The Efficacy of "Broken Windows" Policing

If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” Professors George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote in The Atlantic.

Today, controversy over their metaphorical “broken windows” theory is reverberating again after Eric Garner, a Staten Island man, died of a chokehold last month while being taken into custody for illegally selling cigarettes.

Critics denounce the theory as neoconservative pablum resulting in overpolicing and mass incarceration for relatively minor offenses that disproportionately target poor, black and Hispanic people. Moreover, they say it was not derived from scientific evidence and its connection to the city’s drastic decline in major crime remains unproven.

Click to expand...

...broken windows morphed into something more insidious. In a 2004 study, Harvard and Michigan researchers found that perceptions of “disorder” had less to do with decrepit physical surroundings than if black people dominated the street scene. Such findings reconfirmed the continuing intensity of stereotypes about the “dangerousness of blacks.”

Because of that perceived dangerousness, black people themselves became the broken windows, joined in recent years by Latinos. The result was a tsunami that swept untold people of color off the streets. Between 1980 and today, America’s prison population exploded five-fold, to 1.5 million. Broken windows coincided with harsh drug policies that put away untold nonviolent offenders for long mandatory sentences. Even though there are no major differences by race in illegal drug use, African-Americans, 13 percent of the nation’s population, have made up more than a third of state drug and public order imprisonments and account for more than a third of federal inmates.

Click to expand...

With modern, data-driven policing—exemplified by Compstat, which uses exhaustive crime data and mapping to identify crime trends and hold precinct commanders accountable for their areas—these patterns, not some determination to target minorities, determine law enforcement’s response. That is, when the NYPD analyzes and maps crime and disorder in the city, and then develops its crime-prevention plans and allocates resources to specific neighborhoods, the effort will necessarily target high-crime areas, and those tend to have a preponderance of African-Americans and Hispanics and are usually the poorest neighborhoods in the city. In neighborhoods without high levels of victimization, crime, and disorder, residents maintain order through informal mechanisms and support networks and don’t need to call 311 or 911 regularly for assistance; in these areas, police presence is far less intrusive.

Click to expand...

Ample evidence makes clear that Broken Windows policing leads to less crime. The academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed. These ivory-tower studies, frequently treated with reverence by the media, don’t prove what they purport to prove, and they fail to grasp how crime is managed in dense, urban settings.

New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people. Starting in 1994, with the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor and the appointment of Bratton as police commissioner, Broken Windows policing was put into practice citywide (it had been implemented in the subway in 1990)—and crime fell further, faster, and for longer than anywhere else in the country. Today, by far the largest and densest city in the United States has a lower murder rate, at four per 100,000, than the nation as a whole, at 4.5 per 100,000. In 1993, New York accounted for about 7.9 percent of the nation’s homicides; last year, the city’s share was just 2.4 percent. While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times. And those striking figures are emblematic of a broader accomplishment in a city that has seen huge, historic declines in every one of the seven major crime categories.

Click to expand...

chanson78 said:

Tide1986 have you ever read Freakonomics? There is an interesting take on the lowered crime rate. Granted it may be one of the studies that was referred in your article regarding macro data and wild far fetched conclusions, but it does present a good rationalization for the decreasing crime rate.

Click to expand...