The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference by Gladwell Malcolm

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference by Gladwell Malcolm

Author:Gladwell, Malcolm
Language: eng
Format: epub


FOUR

The Power of Context

(Part One)

BERNIE GOETZ AND THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW YORK CITY CRIME

On December 22, 1984, the Saturday before Christmas, Bernhard Goetz left his apartment in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and walked to the IRT subway station at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. He was a slender man in his late thirties, with sandy-colored hair and glasses, dressed that day in jeans and a windbreaker. At the station, he boarded the number two downtown express train and sat down next to four young black men. There were about twenty people in the car, but most sat at the other end, avoiding the four teenagers, because they were, as eyewitnesses would say later, “horsing around” and “acting rowdy.”

Goetz seemed oblivious. “How are ya?” one of the four, Troy Canty, said to Goetz, as he walked in. Canty was lying almost prone on one of the subway benches. Canty and another of the teenagers, Barry Allen, walked up to Goetz and asked him for five dollars. A third youth, James Ramseur, gestured toward a suspicious-looking bulge in his pocket, as if he had a gun in there.

“What do you want?” Goetz asked.

“Give me five dollars,” Canty repeated.

Goetz looked up and, as he would say later, saw that Canty's "eyes were shiny, and he was enjoying himself.. ..

He had a big smile on his face,“ and somehow that smile and those eyes set him off. Goetz reached into his pocket and pulled out a chrome-plated five-shot Smith and Wes-son .38, firing at each of the four youths in turn. As the fourth member of the group, Darrell Cabey, lay screaming on the ground, Goetz walked over to him and said, ”You seem all right. Here's another," before firing a fifth bullet into Cabey's spinal cord and paralysing him for life.

In the tumult, someone pulled the emergency brake.

The other passengers ran into the next car, except for two women who remained riveted in panic. “Are you all right?” Goetz asked the first, politely. Yes, she said. The second woman was lying on the floor. She wanted Goetz to think she was dead. “Are you all right?” Goetz asked her, twice. She nodded yes. The conductor, now on the scene, asked Goetz if he was a police officer.

“No,” said Goetz. “I don't know why I did it.” Pause.

“They tried to rip me off.”

The conductor asked Goetz for his gun. Goetz declined. He walked through the doorway at the front of the car, unhooked the safety chain, and jumped down onto the tracks, disappearing into the dark of the tunnel.

In the days that followed, the shooting on the IRT caused a national sensation. The four youths all turned out to have criminal records. Cabey had been arrested previously for armed robbery, Canty for theft. Three of them had screwdrivers in their pockets. They seemed the embodiment of the kind of young thug feared by nearly all urban-dwellers, and the mysterious gunman who shot them down seemed like an avenging angel. The tabloids dubbed Goetz the “Subway Vigilante” and the “Death Wish Shooter.



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