Fixing Broken Windows

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Image:Pruitt-Igoe-vandalized-windows.jpg Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities by George L. Kelling and Catherine Coles is a criminology book published in 1996, about petty crime and strategies to contain or eliminate it from urban neighbourhoods.

Contents 1 The book 2 The theory in action 3 Critics of the theory 4 In software development 5 Further reading 6 External links 7 See also

The book

The book is based on an article titled Broken Windows by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which appeared in the March 1982 edition of 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 sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."

A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix 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 do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood. The theory thus makes two major claims: 1) further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and thus 2) major crime will be prevented. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus only on the latter claim.

The theory in action

The book's author, George L. Kelling, was hired as a consultant to the New York Transit Authority in 1984, and robust measures to test the Broken Windows theory were implemented by David Gunn. Graffiti vandalism was intensively targeted, and the system was cleaned line by line and car by car from 1984 until 1990. Kelling has also been hired as a consultant to the LAPD and to the Boston Police Department.

In 1990 William J. Bratton became head of the Transit Police. Bratton described George L. Kelling as his "intellectual mentor", and implemented 'zero tolerance' of fare-dodging, easier arrestee processing methods and background checks on all those arrested. Republican Mayor Giuliani also adopted the strategy more widely in New York City, from his election in 1993, under the rubrics of 'zero tolerance' and 'quality of life'.

Under Giuliani, Bratton was later appointed head of the New York Police Department. A new tax surcharge enabled the training and deployment of around 5,000 new better-educated police officers, police decision-making was devolved to precinct level, and a backlog of 50,000 unserved warrants was cleared. The CompStat real-time police intelligence computer system was effectively introduced and integrated into police working. Police numbers were further boosted in 1995 when the New York's housing and transit police were merged into the New York Police Department.

Thus, Giuliani's "zero tolerance" rollout was part of an interlocking set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since 1984. Giuliani had the police even more strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion, and stopped public drinkers, urinators, and the "squeegee men" who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. Rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years (see: the 2001 study of crime trends in New York by George Kelling and William Sousa, and the 2002 study by Hope Corman).

Critics of the theory

Critics point to the fact that rates of major crimes also dropped in many other US cities during the 1990s, although many of these cities had also adopted 'zero tolerance' policies - and others had adopted different but equally innovative community-led policing strategies. However, other cities did not have such a sharp and sudden drop as New York. In 2002, the New York Times said: "Today, 'broken windows' policing is endorsed by police chiefs across the country, its proponents sought out for lectures and consulting around the world."

Further research has pointed out that the 'zero tolerance' effect on serious crime is difficult to disentangle from other initiatives happening at around the same time in New York. These initiatives were 1) the police reforms described above, 2) programs that moved over 500,000 people into jobs from welfare at a time of economic buoyancy, and 3) housing vouchers that enabled poor black families to move to better neighborhoods. However, the latter two measures only had their full effect several years after the sharp fall in crime began.

Claims that the supply of crack cocaine dropped in New York from 1990 to 1999 - and that this might account for the overall drop in serious crime - are spurious because actually: "cocaine drug usage increased from 1990 to 1999" (source: Hope Corman. Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows, 2002). Other claims often heard are that the number of young 16-24 males was dropping anyway due to demographic changes, and that more people were getting jobs and thus finding a way out of crime. Actually, large waves of immigration to New York during the 1980s meant that the number of young people was increasing in the 1990s. And the economic boom of the later 1990s had not begun in New York - the city was still in recession - when the crime figures started to fall so sharply.

Pressure by activists led to 2,000 fewer petty-crime arrests, and a sixteen-percent fall in gun arrests during early 1999. These falls were swiftly followed by a six-percent increase in New York city's murder rate.

Among academics, David Thacher (Assistant Professor of Public Policy & Urban Planning at the University of Michigan) claimed in a 2004 paper that: "social 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." But Thacher goes on to admit that: "These challenges to the broken windows theory have not yet discredited order maintenance policing with policymakers or the public. But among criminologists, order maintenance is clearly under siege." In the popular 2005 New York Times best seller, "Freakonomics", economist Steven D. Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner cast doubt on the notion that the broken window theory was responsible for New York's drop in crime. Levitt rebuts the broken window theory, and attributes the drop in crime to four other reasons, including the decline in unwanted children since the legalization of abortion, particularly since the Roe v. Wade decision.

An example of the "policymakers" that Thacher points to is the current Democratic New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer is a prominent adherent of Broken Window Theory, especially in the context of white collar crime.

In software development

Andrew Hunt and David Thomas use Fixing Broken Windows as a metaphor for avoiding software entropy in software development in their book, The Pragmatic Programmer Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-61622-X, 1999. Item 4 (of 22 tips) is Don't Live with Broken Windows. The term has also found its way into web-site development.

Further reading

• George Kelling and Catherine Coles. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, ISBN 0684837382

• Eli B. Silverman. NYPD Battles Crime: Innovative Strategies in Policing. Northeastern University Press, 1999.

• William J. Bratton. Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic. Random House, 1998.

• Wesley G. Skogan. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods. University of California Press, 1990.

• John E. Eck & Edward R. Maguire, "Have Changes in Policing Reduced Violent Crime?" in Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman, eds. The Crime Drop in America, rev. ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

• Thacher, David. (2004) "Order Maintenance Reconsidered" (PDF link, full-text, 2MB).

• Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner. "Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". William Morrow, 2005. ISBN 006073132X

• Bernard E. Harcourt, "Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing" (Harvard 2005) ISBN 0674015908

• Malcolm Gladwell. "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference". Back Bay Books, 2002. ISBN 0316346624

External links

• Original March 1982 article — Fee-based site registration required
• Lori Mongomery. Broken Windows: how a theory shook the foundations of law enforcement and helped heal a city. Knight Ridder News Service.
• Interview with James Q. Wilson.
• Interview with Giuliani on 'broken windows' policing and its role in the clean up of New York..
• Corman, Hope. Carrots, Sticks and Broken Windows (2002) (PDF link)
• Legal Affairs magazine - a review of the criticisms of the broken windows theory.
• Shattering "Broken Windows": An Analysis of San Francisco's Alternative Crime Policies. - An Article by Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice detailing crime reduction in San Francisco achieved via alternative crime policies.

See also

• Broken window fallacy (Note that the Broken Window Fallacy has nothing to do with the Broken Windows Theory.)
• New York City - Crime rates
• Crime prevention through environmental designde:Broken-window-Theorie

fr:Théorie de la vitre brisée he:תאוריית החלונות השבורים ja:割れ窓理論