America’s most important cop is retiring. Will that change urban policing?
After decades as a “broken windows” disciple, Bill Bratton is stepping down
Bill Bratton has announced that he’ll be resigning next month, ending his second stint as New York police commissioner. After 45 years in blue, Bratton is the most recognized and influential cop in America, credited with cleaning up America’s biggest, baddest city.
So, what does his resignation mean for the vaunted “broken windows” policing theory—the guiding idea behind his career?
Debuted by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in the early 80s, the doctrine holds that if you clean up the things like broken windows, graffiti, and panhandling, the overall atmosphere of criminality — and the actual crime that comes with it — goes away.
Bratton, who became New York’s police commissioner in 1994, was all in. As he put it in 1996, “There is no such thing as a minor crime in the sense that lesser offenses create an atmosphere of fear and disorder that sets the stage for major crimes. We have moved against low-level drug dealers, street prostitutes, boom-box cars, squeegee pests and other violators. The department shouldn’t slip back into the old view that such offenses are a low priority.”
Violent crime had started to skyrocket in New York City in the 70s, and the trend peaked in 1990, at the height of the urban crack epidemic. But by 1994, the crime rate had already rounded a corner, and it plummeted precipitously under Bratton. Whether he was a miracle worker or the beneficiary of a windfall, one thing is clear: New Yorkers loved him.
In the Bratton era, jumping turnstyles, urinating in alleys, graffiti, public drinking, and jaywalking were aggressively policed. The NYPD also explicitly targeted “squeegee men,” who wiped the windshields of parked cars and demanded payment. The practice that was basically arrested into oblivion.
In terms of crime stats, it appeared to work. But mayor Rudy Giuliani had run on a law-and-order, quality-of-life platform — even specifically promising to rid the city of squeegee men — and he began to feel eclipsed by the commissioner. He edged Bratton out after only two years.
After a period as a private consultant, Bratton became the Los Angeles chief of police in 2002. The city had experienced its own early-1990s turbulence, kicked off with the West Coast iteration of the crack epidemic, peak violent crime, and the Rodney King riots.
Under Bratton arrests went up — way up — in LA, just as they had in New York. So, while the chief was a vocal advocate for diversifying police forces to better reflect the demographics of the cities they serve, his broken windows strategy was funneling mostly black and Latino men into the criminal justice system over minor crimes. Nevertheless, the crime rate declined markedly.
So, when Mayor de Blasio brought Bratton back to New York, the idea was that he would be tough on crime, but with a big heart. After all, he had advocated for diverse police forces and opposed stop-and-frisk policing. He had a reputation as a good guy — an effective good guy.
But when Eric Garner was killed in 2014 during a stop for selling untaxed cigarettes — a petty crime and clear-cut case of broken windows policing — criticism of Bratton’s approach grew. Maybe broken windows was broken?
“The debate…unavoidably turns around the question of racial injustice,” writes Michael Greenberg in The New York Review of Books. “By an overwhelming majority, New Yorkers who are arrested for low-level infractions — ‘rule-breaking’ may be a better term — are young black and Hispanic men in poor neighborhoods…. The paradox is that high-crime neighborhoods make young people vulnerable to violence, but a police policy of zero tolerance in those neighborhoods makes them vulnerable to police arrogance and unnecessary incarceration. They are squeezed from two sides.”
In 1996, Giuliani had wanted Bratton out because the public loved him too much. But by 2016, Bratton had become a PR liability. What many urban residents used to see as a suitable solution to a pressing problem is now increasingly viewed as inequitable and untenable.
The question is: if Bratton’s out, does that mean broken windows policing is on its way out too? Or is his legacy bigger than the man himself?
