Lori Sturdevant: How to create change and make cities safer

If the journalists at the New Yorker magazine have beats, Malcolm Gladwell's is "change." His magazine articles and best-selling books -- "Blink" and "Tipping Point" -- have helped explain why Americans' attitudes and behavior often change so fast.

That makes him just the fellow to help Minnesotans understand societal changes they don't like -- such as the fact that Minnesota has six times as many people in prison today as it did in 1957 -- and ponder how to create changes they'd welcome instead.

Gladwell will be the featured speaker at events Tuesday and Wednesday sponsored by the Council on Crime and Justice, a group that promotes the notion that Minnesota's criminal-justice system should dispense what its name advertises.

The council hopes Gladwell will describe the dramatic decline in criminal activity in New York City that began in the 1990s and continues today. When I caught up with him last week, he said he won't disappoint.

He explained in "Tipping Point" in 2000 how a relatively small change by authorities -- a stepped-up effort to keep subway cars clean and graffiti-free, and to crack down on fare dodgers -- led to lower crime rates. Disorder on the subway showed tolerance for lawbreaking; orderly subways signaled just the opposite.

I'll let him describe what happened:

"New York didn't solve its crime problem in a racially specific way, or by singling out groups. It solved a problem by assuming that all human beings respond to certain kinds of environmental changes and motivations in the same way. It said that we are creatures of our environment. If we take steps to make it better, we'll all respond, regardless of whether we are rich or poor, white or black, employed or unemployed.

"The real lesson of New York's transformation is that we are not prisoners of our culture, or our race, or our demography. We can overcome that, if we just take appropriate steps."

Discovering what those steps are is the trick, of course. Every city's functional equivalent of New York's subway is different. Minnesotans have to see for themselves what in their environment is sending the wrong signals to potential criminals and is susceptible to quick, visible change -- then change it.

But Gladwell confirmed something I suspected when I read his book: Finding and fixing a visible symbol of community disorder is only a start. Altering the trend lines on crime requires sustained, systemic community effort.

"Repairing the physical environment ... got the ball rolling. But what made permanent change is that after initial steps were taken, a series of institutions and individuals came forward and made the longer-term investments that are paying off now in New York."

One of those institutions was government, Gladwell said. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's willingness to raise taxes for crime-prevention activities was crucial, he said.

But just spending more money the same old way wasn't effective. He's been examining charter schools in the Bronx that are taking kids from a neighborhood as rough as any in Minnesota and are lifting them from the 30th to the 80th percentiles of performance on standardized academic tests. He thinks he knows why they are succeeding:

"It was not sufficient for them simply to tweak the educational model. They've radically revised the notion of what an education is. They've said, look, kids from disadvantaged backgrounds are so far behind their middle-class counterparts that they are going to have to outwork them in order to catch up.

"We're talking about kids that start school at 7:30 and end at 5. Kids come to school on Saturday mornings. They go to school throughout July. These kids have class time that's 60 percent longer than their middle-class counterparts. That's a lot.

"Is it hard to have a carefree childhood when you go to school that much? Absolutely. But those who do realize it is their single best chance for a future. They've done what people at the bottom of the socioeconomic rung have done for millennia. They have made a sacrifice. That's a really important part of this. It doesn't just have to be those of affluence in Minneapolis making efforts to help those at the bottom. Those at the bottom have to make sacrifices as well."

Measures such as that one need Minnesota's consideration, if this state wants to reduce the share of its young males -- particularly young males of color -- it puts in prison.

If that is a goal that isn't at the forefront of state priorities, it should be. Demographic trends demand it. The population of nonwhite males ages 18 to 30 is projected to nearly double in Ramsey and Hennepin counties between 2000 and 2030, as the white population of those ages and places drops by about a third.

If Minnesota continues to jail as large a share of its nonwhite male population as it does now, argues Tom Johnson of the Council on Crime and Justice, "our criminal-justice system is unsustainable."

Gladwell described Minnesota's crime situation this way:

"We've gone in the direction over the last two decades in this country of a kind of war on permissiveness. Zero tolerance. If you slip up, that's it. We are in some ways facing the consequences. We've written off a portion of the population that made a misstep, in many cases a serious misstep, early in their lives.

"Maybe it's time to revisit that attitude and ask, is the social cost you pay for that too high? In Minneapolis, you are seeing some of the limitations of zero-tolerance approach. ... You need a portfolio of responses to crime. That's the take-home from the New York experience. "

Lori Sturdevant is a Star Tribune editorial writer and columnist. She is at lsturdevant@startribune.com.