Broken windows policy

The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.

In , 2. These statistics provide some insight into why crime regulation and mass incarceration are such hot topics today, and many scholars, lawyers, and politicians have devised theories and strategies to try to promote safety within society. One such model is broken windows policing, which was first brought to light by American psychologist Philip Zimbardo famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment and further publicized by James Wilson and George Kelling.

Since its inception, this theory has been both widely used and widely criticized. As such, policing these misdemeanors will help create an ordered and lawful society in which all citizens feel safe and crime rates, including violent crime rates, are low. Broken windows policing tries to regulate low-level crime to prevent widespread disorder from occurring. If these small crimes are greatly reduced, then neighborhoods will appear to be more cared for.

The hope is that if these visible displays of disorder and neglect are reduced, violent crimes might go down too, leading to an overall reduction in crime and an increase in public safety.

Source: Hinkle, J. The irony of broken windows policing: A micro-place study of the relationship between disorder, focused police crackdowns and fear of crime. Journal of Criminal Justice, 36 6 , Academics justify broken windows policing from a theoretical standpoint because of three specific factors that help explain why the state of the urban environment might affect crime level:. In a typical urban environment, social norms and monitoring are not clearly known.

As a result, individuals will look for certain signs and signals that provide both insight into the social norms of the area as well as the risk of getting caught violating those norms. In other words, an ordered environment, one that is safe and has very little lawlessness, sends the message that this neighborhood is routinely monitored and criminal acts are not tolerated.

On the other hand, a disordered environment, one that is not as safe and contains visible acts of lawlessness such as broken windows, graffiti, and litter , sends the message that this neighborhood is not routinely monitored and individuals would be much more likely to get away with committing a crime. With a decreased likelihood of detection, individuals would be much more inclined to engage in criminal behavior, both violent and nonviolent, in this type of area.

For example, proponents of this theory would argue that a broken window signals to potential criminals that a community is unable to defend itself against an uptick in criminal activity.

It is not the literal broken window that is direct cause for concern, but more so the figurative meaning that is ascribed to this situation. It symbolizes a vulnerable and disjointed community that is not capable of handling crime — opening the doors to all kids of unwanted activity to occur.

In neighborhoods that do have a strong sense of social cohesion among its residents, these broken windows are fixed both literally and figuratively , giving these areas a sense of control over their communities. However, in environments in which these broken windows are left unfixed, residents no longer see their communities as tight-knit, safe spaces, and will avoid spending time in communal spaces in parks, at local stores, on the street blocks so as to avoid violent attacks from strangers.

Additionally, when these broken windows are not fixed, it also symbolizes a lack of informal social control. Informal social control refers to the actions that regulate behavior, such as conforming to social norms and intervening as a bystander when a crime is committed, that are independent of the law.

Informal social control is important to help reduce unruly behavior. Scholars argue that, under certain circumstances, informal social control is more effective than laws. And some will even go so far as to say that nonresidential spaces, such as corner stores and businesses, have a responsibility to actually maintain this informal social control by way of constant surveillance and supervision. One such scholar is Jane Jacobs, a Canadian-American author and journalist, who believed sidewalks were a crucial vehicle for promoting public safety.

Jacobs can be considered one of the original pioneers of the broken windows theory. Although the idea that community involvement, from both residents and nonresidents, can make a big difference in how safe a neighborhood is perceived to be, Wilson and Keeling argue that the police are the key to maintaining order. As major proponents of broken windows policing, they hold that formal social control, in addition to informal social control, is crucial for actually regulating crime.

Although different people have different approaches to the implementation of broken windows i. This idea, which largely serves as the backbone to the broken windows theory, was first introduced by Philip Zimbardo. In , Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo ran a social experiment in which he abandoned two cars that had no license plates and the hoods up in very different locations.

The first was a predominantly poor, high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx, and the second was a fairly affluent area of Palo Alto, California. He then observed two very different outcomes. After just ten minutes, the car in the Bronx was attacked and vandalized.

A family first approached the vehicle and removed the radiator and battery. Within the first twenty-four hours after Zimbardo left the car, everything valuable had been stripped and removed from the car. Afterwards, random acts of destruction began — the windows were smashed, seats were ripped up, and the car began to serve as a playground for children in the community.

On the contrary, the car that was left in Palo Alto remained untouched for more than a week before Zimbardo eventually went up to it and smashed the vehicle with a sledgehammer. Only after he had done this did other people join the destruction of the car Zimbardo, Zimbardo concluded that something that is clearly abandoned and neglected can become a target for vandalism.

But Kelling and Wilson extended this finding when they introduced the concept of broken windows policing in the early s. This initial study cascaded into a body of research and policy that demonstrated how in areas such as the Bronx, where theft, destruction, and abandonment are more common, vandalism will occur much faster because there are no opposing forces to this type of behavior.

As a result, such forces, primarily the police, are needed to intervene and reduce these types of behavior and remove such indicators of disorder. Rather, he claims that regardless of the neighborhood, once disorder begins, a ripple effect can occur as things get extremely out of hand and control becomes increasingly hard to maintain. The article introduces the broader idea that now lies at the heart of the broken windows theory: a broken window, or other signs of disorder, such as loitering, graffiti, litter, or drug use, can send the message that a neighborhood is uncared for, sending an open invitation for crime to continue to occur, even violent crimes.

The solution, according to Kelling and Wilson and many other proponents of this theory, is to target these very low level crimes, restore order to the neighborhood, and prevent more violent crimes from happening. A strengthened and ordered community is equipped to fight and deter crime because a sense of order creates the perception that crimes go easily detected. As such, it is necessary for police departments to focus on cleaning up the streets as opposed to putting all of their energy into fighting high-level crimes.

As part of the program, police officers were taken out of their patrol cars and were asked to patrol on foot. The aim of this approach was to make citizens feel more secure in their neighborhoods.

Although crime was not reduced as a result, residents took fewer steps to protect themselves from crime such as locking their doors. Reducing fear is a huge goal of broken windows policing. As Kelling and Wilson state in their article, the fear of being bothered by disorderly people such as drunks, rowdy teens, or loiterers is enough to motivate them to withdraw from the community.

But if we can find a way to make people feel less fear namely by reducing low level crimes , then they will be more involved in their communities, creating a higher degree of informal social control and deterring all forms of criminal activity. And Kelling himself was there to play a crucial role. Five years later, in , William J.

In his role, Bratton cracked down on fare evasion and implemented faster methods to process those who were arrested. Bratton was just the first to begin to implement such measures, but once Rudy Giuliani was elected as mayor in , tactics to reduce crime began to really take off Vedantam et al.

They sent hundreds of police officers into subway stations throughout the city to catch anyone who was jumping the turnstiles and evading the fair. And this was just the beginning.

All throughout the 90s, Giuliani increased misdemeanor arrests in all pockets of the city. Conveniently, during this time, crime was also falling in the city and the murder rate was rapidly decreasing, earning Giuliani re-election in Vedantam et al. Because this seemed like an incredibly successful mode, cities around the world began to adopt this approach. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a Safe Streets Program was implemented to deter and reduce unsafe driving and crime rates by increasing surveillance in these areas.

Specifically, the traffic enforcement program influenced saturation patrols that operated over a large geographic area , sobriety checkpoints, follow-up patrols, and freeway speed enforcement. So an officer might issue a warning to someone drinking in public, or talk to kids skateboarding in a park about finding another place to play. Summons and arrests are only one tool, he said. In practice, Broken Windows has come to be synonymous with misdemeanor arrests and summonses.

In New York, the largest city to implement the practice, between and , police issued 1. Felony crime rates, meanwhile, declined. Some policing experts say that Broken Windows is a flawed theory, in part because of the focus on disorder. Kelling argues that in order to determine how to police a community, residents should identify their top concerns, and police should — assuming those issues are legitimate — patrol accordingly. It can also lead police to use minor offenses inappropriately as a pretext to search for more serious contraband, like guns or drugs, he said.

In Newark, police saw the effect of blue summonses on their community first-hand. Those cited also appeared to be disproportionately black or Latino.

You know, I would think not. But in order to get more numbers, the cops go after these people. Is there a way to conduct order-focused policing in black and Latino communities — asking officers to deal with the kid skateboarding recklessly in the park, the guys loitering on the corner — without criminalizing the people who live there?

Activists with the Black Lives Matter movement say no. In New York this month, the city council passed a bill requiring police to establish written guidance on how officers should use their discretion to enforce certain quality-of-life offenses, such as littering and unreasonable noise.

It also allows officers to issue civil summonses to avoid routing people through the criminal justice system for minor offenses.

Portland , Ore. 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 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. 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 s.

Tackling disorder has frequently been a tactic chosen by police in crime hot spots. For example, in the Braga et al. 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.

These hot spots approaches, however, should not be viewed as direct tests of broken windows theory. A number of other strategies were also used in these interventions, including situational crime prevention efforts, which were shown to be the most effective strategy for reducing crime in the Braga and Bond study. Finally, there is concern that any effectiveness of broken windows policing in reducing crime where the evidence, as noted above, is mixed may come at the expense of reduced citizen satisfaction and damage to citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of police.

See the Community Policing and Procedural Justice page for more on the importance of implementing effective strategies in ways that are viewed by citizens as fair.

Studies from the Evidence-Based Policing Matrix incorporating some of the principles of broken windows policing:.