Broken Windows Policing


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/nyc-congressman-says-outdated-broken-windows-policing-factor-eric-garner-death/

PBS Newshour
The Rundown

NYC Congressman says outdated ‘broken windows’ policing a factor in Eric Garner death


U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries says New York City’s “broken windows” policy contributed to Eric Garner’s death.

Many have credited the targeting of minor offenses, like turnstile jumping and “squeegee men” in the 1990s, for New York City’s turnaround two decades ago from a city riddled with crime to one where it’s safe to walk the streets.
But in light of the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died after being put in a chokehold by a police officer, some officials are rethinking that approach, known as the “broken windows” policy.
“That philosophy may have made sense 20 years ago when crime was extremely high, but the windows in New York City are largely together, and have been repaired,” Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told PBS NewsHour a day after a grand jury in Staten Island chose not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo.
“And so there’s no reason to engage in the same aggressive approach that had taken place in the past.”
Pantaleo and other officers attempted to arrest Garner for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes on the street. Jeffries contends 
that their aggressive handling of the minor offense led to Garner’s death.
Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found “that the ‘broken windows’ approach does not deter as much crime as some advocates argue, but it does have an effect, particularly on robbery and motor vehicle theft.”
The policy was instituted under Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has defended the grand jury’s decision and attacked current Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was an aide under Mayor David Dinkins, who preceded Giuliani.
“One of the things the mayor and [civil rights activist Al] Sharpton and the others are doing, they are tearing down respect for a criminal justice system that goes back to England in the 11th century,” Giuliani said in an appearance on Fox News Thursday.
He added that de Blasio, with speeches like the one he delivered Wednesday in which he empathized with G
arner and his family and drew a connection to his own son Dante who is biracial, “helps to create this atmosphere of protest and sometimes even violence. First of all, there was no racism in this case. If this man were a white man resisting arrest at the same size, the same thing would happen. If I recall correctly there was an African American sergeant on the scene observing, in charge of the entire situation, never did anything to stop it.”
“We’ve got to get at the broader problems,” the congressman said, “the broader disease, the broader cancer that is leading to these types of encounters.”



Broken windows theory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The broken windows theory is a criminological theory of the norm-setting and signaling effect of urban disorder and vandalism on additional crime and anti-social behavior. The theory states that maintaining and monitoring urban environments to prevent small crimes such as vandalism, public drinking and toll-jumping helps to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, thereby preventing more serious crimes from happening.
The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientistsJames Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.[1] Since then it has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. The theory has been used as a motivation for several reforms in criminal policy, including the controversial mass use of "stop, question, and frisk" by the New York City Police Department.
Drawbacks in practice[edit]
A low-level intervention of police in neighborhoods has been considered problematic. Accordingly, Gary Stewart writes that "The central drawback of the approaches advanced by Wilson, Kelling, and Kennedy rests in their shared blindness to the potentially harmful impact of broad police discretion on minority communities."[37][page needed] This was seen by the authors, who worried that people would be arrested "for the 'crime' of being undesirable". According to Stewart, arguments for low-level police intervention, including the broken windows hypothesis, often act "as cover for racist behavior".[37][page needed]
The application of the broken windows theory in aggressive policing policies, such as William J. Bratton's zero-tolerance policy, has been shown to criminalize the poor and homeless. This is because the physical signs that characterize a neighborhood with the “disorder” that broken windows policing targets correlate with the socio-economic conditions of its inhabitants. Many of the acts that are considered legal, but “disorderly” are often targeted in public settings and are not targeted when conducted in private. Therefore, those without access to a private space are often criminalized. Critics such as Robert J. Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush of Harvard University see the application of the broken windows theory in policing as a war against the poor as opposed to a war against more serious crimes.[38][page needed]
In Dorothy Roberts' article, "Foreword: Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order Maintenance and Policing," she focuses on problems of the application of the broken windows theory that lead to the criminalization of communities of color, who are typically disfranchised.[39] She underscores the dangers of vaguely written ordinances that allows for law enforcers to determine who engages in disorderly acts, which in turn produce a racially skewed outcome in crime statistics.[40]
According to Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub, and James McCabe, the application of the broken windows theory in policing and policy-making can result in development projects that decrease physical disorder but promote undesiredgentrification. Often, when a city is “improved” in this way, the development of an area can cause the cost of living to rise higher than residents can afford, thus forcing low income people, often minorities, out of the area. As the space changes, middle- and upper class, often white, people begin to move into the area, resulting in the gentrification of urban, low income areas. The local residents are affected negatively by this application of the broken windows theory, ending up evicted from their homes as if their presence indirectly contributed to the area’s problem of “physical disorder”.[39]
In popular press[edit]
In the best-seller More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2000), economist John Lott, Jr. examined the use of the broken windows approach as well as community- and problem-oriented policing programs in cities over 10,000 in population over two decades. He found that the impacts of these policing policies were not very consistent across different types of crime. Lott's book has been subject to criticism, though other groups support Lott's conclusions.
In the best-seller Freakonomics, economist Steven D. Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner both confirm and cast doubt on the notion that the broken windows theory was responsible for New York's drop in crime, arguing "the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk", an alternative that Levitt had attributed in the Quarterly Journal of Economics to the legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade, a decrease in the number of delinquents in the population-at-large one generation later.[41]





http://cebcp.org/

What is Broken Windows Policing?

The broken windows model of policing was first described in 1982 in a seminal article by Wilson and Kelling. Briefly, the model focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g. broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control. The police can play a key role in disrupting this process. If they focus in on disorder and less serious crime in neighborhoods that have not yet been overtaken by serious crime, they can help reduce fear and resident withdrawal. Promoting higher levels of informal social control will help residents themselves take control of their neighborhood and prevent serious crime from infiltrating.
What is the Evidence on Broken Windows Policing?
 
The broken windows model as applied to policing has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. First, agencies have applied broken windows policing in a variety of ways, some more closely following the Wilson and Kelling (1982) model than others. Perhaps the most prominent adoption of a broken windows approach to crime and disorder has occurred in New York City. In other agencies though, broken windows policing has been synonymous with zero tolerance policing, in which disorder is aggressively policed and all violators are ticketed or arrested. The broken windows approach is far more nuanced than zero tolerance allows, at least according to Kelling and Coles (1996) and so it would seem unfair to evaluate its effectiveness based on the effectiveness of aggressive arrest-based approaches that eliminate officer discretion. Thus, one problem may be that police departments are not really using broken windows policing when they claim to be.
 
A second concern is how to properly measure broken windows treatment. The most frequent indicator of broken windows policing has been misdemeanor arrests, in part because these data are readily available. Arrests alone, however, do not fully capture an approach that Kelling and Coles (1996) describe as explicitly involving community outreach and officer discretion. Officers must decide whether an arrest is appropriate and many police stops and encounters with citizens in broken windows policing do not end in arrest. As opposed to a zero-tolerance policy focused only on arresting all minor offenders, Kelling and Coles (1996) describe a more community-oriented approach to partnering with residents and community groups to tackle disorder collectively in a way that still respects the civil liberties of offenders. Whether the NYPD was able to adopt this model successfully remains up for debate but it does suggest that the intervention is complex and difficult to evaluate.
 
Third, the broken windows model suggests a long term indirect link between disorder enforcement and a reduction in serious crime and so existing evaluations may not be appropriately evaluating broken windows interventions. If there is a link between disorder enforcement and reduction in serious crime generated by increased informal social control from residents, we would expect it would take some time for these levels of social control in the community to increase. Policing studies usually use short-follow up periods and so may not capture these changing neighborhood dynamics.
 
There is also no consensus on the existence of a link between disorder and crime, and how to properly measure such a link if it does indeed exist. For example, Skogan’s (1990) research in six cities did suggest a relationship between disorder and later serious crime, but Harcourt (2001) suggested in a re-analysis of Skogan’s (1990) data that there was no significant relationship between disorder and serious crime. Hence, there is no clear answer as to the link between crime and disorder and whether existing research supports or refutes broken windows theory.
 

What is the Evidence on Broken Windows Policing?
 
The broken windows model as applied to policing has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons. First, agencies have applied broken windows policing in a variety of ways, some more closely following the Wilson and Kelling (1982) model than others. Perhaps the most prominent adoption of a broken windows approach to crime and disorder has occurred in New York City. In other agencies though, broken windows policing has been synonymous with zero tolerance policing, in which disorder is aggressively policed and all violators are ticketed or arrested. The broken windows approach is far more nuanced than zero tolerance allows, at least according to Kelling and Coles (1996) and so it would seem unfair to evaluate its effectiveness based on the effectiveness of aggressive arrest-based approaches that eliminate officer discretion. Thus, one problem may be that police departments are not really using broken windows policing when they claim to be.
 
A second concern is how to properly measure broken windows treatment. The most frequent indicator of broken windows policing has been misdemeanor arrests, in part because these data are readily available. Arrests alone, however, do not fully capture an approach that Kelling and Coles (1996) describe as explicitly involving community outreach and officer discretion. Officers must decide whether an arrest is appropriate and many police stops and encounters with citizens in broken windows policing do not end in arrest. As opposed to a zero-tolerance policy focused only on arresting all minor offenders, Kelling and Coles (1996) describe a more community-oriented approach to partnering with residents and community groups to tackle disorder collectively in a way that still respects the civil liberties of offenders. Whether the NYPD was able to adopt this model successfully remains up for debate but it does suggest that the intervention is complex and difficult to evaluate.
 
Third, the broken windows model suggests a long term indirect link between disorder enforcement and a reduction in serious crime and so existing evaluations may not be appropriately evaluating broken windows interventions. If there is a link between disorder enforcement and reduction in serious crime generated by increased informal social control from residents, we would expect it would take some time for these levels of social control in the community to increase. Policing studies usually use short-follow up periods and so may not capture these changing neighborhood dynamics.
 
There is also no consensus on the existence of a link between disorder and crime, and how to properly measure such a link if it does indeed exist. For example, Skogan’s (1990) research in six cities did suggest a relationship between disorder and later serious crime, but Harcourt (2001) suggested in a re-analysis of Skogan’s (1990) data that there was no significant relationship between disorder and serious crime. Hence, there is no clear answer as to the link between crime and disorder and whether existing research supports or refutes broken windows theory.
 
There is much debate over the impact of New York policing tactics on reductions on crime and disorder in the 1990s. Broken windows policing alone did not bring down the crime rates (Eck & Maguire, 2000), but it is also likely that the police played some role. Estimates of the size of this role have ranged from large (Bratton & Knobler, 1998, Kelling & Sousa, 2001) to significant but smaller (Messner et al., 2007; Rosenfeld et al., 2007) to non-existent (Harcourt & Ludwig, 2006).
 
Tackling disorder has frequently been a tactic chosen by police in crime hot spots. For example, in the Braga et al. (1999) problem-oriented policing hot spots study in Jersey City, NJ, officers used aggressive order maintenance as a strategy to reduce violent crime and results suggested significant positive results. Thus, we suspect that the tactics common in broken windows policing will be most successful when combined with knowledge about the small geographic areas where crime is highly concentrated.

Center For Evidence-Based Crime Policy

The Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy (CEBCP), housed within the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, seeks to make scientific research a key component in decisions about crime and justice policies. The CEBCP carries out this mission by advancing rigorous studies in criminal justice and criminology through research-practice collaborations, and proactively serving as an informational and translational link to practitioners and the policy community. CEBCP was founded in 2008 and is the home of Translational Criminology.
Commitment to Research Excellence:
The CEBCP is committed to Mason’s vision - to be a place of consequential research. We engage in primary research on criminological and criminal justice issues, evaluations of justice interventions, and studies of knowledge translation. Of special interest to the center are:
using experimental and other rigorous methods to evaluate justice programs;
a place-based focus on explaining crime and developing criminal justice interventions;
developing translation tools to improve communication between research and practice;
building collaboration with practitioners; and
actively seeking avenues to disseminate information to the public.



Translational Criminology Magazine
CEBCP publishes our magazine, TRANSLATIONAL CRIMINOLOGY twice each year. Our magazine seeks to advance the overall goal of the CEBCP by illustrating examples of how research is converted into criminal justice practice.
Below are all past issues of the magazine as well as the Center’s newsletters from its early years. Features in each magazine are usually by invitation, although we always welcome suggestions and ideas from practitioner-researcher teams who would like to showcase their efforts. To open Translational Criminology in magazine view, set the viewing preferences of your Adobe Reader to “two-page scrolling”.



Division Of Experimental Criminology
The Division of Experimental Criminology (DEC) is one of 8 divisions in the American Society of Criminology. The DEC seeks to promote and improve the use and development of experimental evidence and methods in the advancement of criminological theory and evidence-based crime policy.
The DEC recognizes outstanding achievements iin experimental criminology through the Jerry Lee Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Outstanding Experimental Field Trial, and the Student Paper Award.
 
The Academy of Experimental Criminology
The Academy of Experimental Criminology (AEC) was founded in 1998 in order to recognize criminologists who have successfully led randomized, controlled, field experiments in criminology.
The AEC recognizes outstanding achievements in experimental criminology through election of Fellows and Honorary Fellows as well as the Joan McCord 
Award and the Young Experimental Scholar Award.
DEC-AEC Memorandum of Understanding
 
Recent publications by DEC members related to experiments:
Maimon, D., M. Alper, M. Cukeir, and B. Sobesto. (2014). Restrictive deterrent effects of a warning banner in an attacked computer system. Criminology, 52, 33-59.
Mazerolle, L., S. Bennett, J. Davis, E. Sargeant, and M. Manning. (2013). Procedural justice and police legitimacy: a systematic review of the research evidence. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 9(3), 245-274. 
Prendergast, M.L., F.S. Pearson, D. Podus, Z.K. Hamilton, and L. Greenwell. (2013). The Andrews’ principles of risk, needs, and responsivity as applied in drug treatment programs: meta-analysis of crime and drug use outcomes. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 9(3),275-300.




http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2014/12/broken_windows_policing_doesn_t_work_it_also_may_have_killed_eric_garner.html

Broken Windows Policing Doesn’t Work
It also may have killed Eric Garner.
By Justin Peters
DEC. 3 2014 

Photograph – In the ’90s, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton presided over a surge in petty-crime law enforcement on the theory that vigorously enforcing the small laws in some way dissuades or prevents people from breaking the big ones. There’s little evidence that theory is correct.

On July 17, 2014, an unarmed 43-year-old black man named Eric Garner was standing near the Staten Island Ferry dock when he was approached by several police officers. The cops suspected that Garner was selling untaxed cigarettes. A struggle ensued, and an officer named Daniel Pantaleo put Garner in a chokehold. Garner died, and the New York City medical examiner eventually ruled it a homicide. But on Wednesday afternoon, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo.
Why was Garner approached at all? Because of the emphasis on “broken windows policing” under NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. As Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner in the 1990s, Bratton presided over a surge in petty-crime law enforcement, on the theory that vigorously enforcing the small laws in some way dissuades or prevents people from breaking the big ones. There’s little evidence that theory is correct. Nevertheless, mayor-elect Bill de Blasio brought Bratton back as New York’s police commissioner last December. Bratton’s return meant the return of broken windows policing. “If you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things,” Bratton said in March, spouting the broken windows gospel. It’s that philosophy as much as anything else is to blame for Eric Garner’s death.
Bratton was a popular figure during the Giuliani era because crime rates fell on his watch. While observers were quick to credit his policies for that decline, there’s no reason to think the drop in violent crime had anything to do with broken windows or Bratton’s vaunted Compstat, a computer program that tracks crime statistics citywide.
 
The drop in New York’s violent crime rate, then and now, is consistent with a broader nationwide trend. Rates of violent crime have steadily declined nationwide over the past two decades, and nobody is really sure why. The best argument I’ve seen suggests that violent crime began to fall around the same time that the crack boom started to wane in the early 1990s. The rates have been dropping across the country since then.
We do know that the declines in violent crime in New York have been comparable to declines in cities that didn’t use Compstat or broken windows. As criminologist Richard Rosenfeld put it in a 2002 paper, “homicide rates also have decreased sharply in cities that did not noticeably alter their policing policies, such as Los Angeles, or that instituted very different changes from those in New York, such as San Diego.” The takeaway: Crime just keeps going down everywhere. Nobody is sure why.
In New York, broken windows has replaced stop-and-frisk as the controversial police tactic du jour. During his 2012 campaign, de Blasio pledged to rein in theineffective and racist stop-and-frisk policies of Michael Bloomberg, and he has followed through on that promise. Meanwhile, de Blasio’s Republican mayoral opponent, Joseph Lhota, made the supposed glories of stop-and-frisk the centerpiece of his own doomed campaign. Lhota blasted de Blasio’s “recklessly dangerous agenda on crime,” and predicted that abandoning stop-and-frisk would turn New York City into something like the hellscape depicted ininThe Warriors, with gangs and street punks running roughshod over police officers.
This hasn’t happened. In a recent press conference, de Blasio and Bratton announced that violent crime rates are poised for historic lows in 2014. The New York Times reports that robberies and grand larcenies have both declinedsince 2013. The city’s homicide count sits at 290 as of Dec. 1, which puts New York on pace to beat last year’s record low homicide count of 335. And all this in a year when the New York Police Department is poised to log fewer than 50,000 stop-and-frisk incidents—a figure nearly 10 times lower than it was at New York’s stopping-and-frisking peak. Take that, Joe Lhota!
But this shouldn’t be surprising. Under the Bloomberg administration, hundreds of thousands of people were detained by police each year via the department’s stop-and-frisk program. Close to 90 percent of those people were released without charges after the stopping officers found nothing illegal. Whatever effect stop-and-frisk may have had as a deterrent was likely offset by the fact that it taught innocent people to fear and avoid the police. Stopping people who are doing nothing wrong on the grounds that they look vaguely suspicious only serves to alienate cops from the communities they’re supposed to serve.
With the decline of stop-and-frisk and the return of broken windows, the NYPD has traded one dubious tactic for another. When Bratton was appointed in December 2013, de Blasio positioned him as the opposite of his predecessor as police commissioner, Ray Kelly, saying in a press conference that “public safety and respect for the public aren’t contradictory ideas.” Bratton, for his part, promised policies of “mutual respect and mutual trust,” and vowed that “I will get it right in this city once more”—implying, of course, that he had gotten it right the first time. Three months later, the New York Times reported that arrests of subway panhandlers had tripled since Bratton took over, and that there had been “a noticeable spike in arrests for low-level violations in public housing developments.”
This renewed emphasis on misdemeanor “quality of life” arrests has sparked renewed criticisms from community members who are tired of being hassled. These criticisms spiked after Garner’s death in July. Six members of New York’s congressional delegation sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter noting that “Mr. Garner’s death has taken place in the context of a broken windows policing strategy that appears to target communities of color for the enforcement of minor violations and low-level offenses.”
Two weeks after Garner’s death, de Blasio held a press conference to address these criticisms and defend broken windows. “Breaking a law is breaking a law, and it has to be addressed,” said de Blasio.
That’s nonsense. The cornerstone of effective policing is discretion. If the cops enforced every single law on the books in every single precinct at all hours of the day, New York City would become a police state. Is that what de Blasio and Bratton want?
For mayors and police commissioners, being “tough on crime” means actively implementing some specific policy. But given that violent crime seems to be declining on its own regardless of what they do, there’s a case to be made that de Blasio and Bratton are only making things worse. Here’s a suggestion for a new policing policy for New York City: First, do no harm.
Justin Peters is a writer for Slate. He is working on a book about Aaron Swartz, copyright, and the rise of “free culture.” Email him at justintrevett@fastmail.fm.




http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2014/12/edward_banfield_the_racist_classist_origins_of_broken_windows_policing.html

Loose Cigarettes Today, Civil Unrest Tomorrow
The racist, classist origins of broken windows policing.
By Justin Peters
December 5, 2014


Photograph – Two boys look out of a subway car after performing a rap for passengers on Aug. 13, 2014 in New York City. As part of his controversial “broken windows” policing policy, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton has officers crack down on subway performers.

Broken windows policing is back in New York City, and it may have killed Eric Garner. “Broken windows” is an order-maintenance strategy that encourages cops to enforce quality-of-life laws on the grounds that, essentially, nits breed lice. It presumes that a disorderly environment where small laws are broken with impunity leads to bigger problems. This is the mindset that led the police to approach Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes: loose cigarettes today, civil unrest tomorrow.
Though NYPD Commissioner William Bratton is a big proponent of broken windows policing, there’s no evidence that the policy is effective in reducing violent crime. At the same time, the effects of order-maintenance policing are felt disproportionately by members of minority groups. In August, responding to critics’ claims that these policies unfairly target people of color, Bratton told the Associated Press that “it's not an intentional focus on minorities. It's a focus on behavior.” Bratton added, “We are not a racist organization—not at all.”
Maybe Bratton is right. But even if broken windows isn't explicitly racist, it's inherently classist, and the two are close enough as to be functionally indistinguishable.
 
The broken windows theory was first articulated in a 1982 Atlantic articleby George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who argued that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence.” That idea is rooted in the work of a midcentury political scientist named Edward Banfield. (Wilson studied under Banfield at the University of Chicago.) Banfield specialized in refuting the main tenet of modern liberalism, the idea that the state should take an active role in improving the lives of its most vulnerable residents. Banfield contended that state intervention could only make things worse. 
In his 1970 book The Unheavenly City and a revised edition titled The UnheavenlyCity Revisited, Banfield addressed the era’s so-called urban crisis: high crime rates, riots, white flight. Liberalism was to blame, Banfield argued—or, at the very least, liberal policies would never help fix the crisis. The Great Society initiatives of the Johnson era had just served to widen class divisions and to encourage members of the lower classes to blame others for their plight, thus fostering feelings of resentment and entitlement.
The idea that lower-class men are inherently dangerous and untrustworthy is at the root of broken windows policing.
Banfield argued that class divisions were based less on finances than on one’s life outlook and capacity for long-range thought. Members of the upper class were future-oriented, and, thus, able to postpone short-term pleasures for longer-term rewards. Members of the lower classes—urban blacks, in large part—lived from moment to moment, and acted out of a desire for instant gratification. They were also unambitious, “radically improvident,” antisocial, and prone to mental illness. Their problems were a matter of pathology, not racial prejudice (which Banfield argued was on the wane).
“The implication that lower-class culture is pathological seems fully warranted,” said Banfield. Thus, he argued, rather than waste time and public money implementing policies based on the false notion that all men were created equal, better to just face facts and acknowledge the natural divisions that exist. Members of the lower classes should leave school in ninth grade, to get a jump on a lifetime of manual labor. The minimum wage should be repealed to encourage employers to create more jobs for “low-value labor.” The state should give “intensive birth-control guidance to the incompetent poor.” And the police should feel free to crack down on young lower-class men.
Like many people, Banfield believed the urban unrest of the late 1960s had been stoked by matters of civil rights. But Banfield believed the problem was that the lower classes had too many of them. Criminal behavior was human nature—or, rather, in the nature of a specific subset of lower-class humans. “So long as there are large concentrations of boys and young men of the lower classes on the streets, rampages and forays are to be expected,” Banfield wrote. The clear solution was to remove these lower-class youths from the streets posthaste.
“There are individuals whose propensity to crime is so high that no set of incentives that it is feasible to offer to the whole population would influence their behavior,” Banfield wrote. The most effective way to prevent violent crime in cities, Banfield theorized, would therefore be to pre-emptively abridge the freedom of the “mostly young, lower-class males” who were likely to commit crimes in the future. What’s that? You say that “abridging the freedom of persons who have not committed crimes is incompatible with the principles of free society”? Well, said Banfield, “so, also, is the presence in free society of persons who, if their freedom is not abridged, would use it to inflict serious injuries on others.”
This is basically the plot of Minority Report and countless other dystopian fictions: empowering law enforcement to arrest or otherwise disappear individuals whose continued freedom threatens the stability of the state. These policies might play well in science fiction or Soviet Russia. But this is America, and, in America, pre-emptive incarceration is a political nonstarter. The principle behind this idea, however, is at the root of broken windows policing: the idea that lower-class men are inherently dangerous and untrustworthy and are likely to commit crimes in the future even if they’re not doing so today. To put it another way, there are times where “the essential welfare of individuals must be sacrificed for the good health of society,” as Banfield wrote.
In their 1982 Atlantic article, titled “Broken Windows,” Kelling and Wilson argued that community safety can be negatively affected by a surfeit of “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.” A preponderance of lower-class layabouts makes a neighborhood feel unsafe to its law-abiding residents; these residents hunker down or disassociate or move away, and soon the neighborhood actually becomes unsafe. Better, then, to stop this process before it starts, and to target minor deviant behaviors before they become something worse.
This theory encourages the police to conflate supposed cultural deviance with criminal deviance, to assume that a “disreputable or obstreperous” demeanor indicates some more destructive pathology. Kelling and Wilson cited the example of one effective Newark, New Jersey, police officer who had the habit of “taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order.” In other words, he targeted those who deviate from behavioral norms—norms that are defined by the dominant social class, of course. And while Banfield insisted that he was not making a racial argument—that there were lower-class whites as well as lower-class blacks—the fact is that class status correlates to socio-economic status, and urban poverty is minority poverty. No need for code words here: In modern America, “lower class” basically means “black.” “Disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable”—that also means “black.”
In their Atlantic article, Kelling and Wilson recognized the racial implications of order policing. “How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?” they asked, before essentially shrugging and moving on. “We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question.” Oh, well—hopefully everything will work itself out.
More than 30 years later, the answer seems clear to me: Broken windows willalways become an agent of neighborhood bigotry, because broken windows encourages cops to define lower-class men as basically another species and to make ad hoc cultural judgments the linchpin of crime prevention strategies. This is how looking different transforms into looking dangerous. This is how Eric Garner dies, mumbling “I can’t breathe,” held in a chokehold by a white police officer who works for a department led by a man who believes that if “you take care of the little things, then you can prevent a lot of the big things.” This is how you get thousands of marchers in the streets of New York City. Loose cigarettes today. Civil unrest tomorrow.