No one wants to live in a neighborhood where they fear going out because there is so much
crime.
You could have said that was the case in certain areas of New York City back in the day, and
then sometime in the 1990s the crime rate started to drop.
Police might resort to harsh tactics, such as intensive patrolling of the streets.
Judges might hand down rather long sentences for not so serious crimes.
The streets are safer, but not everyone thinks crackdowns are the best way to reduce crime.
This is a definition of crackdown: “Sudden and dramatic increases in police officer presence,
sanctions, and threats of apprehension either for specific offenses or for all offenses
in specific places.”
As we said, crime can be reduced by oppressive policing.
But who on Earth wants to live in a place where they can only feel safe if people in
uniforms are everywhere?
This kind of dystopian reality suits no one.
If you need to live behind high walls, with huge locks on your doors, life isn’t all
that wonderful.
Experts on crime know this, and so the emphasis for some people for a long time has been on
trying to make people want to be better citizens rather than oppressing them or scaring them.
A result of this is the theory we are going to discuss today.
The concept is pretty simple.
If you value the neighborhood where you live, you’ll be a better citizen and you’ll
treat that place with respect.
On the other hand, if you live in a hell hole that looks like a hell hole you might well
act like the person that lives in a hell hole.
In 1982 two guys called James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling wrote a story for the Atlantic
Monthly called “Broken Windows.”
This is part of what they said, “Consider a building with a few broken windows.
If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows.
Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters
or light fires inside.
Or consider a pavement.
Some litter accumulates.
Soon, more litter accumulates.
Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there
or even break into cars.”
The experts tell us that when humans enter an environment they look for signals as to
how they might act in that environment.
We are sure you’ve all done this at some point.
You visit someone’s messy house and you might just make a mess yourself.
Why not, they did.
You go to a school where the toilets are broken and there is graffiti everywhere and perhaps
some part of you thinks that you don’t have to study very hard because no one gives a
heck at this school.
And so, in parts of the USA, the broken windows theory was adopted.
That meant police taking the riff-raff off the streets, but it also meant keeping the
streets clean and it meant no broken windows.
This is sometimes called informal social control.
Some people have argued that by policing the streets so much that no one dares to step
out of line can be oppressive, but others argue that having beat cops who communicate
with locals can only be a good thing.
Let’s now see if it worked.
As we said, this kind of policing was first adopted in New York City, but later Broken
Windows policing went to Boston and then LA.
In New York police got tough on graffiti, while the city tried to get rid of old graffiti.
Hanging out on the streets and drinking became a big no no, as did public urination, cleaning
car windows for a few cents, and all manner of street activity not deemed appropriate.
In all, police just tried to make the city look better on the outside, and as you know,
the intention was to make people behave better.
Take away petty crimes, ugly things that are visible on the streets, and the result should
be that serious crimes would also happen less.
And that happened, New York City did experience a reduction in serious crimes since the broken
windows theory was adopted.
We must say here that there are advocates of this kind of policing, and there are those
that are against it because they say it means too much surveillance, too many frisks and
too many people getting arrested for very petty crimes.
As the writers of Broken Windows theory said, police would be tasked not just to rid the
streets of violent people, but also “not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals,
but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people.”
Some say this was the way to go, while others say it is too oppressive and targets the poor.
Let’s see what The New Yorker has to say about this theory.
It writes, “Broken Windows is one of the most cited articles in the history of criminology;
it’s sometimes called the Bible of policing.”
But it also makes a strong point, in that the writer says Broken Windows has always
focused way too much on cleaning up the streets of riff-raff rather than doing what it was
originally, mainly intended to do.
That was clean up the city of actual broken windows.
It should have meant investing more in housing, fixing places up, doing something about all
those abandoned buildings.
The New Yorker argues that this didn’t happen enough.
It cites people who said stop and frisk may work, but cleaning up buildings would work
better.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue that the Broken Windows policing the cops did adopt
didn’t work.
The proof is in the statistics.
But then you could also ask if the crime rate dropped for other reasons.
Another source writes that all over the USA in the 1990s the crime rate was dropping,
on average by about 26 percent.
But in New York there was a reduction of 56 percent.
And indeed, many attribute this to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani getting tough on small crimes and
embracing the Broken Windows theory.
He once said this, “Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes.
But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely
to tolerate the other.”
Still, there are skeptics that just say New York City was part of a trend of crime reduction
in the USA, something partly attributed to a decline in unemployment.
In one paper experts argue that this can’t be the reason entirely as the crime dropped
by so much.
Surely Broken Windows did have a positive effect, says that paper.
In it the author wrote, “Between 1990 and 1999, homicide dropped 73 percent, burglary
66 percent, assault 40 percent, robbery 67 percent, and vehicle heists 73 percent.”
Still, you can find other academic papers out there that say there has never been any
significant proof that it was Broken Windows policing that did the trick.
Critics also argue that such policing hurt poor people and picked on minorities.
Let’s now look at Boston, did it work there?
In Boston it was a man called William J. Bratton who pushed the theory.
He too cracked down on petty crimes.
One person wrote, “Bratton switched police thinking in New York when he was there from
waiting until a crime happens and responding, to preventing it from happening in the first
place.”
But did serious crime go down?
Statistics are available online that show Boston’s crime rate from the 60s right up
the present year.
Indeed, if you look at those stats you will find that sometime in the mid-90s serious
crimes in the city started going down.
Nonetheless, just like in New York, there are many critics that say Broken Windows wasn’t
all it was cracked up to be.
You can take that sentence as a double play on words.
In 2015, the Boston Globe wrote what we already know, “The broken windows theory posits
that low-level crimes, such as graffiti, panhandling, or littering, create an atmosphere of lawlessness
in a neighborhood, encouraging more serious crimes.”
The article then states that Broken Windows might not have actually been the reason for
Boston’s big drop in crime.
It cites the Boston Area Research Initiative, which tells us that the reason crime dropped
was more because of people having fewer conflicts.
“Rather than the outside cues that are encouraging criminals into the neighborhoods, the findings
suggest another potential interpretation: the notion of private conflict bubbling up
and leading up to social disorder,” said the researchers.
That paper argued that during the 90s people just began to have a better standard of living
and so there were fewer disputes and that led to less crime.
They said it wasn’t about nabbing people for misdemeanors or cleaning up parks, but
just a consequence of Boston being a better place to live in general.
There was more harmony in households.
There was more money and more jobs, and this resulted in folks behaving better.
The Boston Review is skeptical too, arguing that while Broken Windows may have worked
somewhat, the price of extra policing was too heavy on some people.
It writes, “What broken windows contributed to the overall falling crime rate remains
unclear.
But what is absolutely clear is that, whatever causality did or did not exist, the cost borne
by communities of color and the poor was too high.”
It's exactly the same story in Los Angeles.
Advocates say more community policing and better looking streets has helped reduce the
crime rate, but critics say Broken Windows policing is just too oppressive towards minorities
and the poor.
Crime did indeed drop in LA, but again critics say it was due to a better economy, less unemployment,
the crack epidemic not being so bad.
One law professor put it as simple as this, “When something goes up a lot, it tends
to go down a lot.”
He also said that while he believes there is no certain proof that it was the theory
that brought down the crime rate, making streets look more orderly is never a bad thing.
He told NPR, “Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities
to thrive.
Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime.”
He also said something you are probably thinking, in that Broken Windows actually turned into
merely stop and frisk.
While taking the riff-raff off the streets was always part of the theory, it should have
also been about buildings, i.e.
Broken Windows.
He called the theory seductive, too easy to believe, simplified and reductive, saying
it is time to put the genie back in the bottle and look deeper into why the crime rate dropped
in these places in the mid-90s.
Others tell us crime might indeed happen in bad-looking places, but it doesn’t necessarily
mean one causes the other.
Perhaps poverty is the major reason why crime happens.
This is a debate that rages on.
What we’d like to ask you is this: Why do you think the crime rate fell?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Why Your Money Isn't Safe In Your Bank Account?.
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See you next time.