Previous
David Weisburd
Larry Sherman is a criminologist who teamed up with David Weisburd to study crime in Minneapolis. Sherman and Weisburd discovered that crime was confined to roughly 3.3 percent of the city’s streets. These findings led them to develop the Law of Crime Concentration, which suggests that “crime is tied to very specific places and contexts.” Sherman is also responsible for his experiments with the Kansas City Police Department in the 1990s. Sherman successfully implemented preventative patrol techniques to reduce Kansas City’s major gun problem in the 1990s, when Kansas City’s crime rate was roughly three times the national average. The success of Lawrence’s experiment rested on his emphasis on focused policing, only increasing patrolling in areas with heavy crime rates.
Get the entire Talking to Strangers LitChart as a printable PDF.
Larry Sherman Character Timeline in Talking to Strangers
The timeline below shows where the character Larry Sherman appears in Talking to Strangers. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter Ten: Sylvia Plath
5. After leaving Brooklyn, Weisburd joined fellow criminologist Larry Sherman to continue studying the relationship between geography and crime. Weisburd and Sherman’s study focused on...
(full context)
Chapter Eleven: Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments
2. Lawrence Sherman targeted guns as what fueled Kansas City crime. He assigned teams to go door to...
(full context)
4. Gladwell points out that Lawrence Sherman of the Kansas City experiment is the same Sherman who worked with David Weisburd in...
(full context)
...same neighborhood and have nothing to do, and nobody wanted to believe in Weisburd and Sherman’s Law of Crime Concentration.
(full context)
Chapter Twelve: Sandra Bland
...stigmatizing 399,983 Mikes and Sandras in order to find 17 bad apples?” asks Gladwell. Larry Sherman predicted this problem when he organized the Kansas City gun experiment and anticipated it would...
(full context)
