Pubdate: Fri, 09 Feb 2001
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education, The (US)
Copyright: 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
Contact:  1255 23rd Street, N.W., Suite 700, Washington, D.C. 20037
Fax: (202) 452-1033
Website: http://chronicle.com/
Author: D.W. Miller

POKING HOLES IN THE THEORY OF 'BROKEN WINDOWS'

If there were a Hall of Fame for influential public-policy ideas, then the 
"broken windows" thesis would probably have its own exhibit. In an Atlantic 
Monthly article by that name published in 1982, James Q. Wilson and George 
L. Kelling popularized the idea that neighborhoods that neglected minor 
signs of decay and disorder were opening the door to serious crime.

"One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares," they wrote, 
"and so breaking more windows costs nothing."

Nowhere has "broken windows" thinking been more conspicuous than in New 
York City, where the rates of serious crime have fallen spectacularly over 
the last 10 years. William Bratton, the former police chief, translated the 
thesis into "order maintenance" -- aggressive enforcement of laws against 
nuisance offenses -- and shared the credit with the authors of the Atlantic 
Monthly article.

Recently, however, the "broken windows" thesis has been challenged by 
scholars in sociology, criminology, and political science. Some researchers 
believe that empirical evidence for the connection between disorder and 
crime is weak and overblown. Others argue that New York City's success has 
been oversimplified and distorted. The city's amazing drop in crime, they 
say, reflects a complicated array of factors that are difficult to tease apart.

That complexity bedevils criminology in general. Scholars regard the 
nationwide decline in crime rates over the last decade as a grand puzzle, 
of which "broken windows" is only a part. Police departments have become 
remarkably creative laboratories for innovative tactics and policies, many 
of which go by the vague label "community policing." But to policymakers 
and citizens eager to know whether smart policing can prevail over the 
"root causes" of crime, social scientists have been forced to say: "We may 
never know."

The essence of "broken windows" is that neighborhood disorder -- physical 
decay, such as graffiti, litter, and dilapidation; and minor misconduct, 
such as public drinking and vagrancy -- will, if left unchecked, signal 
potential miscreants that no one is watching.

In the spring of 1990, that idea put on a uniform and hit the streets -- or 
more precisely, the subway platforms. Mr. Kelling, now a criminologist at 
Rutgers University  at Newark, was advising Mr. Bratton on the 
crime-disorder connection during his stint as chief of New York City's 
transit police. "We decided to apply this concept to crime in the subways," 
Mr. Bratton writes in his 1998 memoir, Turnaround: How America's Top Cop 
Reversed the Crime Epidemic (Random House). "Fare evasion was the biggest 
broken window in the transit system. We were going to fix that window and 
see that it didn't get broken again."

He stationed roving squads of plainclothes cops to catch turnstile jumpers. 
To his delight, he discovered that many were carrying illegal weapons or 
flouting arrest warrants. As arrests for such misdemeanors surged, subway 
crime of all kinds receded.

After Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani hired him as the city's police commissioner 
in 1993, Mr. Bratton began a "quality of life initiative" to crack down on 
panhandling, disorderly behavior, public drinking, street prostitution, and 
unsolicited windshield-washing by the city's notorious squeegee people. 
Combined with computerized tracking of crime hot spots and other innovative 
policies, "order maintenance" was credited with reducing felony crime by 27 
percent in its first two years.

Yet little empirical evidence has ever emerged for the idea that disorder, 
left unchecked, causes crime. Advocates of the disorder thesis could point 
to little more than research from the 1980's by Wesley G. Skogan, a 
political scientist at Northwestern University. As he reported in his book 
Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American 
Neighborhoods (University of California Press, 1990), Mr. Skogan analyzed 
earlier surveys of residents in 40 neighborhoods throughout a handful of 
large cities. He found that measures of social and physical decay 
correlated with certain kinds of serious crime.

In Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our 
Communities (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Mr. Kelling and a coauthor write that 
Mr. Skogan "established the causal links between disorder and serious 
crime." But Mr. Skogan had been more cautious. "With only 40 cases to 
untangle this web," he had written, "the high correlation between measures 
of victimization, ratings of crime problems, and disorder make it difficult 
to tell whether they have either separate 'causes' or separate 'effects.' ..."

In the 1990's, New York City led the nationwide decline in serious crime, 
and began touting "order maintenance." As big cities trumpeted their 
success with various kinds of community policing, Bernard E. Harcourt 
decided to give the "broken windows" thesis a second look.

A law professor at the University of Arizona with a Ph.D. in political 
science, Mr. Harcourt could not find any skeptical examination of the 
evidence. In a 1998 article in the Michigan Law Review, he concludes that 
Mr. Skogan's data don't hold up. The link between neighborhood disorder and 
purse-snatching, assault, rape, and burglary disappears when poverty, 
neighborhood stability, and race are factored out. Only the link to robbery 
remains statistically significant.

But even that result is suspect, writes Mr. Harcourt. Of the 40 
neighborhoods in Mr. Skogan's sample, the strongest link occurs in five 
contiguous neighborhoods in Newark. Without those, the link disappears 
completely. Furthermore, he wrote, the various surveys didn't ask exactly 
the same questions, so few of the calculations included data from all the 
neighborhoods.

What really seems to bother Mr. Harcourt, however, is not the proof but the 
principles of order maintenance. "'Broken Windows' is an essay about 
creating order," he says. "But when you look at the text, you see that the 
order is achieved in part through disorder." The 1982 article, he notes, 
approvingly quotes an unnamed officer as saying "we kick ass" -- that is, 
chase known gang members out of a housing project before the gang gets the 
upper hand.

And New York's "zero tolerance" for quality-of-life infractions, Mr. 
Harcourt says, has clogged up municipal courts and sapped judicial 
resources. He is expanding his critique for Illusion of Order: The False 
Promise of Broken Windows Policing, to be published by Harvard University 
Press in June.

When Ralph Taylor, a criminologist at Temple University, sought to connect 
neighborhood crime with what he calls "incivilities," his results were full 
of complications. In 1994-95, he measured crime and disorder in 30 
Baltimore neighborhoods and compared them with data from 1981-82. Some 
kinds of incivilities could be linked with crime or neighborhood decay, it 
turns out, while others could not. Increased numbers of assaults appeared 
to be connected with physical disorder, and more rapes with social disorder.

That inconsistency, he writes in Breaking Away from Broken Windows (just 
published by Westview Press), suggests that "incivilities may not reflect 
an underlying disorder, but rather a constellation of only loosely 
connected, somewhat separate problems that may each require somewhat unique 
policy responses."

"We have focused too much attention on too small a set of strategies," he 
says. "We've been saying, 'Let's reduce physical problems and let's roust 
disorderly and homeless people.'"

An ongoing study of crime, delinquency, and urban neighborhoods, led by 
Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, has also 
bolstered the critics of "broken windows." In the mid-1990's, Mr. Sampson's 
research team surveyed thousands of Chicago families with children, rated 
nearly 24,000 city blocks for physical and social disorder, and tried to 
correlate that information with five kinds of predatory crime. They found, 
Mr. Sampson wrote in the American Journal of Sociology in 1999, that 
disorder is only a "moderate correlate of predatory crime."

Once they accounted for other neighborhood characteristics thought to be 
associated with crime, such as poverty and instability, the connection with 
disorder disappeared for every category except robbery. They conclude that 
serious crime and disorder might both be symptoms of deeper social and 
economic disadvantages.

Although he is "hesitant to make causal claims," Mr. Sampson says, his data 
so far suggest that "concentration of disadvantage and high instability are 
associated with high rates of violence" in a given neighborhood. But that 
effect is moderated in neighborhoods in which residents trust one another 
more and take collective action to protect and improve their surroundings.

In Fixing Broken Windows, Mr. Kelling regards New York City as Exhibit A 
for the effectiveness of "order maintenance." He's not alone. Eli B. 
Silverman, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 
observed the New York Police Department's innovative tactics up close in 
the 1990's and praised them in NYPD Battles Crime: Innovative Strategies in 
Policing (Northeastern University Press, 1999). Rates of serious crime 
dropped earlier, faster, and farther in New York City than elsewhere, he 
concludes, due in part to order-maintenance strategies.

Yes, he's heard the rebuttals. Crime began to decline several years before 
Mr. Bratton's innovations -- but not, he says, at an annual rate in double 
digits. Violent crime declined just as drastically in San Diego, which 
never used Brattonesque policies, and almost as quickly in many other 
cities. But that's because police departments in all those places have 
gotten smarter.

"The real revolution has been in policing. Police departments are better at 
learning from each other than ever before," he says. "They all have in 
common one thing: more intelligent policing."

But Andrew Karmen, a sociologist at John Jay, thinks that's giving police 
tactics too much credit. "N.Y.P.D. or not N.Y.P.D.? That is the question," 
he writes in New York Murder Mystery: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash 
of the 1990's (New York University Press) just published in January.

In his view, the two-thirds drop in the number of homicides during the 
decade was due to many factors, including the end of murderous turf wars 
among crack dealers. And even the evidence for effective policing is 
riddled with caveats and exceptions. Crime rates in New York City peaked 
around 1990, before most significant innovations in policing. Crackdowns on 
gun possession generally cut the murder rate -- except when they don't, as 
New York discovered in the midst of the crack wars of the mid-1980's.

Mr. Wilson, the coauthor of the "Broken Windows" article and a political 
scientist now retired from the University of California at Los Angeles, 
does not claim that his thesis has been proved. He was unavailable for an 
interview with The Chronicle, but at last summer's meeting of the American 
Political Science Association, Mr. Wilson said, "It's only a theory." And 
he told The New York Times last year, "God knows what the truth is."

Mr. Kelling, however, has not been so reticent. "'Broken windows' remains a 
hypothesis which has a lot of support in the form of anecdotes and case 
studies," he says. "My evidence for this continues to be the constant, 
repeated contact I have with citizens and communities. I don't care where 
you go, citizens believe that there's this link ... that every time you 
start to restore order, crime goes down."

He is working on a historical study of policing strategies of all 76 New 
York City precincts. "If, as order maintenance goes up, crime goes down, 
and you get the same phenomenon in all 76 different precincts -- that's not 
scientific evidence, but it's awfully coincidental," he says. "People who 
don't think it has an impact will have to explain a whole lot of impacts."

The debate over "broken windows" is  more than just a dispute over the 
effectiveness of a particular policy. Skeptics like Mr. Harcourt see 
"broken windows" as a harmful, conservative philosophy masquerading as 
pragmatic and progressive public policy.

Because "order maintenance" seems less punitive than get-tough sentencing 
and incarceration policies, says Mr. Harcourt, it appeals to more-moderate 
and liberal voters. Furthermore, he adds, the "disorder" thesis implies 
that fixing surface symptoms of decay can replace a deeper, liberal concern 
about "root causes" of crime -- such as poverty, discrimination, and a lack 
of economic opportunities in the inner cities.

Such ideological conflicts explain why critics like Mr. Sampson assess the 
drawbacks of "zero tolerance," Mr. Kelling says, as if the "broken windows" 
thesis were all about rigid and draconian enforcement. Mr. Kelling suggests 
his detractors reread his 1982 article. There is nothing in it, he says, 
about "zero tolerance" of minor infractions. Rather, it reads: "The essence 
of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal 
control mechanisms of the community itself." That means collaborating with 
civilians and training cops in the exercise of discretion.

The debate over "broken windows" is just one part of a larger dispute over 
the lessons of the 1990's. The dramatic decline in crime offers scholars a 
unique opportunity to test different theories about why crime rates rise 
and fall.

One way of interpreting the evidence of the 1990's, say scholars, is the 
reverse of Murphy's Law: Virtually everything that could go right, did. 
Turf wars in the crack trade died down. The number of young males between 
the ages of 18 and 24 -- the crime-prone years -- shrank. Unbroken economic 
growth provided disadvantaged young people with attractive alternatives to 
crime. In addition, scholars credit public policies, such as those that led 
to higher rates of incarceration.

The uncertainty that surrounds the New York story is typical of 
criminology. In The Crime Drop in America, an edited volume published last 
October by Cambridge University Press, John E. Eck and Edward R. Maguire 
survey the evidence behind a plethora of policing reforms, including 
"problem-oriented policing," "zero tolerance," and aggressive efforts to 
get illegal handguns off the streets.

Based on available evidence, Mr. Eck and Mr. Maguire, associate professors 
of criminology at the University of Cincinnati and George Mason University, 
respectively, could draw firm conclusions about none of them.

We may never know for sure how policing affects crime.  True experiments 
require control groups and random samples for reforms introduced one at a 
time. That, in turn, rests on finding officials and citizens willing to 
tolerate differential treatment for the sake of discovery. That's so rare 
that textbooks and scholars today still cite a 30-year-old experiment as 
the standard for research on policing tactics.

In the early 1970's, as a young criminologist, Mr. Kelling persuaded the 
police department of Kansas City to let him test the effect of 
drive-through police patrols on neighborhood crime. The department 
increased patrols in five randomly chosen neighborhoods, reduced them in 
five others, and made no changes in a third group, as a control.

The results were both valuable and surprising: Increasing patrols made no 
difference to crime rates.

Even criminologists' best efforts, however, cannot replicate the 
laboratory. Scholars have challenged the Kansas City study, on the grounds 
that the results from the control areas might have been tainted by patrol 
cars passing through en route to other neighborhoods. And a sample of 15 
neighborhoods, Mr. Kelling admits, isn't a lot on which to base conclusions.

Nowadays, say scholars, police officials are more open than ever to 
cooperating with scholars. But innovations in policing are driven by the 
needs and hopes of politicians and police officials, who adopt and modify 
and discard tactics all the time. That is no way to run an experiment.

John Jay's Mr. Karmen believes that firmer conclusions about how much 
policing matters are within reach. The answers, he says, lie in municipal 
filing cabinets and on hard drives, where police departments keep data on 
urban crime patterns that they have not been eager to make public.

Others are less optimistic. The precipitous drop in crime offered a prime 
opportunity to set up experiments like Mr. Sampson's, conduct surveys, and 
observe policing up close. Now that recent statistics suggest that trend is 
slowing, scholars wonder whether they have missed the chance of a lifetime. 
"We'll be having this debate for the next 15 years," says Mr. Kelling.
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