Broken Windows Theory: An Unintended Consequence?
Are we pushing to hard to reduce crime?
With drastic reductions in crime across the nation, police departments continue to push for further crime reductions. As new police chiefs take command of new precincts and departments, they are constantly looking for ways to innovate and reduce crime further.
The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signalling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism and escalation into more serious crime.
The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The title comes from the following example:
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.
Recently in New York, several incidents involving police interaction with members of the public over minor, sometimes frivolous crimes have been put under the microscope, particularly over the death of Eric Garner. Mr. Garner who died in police custody last week after he was put in an apparent chokehold, was suspected of committing the relatively minor crime of selling loose, untaxed cigarettes on the street. Mr. Garner was no stranger to law enforcement. He had over 30 arrests in his lifetime and was not cooperating with officers at the scene. He also was a big man, weighing over 350 pounds, standing 6-3”, with an asthma condition.
Also, in January this year, the NYPD (New York Police Department) got into a confrontation with an 84-year-old man and put him in the hospital when he jaywalked at an Upper West Side intersection and didn’t appear to understand their orders to stop. Kang Wong was strolling north on Broadway and crossing 96th Street at around 5 p.m., when an officer told him to halt because he had walked against the light. Police were targeting jaywalkers in the area following the third pedestrian fatality that month around West 96th Street. The NYPD have been attempting to reduce pedestrian deaths throughout NYC by going after reckless drivers and jay walkers.
Garner’s death in particular has put Broken Windows under renewed scrutiny, with some lawmakers and experts saying the decades-old theory no longer applies to a city with far less crime, unnecessarily puts nonviolent people at risk and fuels tensions in the city’s minority communities.
With police management putting pressure to keep crime stats low, officers are now going after low-level offenders for sometimes trivial offenses. Officers are also responding to complaints from business owners and members of the community to address these trivial offenses. What officers are addressing today would have never been addressed 25 years ago. If an officer brought an individual into the stationhouse for untaxed cigarettes, he would have been thrown out by the Sergeant, and probably reprimanded.
In the latest issue of the journal Applied Geography, Gregory D. Breetzke and Amber L. Pearson explore the aspect of the theory that maintains that small crimes will gradually increase discomfort and fear in neighborhood residents—and that when the fear causes the residents to retreat, a sense of neglect will pervade the area, which will in turn implicitly invite more crime. The objective is simple: By attacking petty offenses, the outcome should nurture a sense of safety and order in high-crime neighborhoods, which, in theory, leads to greater safety and order.
At the end of the day, how many broken windows in one neighborhood can be different from other neighborhoods and particularly what is tolerated in one may not be tolerated in another. Finally, and fittingly, criminologists Joshua C. Hinkle and Sue-Ming Yang present a sort of meta-argument in the Journal of Criminal Justice, against the methodology of any scientific attempts to test the broken windows theory out in the field. Many researchers, have tried to measure “disorder” and its resulting effects on neighborhood residents’ feelings of fear, and on crime, but Hinkle and Yang describe how subjective and imprecise these experiments necessarily are. Who decides how much litter on the street is acceptable, or what is normal, or transgressive behavior, in a given neighborhood? In every study they looked at, the neighborhood residents’ perceptions of social and physical disorder differed from the researchers’ perceptions. “That is, people with different demographic backgrounds and life experiences might react to the same environment in very different ways,” the authors write, and conclude, “social disorder is a social construct, rather than a concrete phenomenon.”
New York City Police Commissioner, William Bratton has admired one individual, Sir Robert Peel, founder of the London Metropolitan Police in 1829. In Bratton’s words, Peel articulated nine principles of policing which remain as relevant and meaningful today as they were in the 1830s. “The man had an innate grasp of the challenges police officers face and of the complex interplay between the police and the public that is at the very heart of policing in a free society. Defining the basic mission of police as prevention, recognizing that police must win public approval, favoring persuasion and warning over force, and defining success as the absence of crime and disorder rather than in terms of police action — these were all cutting edge ideas in the 1980s let alone the 1830s”
Commissioner Bratton believes Peel’s nine principles will inform the vision of collaborative policing which he believes is essential to healing the divisions that exist between the police and the communities we serve. Here are Peel’s principles:
Principle 1 — “The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.”
Principle 2 — “The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.”
Principle 3 — “Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.”
Principle 4 — “The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.”
Principle 5 — “Police seek and preserve public favor not by catering to the public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.”
Principle 6 — “Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient.”
Principle 7 — “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
Principle 8 — “Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.”
Principle 9 — “The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.”
Perhaps with these principles and strong community relations, a unified approach will keep all individuals happy, law enforcement and the communities they serve. In New York City, the future of the Broken Window’s Theory remains unclear.
