes in walls and ceilings, ransacking bedrooms. Listen to one of those British soldiers, looking back on what happened that night: A guy still in his pajamas came out cursing, wielding a lamp, and whacked Stan across the head. Stan dodged the next one and decked the bloke with his rifle b.u.t.t. I knew full well that a lot of the lads were taking this opportunity to vent their anger over things already done. Heads were being cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom. Everything in the houses became a ma.s.s of rubble, but, out of the blur, little sharp details still cut through: school photos; smiley family pictures (cracked); trinkets and crucifixes (snapped); kids crying; crunching on the gla.s.s of the Pope's picture; unfinished meals and bad wallpaper; coloured toys and TV noise and radio crackle; painted plates; shoes; a body in the hall, flattened against the wall....This is when I did feel like we'd invaded.

Three hundred and thirty-seven people were arrested that night. Sixty were injured. Charles O'Neill, a disabled air force veteran, was run over and killed by a British armored car. As his body lay on the ground, one of the soldiers poked a bystander with a baton and said, "Move on, you Irish b.a.s.t.a.r.d-there are not enough of you dead." A man named Thomas Burns was shot by a soldier on the Falls Road at eight p.m. as he stood with a friend who was boarding up the windows of his store. When his sister came to pick up his body, she was told he had no business being on the street at that time. At eleven p.m., an elderly man named Patrick Elliman, thinking the worst was over, went out in his bedroom slippers and shirtsleeves for a pre-bedtime stroll. He died in a burst of army gunfire. One of the neighborhood accounts of the curfew says of Elliman's death: That very night British troops actually entered and quartered themselves in the shot man's home, the distraught sister having been moved to the other brother's up the street. This tasteless intrusion into the abandoned home was discovered the next afternoon during the interval in the "curfew" when the brother, with his daughter and son-in-law, went down to the house and found the door broken down, a window broken, kit lying on the floor, shaving tackle on the settee, and used cups in the scullery. Neighbors informed them that the soldiers had dossed down in the upstairs rooms as well.

A door broken down. A window broken. Dirty dishes left in the sink. Leites and Wolf believed that all that counts are rules and rational principles. But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do-or don't do-to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.

By Sunday morning, the situation inside the Lower Falls was growing desperate. The Lower Falls was not a wealthy neighborhood. Many of the adults were unemployed or, if they were not, relied on piecework. The streets were crowded, and the homes were narrow-cheaply built nineteenth-century terraced redbrick row houses, with one room to a floor, and bathrooms in the backyard. Very few houses had a refrigerator. They were dark and damp. People bought bread daily because it grew moldy otherwise. But the curfew was now thirty-six hours old-and there was no bread left. The Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast are packed so tightly together, and linked by so many ties of marriage and blood, that word spread quickly from one to the next about the plight of the Lower Falls. Harriet Carson walked through Ballymurphy, banging together the lids of pots. Next came a woman named Maire Drumm.8 She had a bullhorn. She marched through the streets, shouting to the women: "Come out! Fill your prams with bread and milk! The children haven't gotten any food."

The women started to gather in groups of two and four and ten and twenty, until they numbered in the thousands. "Some people still had their rollers in their hair, and their scarves over their head," Lawlor remembered. "We linked arms and sang, 'We shall overcome. We shall overcome someday.'

"We got down to the bottom of the hill," she went on. "The atmosphere was electric. The Brits were standing with their helmets and their guns-all ready. Their batons were out. We turned and went down the Grosvenor Road, singing and shouting. I think the Brits were in awe. They couldn't believe that these women with prams were coming down to take them on. I remember seeing one Brit standing there scratching his head, going, 'What do we do with all these women? Do we go into riot situation here?' Then we turned onto Slate Street, where the school was-my school. And the Brits were there. They come flying out [of the school], and there was hand-to-hand fighting. We got the hair pulled out of us. The Brits just grabbed us, threw us up against the walls. Oh, aye. They beat us, like. And if you fell, you had to get up very quickly, because you didn't want to get trampled. They came out with brutality. I remember standing up on top of a car and having a look at what was going on in the front. Then I saw a man with shaving cream on his face, and putting his braces on-and all of a sudden the soldiers stopped beating us."

The man putting his braces on was the commanding officer of the Slate Street checkpoint. He might have been the only voice of sanity on the British side that day, the only one who understood the full dimensions of the catastrophe unfolding. A heavily armed group of soldiers was beating up a group of pram-pushing women, coming to feed the children of the Lower Falls.9 He told his men to stop.

"You have to understand, the march was still coming down the road, and the people at the back hadn't a clue what was going on at the front," Lawlor went on. "They kept coming. Women were crying. People started coming out of their houses-pulling people in because there were so many injured. Once all the people started coming out of their houses, the Brits lost control. Everyone came out on the streets-hundreds and hundreds of people. It was like a domino effect. One street they'd come out, next thing you know, doors are opening on another street, another street, and another street. The Brits gave up. They had their hands up. The women forced-and we forced and we forced-until we got in, and we got in and we broke the curfew. I've often thought about it. G.o.d, it was like-Everybody was jubilant. It was like-We did it.

"I remember coming home and suddenly felt very shaky and upset and nervous about the whole episode, do you know? I remember speaking to my father about it afterward. I said, 'Daddy, your words came true. They turned on us.' And he said, 'True. British Army-that's what they do.' He was right. They turned on us. And that was the start of it."

1 An impressive number of famous people have come from Brownsville over the years: two heavyweight boxing champions (Mike Tyson and Ridd.i.c.k Bowe); the composer Aaron Copland; the Three Stooges (played by Moe and Shemp Howard [later replaced by his brother Curly] and Larry Fine); the television host Larry King-not to mention a long list of professional basketball, football, and baseball stars. The operative words, though, are "come from Brownsville." n.o.body who can help it stays in Brownsville.

2 Here are the U.S. imprisonment rates by race and education level.

WHITE MEN 1945a49 1960a64 1975a79 High school dropouts 4.2 8.0 15.3 High school only 0.7 2.5 4.1 Some college 0.7 0.8 1.2 BLACK MEN 1945a49 1960a64 1975a79 High school dropouts 14.7 41.6 69.0 High school only 10.2 12.4 18.0 Some college 4.9 5.5 7.6 The key statistics are the ones in boldface. Sixty-nine percent of all black male high school dropouts born between 1975 and 1979 have spent time behind bars. That's Brownsville in a nutsh.e.l.l.

3 In Belfast, the Twelfth march wends its way through the city and ends up in the "Field," a large staging area where the crowd gathers for public speeches. Here is a sample of one speech given in 1995. Keep in mind that this is after the Downing Street Declaration that officially began the peace process in Northern Ireland: We have read the history books, from 200 years ago. The Roman Catholics forming into groups known as the Defenders, to get rid of the so called heretic dogs, better known by you and I as Protestant people. Well today is no different from 1795. There is a Pope on the throne, a Polish Pope who was around in the days of Hitler and the concentration camps of Auschwitz when they stood back and watched thousands go out to death without one word of condemnation.

4 There are many versions of this children's rhyme, of course. A slightly less offensive version is sung by fans of Manchester United about their archrival Liverpool. (A "scouser," incidentally, refers to someone from Liverpool or who speaks with the Liverpudlian accent. The Beatles were scousers.) Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, Put the scousers on the top, Put the city in the middle, And we'll burn the f.u.c.kin' lot.

As you might expect, numerous highly enthusiastic renditions of this rhyme are available on YouTube.

5 The next day, a Loyalist mob burned the Catholic neighborhood along Bombay Street to the ground. The Loyalists, who are fond of their verse, had a ditty for that attack as well: On the 15th of August, we took a little trip Up along Bombay Street and burned out all the s.h.i.t.

We took a little petrol, and we took a little gun And we fought the b.l.o.o.d.y Fenians till we had them on the run.

6 As Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams would say years later, the curfew's result was that "thousands of people...who had never had any time for physical force now accepted it as a practical necessity."

7 By the way, things didn't get much better in 1973. The British cracked down even harder that year, and there were 171 civilians killed, 5,018 shootings, 1,007 explosions, 1,317 armed robberies, and 17.2 tons of explosives seized by the army.

8 Six years later, Drumm was shot to death in her bed by Protestant extremists while she was being treated at Mater Hospital in Belfast.

9 One of the many legends of the Lower Falls curfew is that the prams pushed by marchers had two purposes. The first was to bring milk and bread into the Lower Falls. The second was to take guns and explosives out-past the unsuspecting eyes of the British Army.

Chapter Eight.

Wilma Derksen

"We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to."

One weekend in June of 1992, Mike Reynolds's daughter came home from college to go to a wedding. She was eighteen, with long honey-blond hair. Her name was Kimber. She was a student at the Fashion Inst.i.tute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. Home was Fresno, several hours to the north, in California's Central Valley. After the wedding, she stayed on to have dinner with an old friend, Greg Calderon. She was wearing shorts and boots and her father's red-and-black-checked sports coat.

Reynolds and Calderon ate at the Daily Planet restaurant, in Fresno's Tower District. They had coffee and then wandered back to her Isuzu. It was 10:41 p.m. Reynolds opened the pa.s.senger door for Calderon, then walked around the car to the driver's side. As she did, two young men on a stolen Kawasaki motorcycle moved slowly out of a parking lot just down the street. They were wearing helmets with shaded visors. The driver, Joe Davis, had a long list of drug and gun convictions. He had just been paroled from Wasco State Prison after serving time for auto theft. On the back of the motorcycle was Douglas Walker. Walker had been in and out of jail seven times. Both men were crystal-meth addicts. Earlier in the evening, they had attempted a carjacking on Shaw Avenue, Fresno's main thoroughfare. "I wasn't really thinking much a nothing, you know," Walker would say months later when asked about his state of mind that night. "When it happens, it happens, you know. It just happened suddenly. We were just out doing what we do. I mean, that's all I can tell you."

Walker and Davis pulled up alongside the Isuzu, using the weight of the motorcycle to pin Reynolds against her car. Calderon jumped out of the pa.s.senger's seat, running around the back of the car. Walker blocked his way. Davis grabbed at Reynolds's purse. He pulled out a .357 magnum handgun and placed it against her right ear. She resisted. He fired. Davis and Walker jumped back on the motorcycle and sped through a red light. People came running out of the Daily Planet. Someone tried to stanch the bleeding. Calderon drove back to Reynolds's parents' house but couldn't wake them. He called and got their answering machine. Finally, at two-thirty in the morning, he got through. Mike Reynolds heard his wife cry out, "In the head! She's been shot in the head!" Kimber died a day later.

"Father-daughter relationships are kind of a real special thing," Mike Reynolds said not long ago, looking back on that awful night. He is an older man now. He limps and has lost most of his hair. He sat at a table in his study, in his rambling Mission-style home in Fresno not more than a five-minute drive from the street where his daughter was shot. On the wall behind him was a photograph of Kimber. In the kitchen, next door, was a painting of Kimber with angel's wings, ascending to heaven. "You may fight with your wife," he went on, his voice filled with the emotion of the memory. "But your daughter is kind of like the princess-she can do no wrong. And for that matter, her dad is the guy who can fix anything, from a broken tricycle to a broken heart. Daddy can fix everything, and when this happened to our daughter, it was something I couldn't fix. I literally held her hand while she was dying. It's a very helpless feeling." At that moment, he made a vow.

"Everything I've done ever since is about a promise I made to Kimber on her deathbed," Reynolds said. "I can't save your life. But I'm going to do everything in my power to try and prevent this from happening to anybody else."

When Reynolds came home from the hospital, he got a call from Ray Appleton, the host of a popular Fresno talk-radio show. "The town was going berserk," Appleton remembers. "At the time, Fresno was number one in the country in per capita murders-or close to it. But this was just so blatant-in front of a million people, in front of a popular restaurant. I got the word late that night that Kimber had died, and I got hold of Mike. I said, 'Whenever you are ready to come on, let me know.' And he said, 'How about today?' That's where this whole thing began, fourteen hours after his daughter's death."

Reynolds describes the two hours he spent on the Appleton show as the most difficult of his life. He was in tears. "I've never seen devastation like that before," Appleton remembers. In the beginning, the two took calls from people who knew the Reynolds family, or who just wanted to express their sympathy. But then he and Reynolds began to talk about what the murder said about California's justice system, and calls started coming in from clear across the state.

Reynolds went back home and called a meeting. He invited everyone he thought could make a difference, and they sat in his backyard around a long wooden table next to his outdoor barbecue. "We had three judges, people from the police department, lawyers, the sheriff, people from the district attorney's office, people from the community, the school system," he said. "And we were asking, 'Why is this happening? What's causing it?'"

Their conclusion was that in California the penalties a.s.sociated with breaking the law were too low. Parole was being granted too easily and too quickly. Chronic offenders were being treated no differently than people who were committing crimes for the first time. Douglas Walker, the man on the back of the motorcycle, had his first run-in with the law when he was thirteen years old for trafficking heroin. He had recently been given a temporary release so he could visit his pregnant wife, and he had never returned. Did that make sense?

The group put together a proposal. At Reynolds's insistence, it was short and simple, written in laymen's language. It became known as the Three Strikes Law. Anyone convicted of a second serious or criminal offense in California, it stated, would have to serve double the sentence currently on the books. And anyone convicted of a third offense-and the definition of a third offense included every crime imaginable-would run out of chances entirely and serve a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life.1 There were no exceptions or loopholes.

Reynolds and his group collected thousands of signatures to qualify for a statewide referendum. There are countless referendum ideas in every California election season, and most never see the light of day. But Three Strikes struck a nerve. It pa.s.sed with the support of an astonishing 72 percent of the state's voters, and in the spring of 1994, Three Strikes was signed into law, almost word for word the way it was written up in Mike Reynolds's backyard. The criminologist Franklin Zimring called it "the largest penal experiment in American history." There were eighty thousand people behind bars in California's prisons in 1989. Within ten years, that number would double-and along the way, the crime rate in California came tumbling down. Between 1994 and 1998, the homicide rate in California dropped 41.4 percent, rape dropped 10.9 percent, robbery dropped by 38.7 percent, a.s.sault dropped by 22.1 percent, burglary dropped by 29.9 percent, and auto theft dropped by 36.6 percent. Mike Reynolds pledged, on his daughter's deathbed, to ensure that what happened to Kimber would never happen to anyone else-and out of his grief came a revolution.

"Back then, we were seeing twelve murders a day in the state of California. Today it's about six," Reynolds said. "So every day that goes by, I like to think that there's six people alive that wouldn't have been prior to this." He was sitting in the office of his house in Fresno, surrounded by pictures of himself with dignitaries of one sort or another and plaques and signed certificates and framed letters-all testifying to the extraordinary role he has played in the politics of America's largest state. "Every once in a while during the course of your life, you might have an opportunity to save somebody else's life," he went on. "You know, pull 'em out of a burning building, rescue 'em from drowning or some other crazy thing. But how many people get a chance to save six people's lives each and every day? I mean, I think, I'm so lucky."

He paused, as if he were going back over all that had happened in the nearly twenty years since he made that promise to Kimber. He was remarkably articulate and persuasive. It was obvious how, even in the midst of overwhelming grief, he would have been so compelling all those years ago on the Ray Appleton show. He started up again: "Think about the guy that invented safety belts. Do you know his name? I don't. I've got no clue. But think about how many guys that are safe, or people that are safe, as a result of safety belts or air bags or tamper-proof medicine containers. I could sit here and go right through it. Simple devices that are made by Joe Average, just like me, that have gone on to save numerous lives. Yet we're not looking for any kudos, we're not looking for any pats on the back. All we're looking for is results, and the results are my greatest reward."

The British came to Northern Ireland with the best of intentions and ended up in the middle of thirty years of bloodshed and mayhem. They did not get what they wanted, because they did not understand that power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect. Mike Reynolds came to wield extraordinary influence in his home state. There are few other Californians of his generation whose actions and ideas have touched as many people as his have. But in his case, power seemed to have achieved its purpose. Just look at the California crime statistics. He got what he wanted, didn't he?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Let us go back to the theory of the inverted-U curve that we discussed in the chapter on cla.s.s size. Inverted-U curves are all about limits. They ill.u.s.trate the fact that "more" is not always better; there comes a point, in fact, when the extra resources that the powerful think of as their greatest advantage only serve to make things worse. The inverted-U shape clearly describes the effects of cla.s.s size, and it clearly applies as well to the connection between parenting and wealth. But a few years ago, a number of scholars began to make a more ambitious argument, an argument that would end up pulling Mike Reynolds and his claims for Three Strikes into the center of two decades of controversy. What if the relationship between punishment and crime was also an inverted U? In other words, what if-past a certain point-cracking down on crime stopped having any effect on criminals and maybe even started to make crime worse?

At the time Three Strikes was pa.s.sed, no one considered this possibility. Mike Reynolds and his supporters a.s.sumed that every extra criminal they locked up, and every extra year they added to the average sentence, would bring about a corresponding decrease in crime.

"Back then, even first-degree murder was just sixteen years, and you'd do eight," Mike Reynolds explained. He was describing California before his Three Strikes revolution. "It became a very viable option to go into the crime business. The human psyche follows the course of least resistance. The course of least resistance is what's easy, and it's a h.e.l.l of a lot easier to go out and rob and steal and suck drugs than it is to go out and bust your a.s.s forty hours a week and punch in on a job and take a lot of s.h.i.t off customers. Who needs that? I can go out there and wave a gun around and make as much as I want as fast as I want, and if I get caught, ninety-five percent of all cases get plea-bargained down. They charge me with this, I'll admit to that, and so let's make a deal. And then third, I'm going to only serve half the time. Weigh all three, the odds are you're going to do one h.e.l.l of a lot of crime before you ever in fact get caught and prosecuted."

Reynolds was making a version of the argument that Leites and Wolf made in their cla.s.sic work on deterrence: Fundamental to our a.n.a.lysis is the a.s.sumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves "rationally," that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly. In Reynolds's view, criminals found the benefits of committing a crime in California much greater than the risks. The answer, he felt, was to raise the costs of committing a crime so high that it was no longer easier to rob and steal than to work an honest job. And for those who continued to break the law-even in the face of those altered odds-Three Strikes said, Lock them up for the rest of their lives, so they never have a chance to commit another crime again. When it came to law and order, Reynolds and the voters of California believed, "more" was always better.

But is it? Here's where the inverted-U theorist steps in. Let's start with the first a.s.sumption-that criminals respond to increases in the cost of crime by committing fewer crimes. This is clearly true when the penalties for breaking the law are really low. One of the best known case studies in criminology is about what happened in the fall of 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike for sixteen hours. Montreal was-and still is-a world-cla.s.s city in a country that is considered one of the most law-abiding and stable in the world. So, what happened? Chaos. There were so many bank robberies that day-in broad daylight-that virtually every bank in the city had to close. Looters descended on downtown Montreal, smashing windows. Most shocking of all, a long-standing dispute between the city's taxi drivers and a local car service called Murray Hill Limousine Service over the right to pick up pa.s.sengers from the airport exploded into violence, as if the two sides were warring princ.i.p.alities in medieval Europe. The taxi drivers descended on Murray Hill with gasoline bombs. Murray Hill's security guards opened fire. The taxi drivers then set a bus on fire and sent it crashing through the locked doors of the Murray Hill garage. This is Canada we're talking about. As soon as the police returned to work, however, order was restored. The threat of arrest and punishment worked.

Clearly, then, there's a big difference between having no penalties for breaking the law and having some penalties-just as there's a big difference between a cla.s.s of forty students and a cla.s.s of twenty-five. On the left side of the inverted-U curve, interventions make a difference.

But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.

Some years ago, for example, the criminologists Richard Wright and Scott Decker interviewed eighty-six convicted armed robbers. Most of what they heard were comments like this: I put forth an effort to try not to think about [getting caught....It's] too much of a distraction. You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, "What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?" As time went on, if I had made up my mind to do a robbery, [I decided] to be totally focused on that and nothing else.

Or this: That's why [my partners and I] get high so much. [We] get high and get stupid, then we don't trip off of [the threat of getting caught]. Whatever happens, happens....You just don't care at the time.

Even when pressed, the criminals interviewed by Decker and Wright "remained indifferent to threatened sanctions." They just weren't thinking that far ahead.

The murder of his daughter made Reynolds want to put the fear of G.o.d into California's would-be criminals-to make them think twice before crossing the line. But that strategy doesn't work if criminals think like this. Joe Davis and Douglas Walker-the two thugs who cornered Kimber Reynolds outside the Daily Planet-were crystal-meth addicts. Earlier that day, they had attempted a carjacking in broad daylight. And remember what Walker said? I wasn't really thinking much a nothing, you know. When it happens, it happens, you know. It just happened suddenly. We were just out doing what we do. I mean, that's all I can tell you. Is this the sort of person to think twice?

"I've talked to family friends who knew Joe and his brother, and they asked him why he shot Kimber," Reynolds once said, looking back on that tragic evening. "And he said that he already had the purse, so that wasn't an issue. But that he'd shot her, instead, because of the way she was looking at him. He shot her because he didn't think she was taking him seriously, and wasn't giving him any respect." Reynolds's own words contradict the logic of Three Strikes. Joe Davis killed Kimber Reynolds because she would not give him the respect he thought he deserved as he held a gun to her head and grabbed at her purse. How on earth does changing the severity of punishment deter someone whose brain works like that? You and I are sensitive to increased punishment, because you and I are people with a stake in society. But criminals aren't. As the criminologist David Kennedy writes: "It may simply be that those who stand ready today to take a chance, often on impulse, often while impaired, on what they view as a very small likelihood of an already very serious sanction will stand ready tomorrow to take the same chance on what they still view as a very small likelihood of a somewhat more serious sanction."2 The second argument for Three Strikes-that every extra year a criminal is behind bars is another year he can't commit a crime-is just as problematic. The math doesn't add up. The average age of a California criminal in 2011 at the moment he was convicted of his Third Strike offense, for example, was forty-three. Before Three Strikes came along, that man might have served something like five years for a typical felony and been released at the age of forty-eight. With Three Strikes, he would serve, at minimum, twenty-five years-and get out at sixty-eight. Logically, the question to ask is: How many crimes do criminals commit between the ages of forty-eight and sixty-eight? Not that many. Take a look at the following graphs, which show the relationship between age and crime both for aggravated a.s.sault and murder and for robbery and burglary.

Longer sentences work on young men. But once someone pa.s.ses that crucial midtwenties mark, all longer sentences do is protect us from dangerous criminals at the point that they become less dangerous. Once again, what starts out as a promising strategy stops working.

Now for the crucial question: Is there a right side to the crime-and-punishment curve-a point where cracking down starts to actually make things worse? The criminologist who has made this argument most persuasively is Todd Clear, and his reasoning goes something like this: Prison has a direct effect on crime: it puts a bad person behind bars, where he can't victimize anyone else. But it also has an indirect effect on crime, in that it affects all the people with whom that criminal comes into contact. A very high number of the men who get sent to prison, for example, are fathers. (One-fourth of juveniles convicted of crimes have children.) And the effect on a child of having a father sent away to prison is devastating. Some criminals are lousy fathers: abusive, volatile, absent. But many are not. Their earnings-both from crime and legal jobs-help support their families. For a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child's chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.

Once the criminal has served his time, he returns to his old neighborhood. There's a good chance he's been psychologically damaged by his time behind bars. His employment prospects have plummeted. While in prison, he's lost many of his noncriminal friends and replaced them with fellow-criminal friends. And now he's back, placing even more strain emotionally and financially on the home that he shattered by leaving in the first place. Incarceration creates collateral damage. In most cases, the harm done by imprisonment is smaller than the benefits; we're still better off for putting people behind bars. But Clear's point is that if you lock up too many people for too long, the collateral damage starts to outweigh the benefit.3 Clear and a colleague-Dina Rose-tested his hypothesis in Tallaha.s.see, Florida.4 They went across the city and compared the number of people sent to prison in a given neighborhood in one year with the crime rate in that same neighborhood the following year-and tried to estimate, mathematically, if there was a point where the inverted-U curve starts to turn. They found it. "If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison," Clear concluded, "the effect on crime starts to reverse."

This is what Jaffe was talking about in Brownsville. The damage she was trying to repair with her hugs and turkeys wasn't caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins in prison that people in the neighborhood had come to see the law as their enemy. Brownsville was on the right side of the inverted U. In California in 1989, there were seventy-six thousand people behind bars. Ten years later, largely because of Three Strikes, that number had more than doubled. On a per capita basis, by the turn of the twenty-first century, California had between five and eight times as many people in prison as did Canada or Western Europe. Don't you think it's possible that Three Strikes turned some neighborhoods in California into the equivalent of Brownsville?

Reynolds is convinced that his crusade saved six lives a day, because crime rates came tumbling down in California after Three Strikes was pa.s.sed. But upon closer examination, it turns out that those reductions started before Three Strikes went into effect. And while crime rates came tumbling down in California in the 1990s, they also came tumbling down in many other parts of the United States in the same period, even in places that didn't crack down on crime at all. The more Three Strikes was studied, the more elusive its effects were seen to be. Some criminologists concluded that it did lower crime. Others said that it worked but that the money spent on locking criminals up would have been better spent elsewhere. One recent study says that Three Strikes brought down the overall level of crime but, paradoxically, increased the number of violent crimes. Perhaps the largest group of studies can find no effect at all, and there is even a set of studies that argue that Three Strikes raised crime rates.5 The state of California conducted the greatest penal experiment in American history, and after twenty years and tens of billions of dollars, n.o.body could ascertain whether that experiment did any good.6 In November of 2012, California finally gave up. In a state referendum, the law was radically scaled back.7 Wilma Derksen was at home, trying to clean up the family room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, when her daughter Candace called. It was a Friday afternoon in November, a decade before Kimber Reynolds walked out of her parents' home for the last time. The Derksens lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on the prairies of central Canada, and at that time of year, the temperature outside was well below freezing. Candace was thirteen. She was giggling, flirting with a young boy from her school. She wanted her mother to come and pick her up. Wilma did a series of calculations in her head. The Derksens had one car. Wilma had to pick up her husband, Cliff, from work. But he wouldn't be finished for another hour. She had two other children-a two-year-old and a nine-year-old. She could hear them quarreling in the other room. She would have to bundle them up first, pick up Candace, then go and pick up her husband. It would be an hour in the car with three hungry children. There was a bus. Candace was thirteen, no longer a child. The house was a mess.

"Candace, do you have money for the bus?"

"Yup."

"I can't pick you up," her mother said.

Derksen returned to her vacuuming. She folded laundry. She bustled about. Then she stopped. Something seemed wrong. She looked at the clock. Candace should have been home by now. The weather outside had suddenly turned colder. It was snowing. She remembered that Candace hadn't dressed warmly. She began to pace between the window in the front of the house and the kitchen window in the back overlooking the alleyway. Candace might come in from either direction. The minutes pa.s.sed. It was time to pick up her husband. She packed up her other two children, got in the car, and drove slowly along Talbot Avenue, the road that connected the Derksens' neighborhood to Candace's school. She peered inside the windows of the 7-Eleven, where her daughter sometimes lingered. She drove to the school. The doors were locked. "Mom, where is she?" her nine-year-old daughter asked. They drove to Cliff's office.

"I can't find Candace," she said to her husband. "I'm worried."

The four of them went back home, watching each side of the street. They began calling her friends one by one. No one had seen her since that afternoon. Wilma Derksen drove to see the boy Candace had been flirting with before she called home. He said he had last seen her walking down Talbot Avenue. The Derksens called the police. At eleven that night, two officers knocked on their door. They sat at the dining room table and asked Wilma and her husband one question after another about whether Candace had been happy at home.

The Derksens formed a search committee, recruiting people from their church and Candace's school and whomever else they could think of. They put up "Have you seen Candace?" posters all over Winnipeg, mounting the largest civilian search in the city's history. They prayed. They cried. They did not sleep. A month pa.s.sed. They took their two young children to see the movie Pinocchio as a distraction-until the movie got to the part where Geppetto is wandering heartbroken, looking for his lost son.

In January, seven weeks after Candace Derksen's disappearance, the Derksens were at their local police station when the two sergeants a.s.signed to the case asked if they could speak to Cliff alone. After a few minutes, they took Wilma to the room where her husband was waiting and closed the door. He waited and then spoke.