AUDASE

Author of ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Defends His Theory

By SAM ROBERTS NY TIMES 

In 1982, after another year of record lawlessness in New York City, two college professors advanced — or, more accurately, rekindled — a plausibly uncomplicated theory that would revolutionize law enforcement in the city: Maintaining public order also helps prevent crime.

"If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken," Professors George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote in The Atlantic.

Today, controversy over their metaphorical "broken windows" theory is reverberating again after Eric Garner, a Staten Island man, died of a chokehold last month while being taken into custody for illegally selling cigarettes.

Critics denounce the theory as neoconservative pablum resulting in overpolicing and mass incarceration for relatively minor offenses that disproportionately target poor, black and Hispanic people. Moreover, they say it was not derived from scientific evidence and its connection to the city’s drastic decline in major crime remains unproven.

Professor Wilson, who taught at Harvard and at the University of California at Los Angeles, died in 2012. His co-author, Professor Kelling, a 78-year-old former seminarian and probation officer, retired from Rutgers but remains a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research institute. He argues that their theory, as applied by Police Commissioners William J. Bratton and Raymond W. Kelly, and plunging crime rates are inextricably linked. He is now concerned, though, that the critics may hold sway.

"I worry about a turnabout, but it doesn’t have to do with Bill de Blasio," Professor Kelling said, referring to the mayor. "He has been a consistent supporter of the maintenance of order. He knows that order and crime rates are volatile issues socially and politically, but he comes under a lot of pressure from small groups that I would consider pretty radical."

But Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, said that enlisting officers to pursue minor offenses is "too expensive and undermines public confidence in the police."

Steve Zeidman, director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at City University School of Law, said: "While broken windows doesn’t lead inexorably to a homicide like Eric Garner’s, the more you turn loose 35,000 officers with the mandate to restore order, the more you increase the chances for something to go horribly wrong.

"Can someone argue that ‘restoration of order’ is at least partially responsible for the drop in reported crime?" Professor Zeidman said. "Sure, but the police commissioner acts like it is a causal relationship that has been proven and is irrefutable."

In the 1982 article, which drew on writings by the urbanologists Jane Jacobs and Nathan Glazer, Professors Kelling and Wilson acknowledged that shifting police officers from patrol cars to foot patrol in Newark during the mid-1970s had not reduced recorded crime. But they concluded that the strategy had made neighborhoods safer and vastly improved relations between the police and the community.

"It started as an observation, but since then there’s been science," Professor Kelling said in an interview, citing studies by criminologists in the Netherlands and Lowell, Mass. "The burden’s on the other side to say there is no link between disorderly conditions and serious crime."

The theory also has been buttressed by one incidental measure. According to the Census Bureau’s latest American Housing Survey, the number of broken windows in the millions of homes and apartments in the New York metropolitan area plunged during the last decade.

"Taking care of broken windows reduces crime; taking care of crime reduces broken windows," said Professor Kelling, who is now a consultant to the city’s Police Department.

He and his co-author were initially motivated by questions about the efficacy of routine policing: Could a culmination of individual offenses turn an entire community into a victim? Which threats to public order are priorities, and which are best dealt with by arrests?

"I’ve never been long on arrests as an outcome," Professor Kelling said.

But when Commissioner Bratton and the Transit Police concluded in the 1990s that arrests were the best way to end fare beating, he recalled, "We parked buses to book fare beaters on the spot and make the process as painless as possible."

Similarly, a clear warning followed by aggressive enforcement eliminated the squeegee menace in a matter of weeks, he recalled.

Referring to Mr. Garner’s death, Professor Kelling suggested that City Hall had to decide neighborhood by neighborhood if selling untaxed cigarettes was a compelling quality-of-life issue and, if so, whether arrest was the correct response.

"It seems to me that it depends," he said. "Is it serious enough to pass a law against? Is selling loosies disruptive to a community? What are the consequences for local businesses?"

The same goes for subway acrobats or homeless people who do not pose any imminent danger. "Social workers should accompany the cops," he said. "We shouldn’t be using our jails as mental hospitals or drug rehabilitation sites."

Stopping and frisking was "overused" during the previous administration, Professor Kelling said, a police tactic predicated on suspicion, in contrast to broken windows, which responds to minor offenses, and zero tolerance, which he described as "zealotry and no discretion — the opposite of what I tried to preach."

Restraint is also called for when teenagers merely look threatening but are not acting suspiciously or do not appear to be armed, he said, adding: "We don’t want to lose the genius of New York that is its diversity."

While he was aware of how loitering laws were used to contain and exploit blacks in the South, he said it was only logical that with black and Hispanic New Yorkers suffering the highest rates of victimization and fear of crime, targeting high-crime areas would produce a disproportionate share of black and Hispanic arrests.

"It’s not the police’s fault," he said. "It’s not whites that are terrorizing those neighborhoods; it’s African Americans."

And broken-windows policing produces another benefit beyond reducing crime, Professor Kelling added: "In an urbanized society, in a world of strangers, civility and orderliness is an end in itself."