James Q. Wilson Dies at 80 - Originated 'Broken Windows' Policing Strategy - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.
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The approach is psychologically based. It proceeds from the presumption, supported by research, that residents’ perceptions of the safety of their neighborhood is based not on whether there is a high rate of crime, but on whether the neighborhood appears to be well tended — that is, whether its residents hold it in mutual regard, uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility, and outwardly disdain the flouting of those obligations.
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acts of criminality are fostered by such an “untended” environment, and that the solution is thus to tend it by being intolerant of the smallest illegalities. The 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,” Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kelling wrote. “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.”
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when a window is broken and someone fixes it, that is a sign that disorder will not be tolerated. But “one unrepaired broken window,” they wrote, “is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”
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“The importance of what Wilson and Kelling wrote was the emphasis not only on crime committed against people but the emphasis on crimes committed against the community, neighborhoods,”
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“I know my political ideas affect what I write,” he acknowledged in a 1998 interview in The Times, “but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.”