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Broken Windows, Informal Social Control, and Crime: Assessing Causality in Empirical Studies

An important criminological controversy concerns the proper causal relationships between disorder, informal social control, and crime. The broken windows thesis posits that neighborhood disorder increases crime directly and indirectly by undermining neighborhood informal social control. Theories of collective efficacy argue that the association between neighborhood disorder and crime is spurious because of the confounding variable informal social control. We review the recent empirical research on this question, which uses disparate methods, including field experiments and different models for observational data. To evaluate the causal claims made in these studies, we use a potential outcomes framework of causality. We conclude that, although there is some evidence for both broken windows and informal control theories, there is little consensus in the present research literature. Furthermore, at present, most studies do not establish causality in a strong way.

INTRODUCTION

A contemporary criminological controversy concerns the interrelationships among neighborhood disorder, informal social control, and crime. This controversy derives from a rich set of theoretical ideas explaining these relationships. According to Wilson & Kelling’s (1982) broken windows thesis, physical and social disorders exert a causal effect on criminal behavior. Disorder does so directly, as it signals to criminals community indifference to crime, and indirectly, as disorder undermines informal social control. By contrast, theories of informal social control argue that the association between disorder and crime is not causal but is instead spurious because of the confounding variable neighborhood informal control ( Sampson & Raudenbush 1999 ). This theoretical divergence has important implications for criminological theory and public policy. Therefore, the conclusions of empirical research on this controversy are of paramount importance. This review discusses the controversy between broken windows and informal social control by reviewing the current state of empirical research. Perhaps the most important question in evaluating the empirical literature is the degree to which studies approximate causal relations. We use a potential outcomes or counterfactual definition of causality, which has gained prominence in statistics and social science ( Morgan & Winship 2015 , Rubin 2006 ), to assess recent research. We try, whenever possible, to give our own assessments of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the studies—our evaluation of the plausibility of the assumptions made in different research designs. This assessment is open to debate and criticism, but we feel that stating our opinion provides a point of departure for subsequent debate. We conclude our discussion with what we think are important avenues for future research.

Rather than exhaustively covering all studies, we focus on those that are well executed both theoretically and methodologically. Because we are principally concerned with how well studies approximate causality, we organize our discussion by methodological design. We acknowledge that causality is not the only important issue for evaluating empirical studies. Extensive literature exists on the important issues of proper measurement of disorder and informal control ( Hipp 2007 , 2010 , 2016 ; Kubrin 2008 ; Sampson & Raudenbush 2004 ; Skogan 2015 ; Taylor 2001 , 2015 ), implications for public policy—particularly order maintenance policing ( Braga et al. 2015 , Fagan & Davies 2000 , Harcourt 1998 , Kelling & Coles 1997 , Weisburd et al. 2015 )—and micro–macro relationships ( Matsueda 2013 , 2017 ; Taylor 2015 ). We set these aside, referring the reader to the extant literature. We also set aside detailed examination of observational studies of individual-level mechanisms of broken windows evaluated recently by O’Brien et al. (2019) , including fear of crime ( Hinkle 2015 ).

THEORIES OF DISORDER, INFORMAL CONTROL, AND CRIME

Social disorganization theory.

From their exhaustive mapping of delinquency across Chicago neighborhoods, Shaw & McKay (1931 , 1969 ) identified a strong statistical association between disorder and delinquency in which delinquency clustered in zones of transition, characterized by rapid population turnover, impoverished immigrant groups, and few homeowners. Also present were signs of physical and social disorder: dilapidated buildings, vacant lots, homeless and unsupervised youth, panhandling, and other incivilities. Delinquency rates followed a gradient—highest in the central city and progressively lower in the periphery—and remained that way over decades despite drastic changes in neighborhood ethnic composition. To explain these patterns, Shaw & McKay (1969) developed their theory of social disorganization and cultural transmission, in which rapid in- and out-migration and lack of homeownership, as well as high rates of poverty, ethnic diversity, and immigrants, undermined local social organization. Social disorganization—weak and unlinked local institutions—led to unsupervised street youth, who forged a delinquent tradition transmitted from older gangs to unsupervised youth. Shaw & McKay treated physical and social disorder as a manifestation—and, consequently, an indicator—of social disorganization. Disorder does not cause crime but instead indexes disorganization, which causes crime via weak informal control, the prevalence of unsupervised youth, and the creation and transmission of a delinquent tradition across age-graded youth groups.

Broken Windows Theory

Wilson & Kelling’s (1982) broken windows thesis posits that disorder and crime are causally linked in a developmental sequence in which unchecked disorder spreads and promotes crime. Both physical disorder (e.g., abandoned buildings, graffiti, and litter) and social disorder (e.g., panhandlers, homeless, unsupervised youths) exert causal effects on crime directly and indirectly. Directly, disorder signals to potential criminals that residents are indifferent to crime, emboldening criminals to commit crimes with impunity. This individual-level causal mechanism implies a rational actor: Motivated offenders perceive disorder to mean the absence of capable guardians ( Cohen & Felson 1979 ). Indirectly, disorder induces residents to fear crime, which causes them to avoid unfamiliar people, restrict travel to safe spaces, and withdraw from public life. Disengaged from the neighborhood, fearful residents increasingly feel that combatting disorder and crime is the duty of others. Ironically, signs of local disorder create fear of crime in residents because they assume a causal effect of disorder on crime. Eventually, as disorder and crime increase, residents with sufficient resources begin to leave the neighborhood, taking their capital with them, which undermines both community resources and the capacity for informal social control ( Wilson & Kelling 1982 ). This indirect effect is a neighborhood-level causal mechanism: Rampant disorder causes residents to withdraw, eroding neighborhood control, which fosters crime.

These two pathways form feedback loops, creating a cascading effect of crime and disorder spreading across physical spaces. As Wilson & Kelling (1982) note, one broken window (signaling indifference) is often followed by another and so on, until all windows are broken. This is an informational cascade, as the observation of disorder and crime provides information signaling the absence of social control. Disorder causes residents to withdraw from the community, weakening objective informal social control, and fostering additional crime, disorder, and incivilities, which, in turn, further undermine informal control, leading to more crime. This is a social interactional cascade in which the key causal mechanism is local residents disengaging from community attempts to control disorder and crime. Left unabated, these feedback loops can produce a crime epidemic spreading across time and space.

Figure 1 diagrams the causal relationships among disorder, informal social control, and crime specified by broken windows. Due to reciprocal pathways, this is a nonrecursive model that is underidentified for cross-sectional data without additional information such as instrumental variables (IVs) or a panel design with repeated observations.

Conceptual model of broken windows theory: disorder, social control, and crime. Two paths link disorder to crime: a direct path, in which ( a ) disorder signals community indifference, which increases crime; and an indirect path, in which ( b ) disorder elicits actual community indifference, which weakens social control, which in turn ( c ) increases crime. These effects are reinforced as ( d ) weakened social control stimulates more disorder and ( e ) crime weakens social control. Two feedback pathways ( d and e ) mean this is a nonrecursive model.

Collective Efficacy Theory of Informal Social Control

Sampson (2012) and others (e.g., Morenoff et al. 2001 , Sampson et al. 1997 ) extend Shaw & McKay’s theory of social disorganization by refining the causal mechanism of informal control, which translates neighborhood social organization into safe neighborhoods. They argued that social cohesion, including social capital, is a crucial resource for neighborhoods to solve problems collectively. Drawing from Coleman (1990) , they asserted that neighborhoods rich in social capital—intergenerational closure (parents know the parents of their children’s friends), reciprocated exchange (neighbors exchange favors and obligations), and generalized trust—have greater resources to prevent neighborhood disorder, incivilities, and crime. Such resources are translated into action via child-centered control. Borrowing from Bandura (1986) , they called this entire causal sequence collective efficacy ( Sampson et al. 1997 ). Sampson et al. (1999) specified potential spillover effects for collective efficacy, in which collective efficacy in one neighborhood affects contiguous neighborhoods, producing a social interactional cascade.

Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) used collective efficacy theory to specify causal relationships among disorder, informal control, and crime and in the process offered a critique of broken windows theory. They maintained that collective efficacy not only keeps neighborhoods safe but also keeps them clean. Because social disorder, physical disorder, and crime pose similar problems, neighborhoods high in collective efficacy are able to combat all three problems. Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) argue that, in contrast to broken windows, the correlation between disorder and crime is spurious due to the confounding variable, collective efficacy. Figure 2 depicts the collective efficacy model of disorder, informal control, and crime. This model is a restrictive recursive model nested within the broken windows model. If these restrictions are valid—crime and disorder are related solely because of confounding by exogenous collective efficacy—this model is fully recursive and identified.

Conceptual model of collective efficacy theory: disorder, social control, and crime. The direct path between disorder and crime is spurious (A = 0), and collective efficacy is an exogenous cause of both crime and disorder (B,E = 0). This is a recursive model.

POTENTIAL OUTCOMES (COUNTERFACTUAL) APPROACH TO CAUSALITY

Broken windows and collective efficacy specify competing causal relationships among disorder, informal control, and crime. To adjudicate empirically between the two requires research methods that closely approximate causal relations. To evaluate the disparate research designs used in the empirical literature, we need a framework for establishing causality. The potential outcomes framework, or Rubin causal model, is an approach to causal inference based on counterfactual reasoning using the ideal of a controlled experiment. Rather than considering only the factual statement “a given treatment happened and we observed a particular outcome,” one also considers the counterfactual statement “if a given treatment had not happened, we would have observed a particular (potential) outcome.” These two statements correspond to treatment and control groups in an ideal controlled experiment. Treatment here refers to a variable of primary interest believed to have a causal effect on the outcome under examination. In the classic experimental design, values of the treatment are assigned (manipulated) by the investigator (e.g., in randomized controlled trials, treatments are randomly assigned to subjects). For a variable to be a cause, it must have been manipulated—or, short of that, at least be manipulable in principle ( Holland 1986 ). Thus, this framework is sometimes termed an interventionist definition of causality ( Woodward 2003 ). Although potential outcome(s) is not the only causal framework ( Morgan & Winship 2015 ), it has increasingly become the dominant approach to causality in statistics and the social sciences.

If Y i 1 is the potential outcome of individual i in the treatment state, and Y i 0 is the potential outcome of individual i in the control group, the individual treatment effect is

The fundamental problem of causal inference is that for those in the treatment group, we cannot observe their outcome in the control group; conversely, for those in the control group, we cannot observe their outcome in the treatment group ( Holland 1986 ). Therefore, we cannot compute individual causal treatment effects (Δ i ). Under additional assumptions, however, we can estimate (causal) average treatment effects (ATEs). For example, we can assume, in a randomized experiment with a treatment group and a control group, treatment assignment is ignorable:

where T = 0 , 1 denotes treatment assignment, and ⊥ denotes statistical independence. Here, the difference in the sample means for assignments T = 1 and T = 0 estimates E ( Y 0 − Y 1 ), the ATE of T on Y .

In an observational study, Equation 2 is unlikely to hold due to selectivity or confounding, but treatment assignment may be ignorable after conditioning on covariates Z :

Equation 3 includes the additional identification condition that at each level of the covariates, there is a positive probability of receiving either treatment. The set of conditions described in Equation 3 is known as strong ignorability given covariates ( Rosenbaum & Rubin 1983 ). Here, the conditional ATE (CATE) E ( Y 1 − Y 0 | Z = z ) can be used to estimate ATEs using a properly specified regression or propensity score match that includes all relevant covariates Z . The major difficulty of establishing causality in observational (nonexperimental) studies is the problem of controlling for all relevant Z to achieve conditional ignorability.

Observational studies of disorder, informal control, and crime have used different methods to approximate CATEs. Cross-sectional studies of neighborhoods use observed covariates to control for confounding, under the assumption of no reciprocal causation. Cross-lagged panel models relax this assumption and examine lagged endogenous predictors over time, under the assumptions that there is sufficient temporal variation to obtain stable estimates and that observed covariates achieve conditional ignorability. Fixed-effects panel models relax the assumption that all relevant time-stable confounders are included in the model. By estimating within-individual (neighborhood) variation over time, fixed-effects models control for both observed and unobserved time-stable covariates. Fixed-effects models, however, still require that all relevant time-varying confounders are included. In reviewing the empirical literature on disorder and informal control, we will assess the degree to which studies achieve conditional ignorability.

The definition of unit causal effects makes the stable unit treatment value assumption (SUTVA), a term coined by Rubin (1986 , p. 961): “the value of Y for unit u when exposed to treatment t will be the same no matter what mechanism is used to assign treatment t to unit u and no matter what treatments the other units receive.” SUTVA implies two distinct assumptions: consistency and absence of interference. Consistency means that the mechanism used to assign treatment can be ignored because the outcomes of the treated observations will be invariant to different assignment mechanisms. Thus, an individual assigned a treatment in an experimental setting exhibits the same outcome as if they naturally received the treatment in the real world. Consistency is less likely in experimental settings because the treatment assignments are carried out by the researcher instead of assigned through natural processes in the real world. Results of the experiment may not generalize to real-world settings because of differences in the treatment-assignment process. By contrast, consistency is more likely to hold for observational data given that treatments are assigned naturally in the real world and not through an artificial assignment process.

No interference means that the treatment assignment of one subject does not affect the outcomes of other subjects. This form of contamination can bias treatment estimates in both experimental and nonexperimental designs. Interference often arises via social processes such as spillover effects, displacement, and cascades ( Matsueda 2017 , Nagin & Sampson 2019 ). Interference violates the assumption typically made in observational studies of identically and independently distributed observations (conditional on covariates). When the form of dependence is known, it can be addressed by specific models, such as autoregressive spatial models for spillover effects between contiguous observations or social network models of contagion across individuals.

Beginning with experimental studies, we review the quantitative empirical research on disorder, informal control, and crime, with an eye toward adjudicating between competing theories of broken windows and collective efficacy and evaluating causal claims.

REVIEW OF EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

Controlled experiments begin with treatment and control groups and manipulate the treatment by intervening in the experimental group. The key to achieving ignorability is ensuring that treatment and control groups are equivalent before the intervention. Randomized experiments ensure groups are probabilistically equivalent by randomly assigning subjects to groups. Because the treatment is manipulated by the researcher, it is strongly exogenous to the outcome, ruling out reciprocal causation. Thus, a well-executed randomized experiment can achieve ignorability and, therefore, strong internal validity. The external validity of experiments is often compromised in three ways. First, observations are rarely obtained through representative sampling, limiting inferences to larger populations of interest. Second, treatment assignments of experiments often differ from the natural way that treatments are assigned in the real world, compromising consistency, and therefore causality, and again limiting generalizability to relevant populations. Third, interference can occur. In individual-level studies, subjects may influence each other on the basis of treatment assignment; in aggregate spatial studies, treatment effects may spill over and affect contiguous aggregate units.

Although a number of studies have attempted to test aspects of broken windows and informal social control using laboratory experiments (e.g., Diekmann et al. 2015 , Engel et al. 2014 ), it is our opinion that no studies we found exhibited sufficient external validity to provide evidence for or against the causal pathways in Figure 1 . Consequently, we examine only field experiments. Compared with laboratory experiments, field experiments trade off some internal validity for gains in external validity. They are conducted in the natural social contexts in which disorder, informal control, and crime are likely to occur and use local subjects who are the typical actors involved. Field experiments use interventions that closely approximate the real-world treatment of interest. This increase in external validity comes at a cost. Because they are conducted in natural settings, field experiments are unable to control the environment of the experiment and, thus, less able to rule out potential confounding factors. Interference, in which subjects of a treatment group affect the outcomes of others, is more likely to occur. Field experiments are typically conducted in a single or small number of geographical locations and rarely use representative sampling of locations or subjects.

A number of field experiments examine the individual-level hypothesis, derived from broken windows, that disorder exerts a direct causal effect on crime (norm violation). The most significant and highly cited broken windows field experiment, Keizer et al.’s (2008) study published in Science , has led to a resurgence of interest in the use of field experiments to study broken windows. Therefore, we discuss this study in some detail. Following Cialdini (2003) , Keizer et al. (2008) conceptualize broken windows as a cross-norm inhibition effect. Descriptive norms reflect common behaviors in a setting, while injunctive norms reflect what is commonly held to be proper in society. Observing a descriptive norm (e.g., seeing litter on the ground) that conflicts with an injunctive norm (e.g., it is wrong to litter) inhibits other injunctive norms as well (e.g., it is wrong to steal). Disorder thus causes crime by reducing inhibitions against criminal behavior. Keizer et al. (2008) conducted six related field experiments in which they manipulated a signal that a contextual norm had been violated (treatment) and then observed whether a target (injunctive) norm was more likely to be violated (outcome).

In the first experiment, the contextual norm was antigraffiti and the target norm was antilittering. Flyers were placed on the handlebars of bicycles parked in an alley of a shopping district. On the wall was a “no graffiti” sign. For the treatment condition, the wall was covered with graffiti; for the control condition, no graffiti was visible. The dependent variable was whether the owner of the bicycle littered the flyer upon returning. Of 77 subjects in each condition, 33% littered in the control condition compared with 69% in the treatment condition, a significant difference. Another experiment placed flyers on bicycles parked in a bicycle shed near a train station, with a treatment condition of the sound of fireworks set off illegally. Again, differences in the incidence of littering the flyers were significant: 26 (52%) littered in the control condition compared to 37 (80%) in the fireworks condition.

A third experiment used a private setting of a supermarket parking garage. The contextual norm was indicated by a “please return your shopping carts” sign and the outcome was littering flyers attached to the windshields of parked cars. In the treatment condition, with unreturned shopping carts strewn about, 35 of 60 (58%) shoppers littered the flyer compared with 13 of 60 (30%) shoppers in the control condition. The fourth experiment used a public setting of a car parking lot, in which the contextual norm was designated by a police ordinance “locking bicycles to the fence is prohibited” sign on a fence outside the lot. The target norm was indicated by a second police ordinance “do not enter” sign at an opening of the fence. In the treatment condition in which four bicycles were locked to the fence, 40 of 49 (82%) subjects violated the “do not enter” sign, whereas only 12 of 44 (27%) violated the norm in the control condition.

The experiment most relevant to broken windows examined theft. Keizer et al. (2008) left a mailing envelope—which was addressed and stamped and had a 5-euro note visible in the envelope’s window—hanging out of a mailbox’s mailing slot. The dependent variable was whether passersby stole the envelope. Two treatment conditions consisted of litter on the ground near the mailbox ( N = 72) and graffiti spray-painted on the mailbox ( N = 60). In the control condition of no graffiti and litter ( N = 71), nine passersby (13%) stole the envelope, compared to 18 (25%) in the litter condition and 16 (27%) in the graffiti condition.

Keizer et al.’s (2008) article is a citation classic, having received nearly 1,000 Google Scholar citations in approximately ten years. It has also spawned a number of studies of broken windows using similar research designs. Nevertheless, the paper has been subject to sharp criticism. Wicherts & Bakker (2014) , in particular, argue that the study is fraught with methodological weaknesses, such as failing to address potential confounding, observer bias, and measurement error; using inflated Type I error rates due to dependencies among subjects; using sequential testing; and failing to control for multiple testing. A major limitation of the study is that each experiment was carried out in a single geographic neighborhood in Groningen, Netherlands, compromising external validity. This criticism has been partially addressed by attempts to replicate Keizer et al.’s (2008) results in different settings. Volker (2017) attempted to replicate Keizer et al.’s (2008) mailbox letter theft experiment in the identical neighborhood as the original study and failed to find significant effects. In their follow-up, Keizer et al. (2011) found the effect of disorder on norm violation stronger in the presence of a sign prohibiting the form of disorder present; however, Wicherts & Bakker (2014) offered similar criticisms to those leveled at the first study. A third study found negative effects of norm violation on prosocial behavior ( Keizer et al. 2013 ).

Keuschnigg & Wolbring (2015) replicated Keizer et al.’s (2008) experiments in two German neighborhoods differing in social capital measured with administrative data. With abandoned and damaged bicycles as a disorder manipulation, they dropped envelopes with five-, ten-, or one-hundred-euro notes and used theft of the envelopes as the outcome. They found treatment heterogeneity: The probability of envelope theft was higher in the disorder condition but only in the low-social-capital neighborhood and for smaller monetary values. This study is significant because it attempts to address the role of informal social control in the disorder–crime relationship. A drawback is that using only two neighborhoods to control for social capital ignores myriad other differences between neighborhoods that may affect theft.

Berger & Hevenstone (2016) conducted field experiments testing the relationship between litter and sanctioning of litterers in Bern and Zurich, Switzerland, and New York. A confederate dropped a bottle near a trash receptacle in view of pedestrians while another recorded whether participants verbally sanctioned the confederate, subtly sanctioned (e.g., an angry glance) the confederate, or picked up the dropped bottle. The researchers manipulated the treatment conditions by introducing bags of garbage and stray litter or conducting the drop farther from the trash can. The manipulation moderately reduced both forms of sanctioning and strongly reduced picking up the bottle. In contrast, dropping the bottle farther from the trash receptacle reduced picking up the bottle but had no effect on sanctioning. Berger & Hevenstone (2016) interpreted their findings as a local effect of litter on both informal social control and cleanup of additional litter, which could produce a cascade effect of littering. They note the presence of interference: In 6.4% of trials, after a participant reacted to the littering, a second individual subsequently joined in sanctioning the confederate. Thus, sanctioning may be a contagious behavior.

These individual-level experiments approximate ignorability by manipulating treatments of graffiti and litter and using naturally occurring passersby, making treatment and control subjects different by the timing of their appearance. Thus, unless treatment and control conditions differ by some confounding event occurring for one but not the other, equivalence seems assured. Furthermore, because the treatment conditions are one-shot transitory events, subjects are unlikely to interfere with each other. The transitory nature of treatment, however, means that these experiments cannot test the hypothesis that repeated exposure to disorder is necessary for norm violations.

A second set of field experiments intervene at the neighborhood level and examine aggregate neighborhood outcomes (see Kondo et al.’s 2018 review). Branas et al. (2018) conducted a randomized experiment of neighborhood disorder in which the main intervention cleaned up physical disorder in vacant lots, created a park-like atmosphere, and maintained the lots on a regular schedule. A second intervention only cleaned up physical disorder. They found that the main intervention, but not cleanup alone, was significantly negatively associated with survey-recorded perceived crime, vandalism, and staying inside due to safety concerns, and positively associated with socializing outside. The main intervention was also positively associated with people watching out for each other but only in neighborhoods below the poverty line. By contrast, both the main intervention and cleanup alone were negatively associated with an index of crimes.

Branas et al. (2018) estimated intent-to-treat models, which estimate treatment effects regardless of whether experimental subjects complied with treatment. If a policy implementing the treatment would result in similar noncompliance, intent-to-treat estimates will give the policy effect expected in the real world. By contrast, if interest is in the effect of actual neighborhood disorder, noncompliance is a problem, and intent-to-treat estimates may be biased. To overcome this, a model controlling for noncompliance uses the randomized intent-to-treat variable as an IV for compliance, yielding an unbiased estimate of the complier average causal effects (CACE) (see Imbens & Rubin 2015 ). Branas et al. (2018) found that CACE and intent-to-treat estimates were similar, suggesting that noncompliance was not a major problem.

This study suggests that neighborhood disorder may undermine social cohesion as well as increase neighborhood crime. The use of randomization ensures ignorability. The manipulated treatment—cleaning up vacant lots—suggests a treatment amenable to public policy intervention, where noncompliance is likely to occur. Nevertheless, we cannot rule out the ecological fallacy because we cannot know for certain if the individuals perceiving high disorder are the same ones withdrawing from the community or committing more crimes. In a related study, Branas et al. (2016) found a stronger reduction in firearm violence near vacant buildings that were boarded up and had their exteriors cleaned. The relevance of these studies to broken windows hinges on an untested assumption of symmetric causality ( Lieberson 1985 ): Removing disorder reduces crime; therefore, introducing disorder increases crime. Researchers clearly cannot introduce disorder at the neighborhood level due to the potential for harm but it is conceivable that natural experiments—sudden exogenous increases in disorder—could be exploited to confirm this symmetry.

A third set of experiments come from the moving to opportunity (MTO) studies, which used a randomized quasi-experimental design ( Harcourt & Ludwig 2006 ). Beginning in 1994 in five major cities, MTO randomly assigned 4,600 low-income families—who were living in public housing or Section 8 project-based housing in high-poverty neighborhoods—to one of three groups. A treatment group was offered housing vouchers for moving to neighborhoods having poverty rates of ten percent or less. A Section 8 group was offered housing vouchers to move to any neighborhood. A control group was not offered housing vouchers. Random assignment rules out the potential biasing effects of self-selection into neighborhoods. Approximately half of the families complied with the treatment by relocating through MTO; therefore, intent-to-treat (ITT) models of the opportunity to move were augmented with ATEs on the treated (ATT) using treatment assignment as an IV. Compared with controls, members of the treatment and Section 8 groups moved to neighborhoods lower in poverty and higher in reported informal social control. Nevertheless, in neither ITT nor ATT models did the treatment groups show lower arrest rates, delinquency, or behavior problems by 2001 ( Kling et al. 2005 ). Harcourt & Ludwig (2006) conclude that broken windows is unsupported: Either declines in community disorder do not reduce criminality or their effects are offset by increases in neighborhood socioeconomic status.

Although MTO studies rule out self-selection, for our purposes, they have three weaknesses. First, the treatment is a compound treatment, consisting of movement to a neighborhood with different poverty, disorder, collective efficacy, and other unmeasured characteristics. The studies cannot distinguish between causal effects of these different treatments. Second, analyses do not consider spillover effects. Sobel (2006) has argued persuasively that the no-interference assumption may have been violated. Families given vouchers may be reluctant to move unless their neighborhood friends also move and may be unable to find suitable housing in a tight housing market when many others are given vouchers. Such interference could bias estimated treatment effects. Third, Sampson (2008) suggested that studies using MTO data must be interpreted carefully: Any treatment effect also includes disruptive effects of moving; voucher users moved to destinations lower in poverty but similar on other indicators of disadvantage and embedded in larger disadvantaged areas; and the treatment resulted in only modest changes in conditions. The sample also constitutes a small, highly disadvantaged group subject to years of cumulative deprivation, limiting external validity.

Our review of field experiments of disorder, social control, and crime suggests mixed results. Keizer et al. (2008) consistently conclude that their experiments support the broken windows thesis (direct effect of disorder on norm violation), but those experiments have been criticized on methodological grounds and have failed to replicate in one instance and were replicated only in a neighborhood poor in social capital in another. Some experimental evidence finds support for the effects of disorder on crime at the neighborhood level, although the mechanism is unclear. Disorder may also impede social control behavior at the individual level.

REVIEW OF OBSERVATIONAL (NONEXPERIMENTAL) STUDIES

Observational studies typically combine survey data on individuals within neighborhoods with administrative data from police and the census. In principle, such nested data allow estimation of combined micro–macro models, but in practice, this research typically models macro relationships among variables aggregated to neighborhoods. A major advantage of observational studies of neighborhoods is they examine natural variation across a representative sample of neighborhoods, making external validity strong. Because the research environment lacks the controls of experiments, however, there are greater threats to internal validity, as ignorability is difficult to approximate. Observational designs differ in how they address the problem of ignorability. Research on disorder and control can be categorized into four nonexperimental designs and models: ( a ) recursive cross-sectional models; ( b ) nonrecursive simultaneous equation models; ( c ) fixed-effects panel models; and ( d ) cross-lagged panel models.

Cross-Sectional Recursive Models

Cross-sectional recursive models are commonly used to examine community theories of crime. The key independent variables, disorder and social control, are not manipulated by the researcher but rather are endogenous. To rule out what econometricians term endogeneity bias, these models rely on two strong assumptions. First, treatment assignment—the process by which neighborhoods attain a level of social control or disorder—is ignorable conditional on exogenous control variables. Thus, all relevant covariates are included in the model. Second, reverse causality—crime affecting either disorder or social control—is absent.

In an important cross-sectional study of neighborhood disorder and crime, Skogan (1990) pooled surveys covering 40 areas in six major US cities to examine a model of disorder and decay. Under the assumption that his path models were well specified, he found a strong effect of perceived disorder on crime, in which disorder mediated the effects of poverty, residential instability, and racial heterogeneity on crime, supporting broken windows. Disorder was measured with an index of social and physical disorder indicators that displayed convergent and discriminant validity. Skogan noted that informal social control is negatively correlated with disorder; however, he did not include it in his structural models. Harcourt (1998) reanalyzed Skogan’s data, excluded a small number of neighborhoods with unusually high disorder and crime, and found results were not robust, although, as Xu et al. (2005) pointed out, Harcourt’s reanalysis lacks statistical power.

Cross-sectional studies have also supported theories of informal control (e.g., Sampson & Groves 1989 ). Using police data, census data, and survey data on 8,782 residents from 343 Chicago neighborhoods from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), Sampson et al. (1997) examined collective efficacy, sociodemographic structure, and crime. Collective efficacy was measured by residents’ reports of informal control (e.g., would neighbors intervene if children were committing deviance?) and social cohesion (e.g., neighbors help each other) adjusted for differential composition of informants across neighborhoods. Using three-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) models, they found that collective efficacy was strongly negatively related to survey-measured victimization and perceived crime as well as police-reported homicides. Collective efficacy also mediated much of the effects of neighborhood disadvantage, residential instability, and immigration. Although this study was carefully conducted—particularly in addressing measurement issues—the cross-sectional design could not rule out reciprocal effects.

Subsequent cross-sectional studies replicated Sampson et al.’s (1997) results in other settings or under varying specifications (e.g., Mazerolle et al. 2010 , Sampson & Wikström 2008 , but not Bruinsma et al. 2013 ). Matsueda & Drakulich (2016) augmented Sampson et al.’s (1997) models to adjust individual perceptions of collective efficacy for perceived deviance. Using the Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey, they found that respondents who observe deviance in their neighborhood report a lower likelihood of neighbors intervening. Nevertheless, controlling for observed deviance resulted in a stronger association between collective efficacy and crime.

Neighborhoods in closer proximity tend to be more similar than those far apart, resulting in spatial autocorrelated data. This can be due to substantive processes, such as spillover or cascade effects, or methodological artifacts, such as spatial mismatch in which the true unit of analysis in causal processes differs from the unit used in the study (see Sampson et al. 1999 , Taylor 2015 ). In either case, the result can be interference as, for example, social capital in one neighborhood (treatment) spills over into a low-social-capital neighborhood (control), lowering its crime rate. Sampson et al. (1999) reanalyzed PHDCN data using first-order spatial autoregressive lag models and found evidence of spillover in neighborhood collective efficacy.

Morenoff et al. (2001) reanalyzed PHDCN data to explore spillover effects in models of social ties, collective efficacy, and future homicide rates. By controlling for homicide rates for three years preceding the survey, they partially address ignorability as prior homicide partly absorbs unobserved (omitted) stable covariates. They find organizations and social ties important for predicting collective efficacy (but not crime). They also find that collective efficacy predicts lower homicide rates but does not mediate socioeconomic disadvantage as strongly as found in Sampson et al. (1997) . Building on this model, Browning et al. (2004) found that collective efficacy predicts lower homicide rates, but the effect is attenuated in the presence of dense social ties (see also Bellair & Browning 2010 ). This suggests that measures of network density moderate collective efficacy and cannot serve as a proxy for informal control (e.g., Markowitz et al. 2001 ).

In sum, cross-sectional studies find effects of neighborhood disorder on crime and effects of informal control on crime that persist in the face of spatial autoregression. These studies do not manipulate disorder or informal control and thus make strong assumptions about causal order (no reciprocal causation) and ignorability (controls for social disorganization achieve conditional ignorability).

Nonrecursive (Simultaneous Equation) Models

In principle, simultaneous equation models with IVs resolve the problem of reverse causality for nonexperimental studies in which treatments are not manipulated but rather are assigned through an endogenous process (e.g., Greene 2003 ). Figure 3 depicts a nonrecursive model in which social control and crime are simultaneously determined. The problem here is that, in the crime (social control) equation, the endogenous predictor, social control (crime), is correlated with the disturbance ε 1 ( ε 2 ), which violates a key assumption of the general linear model, causing estimates to be biased. To resolve this, at least one IV that strongly predicts social control but has no direct effect on crime—holding social control constant—is needed to identify the effect of social control on crime. Similarly, at least one IV that strongly predicts crime but not social control—holding crime constant—is needed to identify the effect of crime on social control. These exclusionary restrictions, in which γ 1 = γ 2 = 0, are indicated in Figure 3 .

Nonrecursive model of social control and crime with lagged instrumental variables (IVs). Social control and crime are reciprocally related ( β 1 , β 2 ) with correlated errors ( ε 1 , ε 2 ). The assumption that the IVs for social control and crime have no cross-lagged effects—signified by the restrictions γ 1 = γ 2 = 0 ( dotted lines )—permits identification.

Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) used nonrecursive models to estimate causal relationships among collective efficacy, disorder, and crime while controlling for crime’s effect on collective efficacy. They used systematic social observation (SSO), an innovative method of measuring disorder across neighborhoods: Videos of street blocks taken by SUVs driving through streets of Chicago during daylight were coded for signs of social and physical disorder. Following Sampson et al. (1997) , they measured collective efficacy using a multilevel measurement model of PHDCN data; crime is captured by police-reported homicide, robbery, and burglary. To identify the reciprocal effects between collective efficacy and crime, the authors assumed that reciprocated exchange among neighbors and attachment to neighborhood (IVs for collective efficacy) affect crime only indirectly through collective efficacy. They used geocoded victim-based homicides from death records as an IV for police-reported crimes under the assumption that resident-based homicide affects collective efficacy solely through police-reported crimes. Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) found, contrary to broken windows, no direct relationship between disorder and crime net of collective efficacy for homicide or burglary. They did, however, find support for a “feedback loop, whereby disorder entices robbery, which in turn undermines collective efficacy, leading over time to yet more robbery” ( Sampson & Raudenbush 1999 , p. 637). Researchers have critiqued Sampson & Raudenbush for assuming that crime does not feedback on disorder and disorder does not feedback on collective efficacy, and therefore, there could be an indirect pathway of disorder on crime through collective efficacy ( Gault & Silver 2008 , Xu et al. 2005 ). O’Brien & Kauffman (2013) replicated Sampson & Raudenbush’s (1999) main results using a survey of rural youth with respondent prosociality—rather than crime—as an outcome. They found rater-assessed and respondent-perceived disorder were unrelated to prosociality, but collective efficacy predicted both disorder and low adolescent prosociality. Although Sampson & Raudenbush specify collective efficacy as a composite of cohesion and expectations for social control, Taylor (1996) found disorder negatively related to social control and positively related to cohesion—effects that canceled out in reduced forms.

Sampson & Wikström (2008) used data from 3,992 individuals in 200 Stockholm neighborhoods and Chicago’s PHDCN to make a cross-national comparison of relationships among collective efficacy, perceived disorder, and crime, controlling for indicators of social disorganization. They found collective efficacy negatively associated with neighborhood crime and victimization in both cities. Sampson & Wikström (2008) found that, controlling for collective efficacy, disorder had a strong positive association with reported violent crimes in Stockholm but not in Chicago. Although these results provide evidence for cross-national consistency in collective efficacy, they also reveal the disorder–crime relationship in Stockholm survives controlling for confounding collective efficacy, a finding that supports broken windows.

Using data from the British Crime Survey, Markowitz et al. (2001) applied nonrecursive models to relationships among burglary, social cohesion, fear of crime, and perceived disorder. To identify the simultaneous parameters, they used lagged versions of endogenous variables as IVs. Thus, the exclusion restriction is no lagged effects in the presence of contemporaneous effects. The authors used survey measures of disorder (e.g., neighborhood litter, vandalism, and loitering teenagers), social cohesion (organizational participation, helping behavior, and neighborhood satisfaction), and fear of crime (fear walking after dark and worried about burglary or robbery). They summed and aggregated the indicators to create neighborhood-level indices. They controlled for disorganization (ethnic heterogeneity, family disruption, and urbanization) to achieve ignorability. In cross-sectional models, Markowitz et al. (2001) found a nonsignificant effect of disorder on burglary, holding constant cohesion and previous burglary. Both nonrecursive and cross-lagged panel models reveal cohesion and disorder are reciprocally related (each at −0.18 standardized), as are burglary and disorder. Furthermore, they found a feedback loop in which social cohesion reduced burglary and disorder, each of which increased fear of crime, which in turn, fed back to reduce social cohesion. These findings generally support broken windows.

Previous studies using nonrecursive models also found evidence that crime—particularly robbery—is associated with less informal social control. Liska & Warner (1991) modeled the reciprocal effects between crime and constrained social behavior (a combination of fear of crime, going out at night, and limiting activities because of crime). Using the US National Crime Survey, they analyzed crime victimization (robbery and a general index of felony crimes) for 26 cities. To identify their simultaneous equations, they used population density as an instrument for crime (assuming no direct effect on constrained social behavior) and media coverage of homicide for constrained social behavior (assuming no direct effect on crime). These are very strong assumptions. They find a reciprocal relationship between robbery and constrained social behavior: Constrained social behavior reduces robbery and other victimization, but robbery also increases constrained social behavior.

Using data on 100 Seattle neighborhoods, Bellair (2000) estimated nonrecursive models of informal surveillance and crime, comparing burglary with a combined measure of robbery and stranger assault. Following Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) , Bellair used reciprocated exchange among neighbors as an instrument for informal control. He used unsupervised teenage groups as an instrument for crime. Because the presence of unsupervised teens is likely to elicit more surveillance even when crime is held constant, Bellair (2000) tried other instruments for crime, including percentage of bars and clubs in the neighborhood and percentage of 16–19-year-olds in the neighborhood (note that each instrument could also affect surveillance directly). Nevertheless, Bellair found that robbery and stranger assault reduce informal surveillance by increasing perceived risk of victimization, which leads to withdrawal from public spaces. Conversely, burglaries lead to greater surveillance. Furthermore, controlling for perceived risk of attack, surveillance is negatively associated with robbery and assault, but not burglary.

In sum, nonrecursive models appear to find a reciprocal causal relationship between informal control (social cohesion) and disorder. Sampson & Raudenbush (1999) found collective efficacy reduces crime but not vice versa, and the effect of disorder on crime is largely spurious due to the confounder, collective efficacy. Other studies, however, find reciprocal effects between informal control and crime, and one finds support for the broken windows indirect pathway in which social cohesion undermines disorder, disorder fosters fear of crime, and fear of crime feeds back to reduce cohesion ( Markowitz et al. 2001 ).

In principle, simultaneous equation models allow researchers to estimate feedback effects; however, in practice, such models require researchers to make strong assumptions to identify key parameters. Consequently, recent applications of simultaneous equations have searched for naturally occurring strong instruments, such as lotteries that randomize treatments to subjects, as in the military draft (e.g., Angrist & Krueger 2001 ), or naturally occurring exogenous shocks that create strong instruments. For example, Kirk (2015) used Hurricane Katrina as an exogenous intervention that dispersed parolees geographically to estimate the effects of returning parolees to their local neighborhoods on recidivism rates. Unfortunately, such strong instruments have not been available to identify nonrecursive relationships among disorder, control, and crime, leaving results open to question.

Panel Models: Cross-Lagged Effects and Fixed Effects

Panel designs collect data on samples of observations repeatedly over short time spans. Researchers examining disorder, informal control, and crime have typically used one of two panel models. First are cross-lagged panel models, in which the interrelationships among time-varying endogenous variables are modeled as first-order lagged variables. Thus, the models estimate (residualized) change in endogenous variables. In Figure 4 , these lagged effects include stability effects (e.g., social control on itself) and cross-lagged effects (e.g., social control on crime and vice versa). Cross-lagged panel models address causality in several ways. The cross-lagged effects specify a causal order among variables consistent with their temporal order. To obtain ATEs in dynamic panel models, one assumes sequential ignorability (conditional ignorability at each time point) ( Rosenbaum & Rubin 1983 ). Sequential ignorability is addressed by including potential time-invariant confounders (exogenous controls in Figure 4 ) as well as stability effects, which help absorb unobserved heterogeneity. Thus, selection into endogenous variables is assumed to be captured by a combination of observed confounders, stabilities, and cross-lags. To obtain stable estimates, cross-lagged panel models make substantial demands of the data: Endogenous variables must have changed sufficiently to model change, and contemporaneous correlations among endogenous predictor variables must be low enough to provide sufficient statistical power, given modest samples of neighborhoods.

Cross-lagged panel model of social control and crime. T1, T2, and T3 represent time periods. Social control (crime) impacts both social control and crime in the next period. Double-headed arrows between ε indicate correlated errors.

Second are fixed-effects models. These models pool the time-series cross-sectional data, yielding NT observations, where N is the number of neighborhoods and T is the number of time periods (waves). Fixed-effects models control for unobserved heterogeneity (time-stable omitted confounders) by estimating within-neighborhood variation by, for example, including N – 1 dummy variables. Thus, fixed-effects models capitalize on panel data to attain conditional ignorability by controlling for all unobserved stable confounders (see Sobel 2012 for assumptions needed to obtain ATEs in fixed-effects models). All relevant time-varying covariates are assumed to be included in the model. Fixed-effects models can include lagged variables—including crosslags—which make greater demands of the data ( Allison et al. 2017 , Wooldridge 2010 ).

Taylor (2001) used two waves of data spaced 12 years apart in 66 tracts in Baltimore to examine the effect of disorder on crime, fear of crime, avoiding dangerous locations, and intentions to move. Disorder was measured by raters observing neighborhoods and separate respondent-perceived physical and social disorder. Taylor found that each indicator of disorder was linked to a different form of crime. This implies different types and measures of disorder may operate as different treatments and combining them into a single measure may mask their separate effects. Using multilevel models, he found both assessed and perceived disorder were associated with fear of crime at the individual level, although only perceived social disorder was associated with avoiding dangerous places and intentions to move. Taylor argued that rater assessments of disorder failed to capture social disorder most troubling to residents—because it is transient and relatively rare—which draws into question objective measures like SSO in capturing a key form of disorder. Taylor does not examine spatial or reciprocal effects.

Using administrative data and ecometric measurement models of survey responses from the Boston Neighborhood Survey, O’Brien & Sampson (2015) examined disorder and crime with two-period cross-lagged panel models. Applying exploratory factor models to police dispatch data, they obtain four measures of conflict and disorder: public social disorder (e.g., public intoxication), public violence (e.g., assault), private violence (e.g., domestic violence), and gun prevalence (e.g., shootings). Physical disorder is measured with counts of reports for private neglect (e.g., housing issues) or public denigration (e.g., detritus) (see O’Brien et al. 2015 ). All measures were aggregated to census tracts. They also included time-invariant controls: percent Hispanic, percent black, income, and baseline collective efficacy.

O’Brien & Sampson (2015) found that no form of disorder or violence was predicted by (or predictive of) public physical disorder. Public social disorder did, however, moderately predict public violence (standardized β = 0.11), although less strongly than did private conflict (0.17). Public social disorder was strongly predicted by private conflict (0.33) and public violence (0.22). This indicates a reciprocal relationship between public violence and public social disorder (but not physical disorder), which supports broken windows theory. The authors could not examine whether social disorder operated through informal social control—the indirect pathway of broken windows—because collective efficacy was measured only at the baseline. The authors also report a second feedback loop of personal conflict in which private conflicts escalate to gun violence: Private conflict predicts gun violence directly (0.19) and via public violence (0.17), which also predicts gun violence (0.20), and gun violence in turn feeds back on future private conflict (0.33). They interpret this result as supporting a social escalation model, in which private conflicts spill over into public spaces. These analyses are limited to residential neighborhoods only, which may inhibit generalizability, as crime and disorder are often concentrated in nonresidential areas ( Yang 2010 ).

Using quasi-experimental methods and panel models, Wheeler et al. (2018) examined the effect of vacant property demolitions on crime. Vacant properties are a form of disorder that may increase crime by signaling low social control (broken windows) or providing opportunities to commit crimes out of sight (situational opportunity). Increases in crime may, however, be spurious if crime and vacant lots are each the result of social disorganization. To examine this, Wheeler and colleagues capitalize on 2,000 demolitions occurring in Buffalo, New York, between 2010 and 2015 to model changes in crime at neighborhood and microplace levels. They estimate a difference-indifference model that matches demolished properties to nondemolished controls using propensity scores based on pretreatment crime and local demographic composition. Comparing crimes before and after demolition at exact addresses and varying distances, they found reductions in crime averaged 90% at demolished parcels. Significant reductions were seen out to more than 1,000 feet. To minimize interference between treatment and controls, the authors estimated a neighborhood-level spatial panel model relating counts of demolitions in census tracts to changes in crime. At the tract level, they found mixed results, as demolitions exerted no significant effects on violent crimes or total police calls, and only a significant spatial effect on nonviolent crimes. That is, demolitions in adjacent neighborhoods are associated with crime reductions, but demolitions within the neighborhood are not. Together these results suggest that removal of vacant properties may reduce crime at the microlevel but may not suppress overall crime in a neighborhood.

Using a two-period cross-lagged, spatial autoregressive model, Boggess & Maskaly (2014) examined effects of disorder on robbery, assault, and disorder in Reno, Nevada. They measured disorder using police calls about intoxication, unwanted persons, graffiti, abandoned vehicles, litter, and dumping and used police-reported robbery and assault as outcomes. They found that, controlling for neighborhood sociodemographic composition, disorder predicts robbery and assault. They also found weak spatial relationships and a modest feedback effect of crime on disorder. However, with no measures of informal control or fear of crime, they cannot rule out spuriousness, and cannot estimate indirect paths between disorder and crime. Their use of police reports for both disorder and crime may introduce a response set, as invoking police is a form of social control. Although Boggess & Maskaly did not provide interwave correlations for disorder, the magnitude of the lagged disorder coefficients (greater than 0.96), large standard errors of other predictors, and a sample of only N = 117 suggest low statistical power.

Wheeler (2017) examined the effects of 311 calls (complaints to the city for physical disorder) on crimes at microplaces (street segments and intersections) in Washington, DC. He divided 311 calls into two categories—detritus (e.g., garbage, abandoned vehicles, illegal dumping) and infrastructure (e.g., potholes, damaged sidewalks, graffiti)—and created an index of serious police-reported crime. The models were carefully done, addressing a number of threats to internal validity. To address ignorability, Wheeler used fixed-effects models to eliminate stable unobserved neighborhood effects, with neighborhoods defined as 500-m squares. To address reciprocal causation, he controlled for prior crime in models of future crime. To model cascading effects of broken windows, he used a first-order, spatial autoregressive lagged crime variable. Wheeler (2017) found that both forms of physical disorder were modestly associated with future crime: An increase of 50 disorder calls for service was significantly associated with one fewer crime. This study is limited exclusively to physical disorder, which may be less consequential for crime than social disorder ( St. Jean 2007 , Yang 2010 ). Furthermore, Wheeler acknowledges that 311 calls are likely to be correlated with informal control against crime, and therefore, disorder could be capturing effects of unobserved informal control.

Although most studies of disorder and informal control use data from the United States, a few apply panel models to other nations. Steenbeek & Hipp (2011) used ten-year panel data from 74 neighborhoods in Utrecht, Netherlands, and distinguished potential informal control (social cohesion and shared expectations for control) from behavioral informal control in cross-lagged models of disorder, social cohesion, and informal control. They did not model crime. Their cross-sectional models replicated previous findings in which social control reduces disorder. Their panel models, however, showed no effect of social control or cohesion on future disorder. By contrast, they found disorder to be negatively associated with future control potential (consistent with broken windows) and residential stability; stability, in turn, is positively associated with future disorder. Disorder is positively associated with future control behavior, which has no significant effect on later disorder. Using first-order spatial- (and temporal-) lagged dependent variables, they find substantial spillover effects between neighborhoods. The authors’ intertemporal correlation tables suggest very high correlations for demographic variables, disorder (0.92–0.96), and cohesion (0.95–0.96), suggesting little change to be explained and potentially weak power of the tests ( Steenbeek & Hipp 2011 ).

Several related papers have examined collective efficacy and crime using panel data from the Australian Community Capacity Study (ACCS), which collected survey data on 4,334 residents across 148 neighborhoods in Brisbane. Hipp & Wickes (2017) followed Sampson et al. (1997) in measuring collective efficacy as a composite of willingness to intervene, cohesion, and trust and controlling for differential distributions of informant characteristics across neighborhoods that may bias reports of collective efficacy. They estimated cross-lagged models for collective efficacy, violence, and neighborhood characteristics (e.g., disadvantage, residential stability, age, population density) and included spatially lagged neighborhood characteristics to control for spillover. They found that, contrary to collective efficacy theory, controlling for prior violence, collective efficacy is significantly associated with future violence—but in the wrong direction. This result held in models using five-year lags and two-year lags and in simultaneous equations using lagged dependent variables as instruments. They also found a small negative indirect effect of collective efficacy on violence through concentrated disadvantage. Although the authors did not present intertemporal correlations among variables, they reported stability coefficients of 0.82 for violence, suggesting modest change, which, combined with the sign flip for collective efficacy, may suggest weak power of statistical tests. It is noteworthy that Sampson (2012) reported evidence for a reciprocal relationship between violent crime and collective efficacy in Chicago using hierarchical cross-lagged panel models. This suggests that the divergent findings may be the result of contextual, rather than methodological, differences between the Brisbane and Chicago studies: Chicago is a larger city with more variation in violent crime.

Wickes & Hipp (2018) used similar models on the same ACCS data set but included three measures of collective efficacy—child-centered social control, reciprocated exchange, and exercise of informal control (attend a meeting, sign a petition, solve a problem with neighbors)—which they hypothesize should have independent effects on crime. They found reciprocal relationships between disadvantage, nearby disadvantage, and all three measures of informal control. Moreover, Wickes & Hipp (2018) found that, contrary to collective efficacy theory, no measure of collective efficacy consistently predicted future crime in the expected direction. Social ties were significantly associated with property crime and drug crime in the wrong direction, control expectations were negatively associated with drug crime only, and exercise of social control was negatively associated with violence only. Interestingly, at the bivariate level, child-centered control is significantly correlated (0.3–0.4) with all crime measures in the direction hypothesized by collective efficacy theory, while the other measures of social control are uncorrelated with all crimes (see appendix 2 in Wickes & Hipp 2018 ). This, with fairly high stabilities for violent crime and property crime, raises the issue of the power of tests of informal control as well as whether the models are controlling for different aspects of the same concept (collective efficacy).

Most studies of disorder, social control, and crime use data from large urban areas, which is consistent with the model of urban growth underlying social disorganization theory. Do results generalize to less-urban settings, where the dynamics of neighborhood residential patterns may be different? Hipp (2016) used block-group-level data from rural North Carolina to examine disorder, informal social control, and perceptions of neighborhood crime in three-wave cross-lagged panel models. Using conventional measures of social cohesion and collective efficacy, Hipp controlled for potential bias in neighborhood reports due to compositional differences in residents across neighborhoods. To measure crime, he asked respondents whether they may have seen or heard acts of violence, arrests, and drug dealing around their neighborhoods and then aggregated responses to the block group. The measures of disorder asked respondents their general impressions of the neighborhood (Do respondents believe neighbors take care of homes and respect property? Is there too much drug use in the neighborhood?).

Using a cross-sectional model, Hipp (2016) replicates Sampson & Raudenbush’s (1999) finding of collective efficacy negatively associated with crime and of both collective efficacy and cohesion negatively associated with disorder. In cross-lagged panel models, he found perceived disorder and crime negatively associated with future collective efficacy, which he interprets as evidence of updating: Respondents’ perceptions of crime and disorder signal weak social control, causing them to update their perceptions of collective efficacy downward (see also Matsueda & Drakulich 2016 ). Furthermore, in a main-effects model, Hipp found that, contrary to collective efficacy theory, neither collective efficacy, social cohesion, nor a composite of the two significantly predicted future perceived crime or disorder. He does, however, find evidence of an interaction effect between social cohesion and collective efficacy. By contrast, consistent with broken windows, disorder predicts future crime. This study provides perhaps the most direct support for broken windows over collective efficacy and contrasts with Sampson & Raudenbush’s (1999) findings. This divergence of findings may be due to differences in measures of crime and disorder (Hipp’s are notably weaker), in simultaneous equation models versus panel models, and in urban versus rural settings.

In sum, panel models find mixed results. In models of disorder and crime, research finds a modest effect of disorder on violence and robbery, even controlling for collective efficacy. Demolitions were modestly associated with future crime at addresses and microplaces but not at the tract level. Cross-lagged panel models find collective efficacy either unrelated to crime, positively related to crime in Brisbane, or moderated by cohesion in rural North Carolina.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Our review of recent causal claims about disorder, informal control, and crime finds a lack of consensus across studies. Turning first to causal links in models of informal social control ( Figure 2 ), some evidence suggests that crime undermines informal control, but this may be limited to robbery. With the exception of one panel study, most research using different designs finds that informal social control is negatively associated with future disorder. Research on the key proposition of collective efficacy and informal social control is mixed. Cross-sectional studies find strong inverse effects of informal control on criminal behavior in different cities in the United States and several other countries. Such studies are unable to address potential reciprocal relationships between informal control and crime, which could result in upward bias. Nonrecursive models address this issue, but those that identify collective efficacy with reciprocated exchange as an instrument find informal control generally affects crime, whereas those that use lagged informal control do not. Cross-lagged panel models, however, show little effect of collective efficacy on future crime in Brisbane or on disorder in Utrecht, and only an interaction effect with cohesion in rural North Carolina, drawing into question theories of informal control. Given that panel models explain change in crime, it could be that collective efficacy can explain variation in crime across neighborhoods but not over time. Alternatively, the panel data sets used may lack sufficient statistical power to detect effects of informal control on temporal variation in crime. Thus, to date, an important counterfactual remains unanswered: In a data set with sufficient change in key endogenous variables and sufficient statistical power of tests, would we find effects of informal social control on changes in crime and disorder?

Evidence on the causal links implied by broken windows theory ( Figure 1 ) is also mixed. The experimental studies of Keizer et al. (2008 , 2011 ) find disorder associated with minor norm violations in Groningen, but another study failed to replicate this result in Groningen while another found treatment heterogeneity by social capital in Germany. With one exception, cross-sectional studies find modest effects of combined social and physical disorder on neighborhood crime. Of the four studies testing the broken windows hypothesis that disorder fosters crime when controlling for informal control, one nonrecursive cross-sectional model found little effect in Chicago, whereas three cross-lagged panel models found modest but significant effects in Boston, rural North Carolina, and Brisbane. Experiments in Bern, Zurich, and New York, the panel study in North Carolina, and one nonrecursive model in Britain found disorder undermines future social control, whereas a second nonrecursive model failed to find a significant effect in Chicago. The positive results would suggest support for disorder affecting crime indirectly through informal control, except that, unlike cross-sectional studies, cross-lagged panel models find little effect of collective efficacy on crime.

In evaluating this research literature, we have come to five tentative conclusions about the relative merits of different research designs as implemented to date. First, individual-level field experiments of disorder on norm violations are promising for testing the specific behavioral principles underlying broken windows. Such experiments can approximate ignorability when conducted with care. The results of recent experiments, however, are questionable because of methodological weaknesses ( Wicherts & Bakker 2014 ). Furthermore, when applied to broken windows and informal control theories, these experiments lack consistency and external validity, and, therefore, to be relevant to criminological debates they must be augmented with studies of naturally occurring crime. Second, we have greater enthusiasm for field experiments that intervene in neighborhoods by manipulating urban blight ( Kondo et al. 2018 ). These experiments manipulate, in a policy-relevant way, the key concept of disorder and examine serious crime. Unfortunately, we could not find parallel interventions seeking to manipulate informal social control. Third, MTO studies, which found few effects of individual moves on crime while eliminating selectivity, are less useful for our task because they cannot disentangle disorder, informal control, and other neighborhood characteristics.

Fourth, we began assuming that well-specified nonrecursive models are stronger than cross-sectional recursive models but weaker than panel models. In this applied literature, however, nonrecursive models are only as valid as the identifying restrictions on IVs. Panel models, while superior in principle, require sufficient change in dependent variables and sufficient statistical power of tests, which may be lacking in applications. Statistical power may also be an issue in simultaneous equation models, given that the power of simultaneous parameters is dependent on, among other things, the strength of IVs ( Bielby & Matsueda 1991 ). Rather than treating such models as panaceas for the possibility of feedback effects, each study needs to be carefully examined for whether the data are up to the assumptions of the models. The model could be correct, but the data are insufficient to estimate the model’s parameters. Fifth, interference is often present in neighborhood models as revealed by spatial analyses; such studies, however, typically do not discuss the degree of bias resulting when interference is ignored.

Although we find mixed results on most key hypotheses, we can make a tentative assessment of where the preponderance of the evidence currently lies. First, informal social control appears to be negatively associated with crime and disorder in urban areas. The negative evidence from panel studies may be the result of inadequate power of tests. Second, disorder—particularly social disorder—appears to be positively associated with future crime and disorder. The causal mechanism could be the broken windows hypothesis that disorder signals weak neighborhood control, or that such disorder generates crime opportunities or conflict, as suggested by Branas et al. (2018) , O’Brien & Sampson (2015) , St. Jean (2007) , and Wheeler et al. (2018) . This association drops substantially when holding constant informal social control but appears not to drop to zero. Third, disorder appears to be negatively associated with future informal social control, implying the possibility of a small indirect effect of disorder on crime operating through informal social control, as suggested by broken windows.

These conclusions are tentative because they will likely change as more research is accumulated. We have deliberately stated these conclusions as empirical associations rather than causal effects because, taken as a whole, these studies of disorder, informal control, and crime remain far from approximating causality as defined by a potential outcomes approach. Consistency is a problem in most experiments, interference is an issue in MTO studies, and ignorability is questionable in most observational studies.

Because these research designs have distinct strengths and weaknesses, more studies within each design are called for, with the hope that consistent results emerge across disparate designs. Future research is needed to address shortcomings in the literature. Individual-level field experiments need to conduct power analyses to ensure sufficient power of tests and conduct experiments in multiple neighborhoods to increase external validity and examine treatment heterogeneity by neighborhood. Given the issues of insufficient change and weak statistical power of tests in neighborhood panel studies, researchers may want to consider modifying research designs. Larger samples, perhaps on smaller neighborhood units, are needed. If the focus is on relatively short-term change, as in most panel studies, studies might examine multiple cities undergoing dynamic change rather than studying older stable metropolitan areas. Within cities, neighborhoods exhibiting change in local organization, disorder, and crime might be oversampled and followed for longer periods, maximizing the likelihood of change. Incorporating neighborhood interventions into panel studies would further leverage change.

Innovative interventions at the neighborhood level, such as randomly assigned demolitions, cleanup campaigns, and greening programs, are needed to examine whether exogenous changes in neighborhood disorder affect crime and informal control. More pressing is the need for studies of informal social control that use experimental interventions to manipulate social capital and collective efficacy across neighborhoods. Finally, while we have focused on causality as the key issue in evaluating the empirical literature on disorder, informal control, and crime, we hope our evaluation will stimulate not only future empirical research but also the further development of theories of disorder, crime, and informal control.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The research underlying this article was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-1625273) and the Royalty Research Foundation, University of Washington. Additional support came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828) to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the funding agencies. We thank Jerald R. Herting and Robert J. Sampson for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

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Broken Windows Theory

How Environment Impacts Behavior

Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Akeem Marsh, MD, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has dedicated his career to working with medically underserved communities.

Verywell / Dennis Madamba

Origins and Explanation

• Application
• Impact on Behavior
• Positive Environments

The broken windows theory was proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, arguing that there was a connection between a person’s physical environment and their likelihood of committing a crime.

The theory has been a major influence on modern policing strategies and guided later research in urban sociology and behavioral psychology . But it’s also come under increasing scrutiny and some critics have argued that its application in policing and other contexts has done more harm than good.

The theory is named after an analogy used to explain it. If a window in a building is broken and remains unrepaired for too long, the rest of the windows in that building will eventually be broken, too. According to Wilson and Kelling, that’s because the unrepaired window acts as a signal to people in that neighborhood that they can break windows without fear of consequence because nobody cares enough to stop it or fix it. Eventually, Wilson and Kelling argued, more serious crimes like robbery and violence will flourish.

The idea is that physical signs of neglect and deterioration encourage criminal behavior because they act as a signal that this is a place where disorder is allowed to persist. If no one cares enough to pick up the litter on the sidewalk or repair and reuse abandoned buildings, maybe they won’t care enough to call the police when they see a drug deal or a burglary either.

How Is the Broken Windows Theory Applied?

The theory sparked a wave of “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” policing where law enforcement began cracking down on nonviolent behaviors like loitering, graffiti, or panhandling. By ramping up arrests and citations for perceived disorderly behavior and removing physical signs of disorder from the neighborhood, police hope to create a more orderly environment that discourages more serious crime.

The broken windows theory has been used outside of policing, as well, including in the workplace and in schools. Using a similar zero tolerance approach that disciplines students or employees for minor violations is thought to create more orderly environments that foster learning and productivity .

“By discouraging small acts of misconduct, such as tardiness, minor rule violations, or unprofessional conduct, employers seek to promote a culture of accountability, professionalism, and high performance,” said David Tzall Psy.D., a licensed forensic psychologist and Deputy Director for the Health and Wellness Unit of the NYPD.

Criticism of the Broken Window Theory

While the idea that one broken window leads to many sounds plausible, later research on the topic failed to find a connection. “The theory oversimplifies the causes of crime by focusing primarily on visible signs of disorder,” Tzall said. “It neglects underlying social and economic factors, such as poverty, unemployment, and lack of education, which are known to be important contributors to criminal behavior.”

When researchers account for those underlying factors, the connection between disordered environments and crime rates disappears.

In a report published in 2016, the NYPD itself found that its “quality-of-life” policing—another term for broken windows policing—had no impact on the city’s crime rate. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of “quality-of-life” summons issued by the NYPD for things like open containers, public urination, and riding bicycles on the sidewalk dropped by about 33%.

While the broken windows theory would theorize that serious crimes would spike when the police stopped cracking down on those minor offenses, violent crimes and property crimes actually decreased during that same time period.

“Policing based on broken windows theory has never been shown to work,” said Kimberly Vered Shashoua, LCSW , a therapist who works with marginalized teens and young adults. “Criminalizing unhoused people, low socioeconomic status households, and others who create this type of ‘crime’ doesn't get to the root of the problem,”

Not only have policing efforts that focus on things like graffiti or panhandling failed to have any impact on violent crime, they have often been used to target marginalized communities. “The theory's implementation can lead to biased policing practices as law enforcement officers can concentrate their efforts on low-income neighborhoods or communities predominantly populated by minority groups,” Tzall said.

That biased policing happens, in part, because there’s no objective measure of disordered environments so there’s a lot of room for implicit bias and discrimination to influence decision-making about which neighborhoods to target in crackdowns.

Studies show that neighborhoods where residents are predominantly Black or Latino are perceived as more disorderly and prone to crime than neighborhoods where residents are mostly white, even when police-recorded crime rates and physical signs of physical deterioration in the environment were the same.

Moreover, many of the behaviors that are used by police and researchers as signs of disorder are influenced by racial and class bias . Drinking and hanging out are both legal activities that are viewed as orderly when they happen in private spaces like a home or bar, for example. But those who socialize and drink in parks or on stoops outside their building are viewed as disorderly and charged with loitering and public drunkenness.

The Impact of Physical Environment on Behavior

While the broken windows theory and its application are flawed, the underlying idea that our physical environment can influence our behavior does hold some water. On one hand, “the physical environment conveys social norms that influence our behavior,” Tzall explained. “When we observe others adhering to certain norms in a particular space, we tend to adjust our own behavior to align with them.”

If a person sees litter on the street, they might be more likely to litter themselves, for example. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make the leap from littering to robbery or violent assault. Moreover, litter can often be a sign that there aren’t enough public trashcans available on the streets for people to throw away food wrappers and other waste while they’re out. In that scenario, installing more trashcans would do far more to reduce litter than increasing the number of citations for littering.

“The design and layout of spaces can also signal specific expectations and guide our actions,” Tzall explained. In the litter example, then, the addition of more trashcans could also act as an environmental cue to encourage throwing trash away rather than littering.

How to Create Positive Environments to Foster Safety, Health, and Well-Being

Ultimately, reducing crime requires addressing the root causes of poverty and social inequality that lead to crime. But taking care of public spaces and neighborhoods to keep them clean and enjoyable can still have a positive impact on the communities who live in and use them.

“Positive environments provide opportunities for meaningful interactions and collaboration among community members,” Tzall said. “Access to green spaces, recreational facilities, mental health resources, and community services contribute to physical, mental, and emotional health,” said Tzall.

By creating more positive environments, we can encourage healthier lifestyle choices—like adding protected bike lanes to encourage people to ride bikes—and prosocial behavior —like adding basketball courts in parks to encourage people to meet and play a game with their neighbors.

At the individual level, Tzall suggests people “can initiate or participate in community projects, volunteer for local organizations, support inclusive initiatives, engage in dialogue with neighbors, and collaborate with local authorities or community leaders.” Create positive environments by taking the initiative to pick up litter when you see it, participate in tree planting initiatives, collaborate with your neighbors to establish a community garden, or volunteer with a local organization to advocate for better public spaces and resources. 

Wilson JQ and Kelling GL. Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety . The Atlantic Monthly. 1982.

Harcourt B, Ludwig J. Broken windows: new evidence from new york city and a five-city social experiment . University of Chicago Law Review. 2006;73(1).

Peters M, Eure P. An Analysis of Quality-of-Life Summonses, Quality-of-Life Misdemeanor Arrests, and Felony Crime in New York City, 2010-2015 . New York City Department of Investigation Office of the Inspector General for the NYPD; 2016.

Sampson RJ. Disparity and diversity in the contemporary city: social (Dis)order revisited . The British Journal of Sociology. 2009;60(1):1-31. Doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01211.x

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Broken Windows Theory

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

The broken windows theory states that visible signs of disorder and misbehavior in an environment encourage further disorder and misbehavior, leading to serious crimes. The principle was developed to explain the decay of neighborhoods, but it is often applied to work and educational environments.

• What Is the Broken Windows Theory?
• Do Broken Windows Policies Work?

The broken windows theory, defined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, drawing on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, argues that no matter how rich or poor a neighborhood, one broken window would soon lead to many more windows being broken: “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Disorder increases levels of fear among citizens, which leads them to withdraw from the community and decrease participation in informal social control.

The broken windows are a metaphor for any visible sign of disorder in an environment that goes untended. This may include small crimes, acts of vandalism, drunken or disorderly conduct, etc. Being forced to confront minor problems can heavily influence how people feel about their environment, particularly their sense of safety.  

With the help of small civic organizations, lower-income Chicago residents have created over 800 community gardens and urban farms out of burnt buildings and vacant lots. Now, instead of having trouble finding fresh produce, these neighborhoods have become go-to food destinations. This example of the broken windows theory benefits the people by lowering temperatures in overheated cities, increasing socialization, reducing stress , and teaching children about nature.

George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson popularized the broken windows theory in an article published in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic . They asserted that vandalism and smaller crimes would normalize larger crimes (although this hypothesis has not been fully supported by subsequent research). They also remarked on how signs of disorder (e.g., a broken window) stirred up feelings of fear in residents and harmed the safety of the neighborhood as a whole.

The broken windows theory was put forth at a time when crime rates were soaring, and it often spurred politicians to advocate policies for increasing policing of petty crimes—fare evasion, public drinking, or graffiti—as a way to prevent, and decrease, major crimes including violence. The theory was notably implemented and popularized by New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton. In research reported in 2000, Kelling claimed that broken-windows policing had prevented over 60,000 violent crimes between 1989 and 1998 in New York City, though critics of the theory disagreed.

Although the “Broken Windows” article is one of the most cited in the history of criminology , Kelling contends that it has often been misapplied. The implementation soon escalated to “zero tolerance” policing policies, especially in minority communities. It also led to controversial practices such as “stop and frisk” and an increase in police misconduct complaints.

Most important, research indicates that criminal activity was declining on its own, for a number of demographic and socio-economic reasons, and so credit for the shift could not be firmly attributed to broken-windows policing policies. Experts point out that there is “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship,” contends Columbia law professor Bernard E. Harcourt. The causes of misbehavior are varied and complex.

The effectiveness of this approach depends on how it is implemented. In 2016, Dr. Charles Branas led an initiative to repair abandoned properties and transform vacant lots into community parks in high-crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia, which subsequently saw a 39% reduction in gun violence. By building “palaces for the people” with these safe and sustainable solutions, neighborhoods can be lifted up, and crime can be reduced.  

When a neighborhood, even a poor one, is well-tended and welcoming, its residents have a greater sense of safety. Building and maintaining social infrastructure—such as public libraries, parks and other green spaces, and active retail corridors—can be a more sustainable option and improve the daily lives of the people who live there.

According to the broken windows theory, disorder (symbolized by a broken window) leads to fear and the potential for increased and more severe crime. Unfortunately, this concept has been misapplied, leading to aggressive and zero-tolerance policing. These policing strategies tend to focus on an increased police presence in troubled communities (especially those with minorities and lower-income residents) and stricter punishments for minor infractions (e.g., marijuana use).  

Zero-tolerance policing metes out predetermined consequences regardless of the severity or context of a crime. Zero-tolerance policies can be harmful in an academic setting, as vulnerable youth (particularly those from minority ethnic/racial backgrounds) find themselves trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline for committing minor infractions. 

Aggressive policing practices can sour relationships between police and the community. However, problem-oriented policing—which identifies the specific problems or “broken windows” in a neighborhood and then comes up with proactive responses—can help reduce crime. This evidence-based policing strategy  has been shown to be effective. 

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Broken Windows Policing

Introduction, tests of broken windows theory.

• Aggressive Order-Maintenance Policing’s Impact on Misdemeanor Arrests
• Aggressive Order-Maintenance Policing’s Impact on Crime, Disorder, and Fear
• Racial Disparities and Impacts on Police Relations with People of Color

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Broken Windows Policing by Jacinta M. Gau , Alesha Cameron LAST REVIEWED: 27 March 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 27 March 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0265

The 1980s saw sweeping changes occur in policing nationwide. Disorder (sometimes also called incivilities) rose to the top of the police agenda with the publication of studies showing that physical decay and socially undesirable behaviors inspire more fear than crime does. Crime is a relatively rare event, but physical disorder (graffiti, vandalism, and the like) and social disorder (such as aggressive panhandling or people being intoxicated in public) are far more prevalent. Broken windows theory drew from concepts embedded within criminological and social psychological theories. According to this perspective, the cause of crime is disorder that goes unchecked and is permitted to spread throughout a neighborhood or community. Disorder is theorized to scare people and makes them believe that their neighborhood is unsafe. These people subsequently withdraw from public spaces. The disorderly environment and empty streets invite crime and criminals. Offenders feel emboldened to prey on people and property because the environmental cues suggest a low likelihood that anyone will intervene or call the police. At this point, the neighborhood’s disorder problem becomes a crime problem. In the broken windows viewpoint, police are the front line of disorder reduction and control. Police are seen as needing to actively combat disorder in order to make neighborhood residents feel safe so that they will continue participating in the social fabric of their community. Broken windows theory does not contain a set of directions for precisely how police should go about preventing and eliminating disorder. Police leaders wanting to use the tenets of broken windows theory in their communities have to figure out how to put these concepts into practice. What evolved to be called order maintenance policing still varies from agency to agency. One of the most popular (and controversial) strategies is to aggressively enforce laws against nuisance and public-order offending (loitering, public drunkenness, and so on). The signature tactic of order maintenance policing is the street stop, which is a brief field detention and questioning. Police officers who have reasonable suspicion to believe an individual is engaged in criminal behavior can detain that person for questioning. Aggressive enforcement using street stops as a core tactic is not universal and there are other options (e.g., community policing, target hardening, utilizing government services, conveying reliable information) for police agencies to engage in disorder-reduction activities. The disorder-reduction strategy relying on street stops and arrests for low-level offenses goes by names such as “broken-windows policing” and “zero-tolerance policing.” The term “aggressive order-maintenance policing” is adopted for present purposes, as some broken-windows proponents have taken issue with terms like “zero tolerance.” This bibliography provides an overview of studies of broken windows theory and of some of the police efforts to employ the logic of this theory to reduce disorder, fear, and crime. Methodological rigor has been a recurrent topic in the discussion about the merits of broken windows theory and order maintenance policing, so this will be reflected in the bibliographies where relevant.

Broken windows theory should be understood as analytically separate from the policing strategy premised upon it. Broken windows theory predicts that unchecked disorder sparks fear and drives people indoors or causes them to move out of the neighborhood altogether. Social ties between neighbors break down and social control in public spaces declines. This physical and social decay creates an environment in which offenders thrive. The accuracy of the prediction that police can control crime by managing disorder rests upon the validity of the assumption that disorder causes crime. Several researchers have attempted to test this assumption. Data sources have included survey-based reports of people’s perceptions of disorder and crime, systematic social observation of public spaces, and official data from police departments. While some studies appear to support the claim that disorder causes crime, this support is limited and inconsistent. The evidence leans toward the conclusion that disorder and crime are interrelated problems but that disorder cannot be isolated as a singularly influential determinant from which a crime problem will eventually emerge. Skogan 1990 was the first empirical test of broken windows theory and concluded that the disorder-crime relationship appeared sound. Harcourt 2001 , however, reanalyzes the data Skogan 1990 used, and finds that the disorder-crime relationship was significantly weaker than Skogan had claimed, even nonexistent in some cities. Taylor 2001 likewise finds that disorder is a weak, inconsistent predictor of later crime rates. Sampson and Raudenbush 1999 suggests that racial and social composition of a neighborhood predicted perceived disorder more than direct observations of disorder did. Sampson and Raudenbush 2004 uncovers evidence that neighborhood-level collective efficacy accounted for the presence of both disorder and crime. Gau and Pratt 2008 finds that people do not make distinctions between disorder and crime in their neighborhoods, though Gau and Pratt 2010 determines that this distinction does appear larger in disorderly areas. Harcourt and Ludwig 2006 finds that disorder had no effect on crime. Skogan 2015 concludes that disorder plays a role in encouraging fear of crime, eroding community stability, and weakening informal social control.

Gau, J. M., N. Corsaro, and R. K. Brunson. 2014. Revisiting broken windows theory: A test of the mediation impact of social mechanisms on the disorder–fear relationship. Journal of Criminal Justice 42.6: 579–588.

Although previous research on broken windows theory suggests that disorder initiates fear of crime, which then leads to crime, this article uses individual and census-tract level data to examine the mediating effects of both social cohesion and social control in relation to fear of crime. Findings from this article suggest that fear of crime outcomes are caused partially by disorder through the mediating effects of social cohesion and control.

Gau, J. M., and T. C. Pratt. 2008. Broken windows or window dressing? Citizens’ (in)ability to tell the difference between disorder and crime. Criminology & Public Policy 7.2: 163–194.

This study uses survey data measuring people’s assessments of the extent of disorder and crime in their neighborhoods to determine whether these two constructs are empirically separable. Results from confirmatory factor analyses suggest that although a two-factor model fits the data, the strong between-factor correlation indicates an absence of discriminant validity. The authors conclude that people’s inability to discern the difference between disorder and crime might account for the consistently high relationship found between these two neighborhood problems.

Gau, J. M., and T. C. Pratt. 2010. Revisiting broken windows theory: Examining the sources of the discriminant validity of perceived disorder and crime. Journal of Criminal Justice 38.4: 758–766.

This article analyzes the relationship between concentrated disadvantage and perceptions of disorder and crime as separate problems. The authors of this article utilize survey data collected in 2003 and 2006. Findings suggest concentrated disadvantage affects respondents’ perceptions of fear and crime as separate social problems. Results from this study support the broken windows notion that orderly areas should be kept orderly. The occurrence of varying perceptions of disorder and crime as separate problems is also a key finding in this study.

Harcourt, B. E. 2001. Illusion of order: The false promise of broken windows policing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Harcourt situates broken windows theory within the politically conservative movement underway in the 1980s. Harcourt maintains that the social meaning of disorder is more important than disorder itself, and that social meaning can change across time and be different across groups. In reanalyzing Skogan’s data, Harcourt finds that robbery is the only crime statistically related to disorder once neighborhood disadvantage (e.g., poverty) is controlled for. Additionally, even this relationship disappears when the five neighborhoods in Newark are excluded from the analysis.

Harcourt, B. E., and J. Ludwig. 2006. Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city social experiment. The University of Chicago Law Review 73.1: 271–320.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project provides housing vouchers to relocate low-income families to less disadvantaged communities that have fewer signs of both physical and social disorder. This article presents evidence on the disorder and crime relationship proposed in broken windows theory by using MTO data from five cities in the United States. Since disorder was found to have no effect on crime, results from this study do not support the claim that reducing signs of disorder in turn reduces crime.

Sampson, R. J., and S. W. Raudenbush. 1999. Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology 105.3: 603–651.

Utilizing a combination of systematic social observation, US census data from 1990, household survey data, and Chicago Police Department data from 1995, the authors of this article analyze the origins and effects of public disorder. In testing the broken windows hypothesis, which states that disorder is directly related to serious crime, findings from this study did not support this claim. The authors conclude that the disorder-crime relationship varies according to neighborhood characteristics, such as collective efficacy.

Sampson, R. J., and S. W. Raudenbush. 2004. Seeing disorder: Neighborhood stigma and the social construction of “broken windows.” Social Psychology Quarterly 67.4: 319–342.

This article examines variations in individual perceptions of disorder within and between neighborhoods. The authors use neighborhood survey data, US census data, official crime data, and systematic social observation. Results suggest that racial and social composition of a neighborhood predicted perceived disorder more than direct observations of disorder. The findings from this study reveal that the broken windows hypothesis on reducing disorder may have limited effects on perceptions of neighborhoods with large minority populations.

Skogan, W. G. 1990. Disorder and decline: Crime and the spiral of decay in American neighborhoods . Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Using data collected between 1977 and 1983 from residents in high-crime neighborhoods in six major cities, Skogan estimates the empirical relationship between disorder and crime. Using survey-based measures of neighborhood-level disorder and robbery victimization, he finds a significant relationship between disorder and robbery, controlling for relevant covariates. He follows up this analysis with a multi-city comparison of different types of order-maintenance policing strategies, which reveal mixed results in terms of how police successfully reduced disorder, fear, and crime.

Skogan, W. 2015. Disorder and decline: The state of research. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 52.4: 464–485.

This article summarizes the research available on social and physical disorder indicators that are used in community settings and specifies approaches for measuring disorder. In support of broken windows theory, the author concludes that disorder plays a role in encouraging fear of crime, eroding community stability, and weakening informal social control.

Taylor, R. B. 2001. Breaking away from broken windows: Baltimore neighborhoods and the nationwide fight against crime, grime, fear, and decline . Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Taylor critiques both the tenets behind broken windows theory and the methods previous researchers used to empirically test the theory. Taylor notes that although disorder and crime frequently covary, it is hard to prove that disorder causes crime. Many other community-level factors and social processes are at play. Taylor’s analysis of survey-based and independently assessed disorder measures from Boston neighborhoods were weak, inconsistent predictors of later crime rates in those neighborhoods.

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Broken Windows Theory

Ayesh Perera

B.A, MTS, Harvard University

Ayesh Perera, a Harvard graduate, has worked as a researcher in psychology and neuroscience under Dr. Kevin Majeres at Harvard Medical School.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

On This Page:

• The broken windows theory is a criminological theory which, employing broken windows as a metaphor for anti-social behavior and civil disorder, and links the occurrence of serious crimes with visible signs of incivility in a community (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).
• The theory holds that policing approaches targeting misdemeanors such as vandalism, fare evasion, public drinking, and loitering can help create an environment favorable to law and order.

Zimbardo’s Study

In 1969, the Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in which he arranged two automobiles in the same condition, with their hoods up and no license plates, to be parked in two different locations—one in Bronx, New York, and the other in Palo Alto, California.

Within minutes, the car in the Bronx was attacked. The first vandals comprised a family, a mother, and father with their young son, who removed the battery and radiator. Within the ensuing 24 hours, the vehicle was stripped of everything valuable.

Not long afterward, the car’s upholstery was ripped, its windows were smashed, and soon children were playing upon it. Meanwhile, the car in Palo Alto would remain untouched for more than 7 days.

Finally, Zimbardo went and smashed the car using a sledgehammer. Soon, others joined in, and the car was destroyed. Most of those involved in the vandalism herein were well dressed and apparently decent individuals.

The study seemed to support the conclusion that communities with histories of theft and abandoned property are more likely to experience vandalism because apathy to the erosion of civility is likely to engender and encourage unacceptable behavior.

Wilson and Kelling – Broken Window Policy

Despite the abovementioned early experiments, the concept was first introduced as a theory by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in March 1982 in their article “Broken Windows” in The Atlantic Monthly.

Herein, they noted, “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing” (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).

Source: Hinkle, J. C., & Weisburd, D. (2008). 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), 503-512.

The theory would be further developed by George Kelling and Catherine Coles in their 1996 book Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities .

The book discussed strategies to curb crimes in urban neighborhoods and posited that addressing problems while they are small (e.g., immediately repairing broken windows and cleaning the sidewalks daily) could stop minor misconduct from escalating into major crimes (Kelling & Coles, 1997).

The theory soon gained enormous attention. While its advocates sought to enact it via various law enforcement initiatives, its detractors showed no reluctance in denouncing what they saw as its adverse aspects.

Examples of Broken Windows Policing

New york city.

The 1990s saw the broken windows theory significantly shaping law enforcement policy. Having hired George Kelling as a consultant in 1985, New York City authorities soon embarked on an ambitious project to reduce crime (Fagan & Garth, 2000).

Led by Police Commissioner William Bratton, New York City adopted an aggressive order-maintenance approach, deploying squads of plain-clothes officers to make arrests for misdemeanors.

The ‘quality of life initiative’ of 1994, in particular, cracked down on disorderly conduct, panhandling, street prostitution, unsolicited windshield washing, and public drinking. By 1996, when Bratton resigned, the rate of homicide had been halved, and felonies had decreased by nearly 40%.

Lowell, Massachusetts

New York City’s success would soon inspire similar policing around the United States. For instance, researchers from Harvard and Suffolk tracked down 34 hotspots for crime in Lowell, Massachusetts, and local authorities reorganized half of these regions (Johnson, 2009; Ruhl, 2021).

They increased misdemeanor arrests, fixed streetlights, and cleaned up the trash. The other half of the crime hotspots remained unaltered. Calls to the police dropped by a notable 20% in the areas which had been cleaned up by the law enforcement.

Making regular arrests, as well as significantly changing the landscape of the city, seemed to have profoundly improved the safety of the environment.

Tokyo, Japan

The local government of Adachi Ward, Tokyo, which once had Tokyo’s highest crime rates, introduced the “Beautiful Windows Movement” in 2008 (Hino & Chronopoulos, 2021).

The intervention was twofold. The program, on one hand, drawing on the broken windows theory, promoted policing to prevent minor crimes and disorder. On the other hand, in partnership with citizen volunteers, the authorities launched a project to make Adachi Ward literally beautiful.

Following 11 years of implementation, the reduction in crime was undeniable. Felony had dropped from 122 in 2008 to 35 in 2019, burglary from 104 to 24, and bicycle theft from 93 to 45.

This Japanese case study seemed to further highlight the advantages associated with translating the broken widow theory into both aggressive policing and landscape altering.

Pros and Cons of Broken Windows Policing

Despite its salutary effects, the broken windows theory has been challenged as a fallacious slippery slope argument that fuels fear of youth and class bias (Harcourt, 2009).

Critics have contended that punishing misdemeanors, such as avoiding subway fares, imposes penalties on economic desperation and that such harsh policing discriminates against a society’s lower socio-economic classes and by extension, certain racial minorities.

Another major criticism of the theory holds that policing inspired by the broken windows theory justifies needless rules (e.g., prohibiting people from painting their houses with certain colors) and wasteful government expenditure (e.g., the cost of regular police patrols).

Notwithstanding the criticism, the theory’s proponents adamantly defend its merits against its adversaries. Heather Mac Donald, the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe , for instance, has pointed out that government spending on misdemeanor enforcement interrupts criminal conduct before it could ripen into felony (Donald, 2016).

She has repeatedly noted that “the solution to racial disparities in the criminal-justice system is not to target policing” but “to bring the Black crime rate down” by “revalorizing the two-parent family” (Harcourt, 2009).

In conclusion, denounced by some and praised by others, the broken windows theory remains a controversial means of reducing crime and maintaining law and order.

Further Information

Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic monthly, 249(3), 29-38.

Harcourt, B. E., & Ludwig, J. (2006). Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city social experiment. U. Chi. L. Rev., 73, 271.

Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2004). Seeing disorder: Neighborhood stigma and the social construction of “broken windows”. Social psychology quarterly, 67(4), 319-342.

Hino, K., & Chronopoulos, T. (2021). A review of crime prevention activities in a Japanese local government area since 2008: Beautiful Windows Movement in Adachi Ward. Crime Prevention and Community Safety, 1-17.

Fagan, J., & Davies, G. (2000). Street stops and broken windows: Terry, race, and disorder in New York City. Fordham Urb. LJ , 28, 457.

Harcourt, B. E. (2009). Illusion of order: The false promise of broken windows policing . Harvard University Press.

Harcourt, B. E., & Ludwig, J. (2006). Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city social experiment. U. Chi. L. Rev., 73 , 271.

Johnson, C. Y. (2009). Breakthrough on “broken windows.” Boston Globe.

Kelling, G. L., & Coles, C. M. (1997). Fixing broken windows: Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities . Simon and Schuster.

Ruhl, C. (2021, July 26). The broken windows theory . Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/broken-windows-theory.html

Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic monthly, 249 (3), 29-38.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In Nebraska symposium on motivation. University of Nebraska press.

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How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong

Shankar Vedantam

Chris Benderev

Renee Klahr

Maggie Penman

Jennifer Schmidt

The broken windows theory of policing suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crime as well. Getty Images/Image Source hide caption

The broken windows theory of policing suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crime as well.

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up.

After just 10 minutes, passersby in New York City began vandalizing the car. First they stripped it for parts. Then the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched for more than a week.

Finally, Zimbardo did something unusual: He took a sledgehammer and gave the California car a smash. After that, passersby quickly ripped it apart, just as they'd done in New York.

This field study was a simple demonstration of how something that is clearly neglected can quickly become a target for vandals. But it eventually morphed into something far more than that. It became the basis for one of the most influential theories of crime and policing in America: "broken windows."

Thirteen years after the Zimbardo study, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote an article for The Atlantic . They were fascinated by what had happened to Zimbardo's abandoned cars and thought the findings could be applied on a larger scale, to entire communities.

"The idea [is] that once disorder begins, it doesn't matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control," Kelling tells Hidden Brain.

In the article, Kelling and Wilson suggested that a broken window or other visible signs of disorder or decay — think loitering, graffiti, prostitution or drug use — can send the signal that a neighborhood is uncared for. So, they thought, if police departments addressed those problems, maybe the bigger crimes wouldn't happen.

"Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighborhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods," says Kelling. "People claim their public spaces, and the store owners extend their concerns to what happened on the streets. Communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained, and it is that dynamic that helps to prevent crime."

Kelling and Wilson proposed that police departments change their focus. Instead of channeling most resources into solving major crimes, they should instead try to clean up the streets and maintain order — such as keeping people from smoking pot in public and cracking down on subway fare beaters.

The argument came at an opportune time, says Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt.

"This was a period of high crime, and high incarceration, and it seemed there was no way out of that dynamic. It seemed as if there was no way out of just filling prisons to address the crime problem."

An Idea Moves From The Ivory Tower To The Streets

As policymakers were scrambling for answers, a new mayor in New York City came to power offering a solution.

Rudy Giuliani won election in 1993, promising to reduce crime and clean up the streets. Very quickly, he adopted broken windows as his mantra.

It was one of those rare ideas that appealed to both sides of the aisle.

Conservatives liked the policy because it meant restoring order. Liberals liked it, Harcourt says, because it seemed like an enlightened way to prevent crime: "It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves."

Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton, focused first on cleaning up the subway system, where 250,000 people a day weren't paying their fare. They sent hundreds of police officers into the subways to crack down on turnstile jumpers and vandals.

Very quickly, they found confirmation for their theory. Going after petty crime led the police to violent criminals, says Kelling: "Not all fare beaters were criminals, but a lot of criminals were fare beaters. It turns out serious criminals are pretty busy. They commit minor offenses as well as major offenses."

The policy was quickly scaled up from the subway to the entire city of New York.

Police ramped up misdemeanor arrests for things like smoking marijuana in public, spraying graffiti and selling loose cigarettes. And almost instantly, they were able to trumpet their success. Crime was falling. The murder rate plummeted. It seemed like a miracle.

The media loved the story, and Giuliani cruised to re-election in 1997.

George Kelling and a colleague did follow-up research on broken windows policing and found what they believed was clear evidence of its success. In neighborhoods where there was a sharp increase in misdemeanor arrests — suggesting broken windows policing was in force — there was also a sharp decline in crime.

By 2001, broken windows had become one of Giuliani's greatest accomplishments. In his farewell address, he emphasized the beautiful and simple idea behind the success.

"The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti," he said. "Well, you can't be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society."

Questions Begin To Emerge About Broken Windows

Right from the start, there were signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative.

"Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing," says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. "And of course what we witnessed from that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it's a remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what's so remarkable about it is how widespread it was."

Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is really interesting because Los Angeles was wracked with terrible policing problems during the whole time, and crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York," says Harcourt.

There were lots of theories to explain the nationwide decline in crime. Some said it was the growing economy or the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Some criminologists credited harsher sentencing guidelines.

In 2006, Harcourt found the evidence supporting the broken windows theory might be flawed. He reviewed the study Kelling had conducted in 2001, and found the areas that saw the largest number of misdemeanor arrests also had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Harcourt says the earlier study failed to consider what's called a "reversion to the mean."

"It's something that a lot of investment bankers and investors know about because it's well-known and in the stock market," says Harcourt. "Basically, the idea is if something goes up a lot, it tends to go down a lot."

A graph in Kelling's 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this small view gives us a selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines. And each time, the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean.

Kelling acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime. But he thinks it still has value.

"Even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world," he says. "Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime."

Order might be an end in itself, but it's worth noting that this was not the premise on which the broken windows theory was sold. It was advertised as an innovative way to control violent crime, not just a way to get panhandlers and prostitutes off the streets.

'Broken Windows' Morphs Into 'Stop And Frisk'

Harcourt says there was another big problem with broken windows.

"We immediately saw a sharp increase in complaints of police misconduct. Starting in 1993, what you're going to see is a tremendous amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing, with complaints skyrocketing, with settlements of police misconduct cases skyrocketing, and of course with incidents, brutal incidents, all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip."

The problem intensified with a new practice that grew out of broken windows. It was called "stop and frisk," and was embraced in New York City after Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001.

If broken windows meant arresting people for misdemeanors in hopes of preventing more serious crimes, "stop and frisk" said, why even wait for the misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop, question and search anyone who looked suspicious?

There were high-profile cases where misdemeanor arrests or stopping and questioning did lead to information that helped solve much more serious crimes, even homicides. But there were many more cases where police stops turned up nothing. In 2008, police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York for what they called furtive movements. Only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of those turned up a gun.

Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly?

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder . They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In his article, he and James Q. Wilson write: "How do we ensure ... that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question."

In August of 2013, a federal district court found that New York City's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional because of the way it singled out young black and Hispanic men. Later that year, New York elected its first liberal mayor in 20 years. Bill DeBlasio celebrated the end of stop and frisk. But he did not do away with broken windows. In fact, he re-appointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

And just seven months after taking over again as the head of the New York Police Department, Bratton's broken windows policy came under fresh scrutiny. The reason: the death of Eric Garner.

In July 2014, a bystander caught on cellphone video the deadly clash between New York City police officers and Garner, an African-American. After a verbal confrontation, officers tackled Garner, while restraining him with a chokehold, a practice that is banned in New York City.

Garner died not long after he was brought down to the ground. His death sparked massive protests, and his name is now synonymous with the distrust between police and African-American communities.

For George Kelling, this was not the end that he had hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like wildfire.

But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never intended and could not control.

"When, during the 1990s, I would occasionally read in a newspaper something like a new chief comes in and says, 'I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow,' I would listen to that with dismay because [it's] a highly discretionary activity by police that needs extensive training, formal guidelines, constant monitoring and oversight. So do I worry about the implementation about broken windows? A whole lot ... because it can be done very badly."

In fact, Kelling says, it might be time to move away from the idea.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

These days, the consensus among social scientists is that broken windows likely did have modest effects on crime. But few believe it caused the 60 or 70 percent decline in violent crime for which it was once credited.

And yet despite all the evidence, the idea continues to be popular.

Bernard Harcourt says there is a reason for that:

"It's a simple story that people can latch onto and that is a lot more pleasant to live with than the complexities of life. The fact is that crime dropped in America dramatically from the 1990s, and that there aren't really good, clean nationwide explanations for it."

The story of broken windows is a story of our fascination with easy fixes and seductive theories. Once an idea like that takes hold, it's nearly impossible to get the genie back in the bottle.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain , and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

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• racial profiling
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This Works: Crime Prevention and the Future of Broken Windows Policing

Broken windows policing is a strategy based on the idea that reducing quality of life offenses (panhandling, graffiti, etc.) will restore community order and reduce crime. Broken windows has been implemented successfully in New York and other cities across the country, and has been credited with significant reductions in crime rates.

In this Civic Bulletin, a panel of experts on broken windows policing discuss the foundations of this revolutionary approach and explain how policymakers can use the broken windows concept to restore order and reduce crime. Speakers include William Bratton, Los Angeles Police Chief, James Q. Wilson, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, and George Kelling, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow.

READ THE FULL REPORT

Civic Bulletin

WILLIAM BRATTON : Thank you all for coming. This is an exciting evening for me in that for the first time I have the opportunity to be with both George Kelling and James Q. Wilson at the same time, and they are two individuals whose writings on crime and policing tactics have profoundly influenced my career, and as a result profoundly influenced the lives of millions of others who are significantly safer today thanks to their research.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that there are many people who are alive today who would not be if not for the writings of these two scholars, as well as the efforts of the thousands of police officers who have taken to practicing much of what they preach.

This conference is a significant event and I would like to thank the Manhattan Institute and the Milken Institute for making it possible.

The safest large city in America. That expression, coupled with the name Los Angeles, doesn't make sense to a lot of people. It just doesn't add up. Fortunately, I work for Mayor Jim Hahn, who shares my vision and optimism, and believes that Los Angeles can become the safest large city in America. This is one of the reasons that I wanted to come to Los Angeles and return to policing, and so, about a year ago, for the first time in my professional police career, I applied for a job—as Los Angeles' Chief of Police.

I have never sought a position in all the years that I have spent in the field of criminal justice. I have always had the good fortune to be sought after, rather than having to go looking for great opportunities. And so it was somewhat humbling and something of a career risk competing for a position that I had no certainty that I would be offered.

In fact, when I entered the competition to become Los Angeles Police Chief (and it was very much like a competition) the then president of the police commission, who has since then become not only a terrific professional colleague but also a close personal friend, Rick Caruso, advised me through intermediaries not to even apply. In short, it was an intimidating process at the outset. But I very much wanted to become the next police chief of this great city.

First of all, after the events of 9/11, I felt that I had more that I could contribute to public service, but also, having worked as part of the federal monitoring team for almost a year in Los Angeles, I felt that I had a true appreciation for the potential of this great city.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to meet Mayor Hahn and, similar to an earlier conversation I had had nine years before with another mayor—or rather another candidate, Rudolph Giuliani—Mayor Hahn had a strange belief that he could transform crime in Los Angeles. Mayor Hahn and I realized that we had the same kind of shared energy, the same shared belief that we could have a real impact on crime, on the quality of life, and on social disorder that Mayor Giuliani and I shared in New York.

Of course, in 1990 nobody would have ever believed that New York City could become what it is today, arguably the safest large city in this country. This year, crime in New York City is down again-by almost 6 percent. Unfortunately, homicides in New York are on the rise, and they're now neck and neck with Chicago as the murder capital of the United States. Regardless, for thirteen straight years crime has gone down in New York and that is a tremendous accomplishment.

What shaped Mayor Giuliani's views on crime and policing was his exposure to concepts from the two men that I have already mentioned, James Wilson and George Kelling. These two men created a true American policing innovation, an innovation that I, as chief of police, have always used as a cornerstone for all of the activities that my officers and I engage in. That innovation is "broken windows policing", a very successful, but at the same time controversial, philosophy.

And I say controversial because there are still those who don't believe that it is an essential component of making any city a safer city, and certainly not in making New York or Los Angeles the safest large cities in America. But I believe in broken windows policing as a practitioner who has been in this field for over thirty years, and as someone who practiced what they preached so eloquently about five years before they even wrote about it in the late 1970s.

As a young police sergeant in Boston, Massachusetts, I was enlisted in that city's first neighborhood policing initiative, the forerunner of what came to be popularly known as "community policing" in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In Boston in the 1970s we were developing a program called neighborhood policing, based on the unheard-of idea that police should go into neighborhoods and listen to the concerns of the residents, because up until that time police didn't invite local feedback. We thought we knew what was right for a neighborhood and we focused our energy on serious crimes: rapes, robberies, and violent assaults. Indeed, the reporting of crime, the national reporting of crime, still focuses on those serious crimes. The Universal Crime Report and the Department of Justice victimization surveys still ignore quality of life crimes.

As a young sergeant, I began to hold police and community meetings in Boston. Four nights a week we would hand out leaflets in local neighborhoods, knock on doors, and encourage people to come to police meetings. "We're the police", we said. "We want to hear from you." At the time, I was armed to the teeth with various crime statistics. I knew every murder, every robbery, and every rape. We thought that we knew that community inside out.

And what did we hear from the community? We heard complaints about prostitutes, abandoned cars, and broken windows. That was a wake-up call for me at a very early stage of my career, the formulative stage of my career as a young sergeant. I started to focus on what concerned the community, what caused them fear, and why it caused fear.

These seemingly minor crimes unnerved them because they experienced them every day. They knew before we did, before the experts did, that the so-called victimless crimes have a victim-and the victim was the entire neighborhood. Ultimately, the victim was the city, and crime was a cancer that was destroying America's cities, but we didn't really recognize that during the 1970s. We really did not recognize it in an institutional way until Kelling and Wilson wrote their “Broken Windows” article in 1982, where they put into a strong, powerful voice a concept that resonated not only with people who lived in these fear-ridden neighborhoods, but resonated with the police that patrolled them.

We had a hard time establishing community policing in the American police profession in the late 80's and early 90's, but we finally managed to institutionalize it. We succeeded because rank and file police understood that in addition to serious violent crimes, quality of life crimes were tearing apart the civic fabric of the neighborhoods they were policing. Quality of life crimes destroy the citizens' trust and confidence in government's ability to provide its first obligation, which is public safety.

This is not to say that broken windows policing is a magic solution to crime. It is more like a powerful prescription that a doctor will use to cure a sick patient. It is an essential component, in many instances the essential component, but in and of itself it is not going to solve any city's crime problem. But it can be used in a variety of ways. It is even now, 20 years later, an incredibly misunderstood paradigm and crime control tactic, because many people still don't understand that it can be applied in many different ways.

We first showed the flexibility of broken windows policing in New York when George Kelling recruited me there in 1990 when he was doing consulting work with the Transit Authority. He encouraged me to come to New York and apply broken windows policing to subway crime with the idea that, far-fetched as it seemed in 1990, if it succeeded in the subways, someone would have enough faith in us to try it on the streets of New York.

We were successful. The reduction in subway crime and quality of life crimes attracted the attention of the then-candidate Rudy Giuliani, and George and I traveled to New York in 1993 and spent a Friday afternoon with Rudy and some of his aides. The question he asked us was the central one Kelling had already anticipated: "Can you take what worked in the subways and make it work on the streets of New York?" We said we could. We continue to have confidence in broken windows policing, and we'll implement it again here in Los Angeles.

It will be a more difficult transition in Los Angeles than in New York, however, because the essential element that we had working in our favor in New York, and this is referenced in a very well-written article in Governing magazine on our efforts here, is that there are many people in Los Angeles who do not believe in the effectiveness of broken windows policing.

There are many people who do not believe that police count, that police can make a difference, and who believe that crime is most significantly impacted by demographics, economic circumstances, or racism. I understand that crime is  influenced by all those factors, but I don't believe it's caused by any of them. I strongly believe that crime is caused by individual behavior, and since all behavior is learned, the police can do something about controlling criminal behavior, correcting that behavior, by imparting a new ethic of order to our communities—regardless of their economic, racial, or ethnic make-up. The challenge for police is to do this consistently, compassionately, and particularly in a democratic society such as ours, constitutionally.

What we showed in New York, and what we will show in Los Angeles, is that in two very different cites with two extraordinarily different police departments, both in terms of size as well as tactics, traditions, histories, and styles of policing, that the police can make an enormous difference.

We are making a difference today. This year in this city, homicides are down by over 25 percent. Overall crime is down by about 5 percent. And that's with a police force that is one-fourth the size of what I commanded in New York.

The main difficulty that we are facing here is that, unlike New York, where we had the ability by virtue of the sheer size of the department to impact the entire city at the same time, in Los Angeles the police are constantly running from fire to fire. We clamp down on one crime hotspot and then are forced to redirect our limited resources to another location. Our challenge here is very different, but we are approaching it in much the same way, with the same underpinning, that we need to focus as much attention on the signs of crime, on quality of life issues, at the same time that we focus on serious crimes. We are doing that through a variety of efforts and initiatives, Compstat for one—a program that I am sure you are all very familiar with.

But much depends on using broken windows policing or a focus on quality of life crimes to effectively influence how a city feels about itself and thereby influence actual crime. That was our great discovery on the transit system project that I worked on with George, and then again when I went into New York in 1994 and worked with one of the all-time great policemen, Jack Maple, the late, great New York City Deputy Police Commissioner, who truly understood how you could use the enforcement of quality of life crimes to enhance your ability to deal with serious crimes. While violent crimes are much smaller in number than quality of life offenses, they greatly contribute to a sense of lawlessness because those crimes are the most reported in the newspapers and FBI crime statistics. We discovered that we could impact more serious crimes through quality of life policing—through a weeding of the garden, as it were.

Let me use the example of the New York City subway system that Malcolm Gladwell used in his New Yorker magazine article "Tipping Point," an article that ultimately became the basis for his Tipping Point book, an extraordinary book that in many respects supports the broken windows theories of Kelling and Wilson.

Gladwell endorses the idea that you can, as fast as an epidemic spreads, just as quickly diminish the impact of that spread and in fact tip it the other way. What we did in the New York City subway system, with Kelling's guidance and a lot of great thinking by many terrific police officers, was to deal with the issue of fare evasion, an issue that nobody really wanted to do much about.

Back then, this was a $1.15 theft of service from the transit system. At the time, three and a half million people rode the New York subway system every day. However, those numbers had been declining dramatically because of a combination of fear of the system—at the time there was very little maintenance of the system, and every day there were fires on the tracks and train derailments—and every day they would encounter the subway version of the squeegee pest, or the petty criminal who vandalized the turnstiles, so that in order to get into the subway you had to go through the adjacent gate, and a beggar or petty criminal would be standing there with his hand out, intimidating you to give him money in much the same way that his counterpart at street level with a squeegee was intimidating you when you were stopped at a red light.

The system at the time was having a hard time dealing with the problem of fare evasion. Fare evasion, in the form of scruffy characters who would go under turnstiles, or over turnstiles, because it seemed that nobody was maintaining them or even cared about them, increased to 250,000 people a day and was growing worse all the time.

How did we know that? The subway system documented it. They would literally have people go out once a month, stand at every turnstile, and count the fare evaders. We had a very accurate understanding of the problem, but the subway police had a mentality that they didn't want to address minor crimes like a $1.15 fare theft.

Subway police management didn't want to deal with it because to make an arrest in New York City at that time would take approximately twelve to twenty-four hours of police administrative time—an entire day, in other words, to process a $1.15 theft of service. This meant losing an officer from the subway system for significant periods of time, and since they only had about 700 officers on the system at any given time, if they were making a lot of arrests there would be nobody left to police the rest of the system.

We developed a number of strategies to increase the number of arrests while still reducing arrest-processing time. We designed "bust busses", so that instead of taking prisoners twenty miles down to the central booking facility, we brought an arrest bus right to the scene. We would arrest people below ground, get them up into the bus and process them there. Those that didn't have outstanding warrants could be quickly processed and then released. Those that had warrants would be held.

And what did we find? Thanks to a very cost-effective arrest procedure, the system actually raised police morale. In a nutshell, cops like making arrests. That's what they do. But they don't want to make arrests that don't have any impact. They don't want to make arrests that keep them chained to a prisoner for twenty-four hours. They want to be part of something that they feel is going to have a demonstrable impact.

Once our program was underway, officers discovered that one out of every seven people we were arresting for fare evasion was wanted on a warrant. Often times, these warrants would be for very serious crimes: murders, rapes, and so on. One out of every twenty-one fare-evaders, at least initially, was carrying some type of weapon—ranging from a straightedge razor on up to Uzi submachine guns. Eventually this process excited police because they had a good chance of catching significant offenders without exorbitant effort.

And, perhaps most importantly, crime began to go down. Fare evasion began to go down. Why? We were using the police in a very public, visible way to control behavior. We were going after minor types of crime, and yet we were also having a significant impact on more serious crimes. If you're a felon coming into the system to commit a robbery, you're not going to pay $1.15 to ride the subway. Criminals are very cost-efficient that way; if you are intent on stealing through theft or violence, you won't contribute to the MTA. Given that practical reality, cracking down on fare evasion provided a significant disincentive for other crimes as well.

Now, thirteen years later, crime in the subway system is down almost 90 percent from what it was in 1990. The MTA no longer counts fare evaders. There are so few now that it is not economically sensible to put out counters every month to keep track of them, and the MTA system now has five and one-half million riders.

It is a system also that has approximately one half the police that we had back in 1990. Why? Because there's not all that much for them to do now. We went after the broken windows, the so-called signs of crime, in a way that contributed to the reduction of serious crime.

Broken windows works. Not by itself, but as part of a master set of strategies. No two cities in this country, no two cities in the world are alike. This is not cookie-cutter approach. What we're designing in Los Angeles is in many respects very different than the strategies we employed in New York, and as you're going to hear from the panelists, very different in many respects from what worked in Boston.

The ailments that afflict cities seem to have a certain commonality, but when you look at it quite closely, it's like the illnesses that affect any individual. While there might be certain common elements to disease, how it impacts your particular body might be very different from how that same disease would impact the person sitting beside you. Similarly, in the policing of cities you need to be good at making broad diagnoses, but broken windows policing is an essential treatment that has to be molded to new circumstances and different environments.

When it comes to broken windows policing, I'm a practitioner of a philosophy that is no longer a philosophy. It is a reality. But it is a reality that still needs to be better understood, and I hope that in the next hour or so that you'll hear from the people who truly understand it how it works and how it can be adapted.

JAMES Q. WILSON : Chief Bratton said that crime in New York City has declined for thirteen straight years. He also went on to praise quite generously George and my contribution to that development by citing the “Broken Windows” article in Atlantic Monthly magazine.

But I want to clarify at the outset that crime went down in New York City for many reasons, of which patrolling to deal with quality of life crimes was only one. The Compstat program, the effort to hold precinct commanders—or in Los Angeles, district commanders—accountable for individual crimes in their area on penalty of not being promoted if you failed to do so, was also a very powerful crime reduction tool, as was having more police officers to patrol the city—and, I would add, Los Angeles desperately needs more police officers. I could also note the street crime unit that the Chief Bratton used to take guns off the street in order to reduce the temptation people face to use guns to commit crimes. Each of these programs, along with quality of life policing, helped bring about a tremendous reduction in crime.

What all these factors had in common, and this commonality didn't sit comfortably with many criminologists in the country, was that they were based on the common perception that the police could make a real difference. George and I had been working in this area for many decades, and when we began it was clear that hardly anyone thought that the police or even the prisons would make a difference in crime rates. The conventional wisdom of the day was that you couldn't reduce crime without addressing its “root causes”. People spoke about root causes as if they knew what they were, but when pressed it turned out they weren't quite sure. It might mean changing the class structure of society, altering our culture, or eliminating the desire to join gangs—changes that, if they could be done at all, could be done only over several generations.

The view that George and I have had, and continue to share, is that the criminal justice system can make a significant difference. While society is waiting for root causes to change, and while we are building government programs to help them change, we can make our communities safer.

The police, however, need help. They cannot do this alone. They need help from other civic agencies. They need help to maintain streets, to fix stop signs. They need help from the building inspection department. They need help from the courts. They need help from all government agencies whose behavior, while they often don't see it this way, profoundly affects the quality of life in neighborhoods.

And one of the things that broken windows policing means is that the police are responsive to complaints from neighborhoods, which at first glance do not seem to be police business at all. This traffic light is out. There is garbage in the street. The building across the street hasn't been inspected and it is on the verge of collapse. Truly, broken windows policing is more than policing. We should really talk about broken windows government.

That is to say, making city government focus on local neighborhoods. There has to be a coordinated effort to bring efficiency and accountability together at the local level where citizens need it the most. And here I mean the supervisors who run schools, building maintenance programs, street maintenance, and the like. All of these agencies need to act together to identify what is important to individual neighborhoods.

Let me tell you a little bit about what broken windows policing is not. It is, first of all, not a single tactic. The tactic depends on the conditions in the city. In some cases it means getting rid of graffiti. In other places it means dealing with prostitutes hanging out on street corners or rowdy teenage gangs. In other cases it means tearing down or fixing up abandoned buildings or eliminating seedy motels that have become centers for the drug trade.

Secondly, broken windows policing is not zero tolerance, though that phrase has been hung on it, as if the police could eliminate crime by having no tolerance for any infraction however small. Even in New York City with 38,000 officers on patrol you cannot practice zero tolerance policing. What you can do is use the police to address those aspects of seemingly minor crimes that if left unattended will cause the conditions of public order in neighborhoods to deteriorate.

This doesn't mean harassing everyone. Indeed it doesn't really mean harassing anyone. It means dealing with those small signs of disorder that you believe, if left unattended, will create a problem.

And, finally, broken windows policing is not indifferent to community concerns. Indeed it is part of community-oriented policing. If you talk to people in crime-ridden neighborhoods in any serious way, they all say the same thing. They want their neighborhood repaired. And there is a broad agreement as to what that repair entails.

Broken windows policing means that you are responding, I think, to what people say are their major concerns. Broken windows policing began with an experiment done in Newark, New Jersey, orchestrated by the Police Foundation when George Kelling was its research director. The Foundation thought it would be an interesting idea to see if foot patrols would make a difference in neighborhood crime. This experiment was carried out over the objections of most police officers, which thought that foot patrol by officers would have no effect on the crime rate.

Consequently, foot patrol was instituted on an experimental basis in certain selected neighborhoods, and the behavior of people and offenders in those neighborhoods was compared with similar neighborhoods where foot patrol was not instituted.

What did we find? We found that foot patrols did not have much of an effect on crime rates, just as the police chiefs had told us. But what it did have an effect on was public confidence. What it did have an effect on was how willing people were to use the street, to feel comfortable in the street, and to feel safe in the street. Public satisfaction with the condition of their lives went up, even though the crime rate did not change. This may seem strange, but it is not.

The average person on a typical day is not the victim of a crime. The average person walking to the supermarket or going to the bus stop or passing rowdy teenagers on the street corner is, however, the subject of potential disorder or intimidation. Eliminate the disorder and the intimidation and more decent people use the streets.

George and I, in our article on broken windows, offered the speculation that if public order improved, crime rates might go down. Now there's a lively debate among social scientists as to whether the crime rates have gone down as a result of this, and like all arguments of this sort it is difficult, if not impossible, to make an absolutely non-controversial argument that we were right, but George will offer you some reasons for thinking that we could very well be right.

But even if we were wrong, even if the crime rate does not decline when you address minor offenses, public happiness undoubtedly goes up, and the police, like all civic agencies, have a responsibility to attend to public happiness.

We wanted to revive the traditional police officer's concern for public order. In the 19th and early parts of the 20th century, public order was the focus of police activity. They were the watchmen on the street corners. They would shout when they saw a fire. They would set up a hullabaloo when they saw a violent offense. They were people there to convey to the community and to those who would disturb the community that the community's preferences came first.

The police, beginning in the middle of the 20th century, became exclusively crime fighters, and by crime fighters I mean they sat in patrol cars, waited for a radio call, and then went out and tried to find, often unsuccessfully, perpetrators of a major burglary, robbery, rape or homicide. Restoring order maintenance restores the police to their older and more traditional function without at all abandoning their commitment to becoming serious crime fighters. Will this reduce crime? We think so. And in his remarks I hope George Kelling will tell you why we think so.

GEORGE KELLING : I have the unenviable task of speaking after Chief Bratton—the police chief who will go down in history as the police chief who bridged the 20th and 21st centuries—and James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who is not just a most eminent political scientist, but is probably the most eminent social thinker in the United States at the current time. I will then be followed by Gene Rivers, who is one of the most eloquent preachers and social activists in America. Clearly, I am the odd man out in a room full of eloquent leaders.

Even so, I want to return to the New York subway program Chief Bratton mentioned earlier because I think it is relevant, very relevant to some of the things that are happening in Los Angeles.

How many of you rode the subway in New York City in the 1980s? That was an experience. It was like something out of Dante's Inferno. But if you read the New York Times in the 1980s, you would have believed that crime in the subways was caused by homelessness. If you talked to the police, the problem was homelessness. If you talked to the Transportation Authority, the problem was homelessness.

And yet, as Chief Bratton recounts, if you went into the subway and studied the crime there, the idea that homelessness was driving it was ludicrous. Of course there were some homeless people down there, but really there was just a culture of lawlessness. Anything went in the subways. As a result, criminals could intimidate people, could block the subway turnstiles, and could jump over the turnstiles with impunity. It was a social environment that was absolutely out of control.

Solving this problem from a police point of view was not all that complicated. All you had to do was have some leadership, and all you had to do was do some policing along the lines that Jim talked about. You simply had to take seriously the idea that minor offenses matter. If you ride in the New York subways now, it's a completely different culture. It has a different feel to it. It is a different place than it was in the 1980s.

A critical part of the equation, and I think Jim hinted about this in his remarks on Compstat and some of the other contributions that Chief Bratton has made, is that before you try to fix a social problem, you had better understand exactly which problem you are facing.

The problem in the subway was not homelessness. The problem in the subway was lawlessness, and it didn't take much to end that culture once you figured out what the problem was. I should add an addendum to what Chief Bratton said. It took us fifteen months to sell that idea, defend that idea, and to get leadership who would pursue that idea, but once Chief Bratton took over, the culture was changed within a matter of months. The idea that you needed years and years and years to change a culture or even a police culture, has been shown to be a lie.

Now the reason why I emphasize this is because during one of my early trips to Los Angeles last November, Chief Bratton asked me if I'd give him a hand with a few problems here in Los Angeles, and he gave me a few easy ones. I started out with violence in MacArthur Park—Skid Row. Now, as everyone knows, Skid Row makes the New York City subways seem like a picnic by comparison.

When I began to research Skid Row, I read many articles in the Los Angeles Times claiming that crime in Skid Row is driven by homelessness. That is the general cultural perception, that there is a homeless problem there. That is simply untrue. There's a culture of lawlessness there, and if you would just go and stand on a corner, or walk around the neighborhood, you will see that there is no social order in that community. The problem is not homelessness. To be sure there are some homeless people there, but that's not the problem. The problem is a culture has developed there that tolerates anything and everything.

Now we have to figure out what to do. In many respects the Los Angeles Police Department knows what to do. However, the police are also sure that they will be sued for their efforts. We will have to constantly justify what we're doing. But the evidence is there that you can restore order, and restoring order is not harassment. It is not criminalizing the poor. In reality, it's the poor who suffer the most from social disorder and crime and the problems of Skid Row.

When Jim first asked me if I wanted to co-author the article in Atlantic Monthly after the Newark foot patrol study was published, he was quick to point out to me that I would be in for some real criticism in my profession. And he also said that I was going to be called a racist, and worse. And all of that did in fact happen. But we have an obligation to publish the truth because there is a desperate need for order in the poorest neighborhoods and communities, especially in minority communities. They can't protect their own property, they can't let their children play in the streets, and as a result a culture of terror develops that diminishes those communities to the point where many of them are virtually unlivable.

But no sooner had the article come out than the police readily accepted the idea. At first it was "yes, you're right, but we have too many calls for service, we have too much serious crime that we have to concentrate on", etc. But the police knew how devastating social disorder is in poor neighborhoods and once we put quality of life in policing into an idiom that police officers could understand there was this real "Eureka!" moment among the rank and file officers. This feeling mushroomed when one day it was discovered that one in ten fare beaters either was carrying an illegal weapon or was wanted on a warrant for a serious crime. Not all fare beaters are serious criminals, but a lot of serious criminals are fare beaters.

In other words, serious criminals are busy doing a lot of bad stuff, and they're busy at it quite often, and because they have no respect for any laws at all they open themselves up to the kind of interventions that Jim has talked about and that Chief Bratton has implemented.

The criticism against broken windows policing goes something like this. Jim and I are order fanatics. We have a housekeeper's mentality, a place for everything and everything in its place, and what we want to do is to impose White Anglo Saxon Protestant values on minority communities, and that in fact we are cultural imperialists who are systematically trying to force our views of order and culture onto poor people and minorities.

Well that's an interesting argument, and it's especially interesting when I talk about broken windows policing in African American communities. Does anyone seriously think that any parent, regardless of race or culture, wants their daughters propositioned for sex on the way to school? Is that a cultural tradition that we want to preserve and pass down to future generations? If you think about it, the idea that somehow minorities and poor people revel in conditions that encourage social disorder and crime is simply an insult to the poor. It's an insult to minorities that assumes that they somehow enjoy living in broken neighborhoods.

As a matter of fact, research by Professor Wes Skogan at Northwestern University demonstrated that if you go across races, across cultures, you discover that people intuitively know what social disorder is. They want something done about it, and they want something done about it very badly.

When we first started meeting with focus groups in the subway we would get, for example, different cultural groups together, including African American women, and ask them what they thought of our proposals. Surprisingly, they were disappointed in our proposals because they didn't think that we were going far enough. They lived in constant fear and were the victims of repeated insults and aggressive begging, so much so that they really wanted much more in the way of order policing. Our interaction with the community convinced us that the idea that poor people and minorities tolerate disorder, prostitution, and crime is the brainchild of academics who are out of touch with the communities whom they claim to represent.

Another area that I would like to draw attention to, whether we are talking about the subways or Skid Row, is the issue of problem analysis. If you start to do good problem analysis and identify accurately the problems you face, it will soon become apparent to you that police can't solve the problems alone. They're important, they're essential, but they have to develop partnership strategies with other city agencies, with faith-based organizations, and with other community organizations devoted to positive social change.

If you want to deal systematically with MacArthur Park, for example, you're going to have to think about who owns that park. How are you going to get the community to retake ownership of that park? How are you going to protect and maintain community ownership over time? I know that Chief Bratton and the Los Angeles Police Department can go in and get control over that park very quickly simply by assigning enough police to the area. But they can't maintain that level of policing indefinitely and four months from now they would probably have to do it again—and again after that.

Police need to realize very quickly that you can't sustain that level of policing without appropriate ownership by the community. This is true, first of all, because real social order is only sustainable when the community reclaims parks and streets for itself.

By the way, when Chief Bratton took over the subway police in New York, there were close to 4,000 assigned subway police and it was an environment entirely under control. Right now it remains an environment entirely under control with only 1,600 police officers—less than 50% of peak levels. In other words, if you make the commitment, if you restore order, if you keep order, you need far less police eventually, but you can't do it on the cheap, at least at first.

Jim's statement that Los Angeles is a notoriously under-policed city is entirely true, but I don't think many people really appreciate how true it is. Chicago is the nation's third largest city. Chicago has between 13 and 14,000 police officers. Los Angeles is the nation's second largest city and it only has 9,000 police officers, and as a result it is constantly forced to shift resources around the city to respond to spikes in neighborhood criminal activity. Over the long term, this is not a successful strategy for crime reduction.

The final point that I would like to make is that there is a lot more research that needs to be done on quality of life policing. For instance, a criminologist in England checked to see what kind of people park illegally in handicapped parking places. Not surprisingly, they have terrible driving records.

In Newark, the city has decided that it is tired of bicyclists running over and intimidating pedestrians. The first day they enforced the traffic laws regarding bicycle riding the police arrested three people who were carrying high-powered guns.

In short, we need to capitalize on the discovery by Chief Bratton, Jack Maple, and others that certain quality of life crimes are also indicators for more serious offenses. Broken windows, as I initially framed it, was focused around the idea of restoring community order, i.e. ultimately empowering the community to control itself. It turned out as we put this idea together that it also fit very well with a well-known axiom of criminology. Five percent of offenders commit over 50 percent of serious offenses. A small number of people create an enormous amount of havoc. But what researchers are discovering more and more is that habitual offenders are also committing a lot of minor offenses along the way.

Jim did a study in the 1970s with Barbara Boland looking at the relationship between aggressive traffic enforcement and levels of crime. Now a lot more work needs to be done, but they found that people who drive badly on the road are the same people who park illegally in handicapped parking spaces, who evade fares on the subway, and who are rude to you when you pass them in the street. These people create all kinds of social havoc, from the minor to the significant. The good news is that they're a small number and we can do something about them.

Now that realization is shaping how we've been thinking about violence in Skid Row. We know that there is a relatively small number of very serious criminals out there, everyone knows who they are, but the police and the community have not been cooperating for a long enough period of time to identify these people and focus our efforts on getting them out of the community. I think that that is changing now, and we are dedicated to making a difference.

EUGENE RIVERS : Jim made a very important point during his articulation of broken windows policing when he said that there is no cookie cutter approach to quality of life policing and that there are a number of significant factors that have to be in play for it to effectively reduce crime in inner city neighborhoods.

Chief Bratton and I have been working together since the early 1990s. I met Chief Bratton when he was the police commissioner in Boston, and Boston, as many of you know, was a racially polarized city as a result of busing during the mid-1970s and then the crack epidemic during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

During the crack epidemic in the late 1980s a whole series of new racial tensions emerged that were driven by very, very aggressive policing tactics on the part of Chief Bratton's predecessor. When Chief Bratton took over leadership of the Boston Police Department during the early 1990s, a new set of strategic conversations evolved because it had become clear that the use of force alone was necessary but insufficient to effectively reduce crime.

Aggressive policing as an isolated tactic alienated the communities it was supposed to protect. It promoted racial divisions, but did not necessarily reduce crime, and it was in this context that Chief Bratton recognized the importance of community policing and building strategic partnerships with the community.

As a direct result of the foundations that Chief Bratton laid through strategic partnerships between the law enforcement community and the institutions of civil society there was, over the early 1990s, a 75% drop in violent crime in the city of Boston, especially in youth and gang-related violence.

This is a very significant fact, especially in light of the developments in Cincinnati, Ohio. The unfortunate death of Nathaniel Jones and the political theatrics which followed subsequently suggests that the kinds of discussion that we're having here this evening are absolutely essential to promoting understanding between local communities and police.

This is no less true in the context of Los Angeles, which, as you know, has a violent crime epidemic of its own, but has also exported a culture of violence to the rest of the country through Los Angeles based gangs. This means that if we are to effectively address violent crime in the U.S., we must deal with the challenge presented in Los Angeles and particularly gang violence.

There are a couple of things that I think are very interesting in light of the larger issues I just mentioned, and I would call this "broken windows plus", and here I mean engaging the community to address in an honest way the nature of the problem it faces.

When George mentioned the academic critique of broken windows policing, I was reminded of my mother. She didn't know it, but my mother, a black Pentecostal in North Philadelphia, was a broken windows theorist because she intuitively understood that the slightest indication of disorder was something that had to be corrected immediately, because she understood that once disorder takes hold of a community it is all downhill from there.

This was intuitively obvious to her, and so I was raised in a context where I was assigned to sweeping sidewalks, not just ours but the entire block, because she understood that if we permitted decay in our neighborhood, everyone would suffer.

She and other neighborhood parents would take their sons and deploy us to maintain order in the neighborhood. We hadn't learned yet what the theory was, but she understood that a clean neighborhood and a clean block were safer places, and the appearance of order would create disincentives for others to litter, or urinate on a wall, or throw beer bottles into someone's front yard.

And so Chief Bratton and I are helping to bring this philosophy back to Los Angeles. Chief Bratton and I have approached Bishop Charles Blake from the West Angeles Church, and he has agreed to provide leadership for a new initiative to mobilize black churches to work in support of broken windows policing.

I also believe that we need to rethink how we think about crime in the inner city. Anyone that goes to what we now call South Los Angeles, what used to called South Central, anyone who goes and hears any of the anecdotal stories regarding the violence in that area could not escape the impression that that area is literally terrorized by crime. Terrorism is the right word to use because there is no other term that adequately describes the breadth and depth of the violence that people have been subjected to for over twenty years. However, media coverage rarely uses that term, even though I think that they should. If we can address terrorism across the world at the cost of a billion dollars a week, why can we not devote at least limited resources to addressing the terrorism in our cities that happens every day?

Now, part of the challenge politically is that that would force a re-definition of terms because the race card could no longer be deployed as a way of obfuscating the issue and dodging the empirical fact that there are disproportionate levels of violence in the inner city. In Boston in the early 1990s, my house was shot into. In July of 1991, some young men looking for another hoodlum shot into my house. They emptied a 9mm Glock and a .45 into my house, with the first three bullets going into my then three-year-old son's bedroom.

That was the turning point for me. Prior to 1991 my view was that all of these young brothers in trouble with the law had just lost their way. They were all well-intentioned young men, they probably wanted to do the right thing, and with maybe a job or some kind of recreational activity these young men would become responsible community members. In July of 1991 I learned that I was wrong as my son ran terrified into my bedroom.

That was a turning point in Boston's history, because it was in the context of the scourge of drug violence that the black clergy began to organize and say publicly that we had to redefine the black community's relationship to law enforcement and deracialize the issue and in a collaborative way mobilize our faith communities to mentor, monitor, and minister to high risk youth with the assistance of law enforcement. We realized that we had to reject the use of the race card as a mechanism to avoid accountability on the part of the community as well as law enforcement.

We revolutionized policing in Boston, decreasing crime by 75% and bringing about a corresponding decrease in the number of civilian complaints. And we accomplished all of this in a city that had a history of being notoriously racially divided.

My thinking, as we've been working with Chief Bratton, is that we must now begin a new discussion and a reconceptualization of how crime terrorizes our communities. We have to emphasize that strategic partnerships with the police, along with measurable outcomes, must be the end game of any political discourse about crime reduction.

The broken windows model must be expanded, deepened and extended so that we can begin a new conversation between America's different communities. The challenge of gang violence in Los Angeles is absolutely crucial in this discussion because as Los Angeles goes, so goes the country. Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia all follow the criminal patterns generated in Los Angeles.

The reason that myself and many other community leaders are coming to Los Angeles to work with Chief Bratton is that we see that the future of the country and other cities depends in large measure on how violent crime issues are addressed here. What kinds of resources are we putting at the disposal of the law enforcement community? What civic institutions must complement and supplement the work of the police department? These are all critical questions and we will work with Chief Bratton to solve them all.

PETER COVE : I'm going to talk to you a bit about recidivism and the issue of how recidivism impacts crime and communities, and what we might be able to do about that.

First of all let me just give you a statistic that caught the attention of Dr. Lee Bowes, who is the CEO of America Works and also my wife, and I about three years ago. Statistics show that over 600,000 people are paroled every year just from state penitentiaries in the United States, and within three years almost 70 percent of them are going to be reincarcerated. That's seven out of ten. That number is staggering when you consider the impact of crime on our communities, and the cost to society of maintaining thousands of jails across the country. If you just think about what that really means, in terms of lost lives and lost resources, it is a very troubling picture.

Our company, America Works, has been in business about 22 years. We were the first for-profit welfare-to-work program in this country. We found, through working with single mothers and working with other people who were on welfare, that if you moved them very quickly into work enviroments and then supported them while they were on the job, you could really make a tremendous difference in their lives in terms of freeing them from welfare dependence, in raising the life-chances of their children, and in expanding America's base of human capital.

We spent many, many years working with welfare recipients, but we were also aware that we were not working with many men. Most people who are on welfare, as you would know because they're single heads of households, are women. There are a few men, but the majority were women. About three and a half years ago Lee and I looked into this and we said that we had to do more to reach out to men.

As a result, we talked with a number of criminal justice experts, and perhaps the most important thing that was said to us was by John DiIulio, who was head of the Faith-Based Initiative at the White House, but he is also an expert on faith-based initiatives in prisons with offenders. We talked with John, and John said to us, "remember what it was like when you started America Works by focusing on welfare to work? There was hardly anyone in the field." He said that is where prison to work is now. And he said that if we could do something about reducing recidivism, we would have a major impact on crime.

Lee and I thought a lot about that and decided that we were going to try and build a program and we did. We were very fortunate to have a contract under the Giuliani administration for welfare to work recipients, but it allowed us to take in ex-offenders as well, and we went to Giuliani and other people in the administration, and we said, do you want us to do this, because it's going to generate quite a lot of exposure. We intend to take in large numbers of paroled offenders, and we're going to find them employment. They responded enthusiastically and so we made this a part of our mission.

We did it for a couple of years, at which point the Manhattan Institute financed Columbia University's SIPA Department, School of International and Public Affairs, to study the question of whether or not work reduced recidivism. Now, I caution you that this was a small study, not the kind of project that you would build a national policy on, but it was very suggestive because it showed that you may be able to have a significant impact on crime by using work as an intervention for people emerging from the prison system.

We are talking with other cities about expanding our services and—if our initial success holds up—the potential gains are enormous. Just think of what we could accomplish by reducing recidivism by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, or even 40 percent. Take, for instance, California, where, unlike New York, the state has had a huge increase in prisons over the last ten years. If you could start to reduce the cost of prisons by reducing recidivism, you could make a major impact on the state tax burden. You could make a major impact on crime. You could really have a significant impact on the quality of life issues that we've been talking about today, and, based on what Chief Bratton has done in New York and elsewhere, that impact would be revolutionary.

I truly believe that work does reduce crime. I've seen it. I've watched it work first hand. What you have to do, and this is very important, is you have to have an intervention with parolees right as they're coming out of prison, because if you don't do it then you lose them. We have to engage these people and help them become re-engaged in their communities. Work gives them that engagement and resocializes them. They have to show up at work, they have to meet standards, and as a result they will gain a sense of accomplishment.

What was surprising-and encouraging-to us was that companies were more than willing to hire them. In fact, they're doing as well or better than our welfare-to-work recipients. We are addressing the second half of the puzzle, because many of these men have left behind women and children when they entered the penal system—women who then enter welfare. This is an anecdotal observation, but I think that by giving these men self-esteem we may be able to bring about some family involvement by these men in their children's lives. We may be able to bring about some family reunifications or even marriages at some point. Work does do that. It socializes people and as a result we really feel that we can have a very significant effect with this program.

As I mentioned earlier, we are now talking to a number of cities around the country about opening more offices, and I want to say something about this. It's a technical observation, but I think that it is very, very important. It is not well known, but there is federal funding available for programs like this through the Food Stamp entitlement. If you enroll someone on Food Stamps, you can then draw funding from the federal government for what's called Food Stamp Training. And, best of all, you can access as much money as you need for individual job training. It is a significant way of building prison-to-work programs, and we think that this is a terrific starting point given the current fiscal climate.

There are, as I said, over 600,000 people coming out of jail every year, and the number of programs in this country is de minimis in terms of integrating these people into the mainstream economy. If we're right that work really does reduce recidivism, we can't afford to pass up the opportunity to help these people become productive, law-abiding citizens.

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What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

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The broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime in urban areas lead to further crime. The theory is often associated with the 2000 case of Illinois v. Wardlow , in which the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that the police, based on the legal doctrine of probable cause , have the authority to detain and physically search, or “stop-and-frisk,” people in crime-prone neighborhoods who appear to be behaving suspiciously.

Key Takeaways: Broken Windows Theory

• The broken windows theory of criminology holds that visible signs of crime in densely-populated, lower-income urban areas will encourage additional criminal activity.
• Broken windows neighborhood policing tactics employ heightened enforcement of relatively minor “quality of life” crimes like loitering, public drinking, and graffiti.
• The theory has been criticized for encouraging discriminatory police practices, such as unequal enforcement based on racial profiling.

Broken Windows Theory Definition

In the field of criminology, the broken windows theory holds that lingering visible evidence of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil unrest in densely populated urban areas suggests a lack of active local law enforcement and encourages people to commit further, even more serious crimes.

The theory was first suggested in 1982 by social scientist, George L. Kelling in his article, “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety” published in The Atlantic. Kelling explained the theory as follows:

“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.”

Kelling based his theory on the results of an experiment conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1969. In his experiment, Zimbardo parked an apparently disabled and abandoned car in a low-income area of the Bronx, New York City, and a similar car in an affluent Palo Alto, California neighborhood. Within 24 hours, everything of value had been stolen from the car in the Bronx. Within a few days, vandals had smashed the car’s windows and ripped out the upholstery. At the same time, the car abandoned in Palo Alto remained untouched for over a week, until Zimbardo himself smashed it with a sledgehammer. Soon, other people Zimbardo described as mostly well dressed, “clean-cut” Caucasians joined in the vandalism. Zimbardo concluded that in high-crime areas like the Bronx, where such abandoned property is commonplace, vandalism and theft occur far faster as the community takes such acts for granted. However, similar crimes can occur in any community when the people’s mutual regard for proper civil behavior is lowered by actions that suggest a general lack of concern.

Kelling concluded that by selectively targeting minor crimes like vandalism, public intoxication, and loitering, police can establish an atmosphere of civil order and lawfulness, thus helping to prevent more serious crimes.

Broken Windows Policing

In1993, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton cited Kelling and his broken windows theory as a basis for implementing a new “tough-stance” policy aggressively addressing relatively minor crimes seen as negatively affecting the quality of life in the inner-city.

Bratton directed NYPD to step up enforcement of laws against crimes like public drinking, public urination, and graffiti. He also cracked down on so-called “squeegee men,” vagrants who aggressively demand payment at traffic stops for unsolicited car window washings. Reviving a Prohibition-era city ban on dancing in unlicensed establishments, police controversially shuttered many of the city’s night clubs with records of public disturbances.

While studies of New York’s crime statistics conducted between 2001 and 2017 suggested that enforcement policies based on the broken windows theory were effective in reducing rates of both minor and serious crimes, other factors may have also contributed to the result. For example, New York’s crime decrease may have simply been part of a nationwide trend that saw other major cities with different policing practices experience similar decreases over the period. In addition, New York City’s 39% drop in the unemployment rate could have contributed to the reduction in crime.

In 2005, police in the Boston suburb of Lowell, Massachusetts, identified 34 “crime hot spots” fitting the broken windows theory profile. In 17 of the spots, police made more misdemeanor arrests, while other city authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, and enforced building codes. In the other 17 spots, no changes in routine procedures were made. While the areas given special attention saw a 20% reduction in police calls, a study of the experiment concluded that simply cleaning up the physical environment had been more effective than an increase in misdemeanor arrests.

Today, however, five major U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Denver—all acknowledge employing at least some neighborhood policing tactics based on Kelling’s broken windows theory. In all of these cities, police stress aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws.

Despite its popularity in major cities, police policy based on the broken windows theory is not without its critics, who question both its effectiveness and fairness of application.

In 2005, University of Chicago Law School professor Bernard Harcourt published a study finding no evidence that broken windows policing actually reduces crime. “We don’t deny that the ‘broken windows’ idea seems compelling,” wrote Harcourt. “The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work as claimed in practice.”

Specifically, Harcourt contended that crime data from New York City’s 1990s application of broken windows policing had been misinterpreted. Though the NYPD had realized greatly reduced crime rates in the broken windows enforcement areas, the same areas had also been the areas worst affected by the crack-cocaine epidemic that caused citywide homicide rates to soar. “Everywhere crime skyrocketed as a result of crack, there were eventual declines once the crack epidemic ebbed,” Harcourt note. “This is true for police precincts in New York and for cities across the country.” In short, Harcourt contended that New York’s declines in crime during the 1990s were both predictable and would have happened with or without broken windows policing.

Harcourt concluded that for most cities, the costs of broken windows policing outweigh the benefits. “In our opinion, focusing on minor misdemeanors is a diversion of valuable police funding and time from what really seems to help—targeted police patrols against violence, gang activity and gun crimes in the highest-crime ‘hot spots.’”

Broken windows policing has also been criticized for its potential to encourage unequal, potentially discriminatory enforcement practices such as racial profiling , too often with disastrous results.

Arising from objections to practices like “Stop-and-Frisk,” critics point to the case of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man killed by a New York City police officer in 2014. After observing Garner standing on a street corner in a high-crime area of Staten Island, police suspected him of selling “loosies,” untaxed cigarettes. When, according to the police report, Garner resisted arrest, an officer took him to the ground in a chock hold. An hour later, Garner died in the hospital of what the coroner determined to be homicide resulting from, “Compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” After a grand jury failed to indict the officer involved, anti-police protests broke out in several cities.

Since then, and due to the deaths of other unarmed Black men accused of minor crimes predominantly by white police officers, more sociologists and criminologists have questioned the effects of broken windows theory policing. Critics argue that it is racially discriminatory, as police statistically tend to view, and thus, target, non-whites as suspects in low-income, high-crime areas.

According to Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, established historic evidence shows that persons of color are more likely than whites to be detained, questioned, searched, and arrested by police. Larkin suggests that this happens more often in areas chosen for broken windows-based policing due to a combination of: the individual’s race, police officers being tempted to stop minority suspects because they statistically appear to commit more crimes, and the tacit approval of those practices by police officials.

Sources and Further Reference

• Wilson, James Q; Kelling, George L (Mar 1982), “ Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety .” The Atlantic.
• Harcourt, Bernard E. “ Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City & a Five-City Social Experiment .” University of Chicago Law Review (June 2005).
• Fagan, Jeffrey and Davies, Garth. “ Street Stops and Broken Windows .” Fordham Urban Law Journal (2000).
• Taibbi, Matt. “ The Lessons of the Eric Garner Case .” Rolling Stone (November 2018).
• Herbert, Steve; Brown, Elizabeth (September 2006). “ Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal City .” Antipode.
• Larkin, Paul. “ Flight, Race, and Terry Stops: Commonwealth v.Warren .” The Heritage Foundation.
• Criminology Definition and History
• How the Illinois v. Wardlow Case Affects Policing
• The History of Modern Policing
• What Is a Criminal Infraction?
• 5 Common Misconceptions About Black Lives Matter
• What Is Restorative Justice?
• Why Racial Profiling Is a Bad Idea
• What Is Retributive Justice?
• Racial Profiling and Why it Hurts Minorities
• An Overview of Labeling Theory
• What Is Procedural Justice?
• Terry v. Ohio: Supreme Court Case, Arguments, Impact
• Racial Bias and Discrimination: From Colorism to Racial Profiling
• Manifest Function, Latent Function, and Dysfunction in Sociology
• What Is Social Learning Theory?
• What's the Difference Between Probation and Parole?

November 24, 2008

Broken Windows Crime Theory

Cyclists littered more near a graffiti-covered wall, lending evidence to the "broken windows" theory, which says that not cleaning up petty societal offenses leads to more crime. Karen Hopkin reports

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

It’s called the "broken windows" theory and it says that in a neighborhood where buildings have broken windows, people are more likely to engage in bad behavior. Maybe because they figure no one will care. Or there’s little chance they’ll get caught. The idea has been embraced by people in law enforcement—crack down on petty crime and you’ll also put a halt to more serious offenses. New York City, for example, used the logic to justify a “zero tolerance” approach to things like the squeegeeing of car windows. But the theory has been hard to prove. Crime did go down in New York, but was it directly related to the squeegee decline? Now Dutch scientists say that there may be something to the whole “broken windows” thing, after all. For example, they found that cyclists who parked their bikes near a wall covered in graffiti were twice as likely to litter than people who parked near the same wall after it was painted clean. The results were published online by the journal Science on November 20th. I guess we should be thankful that the cyclists’ bad behavior stopped at littering. And they didn’t decide to, say, swipe a better set of wheels for the ride home.

—Karen Hopkin 

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Broken Windows

The police and neighborhood safety

Editor’s Note: We’ve gathered dozens of the most important pieces from our archives on race and racism in America. Find the collection here .

In the mid-1970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.

Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a "good pinch." In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along.

Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.

These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer.

But how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down—in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.

What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this "order-maintenance" function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both parties.

One of us (Kelling) spent many hours walking with Newark foot-patrol officers to see how they defined "order" and what they did to maintain it. One beat was typical: a busy but dilapidated area in the heart of Newark, with many abandoned buildings, marginal shops (several of which prominently displayed knives and straight-edged razors in their windows), one large department store, and, most important, a train station and several major bus stops. Though the area was run-down, its streets were filled with people, because it was a major transportation center. The good order of this area was important not only to those who lived and worked there but also to many others, who had to move through it on their way home, to supermarkets, or to factories.

The people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was white. The people were made up of "regulars" and "strangers." Regulars included both "decent folk" and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who "knew their place." Strangers were, well, strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.

These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the "regulars" on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these, everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone violated them, the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator. Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as "enforcing the law," but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.

A determined skeptic might acknowledge that a skilled foot-patrol officer can maintain order but still insist that this sort of "order" has little to do with the real sources of community fear—that is, with violent crime. To a degree, that is true. But two things must be borne in mind. First, outside observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of "real" crime and how much from a sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, worrisome encounters. The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order.

Second, at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment." The first to arrive were a family—father, mother, and young son—who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began—windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the "vandals" appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."

We suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly. They will use the streets less often, and when on the streets will stay apart from their fellows, moving with averted eyes, silent lips, and hurried steps. "Don't get involved." For some residents, this growing atomization will matter little, because the neighborhood is not their "home" but "the place where they live." Their interests are elsewhere; they are cosmopolitans. But it will matter greatly to other people, whose lives derive meaning and satisfaction from local attachments rather than worldly involvement; for them, the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends whom they arrange to meet.

Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes' customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will occur.

Among those who often find it difficult to move away from this are the elderly. Surveys of citizens suggest that the elderly are much less likely to be the victims of crime than younger persons, and some have inferred from this that the well-known fear of crime voiced by the elderly is an exaggeration: perhaps we ought not to design special programs to protect older persons; perhaps we should even try to talk them out of their mistaken fears. This argument misses the point. The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a drunken panhandler can be as fear-inducing for defenseless persons as the prospect of meeting an actual robber; indeed, to a defenseless person, the two kinds of confrontation are often indistinguishable. Moreover, the lower rate at which the elderly are victimized is a measure of the steps they have already taken—chiefly, staying behind locked doors—to minimize the risks they face. Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more.

Nor is the connection between disorderliness and fear made only by the elderly. Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, has recently gathered together a number of surveys on the sources of public fear. One, done in Portland, Oregon, indicated that three fourths of the adults interviewed cross to the other side of a street when they see a gang of teenagers; another survey, in Baltimore, discovered that nearly half would cross the street to avoid even a single strange youth. When an interviewer asked people in a housing project where the most dangerous spot was, they mentioned a place where young persons gathered to drink and play music, despite the fact that not a single crime had occurred there. In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest. Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti. As Nathan Glazer has written, the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider with the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests."

In response to fear people avoid one another, weakening controls. Sometimes they call the police. Patrol cars arrive, an occasional arrest occurs but crime continues and disorder is not abated. Citizens complain to the police chief, but he explains that his department is low on personnel and that the courts do not punish petty or first-time offenders. To the residents, the police who arrive in squad cars are either ineffective or uncaring: to the police, the residents are animals who deserve each other. The citizens may soon stop calling the police, because "they can't do anything."

The process we call urban decay has occurred for centuries in every city. But what is happening today is different in at least two important respects. First, in the period before, say, World War II, city dwellers- because of money costs, transportation difficulties, familial and church connections—could rarely move away from neighborhood problems. When movement did occur, it tended to be along public-transit routes. Now mobility has become exceptionally easy for all but the poorest or those who are blocked by racial prejudice. Earlier crime waves had a kind of built-in self-correcting mechanism: the determination of a neighborhood or community to reassert control over its turf. Areas in Chicago, New York, and Boston would experience crime and gang wars, and then normalcy would return, as the families for whom no alternative residences were possible reclaimed their authority over the streets.

Second, the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested "on suspicion" or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. "Rights" were something enjoyed by decent folk, and perhaps also by the serious professional criminal, who avoided violence and could afford a lawyer.

This pattern of policing was not an aberration or the result of occasional excess. From the earliest days of the nation, the police function was seen primarily as that of a night watchman: to maintain order against the chief threats to order—fire, wild animals, and disreputable behavior. Solving crimes was viewed not as a police responsibility but as a private one. In the March, 1969, Atlantic, one of us (Wilson) wrote a brief account of how the police role had slowly changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes. The change began with the creation of private detectives (often ex-criminals), who worked on a contingency-fee basis for individuals who had suffered losses. In time, the detectives were absorbed in municipal agencies and paid a regular salary simultaneously, the responsibility for prosecuting thieves was shifted from the aggrieved private citizen to the professional prosecutor. This process was not complete in most places until the twentieth century.

In the l960s, when urban riots were a major problem, 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. Order maintenance became, to a degree, coterminous with "community relations." But, as the crime wave that began in the early l960s continued without abatement throughout the decade and into the 1970s, attention shifted to the role of the police as crime-fighters. Studies of police behavior ceased, by and large, to be accounts of the order-maintenance function and became, instead, efforts to propose and test ways whereby the police could solve more crimes, make more arrests, and gather better evidence. If these things could be done, social scientists assumed, citizens would be less fearful.

A great deal was accomplished during this transition, as both police chiefs and outside experts emphasized the crime-fighting function in their plans, in the allocation of resources, and in deployment of personnel. The police may well have become better crime-fighters as a result. And doubtless they remained aware of their responsibility for order. But the link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten.

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That link is similar to the process whereby one broken window becomes many. The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window. Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.

Some police administrators concede that this process occurs, but argue that motorized-patrol officers can deal with it as effectively as foot patrol officers. We are not so sure. In theory, an officer in a squad car can observe as much as an officer on foot; in theory, the former can talk to as many people as the latter. But the reality of police-citizen encounters is powerfully altered by the automobile. An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can help him manage whatever is about to happen. And he can never be certain what that will be—a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation, a teasing remark, a confused babble, a threatening gesture.

In a car, an officer is more likely to deal with street people by rolling down the window and looking at them. The door and the window exclude the approaching citizen; they are a barrier. Some officers take advantage of this barrier, perhaps unconsciously, by acting differently if in the car than they would on foot. We have seen this countless times. The police car pulls up to a corner where teenagers are gathered. The window is rolled down. The officer stares at the youths. They stare back. The officer says to one, "C'mere." He saunters over, conveying to his friends by his elaborately casual style the idea that he is not intimidated by authority. What's your name?" "Chuck." "Chuck who?" "Chuck Jones." "What'ya doing, Chuck?" "Nothin'." "Got a P.O. [parole officer]?" "Nah." "Sure?" "Yeah." "Stay out of trouble, Chuckie." Meanwhile, the other boys laugh and exchange comments among themselves, probably at the officer's expense. The officer stares harder. He cannot be certain what is being said, nor can he join in and, by displaying his own skill at street banter, prove that he cannot be "put down." In the process, the officer has learned almost nothing, and the boys have decided the officer is an alien force who can safely be disregarded, even mocked.

Our experience is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer. Such exchanges give them a sense of importance, provide them with the basis for gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them (whereby they gain a modest but significant sense of having "done something" about the problem). You approach a person on foot more easily, and talk to him more readily, than you do a person in a car. Moreover, you can more easily retain some anonymity if you draw an officer aside for a private chat. Suppose you want to pass on a tip about who is stealing handbags, or who offered to sell you a stolen TV. In the inner city, the culprit, in all likelihood, lives nearby. To walk up to a marked patrol car and lean in the window is to convey a visible signal that you are a "fink."

The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must accommodate them. And therein lies the problem.

Should police activity on the street be shaped, in important ways, by the standards of the neighborhood rather than by the rules of the state? Over the past two decades, the shift of police from order-maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions, provoked by media complaints and enforced by court decisions and departmental orders. As a consequence, the order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals. This is, we think, an entirely new development. For centuries, the role of the police as watchmen was judged primarily not in terms of its compliance with appropriate procedures but rather in terms of its attaining a desired objective. The objective was order, an inherently ambiguous term but a condition that people in a given community recognized when they saw it. The means were the same as those the community itself would employ, if its members were sufficiently determined, courageous, and authoritative. Detecting and apprehending criminals, by contrast, was a means to an end, not an end in itself; a judicial determination of guilt or innocence was the hoped-for result of the law-enforcement mode. From the first, the police were expected to follow rules defining that process, though states differed in how stringent the rules should be. The criminal-apprehension process was always understood to involve individual rights, the violation of which was unacceptable because it meant that the violating officer would be acting as a judge and jury—and that was not his job. Guilt or innocence was to be determined by universal standards under special procedures.

Ordinarily, no judge or jury ever sees the persons caught up in a dispute over the appropriate level of neighborhood order. That is true not only because most cases are handled informally on the street but also because no universal standards are available to settle arguments over disorder, and thus a judge may not be any wiser or more effective than a police officer. Until quite recently in many states, and even today in some places, the police made arrests on such charges as "suspicious person" or "vagrancy" or "public drunkenness"—charges with scarcely any legal meaning. These charges exist not because society wants judges to punish vagrants or drunks but because it wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighborhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.

Once we begin to think of all aspects of police work as involving the application of universal rules under special procedures, we inevitably ask what constitutes an "undesirable person" and why we should "criminalize" vagrancy or drunkenness. A strong and commendable desire to see that people are treated fairly makes us worry about allowing the police to rout persons who are undesirable by some vague or parochial standard. A growing and not-so-commendable utilitarianism leads us to doubt that any behavior that does not "hurt" another person should be made illegal. And thus many of us who watch over the police are reluctant to allow them to perform, in the only way they can, a function that every neighborhood desperately wants them to perform.

This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one"- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order—is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows. Of course, agencies other than the police could attend to the problems posed by drunks or the mentally ill, but in most communities especially where the "deinstitutionalization" movement has been strong—they do not.

The concern about equity is more serious. We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable than another but how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?

We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question. We are not confident that there is a satisfactory answer except to hope that by their selection, training, and supervision, the police will be inculcated with a clear sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority. That limit, roughly, is this—the police exist to help regulate behavior, not to maintain the racial or ethnic purity of a neighborhood.

Consider the case of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, one of the largest public-housing projects in the country. It is home for nearly 20,000 people, all black, and extends over ninety-two acres along South State Street. It was named after a distinguished black who had been, during the 1940s, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. Not long after it opened, in 1962, relations between project residents and the police deteriorated badly. The citizens felt that the police were insensitive or brutal; the police, in turn, complained of unprovoked attacks on them. Some Chicago officers tell of times when they were afraid to enter the Homes. Crime rates soared.

Today, the atmosphere has changed. Police-citizen relations have improved—apparently, both sides learned something from the earlier experience. Recently, a boy stole a purse and ran off. Several young persons who saw the theft voluntarily passed along to the police information on the identity and residence of the thief, and they did this publicly, with friends and neighbors looking on. But problems persist, chief among them the presence of youth gangs that terrorize residents and recruit members in the project. The people expect the police to "do something" about this, and the police are determined to do just that.

But do what? Though the police can obviously make arrests whenever a gang member breaks the law, a gang can form, recruit, and congregate without breaking the law. And only a tiny fraction of gang-related crimes can be solved by an arrest; thus, if an arrest is the only recourse for the police, the residents' fears will go unassuaged. The police will soon feel helpless, and the residents will again believe that the police "do nothing." What the police in fact do is to chase known gang members out of the project. In the words of one officer, "We kick ass." Project residents both know and approve of this. The tacit police-citizen alliance in the project is reinforced by the police view that the cops and the gangs are the two rival sources of power in the area, and that the gangs are not going to win.

None of this is easily reconciled with any conception of due process or fair treatment. Since both residents and gang members are black, race is not a factor. But it could be. Suppose a white project confronted a black gang, or vice versa. We would be apprehensive about the police taking sides. But the substantive problem remains the same: how can the police strengthen the informal social-control mechanisms of natural communities in order to minimize fear in public places? Law enforcement, per se, is no answer: a gang can weaken or destroy a community by standing about in a menacing fashion and speaking rudely to passersby without breaking the law.

We have difficulty thinking about such matters, not simply because the ethical and legal issues are so complex but because we have become accustomed to thinking of the law in essentially individualistic terms. The law defines my rights, punishes his behavior and is applied by that officer because of this harm. We assume, in thinking this way, that what is good for the individual will be good for the community and what doesn't matter when it happens to one person won't matter if it happens to many. Ordinarily, those are plausible assumptions. But in cases where behavior that is tolerable to one person is intolerable to many others, the reactions of the others—fear, withdrawal, flight—may ultimately make matters worse for everyone, including the individual who first professed his indifference.

It may be their greater sensitivity to communal as opposed to individual needs that helps explain why the residents of small communities are more satisfied with their police than are the residents of similar neighborhoods in big cities. Elinor Ostrom and her co-workers at Indiana University compared the perception of police services in two poor, all-black Illinois towns—Phoenix and East Chicago Heights with those of three comparable all-black neighborhoods in Chicago. The level of criminal victimization and the quality of police-community relations appeared to be about the same in the towns and the Chicago neighborhoods. But the citizens living in their own villages were much more likely than those living in the Chicago neighborhoods to say that they do not stay at home for fear of crime, to agree that the local police have "the right to take any action necessary" to deal with problems, and to agree that the police "look out for the needs of the average citizen." It is possible that the residents and the police of the small towns saw themselves as engaged in a collaborative effort to maintain a certain standard of communal life, whereas those of the big city felt themselves to be simply requesting and supplying particular services on an individual basis.

If this is true, how should a wise police chief deploy his meager forces? The first answer is that nobody knows for certain, and the most prudent course of action would be to try further variations on the Newark experiment, to see more precisely what works in what kinds of neighborhoods. The second answer is also a hedge—many aspects of order maintenance in neighborhoods can probably best be handled in ways that involve the police minimally if at all. A busy bustling shopping center and a quiet, well-tended suburb may need almost no visible police presence. In both cases, the ratio of respectable to disreputable people is ordinarily so high as to make informal social control effective.

Even in areas that are in jeopardy from disorderly elements, citizen action without substantial police involvement may be sufficient. Meetings between teenagers who like to hang out on a particular corner and adults who want to use that corner might well lead to an amicable agreement on a set of rules about how many people can be allowed to congregate, where, and when.

Where no understanding is possible—or if possible, not observed—citizen patrols may be a sufficient response. There are two traditions of communal involvement in maintaining order: One, that of the "community watchmen," is as old as the first settlement of the New World. Until well into the nineteenth century, volunteer watchmen, not policemen, patrolled their communities to keep order. They did so, by and large, without taking the law into their own hands—without, that is, punishing persons or using force. Their presence deterred disorder or alerted the community to disorder that could not be deterred. There are hundreds of such efforts today in communities all across the nation. Perhaps the best known is that of the Guardian Angels, a group of unarmed young persons in distinctive berets and T-shirts, who first came to public attention when they began patrolling the New York City subways but who claim now to have chapters in more than thirty American cities. Unfortunately, we have little information about the effect of these groups on crime. It is possible, however, that whatever their effect on crime, citizens find their presence reassuring, and that they thus contribute to maintaining a sense of order and civility.

The second tradition is that of the "vigilante." Rarely a feature of the settled communities of the East, it was primarily to be found in those frontier towns that grew up in advance of the reach of government. More than 350 vigilante groups are known to have existed; their distinctive feature was that their members did take the law into their own hands, by acting as judge, jury, and often executioner as well as policeman. Today, the vigilante movement is conspicuous by its rarity, despite the great fear expressed by citizens that the older cities are becoming "urban frontiers." But some community-watchmen groups have skirted the line, and others may cross it in the future. An ambiguous case, reported in The Wall Street Journal involved a citizens' patrol in the Silver Lake area of Belleville, New Jersey. A leader told the reporter, "We look for outsiders." If a few teenagers from outside the neighborhood enter it, "we ask them their business," he said. "If they say they're going down the street to see Mrs. Jones, fine, we let them pass. But then we follow them down the block to make sure they're really going to see Mrs. Jones."

Though citizens can do a great deal, the police are plainly the key to order maintenance. For one thing, many communities, such as the Robert Taylor Homes, cannot do the job by themselves. For another, no citizen in a neighborhood, even an organized one, is likely to feel the sense of responsibility that wearing a badge confers. Psychologists have done many studies on why people fail to go to the aid of persons being attacked or seeking help, and they have learned that the cause is not "apathy" or "selfishness" but the absence of some plausible grounds for feeling that one must personally accept responsibility. Ironically, avoiding responsibility is easier when a lot of people are standing about. On streets and in public places, where order is so important, many people are likely to be "around," a fact that reduces the chance of any one person acting as the agent of the community. The police officer's uniform singles him out as a person who must accept responsibility if asked. In addition, officers, more easily than their fellow citizens, can be expected to distinguish between what is necessary to protect the safety of the street and what merely protects its ethnic purity.

But the police forces of America are losing, not gaining, members. Some cities have suffered substantial cuts in the number of officers available for duty. These cuts are not likely to be reversed in the near future. Therefore, each department must assign its existing officers with great care. Some neighborhoods are so demoralized and crime-ridden as to make foot patrol useless; the best the police can do with limited resources is respond to the enormous number of calls for service. Other neighborhoods are so stable and serene as to make foot patrol unnecessary. The key is to identify neighborhoods at the tipping point—where the public order is deteriorating but not unreclaimable, where the streets are used frequently but by apprehensive people, where a window is likely to be broken at any time, and must quickly be fixed if all are not to be shattered.

Most police departments do not have ways of systematically identifying such areas and assigning officers to them. Officers are assigned on the basis of crime rates (meaning that marginally threatened areas are often stripped so that police can investigate crimes in areas where the situation is hopeless) or on the basis of calls for service (despite the fact that most citizens do not call the police when they are merely frightened or annoyed). To allocate patrol wisely, the department must look at the neighborhoods and decide, from first-hand evidence, where an additional officer will make the greatest difference in promoting a sense of safety.

One way to stretch limited police resources is being tried in some public housing projects. Tenant organizations hire off-duty police officers for patrol work in their buildings. The costs are not high (at least not per resident), the officer likes the additional income, and the residents feel safer. Such arrangements are probably more successful than hiring private watchmen, and the Newark experiment helps us understand why. A private security guard may deter crime or misconduct by his presence, and he may go to the aid of persons needing help, but he may well not intervene—that is, control or drive away—someone challenging community standards. Being a sworn officer—a "real cop"—seems to give one the confidence, the sense of duty, and the aura of authority necessary to perform this difficult task.

Patrol officers might be encouraged to go to and from duty stations on public transportation and, while on the bus or subway car, enforce rules about smoking, drinking, disorderly conduct, and the like. The enforcement need involve nothing more than ejecting the offender (the offense, after all, is not one with which a booking officer or a judge wishes to be bothered). Perhaps the random but relentless maintenance of standards on buses would lead to conditions on buses that approximate the level of civility we now take for granted on airplanes.

But the most important requirement is to think that to maintain order in precarious situations is a vital job. The police know this is one of their functions, and they also believe, correctly, that it cannot be done to the exclusion of criminal investigation and responding to calls. We may have encouraged them to suppose, however, on the basis of our oft-repeated concerns about serious, violent crime, that they will be judged exclusively on their capacity as crime-fighters. To the extent that this is the case, police administrators will continue to concentrate police personnel in the highest-crime areas (though not necessarily in the areas most vulnerable to criminal invasion), emphasize their training in the law and criminal apprehension (and not their training in managing street life), and join too quickly in campaigns to decriminalize "harmless" behavior (though public drunkenness, street prostitution, and pornographic displays can destroy a community more quickly than any team of professional burglars).

Above all, we must return to our long-abandoned view that the police ought to protect communities as well as individuals. Our crime statistics and victimization surveys measure individual losses, but they do not measure communal losses. Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police—and the rest of us—ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.

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Broken Windows Theory

Last updated 2 Apr 2018

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James Q. Wilson concluded that the extent to which a community regulates itself has a dramatic impact on crime and deviance. The "broken windows" referred to in the theory’s name is the idea that where there is one broken window left unreplaced there will be many.

A broken window is a physical symbol that the residents of a particular neighbourhood do not especially care about their environment and that low-level deviance is tolerated. The theory influenced policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic and, most famously, in New York in the 1990s.  

Their response was  zero tolerance  policing where the criminal justice system took low-level crime and anti-social behaviour much more seriously than they had in the past.  This included "three strikes and you're out" policies where people could get serious custodial sentences for repeated minor offences, such as unsolicited windscreen cleaning, prostitution, drunk and disorderly behaviour, etc. 

The idea was that low-level crime should not be tolerated and severe penalties needed to be meted out for anti-social behaviour and minor incivilities in order to deter more serious crime and ensure that  collective conscience  and  social solidarity  is maintained by clear  boundary maintenance.

Evaluating Broken Windows Theory

• The impact of the policy in New York appeared to be dramatic with crime levels (including very serious crimes like murder) falling rapidly. There was a 40% drop in overall crime and over 50% in homicide. Fans of Broken Windows on the political right in America hailed this as a success, but there are two main criticisms.
• This policy coincided with a period of economic growth and a reduction in poverty.  Those who feel that social conditions are a stronger driver of crime than broken windows suggest that the crime rates in New York fell because the social conditions for people in New York significantly improved. As such it is possible that it was purely a coincidence that it happened at the same time as the implementation of broken windows. Just because there was a correlation does not mean that there was causality .
• Some accused Broken Windows of achieving control without justice. Yes, the crime rates fell, but people were in prison, sometimes serving long sentences, for very minor misdemeanours.  Furthermore, there was evidence showing that the policy impacted much more heavily on minority ethnic groups, particularly African Americans and Latin Americans, than on the majority white population.  While poor black people might be arrested for public drunkenness or jay-walking, white middle-class students celebrating the start of their freshman year by doing the same things are tolerated. Therefore, police discretion makes the implementation of broken windows unjust. Supporters of the theory, however, would counter that zero tolerance should mean zero tolerance and white students shouldn't get away with public drunkenness either.

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