Broken window policing certainly works, but one of the primary negative consequences of those policies is that departments and municipal governments quickly realized how much revenue they could generate from poor neighborhoods while rationalizing it as dollars needed to fund the high cost of policing high crime neighborhoods. Over time, it has become just another revenue stream they can’t do without regardless of the (real) social costs. For governments its a double edged sword. On the one hand most people in those neighborhoods are law abiding citizens. On the other hand, according to FBI statistics, 6% of the US population is responsible for 50% of all murders, and 45% of all violent crime. Given limited resources, it appears reasonable for law enforcement to focus a great deal of attention toward that subgroup. That warranted attention creates serious resentment among all those innocent people caught in the traps set by police and their city leaders set to capture violent criminals. More problematic is that those complaining the loudest are the primary victims of the crime police are trying to stop. In those same communities you are far far more likely to be victimized by a criminal than by the police, yet people are more fearful of the police. Why?

I argue that the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, general unrest, even the rise of the BLM movement aren’t so much a response to police as they are a response to governments treating large numbers of the population as an ATM machine rather than citizens to be served.

Policing for profit, aggressive asset forfeiture, lots of nitpicky fines, ticket stacking, code violation fines, are all ways governments have found to extract revenue from the populace who have repeatedly refused to pay more for governance. Where governments are responsive, citizens willingly pay. Where governments are corrupt, self serving, and predatory, citizens won’t pay. Bureaucrats solution is to fleece the citizens anyway, and they target those least willing or able to stop them. Take a look at the reports below for a deeper understanding of this issue.

As for Mr Garner, he’s a very poor example of broken windows policing. The criminalization of selling single cigarettes was due to a new policy by Obama’s health and human services secretary. It’s an attempt to keep cigarettes out of the hands of the poor. She apparently believed poor Black men selling cigarettes were better off in jail. The supervisor on site during Mr Garner’s arrest and clearly visible in the videos was a Black female Sargent. You might be better off blaming Obama and HHS for Mr Garner’s death than Bratton.