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The police and neighborhood safety
BROKEN WINDOWS
by JAMES Q. WILSON AND GEORGE L. KELLING
James Q. Wilson is Shattuck Professor of Government at
Harvard and author of
Thinking About Crime. George L. Kelling, formerly director of the evaluation
field staff of the Police foundation, is currently a research fellow at the John
F
Kennedy School of Government Harvard.
(Broken
Windows Theory - printable copy)
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 or forget 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 run- own 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 localattachments 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' 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 he 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 into municipal police 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 1960s, when urban riots were a major problem, social
scientists began to explore carefully the order- aintenance 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 1960s 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- revention, so obvious to earlier generations, was
forgotten.
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 fromannoying 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 officers 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 make 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
neighbors hood enter it, "we ask them their business," he said. "If they say
they're going clown 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 success 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 office -- 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.
Copyright 1982 by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.
All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; March 1982; Broken Windows; Volume 249, No. 3; pages
29-38.
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