Is Urban Violence Viral?

IS URBAN VIOLENCE VIRAL? It might be according to experts cited in this New York Times magazine article. The essence:

CeaseFire’s founder, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for 10 years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, and so, he suggests, the treatment ought to mimic the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source. “For violence, we’re trying to interrupt the next event, the next transmission, the next violent activity,” Slutkin told me recently. “And the violent activity predicts the next violent activity like H.I.V. predicts the next H.I.V. and TB predicts the next TB.” Slutkin wants to shift how we think about violence from a moral issue (good and bad people) to a public health one (healthful and unhealthful behavior).

It seems plausible, and interestingly, very similar to our approach to stakeholder management at the office--except in that case, we're trying to foster the spread of behavior rather than hinder it.

Either way, the central issue is network effects, and in particular, the role of hyper-connected actors within the network. Think of it this way: If someone catches the cold, but only interacts with a few other people, the rate of transmission is likely to be low. If on the other hand the ill person shakes 100 hands a day, well, a lot of people are probably going to get sick. Substitute the willingness to enact violence, or support for your company's SAP implementation, for the common cold, and it's clear that not everyone in the network is equal in the effects they exert on the whole. It's all about dealing with the critical few.

For the seminal academic piece read Rogers; for the seminal popular piece read Gladwell (the book or the original article).