In fact, that period of education will serve me very well. I saw criminals in the act of planning, or sometimes, debriefing after-the-fact, thier crimes. One stands out:
I was in the drug trap house, and two crackhead chicks had just robbed a room in a Microtel. The black fellow who was critiquing the crime chastised them severely for stealing from a room right across the hall from their room. He remarked, "Man, you don't DO that, they got cameras. You on FILM now, bitch! Next time you call me or **** or #### and we send a hood-n****a in there, he's wearin' a hoodie and a baseball cap and HE does it!"
Criminals think, plan, and operate much as any other group of individuals do. They use common sense, formulate plans, and use their experience to improve their craft. I had always viewed crime as an impulse thing, this was my awakening that this was not necessarily so.
A relatively small number of full-time criminals is responsible for a relatively-large percentage of robberies, burglaries, and theft.
About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.Coming very soon to a neighborhood near you.Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.