David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

the previous twelve months. That search
yielded 106 names, corresponding to
180 arrests. Jaffe’s assumption was that
anyone arrested for a mugging had
probably committed somewhere
between twenty and fifty other crimes
that never came to the attention of the
police, so by her rule of thumb, her 106
juveniles were responsible for as many
as five thousand crimes in the previous
year.
She then put together a task force of
police officers and had them contact
every name on the list. “We said to them,
‘You’re in the program,’” Jaffe
explained. “‘And the program is that
we’re going to give you a choice. We