The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. It was further popularized in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose policing policies were influenced by the theory.
The theory has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has become associated with controversial police practices such as the use of "stop-and-frisk" by the New York City Police Department. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.
The theory has been subject to great debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has become associated with controversial police practices such as the use of "stop-and-frisk" by the New York City Police Department. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.
Article and crime prevention
The broken windows of an abandoned hospital building in Northampton, Massachusetts
James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling first introduced the broken
windows theory in an article titled "Broken Windows", in the March 1982 The Atlantic Monthly. 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.
The article received a great deal of attention and was very widely cited. A 1996 criminology and urban sociology book, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling
and Catharine Coles, is based on the article but develops the argument
in greater detail. It discusses the theory in relation to crime and strategies to contain or eliminate crime from urban neighborhoods.
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, according to the
book's authors, is to address the problems when they are small. Repair
the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the
tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or
do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is
for litter
not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less).
Problems are less likely to escalate and thus "respectable" residents do
not flee the neighborhood.
Though police work is crucial to crime prevention, Oscar Newman, in his 1972 book, Defensible Space,
wrote that the presence of police authority is not enough to maintain a
safe and crime-free city. People in the community help with crime
prevention. Newman proposes that people care for and protect spaces they
feel invested in, arguing that an area is eventually safer if the
people feel a sense of ownership and responsibility towards the area.
Broken windows and vandalism are still prevalent because communities
simply do not care about the damage. Regardless of how many times the
windows are repaired, the community still must invest some of their time
to keep it safe. Residents' negligence of broken window-type decay
signifies a lack of concern for the community. Newman says this is a
clear sign that the society has accepted this disorder—allowing the
unrepaired windows to display vulnerability and lack of defense. Malcolm Gladwell also relates this theory to the reality of NYC in his book The Tipping Point.
The theory thus makes two major claims: that further petty crime
and low-level anti-social behavior is deterred, and that major crime is
prevented as a result. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus
disproportionately on the latter claim.
Theoretical explanation
The reason the state of the urban environment may affect crime may be three factors:
- Social norms and conformity,
- the presence or lack of routine monitoring, and
- social signaling and signal crime.
In an anonymous urban environment, with few or no other people
around, social norms and monitoring are not clearly known. Individuals
thus look for signals within the environment as to the social norms in
the setting and the risk of getting caught violating those norms; one of
the signals is the area's general appearance.
Under the broken windows theory, an ordered and clean
environment, one that is maintained, sends the signal that the area is
monitored and that criminal behavior is not tolerated. Conversely, a
disordered environment, one that is not maintained (broken windows,
graffiti, excessive litter), sends the signal that the area is not
monitored and that criminal behavior has little risk of detection.
The theory assumes that the landscape "communicates" to people. A
broken window transmits to criminals the message that a community
displays a lack of informal social control and so is unable or unwilling
to defend itself against a criminal invasion. It is not so much the
actual broken window that is important, but the message the broken
window sends to people. It symbolizes the community's defenselessness
and vulnerability and represents the lack of cohesiveness
of the people within. Neighborhoods with a strong sense of cohesion fix
broken windows and assert social responsibility on themselves,
effectively giving themselves control over their space.
The theory emphasizes the built environment, but must also consider human behavior.
Under the impression that a broken window left unfixed leads to
more serious problems, residents begin to change the way they see their
community. In an attempt to stay safe, a cohesive community starts to
fall apart, as individuals start to spend less time in communal space to
avoid potential violent attacks by strangers.
The slow deterioration of a community as a result of broken windows
modifies the way people behave when it comes to their communal space,
which, in turn, breaks down community control. As rowdy teenagers,
panhandlers, addicts, and prostitutes slowly make their way into a
community, it signifies that the community cannot assert informal social
control, and citizens become afraid that worse things will happen. As a
result, they spend less time in the streets to avoid these subjects and
feel less and less connected from their community if the problems
persist.
At times, residents tolerate "broken windows" because they feel
they belong in the community and "know their place". Problems, however,
arise when outsiders begin to disrupt the community's cultural fabric.
That is the difference between "regulars" and "strangers" in a
community. The way that "regulars" act represents the culture within,
but strangers are "outsiders" who do not belong.
Consequently, daily activities considered "normal" for residents
now become uncomfortable, as the culture of the community carries a
different feel from the way that it was once.
With regard to social geography, the broken windows theory is a
way of explaining people and their interactions with space. The culture
of a community can deteriorate and change over time with the influence
of unwanted people and behaviors changing the landscape. The theory can
be seen as people shaping space as the civility and attitude of the
community create spaces used for specific purposes by residents. On the
other hand, it can also be seen as space shaping people with elements of
the environment influencing and restricting day-to-day decision making.
However, with policing efforts to remove unwanted disorderly
people that put fear in the public’s eyes, the argument would seem to be
in favor of "people shaping space" as public policies are enacted and
help to determine how one is supposed to behave. All spaces have their
own codes of conduct, and what is considered to be right and normal will
vary from place to place.
The concept also takes into consideration spatial exclusion and
social division as certain people behaving in a given way are considered
disruptive and therefore unwanted. It excludes people from certain
spaces because their behavior does not fit the class level of the
community and its surroundings. A community has its own standards and
communicates a strong message to criminals, by social control, that
their neighborhood does not tolerate their behavior. If however, a
community is unable to ward off would-be criminals on their own,
policing efforts help.
By removing unwanted people from the streets, the residents feel
safer and have a higher regard for those that protect them. People of
less civility who try to make a mark in the community are removed,
according to the theory. Excluding the unruly and people of certain social statuses is an attempt to keep the balance and cohesiveness of a community.
Concepts
Informal social controls
Many claim that informal social controls can be an effective strategy to reduce unruly behavior. Garland 2001
expresses that “community policing measures in the realization that
informal social control exercised through everyday relationships and
institutions is more effective than legal sanctions”.
Informal social control methods, has demonstrated a “get tough”
attitude by proactive citizens, and expresses a sense that disorderly
conduct is not tolerated. According to Wilson and Kelling, there are two
types of groups involved in maintaining order, ‘community watchmen’ and
‘vigilantes’
The United States has adopted in many ways policing strategies of old
European times, and at that time informal social control was the norm,
which gave rise to contemporary formal policing. Though, in earlier
times, there were no legal sanctions to follow, informal policing was
primarily ‘objective’ driven as stated by Wilson and Kelling (1982).
Wilcox et al. 2004 argue that improper land use can cause disorder, and the larger the public land is, the more susceptible to criminal deviance.
Therefore, nonresidential spaces such as businesses, may assume to the
responsibility of informal social control "in the form of surveillance, communication, supervision, and intervention". It is expected that more strangers occupying the public land creates a higher chance for disorder. Jane Jacobs can be considered one of the original pioneers of this perspective of broken windows. Much of her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities
focuses on residents' and nonresidents' contributions to maintaining
order on the street, and explains how local businesses, institutions,
and convenience stores provide a sense of having "eyes on the street".
On the contrary, many residents feel that regulating disorder is
not their responsibility. Wilson and Kelling found that studies done by
psychologists suggest people often refuse to go to the aid of someone
seeking help, not due to a lack of concern or selfishness “but the
absence of some plausible grounds for feeling that one must personally
accept responsibility”
On the other hand, others plainly refuse to put themselves in harm's
way, depending on how grave they perceive the nuisance to be; a 2004
study observed that "most research on disorder is based on individual
level perceptions decoupled from a systematic concern with the
disorder-generating environment."
Essentially, everyone perceives disorder differently, and can
contemplate seriousness of a crime based on those perceptions. However,
Wilson and Kelling feel that although community involvement can make a
difference, “the police are plainly the key to order maintenance.”
Role of fear
Ranasinghe
argues that the concept of fear is a crucial element of broken windows
theory, because it is the foundation of the theory. She also adds that public disorder is "...unequivocally constructed as problematic because it is a source of fear".
Fear is elevated as perception of disorder rises; creating a social
pattern that tears the social fabric of a community, and leaves the
residents feeling hopeless and disconnected. Wilson and Kelling hint at
the idea, but don’t focus on its central importance. They indicate that
fear was a product of incivility, not crime, and that people avoid one
another in response to fear, weakening controls.
Hinkle and Weisburd found that police interventions to combat minor
offenses, as per the broken windows model, "significantly increased the
probability of feeling unsafe," suggesting that such interventions might
offset any benefits of broken windows policing in terms of fear
reduction.
Difference with "zero tolerance"
Broken windows policing is sometimes described as a "zero tolerance" policing style, including in some academic studies.
However, several key proponents such as Bratton and Kelling argue that
there is a key difference. In 2014, they outlined a difference between
"broken windows policing" and "zero tolerance":
Critics use the term “zero tolerance” in a pejorative sense to suggest that Broken Windows policing is a form of zealotry—the imposition of rigid, moralistic standards of behavior on diverse populations. It is not. Broken Windows is a highly discretionary police activity that requires careful training, guidelines, and supervision, as well as an ongoing dialogue with neighborhoods and communities to ensure that it is properly conducted
Bratton and Kelling advocate that authorities should be effective at
catching minor offenders while also giving them lenient punishment.
Citing fare evasion as an example, they argue that the police should attempt to catch fare evaders, and that the vast majority should be summoned
to court rather than arrested and given a punishment other than jail.
The goal is to deter minor offenders from committing more serious crimes
in the future and reduce the prison population in the long run.
Critical developments
In an earlier publication of The Atlantic
released March, 1982, Wilson wrote an article indicating that police
efforts had gradually shifted from maintaining order to fighting crime.
This indicated that order maintenance was something of the past, and
soon it would seem as it has been put on the back burner. The shift was
attributed to the rise of the social urban riots of the 1960s, and
"social scientists began to explore carefully the order maintenance
function of the police, and to suggest ways of improving it—not to make
streets safer (its original function) but to reduce the incidence of
mass violence".
Other criminologists argue between similar disconnections, for example,
Garland argues that throughout the early and mid 20th century, police
in American cities strived to keep away from the neighborhoods under
their jurisdiction.
This is a possible indicator of the out-of-control social riots that
were prevalent at that time. Still many would agree that reducing crime
and violence begins with maintaining social control/order.
Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities
is discussed in detail by Ranasinghe, and its importance to the early
workings of broken windows, and claims that Kelling's original interest
in "minor offences and disorderly behaviour and conditions" was inspired
by Jacobs' work.
Ranasinghe includes that Jacobs' approach toward social disorganization
was centralized on the "streets and their sidewalks, the main public
places of a city" and that they "are its most vital organs, because they
provide the principal visual scenes".
Wilson and Kelling, as well as Jacobs, argue on the concept of civility
(or the lack thereof) and how it creates lasting distortions between
crime and disorder. Ranasinghe explains that the common framework of
both set of authors is to narrate the problem facing urban public
places. Jacobs, according to Ranasinghe, maintains that "Civility
functions as a means of informal social control, subject little to
institutionalized norms and processes, such as the law" 'but rather
maintained through an' "intricate, almost unconscious, network of
voluntary controls and standards among people... and enforced by the
people themselves".
Case studies
Precursor experiments
Before the introduction of this theory by Wilson and Kelling, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford
psychologist, arranged an experiment testing the broken-window theory
in 1969. Zimbardo arranged for an automobile with no license plates and
the hood up to be parked idle in a Bronx neighbourhood and a second automobile in the same condition to be set up in Palo Alto, California.
The car in the Bronx was attacked within minutes of its abandonment.
Zimbardo noted that the first "vandals" to arrive were a family – a
father, mother and a young son – who removed the radiator and battery.
Within twenty-four hours of its abandonment, everything of value had
been stripped from the vehicle. After that, the car's windows were
smashed in, parts torn, upholstery ripped, and children were using the
car as a playground. At the same time, the vehicle sitting idle in Palo
Alto sat untouched for more than a week until Zimbardo himself went up
to the vehicle and deliberately smashed it with a sledgehammer. Soon
after, people joined in for the destruction. Zimbardo observed that a
majority of the adult "vandals" in both cases were primarily well
dressed, Caucasian, clean-cut and seemingly respectable individuals. It
is believed that, in a neighborhood such as the Bronx where the history
of abandoned property and theft are more prevalent, vandalism occurs
much more quickly as the community generally seems apathetic. Similar
events can occur in any civilized community when communal barriers—the
sense of mutual regard and obligations of civility—are lowered by
actions that suggest apathy.
New York City
In 1985, the New York City Transit Authority hired George L. Kelling, the author of Broken Windows, as a consultant. Kelling was later hired as a consultant to the Boston and the Los Angeles police departments.
One of Kelling's adherents, David L. Gunn
implemented policies and procedures based on the Broken Windows Theory
during his tenure as President of the New York City Transit Authority.
One of his major efforts was to lead a campaign from 1984 to 1990 to rid
graffiti from New York's subway system.
In 1990, William J. Bratton became head of the New York City Transit Police.
Bratton was influenced by Kelling, describing him as his "intellectual
mentor". In his role he implemented a tougher stance on fare evasion, faster arrestee processing methods, and background checks on all those arrested.
After being elected Mayor of New York City in 1993 as a Republican, Rudy Giuliani hired Bratton as his police commissioner
to implement similar policies and practices throughout the city.
Giuliani heavily subscribed to Kelling and Wilson's theories. Such
policies emphasized addressing crimes that negatively affect quality of life. In particular, Bratton directed the police to more strictly enforce laws against subway fare evasion, public drinking, public urination, and graffiti. He increased enforcement against "squeegee men", those who aggressively demand payment at traffic stops for unsolicited car window cleanings. Bratton also revived the New York City Cabaret Law,
a previously dormant Prohibition era ban on dancing in unlicensed
establishments. Throughout the late 1990's NYPD shut down many of the
city's acclaimed night spots for illegal dancing.
According to a 2001 study of crime trends in New York City by
Kelling and William Sousa, rates of both petty and serious crime fell
significantly after the aforementioned policies were implemented.
Furthermore, crime continued to decline for the following ten years.
Such declines suggested that policies based on the Broken Windows Theory
were effective.
However, other studies do not find a cause and effect relationship between the adoption of such policies and decreases in crime.
The decrease may have been part of a broader trend across the United
States. Other cities also experienced less crime, even though they had
different police policies. Other factors, such as the 39% drop in New
York City's unemployment rate, could also explain the decrease reported by Kelling and Sousa.
A 2017 study found that when the New York Police Department
(NYPD) stopped aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes in late 2014
and early 2015 that civilian complaints of three major crimes (burglary,
felony assault, and grand larceny) decreased (slightly with large error
bars) during and shortly after sharp reductions in proactive policing.
There was no statistically significant effect on other major crimes such
as murder, rape, robbery, or grand theft auto. These results are touted
as challenging prevailing scholarship as well as conventional wisdom on
authority and legal compliance by implying that aggressively enforcing
minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.
Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico,
instituted the Safe Streets Program in the late 1990s based on the
Broken Windows Theory. Operating under the theory that American Westerners use roadways much in the same way that American Easterners use subways, the developers of the program reasoned that lawlessness on the roadways had much the same effect as it did on the New York City Subway. Effects of the program were reviewed by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and were published in a case study.
Lowell, Massachusetts
In 2005, Harvard University and Suffolk University researchers worked with local police to identify 34 "crime hot spots" in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of the spots, authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, enforced building codes, discouraged loiterers, made more misdemeanor arrests, and expanded mental health services and aid for the homeless. In the other half of the identified locations, there was no change to routine police service.
The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20%
reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up
the physical environment was more effective than misdemeanor arrests and
that increasing social services had no effect.
Netherlands
In 2007 and 2008, Kees Keizer and colleagues from the University of Groningen
conducted a series of controlled experiments to determine if the effect
of existing visible disorder (such as litter or graffiti) increased
other crime such as theft, littering, or other antisocial behavior.
They selected several urban locations, which they arranged in two
different ways, at different times. In each experiment, there was a
"disorder" condition in which violations of social norms as prescribed
by signage or national custom, such as graffiti and littering, were
clearly visible as well as a control condition where no violations of
norms had taken place. The researchers then secretly monitored the
locations to observe if people behaved differently when the environment
was "disordered". Their observations supported the theory. The
conclusion was published in the journal Science: "One example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing."
Other advantages
Real estate
Other
side effects of better monitoring and cleaned up streets may well be
desired by governments or housing agencies and the population of a
neighborhood: broken windows can count as an indicator of low real
estate value and may deter investors. Fixing windows is therefore also a
step of real estate development, which may lead, whether it is desired or not, to gentrification.
By reducing the amount of broken windows in the community, the inner
cities would appear to be attractive to consumers with more capital.
Ridding spaces like downtown New York and Chicago, notably notorious for
criminal activity, of danger would draw in investment from consumers,
increasing the city's economic status, providing a safe and pleasant
image for present and future inhabitants.
Education
In
education, the broken windows theory is used to promote order in
classrooms and school cultures. The belief is that students are signaled
by disorder or rule-breaking and that they in turn imitate the
disorder. Several school movements encourage strict paternalistic
practices to enforce student discipline. Such practices include language
codes (governing slang, curse words, or speaking out of turn),
classroom etiquette (sitting up straight, tracking the speaker),
personal dress (uniforms, little or no jewelry), and behavioral codes
(walking in lines, specified bathroom times).
From 2004 to 2006, Stephen B. Plank and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University
conducted a correlational study to determine the degree to which the
physical appearance of the school and classroom setting influence
student behavior, particularly in respect to the variables concerned in
their study: fear, social disorder, and collective efficacy. They collected survey data administered to 6th-8th students by 33 public schools in a large mid-Atlantic
city. From analyses of the survey data, the researchers determined that
the variables in their study are statistically significant to the
physical conditions of the school and classroom setting. The conclusion,
published in the American Journal of Education, was
...the findings of the current study suggest that educators and researchers should be vigilant about factors that influence student perceptions of climate and safety. Fixing broken windows and attending to the physical appearance of a school cannot alone guarantee productive teaching and learning, but ignoring them likely greatly increases the chances of a troubling downward spiral.
Criticism
Other factors
Many
critics state that factors other than physical disorder more
significantly influence crime rates. They argue that efforts to more
effectively reduce crime rate should target or pay more attention to
such factors instead.
According to a study by Robert J. Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush,
the premise on which the theory operates, that social disorder and
crime are connected as part of a causal chain, is faulty. They argue
that a third factor, collective efficacy, "defined as cohesion among
residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of
public space," is the actual cause of varying crime rates that are
observed in an altered neighborhood environment. They also argue that
the relationship between public disorder and crime rate is weak.
C. R. Sridhar, in his article in the Economic and Political Weekly, also challenges the theory behind broken windows policing and the idea that the policies of William Bratton and the New York Police Department was the cause of the decrease of crime rates in New York City.
The policy targeted people in areas with a significant amount of
physical disorder and there appeared to be a causal relationship between
the adoption of broken windows policing and the decrease in crime rate.
Sridhar, however, discusses other trends (such as New York City's
economic boom in the late 1990s) that created a "perfect storm"
that contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly
than the application of the broken windows policy. Sridhar also compares
this decrease of crime rate with other major cities that adopted other
various policies and determined that the broken windows policy is not as
effective.
Baltimore criminologist Ralph B. Taylor argues in his book that
fixing windows is only a partial and short-term solution. His data
supports a materialist view: changes in levels of physical decay,
superficial social disorder, and racial composition do not lead to
higher crime, but economic decline does. He contends that the example
shows that real, long-term reductions in crime require that urban
politicians, businesses, and community leaders work together to improve
the economic fortunes of residents in high-crime areas.
Another tack was taken by a 2010 study questioning the legitimacy
of the theory concerning the subjectivity of disorder as perceived by
persons living in neighborhoods. It concentrated on whether citizens
view disorder as a separate issue from crime or as identical to it. The
study noted that crime cannot be the result of disorder if the two are
identical, agreed that disorder provided evidence of "convergent
validity" and concluded that broken windows theory misinterprets the
relationship between disorder and crime.
In recent years, there has been increasing attention on the
correlation between environmental lead levels and crime. Specifically,
there appears to be a correlation with a 25-year lag with the addition
and removal of lead from paint and gasoline and rises and falls in
murder arrests.
Implicit bias
Robert
J. Sampson argues that based on common misconceptions by the masses, it
is clearly implied that those who commit disorder and crime have a
clear tie to groups suffering from financial instability and may be of
minority status: "The use of racial context to encode disorder does not
necessarily mean that people are racially prejudiced in the sense of
personal hostility." He notes that residents make a clear implication of
who they believe is causing the disruption, which has been termed as
implicit bias.
He further states that research conducted on implicit bias and
stereotyping of cultures suggests that community members hold
unrelenting beliefs of African-Americans and other disadvantaged
minority groups, associating them with crime, violence, disorder,
welfare, and undesirability as neighbors.
A later study indicated that this contradicted Wilson and Kelling's
proposition that disorder is an exogenous construct that has independent
effects on how people feel about their neighborhoods.
Criminology
According to some criminologists who speak of a broader "backlash," the broken windows theory is not theoretically sound. They claim that the "broken windows theory" closely relates correlation with causality, a reasoning prone to fallacy. David Thacher, assistant professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan, stated in a 2004 paper:
[S]ocial science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it.... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces.
It has also been argued that rates of major crimes also dropped in
many other US cities during the 1990s, both those that had adopted
broken windows policing and those that had not. In the winter 2006 edition of the University of Chicago Law Review, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig looked at the later Department of Housing and Urban Development program that rehoused inner-city project tenants in New York into more-orderly neighborhoods.
The broken windows theory would suggest that these tenants would commit
less crime once moved because of the more stable conditions on the
streets. However, Harcourt and Ludwig found that the tenants continued
to commit crime at the same rate.
In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York in the 1990. Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic, unrelated growth in the prison population by the Rockefeller drug laws, and that the number of males from 16 to 24 was dropping regardless of the shape of the US population pyramid.
Drawbacks in practice
Broken
windows policing has sometimes become associated with zealotry, which
has led to critics suggesting that it encourages discriminatory
behaviour. Some campaigns such as Black Lives Matter have called for an end to broken windows policing. In 2016, a Department of Justice report argued that it had led the Baltimore Police Department discriminating against and alienating minority groups.
In response, Kelling and Bratton have argued that broken windows
policing does not discriminate against law-abiding communities of
minority groups if implemented properly. They cited Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods, a study by Wesley Skogan at the University of California.
The study, which surveyed 13,000 residents of large cities, concluded
that different ethnic groups have similar ideas as to what they would
consider to be "disorder".
A low-level intervention of police in neighborhoods has been
considered problematic. Accordingly, Gary Stewart wrote, "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."
It 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".
A common criticism of broken policing is the argument that it
criminalizes the poor and homeless. That 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 they
are 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.
In Dorothy Roberts's
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, which lead to the criminalization of
communities of color, who are typically disfranchised.
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.
According to Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub, and James McCabe,
the application of the broken windows theory in policing and
policymaking can result in development projects that decrease physical
disorder but promote undesired gentrification.
Often, when a city is so "improved" in this way, the development of an
area can cause the cost of living to rise higher than residents can
afford, which forces low-income people, often minorities, out of the
area. As the space changes, the middle and upper classes, often white,
begin to move into the area, resulting in the gentrification of urban,
poor areas. The local residents are affected negatively by such an
application of the broken windows theory and end up evicted from their
homes as if their presence indirectly contributed to the area’s problem
of "physical disorder".
A 2015 meta-analysis of broken windows policing implementations found that disorder policing strategies, such as "hot spots policing" or problem-oriented policing, result in "consistent crime reduction effects across a variety of violent, property, drug, and disorder outcome measures".
However, the authors noted that "aggressive order maintenance
strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate
significant crime reductions," pointing specifically to zero tolerance
policing models that target singular behaviors such as public
intoxication and remove disorderly individuals from the street via
arrest. The authors recommend that police develop "community
co-production" policing strategies instead of merely committing to
increasing misdemeanor arrests.
Popular press
In 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, but other groups support Lott's conclusions.
In the 2005 book Freakonomics, coauthors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
confirm and question the notion that the broken windows theory was
responsible for New York's drop in crime, saying "the pool of potential
criminals had dramatically shrunk". Levitt had in the Quarterly Journal of Economics attributed that possibility to the legalization of abortion with Roe v. Wade, which correlated with a decrease, one generation later, in the number of delinquents in the population at large.
In his 2012 book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, Jim Manzi writes that of the randomized field trials conducted in criminology, only nuisance abatement per broken windows theory has been successfully replicated.
