‘Broken Windows’ a Smashing Success

‘Broken Windows’ a Smashing Success
By Bernard Kerik

Policy that cracked down on petty vandalism led to huge reductions in more serious crimes.

Ask cops on the beat and they’ll tell you keeping the peace on the streets isn’t rocket science.

In fact, criminologist George L. Kelling mapped out what it takes over four decades ago.

Kelling and fellow professor James Q. Wilson, writing in a 1982 article in Atlantic magazine, argued that authorities were too slow to address petty vandalism and “non-violent” crimes. Those infractions might seem minor, Kelling wrote, but they disrupted community life and set the stage for the more serious crimes.

“Just one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares,” they wrote. And with that, the “Broken Windows” theory of policing was born.

Kelling’s field studies in Newark, N.J., and Kansas City, Mo., rebuffed the progressive-liberal notion that “minor,” and “victimless” crime that  supposedly hurts no one - drug dealing, illegal gambling, vagrancy, and prostitution could simply be ignored.

Kelling argued such selective law enforcement drove law-abiding citizens from public spaces like parks, street corners, and gathering places, and handed them over to those engaged in begging, graffiti, vandalism, jaywalking, fare evading, and public drunkenness.

And from there the criminal elements only got worse setting off a downward spiral of chaos and disorder.

New York City leaders, desperate to take back their streets, decided to give the broken windows theory a try.

A 1984-1989 experiment by the New York Mass Transit Authority reduced New York subway crime by eliminating subway car graffiti.

Next, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly put an end to the intimidating phenomenon “squeegee men” who panhandled by intrusively cleaning the windshields of cars stopped at traffic lights. The squeegee crackdown escalated when newly elected Mayor Rudy Giuliani took over in 1994.

Under Giuliani, Police Commissioner William Bratton unleashed Broken Windows policing across New York, cracking down on aggressive begging, prostitution, and even subway turnstile jumping - forms of vice that have all made a comeback in Gotham in recent years, along with violent crime.

Broken Windows went on to inform policing strategies from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between. It has also gave rise to a whole genre of spinoff and ancillary theories - all of them imbued with the idea that focusing on low-level disorder reduced more serious crime.

Bratton would later remark that Kelling’s “Broken Windows” concept had “the most profound influence on American policing in the last 40 to 50 years.” - B.K.