Broken Windows theory

The Broken Windows theory was first published in an Atlantic Monthly article in 1982 and talked about in the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell where I read about it. It was written by James Q. Wilson, a political scientist at Harvard, and George L. Kelling, a criminologist.  This theory suggests crime is the inevitable result of disorder.  If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people will conclude that no one cares.  Soon more windows will be broken and the disorder will spread to the street.

In the mid-1980s, Kelling was hired by the NY Transit Authority as a consultant, and he urged them to put the Broken Windows theory into practice.  They agreed, and hired David Gunn to oversee a multibillion-dollar rebuilding of the subway system.  Many people thought that Gunn should not worry about the graffiti. "Worrying about graffiti at a time when the entire system was close to collapse seems as pointless as scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the icebergs."

But Gunn didn't listen.  The cars on the subway were reclaimed one at a time.  Graffiti was either painted over or cleaned with solvent as soon as possible.  "Dirty" cars with graffiti still on them were never to be mixed with "clean" cars.  The idea was to send a strong message to the vandals.

The cleanup took from 1984 to 1990.  At that point, the Transit Authority hired William Bratton to head the transit police, and the second part of the reclamation of the subway began.  Bratton believed in the Broken Windows theory.  His first step as police chief seemed impractical.  With felonies on the subway system at an all-time high, Bratton decided to crack down on fare-beaters.  He believed they were like the graffiti, inviting bigger crimes.  Up until this time, the transit police didn't feel that fighting over a $1.25 fare was worth it, especially when more serious crimes were happening on the platform and on the trains.

Bratton picked stations where fare-beating was the biggest problem, and put as many as ten policemen in plain clothes at the turnstiles.  The team would nab fare-beaters one-by-one, handcuff them, and leave them standing on the platform until they had a "full catch."  The idea was to signal, as publicly as possible, that the police were serious on cracking down.  Checks were run on all those arrested.  One of seven had outstanding warrants for previous crimes, and one in twenty was carrying a weapon of some sort.  Bratton writes, "For the cops it was a bonanza.  Every arrest was like opening a box of Cracker Jack. Got a gun? Got a knife? Got a warrant? Do we have a murderer here? After a while the bad guys wised up and began to leave their weapons home and pay their fares."

In 1994 Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor and appointed Bratton to the NYC Police Department.  He applied the same strategies to the city at large.  His officers cracked down on quality-of-life crimes: on the "squeegee men" who came up to drivers at NYC intersections and demanded money for washing car windows, on public drunkenness, on public urination, and on relatively minor damage to property.  When crime began to fall in the city - as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways - Bratton and Giuliani pointed to the same cause.  Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were tipping points for violent crimes.

Now you have heard something interesting.