Posted: April 24th, 2025

Summary

  You must submit a 2-3 page of the assigned journal article readings from this module. This is not the appropriate place to discuss whether or not you enjoyed the material but is instead a means to assess whether or not you understood the material well enough to briefly summarize it. In other words, do not make your own argument in the summary papers (, instead summarize the study or key arguments the author(s) is making. 

Journal Article Reading: 

Schuck, A. M., & Rabe-Hemp, C. (2019). Inequalities regimes in policing: Examining the connection between social exclusion and order maintenance strategies. Race and Justice, 9(3), 228–250.

• *Rogers, R., Blackwood, H. L., Fiduccia, C. E., Steadham, J. A., Drogin, E. Y., &Rogstad, J. E. (2012). Juvenile Miranda warnings perfunctory rituals or procedural safeguards? Criminal Justice and Behavior, 39(3), 229–249.

• Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29–38.

BROKEN WINDOWS

The police and neighborhood safety

By George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson

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,

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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 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

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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 rundown 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

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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 local attachments 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
is 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

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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 the 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 in municipal 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 l960s, when urban riots were a major problem, social scientists began to explore

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carefully the order maintenance 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 l960s 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-prevention, 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 from annoying 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 officer’s 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

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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 made 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.

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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.

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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

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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 neighborhood enter it, “we ask them their business,” he said.
“If they say they’re going down 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

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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 successful 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 officer—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).

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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.

And some of the comments posted below the article:

Cop • 2 years ago
This is, without a shadow of a doubt, the bible of policing policy.

zuul • 7 months ago
But now it is time to examine the interaction of broken windows policing, aggressive use of

Terry stops and frisks and a police commissioner who expects a certain number of arrests from
the cops patrolling the streets. Make no mistake, this is not community policing any more, this is
the cops trolling for “bad guys.” Unfortunately, the definition of a “bad guy” is anyone who can
be arrested for any reason based on a stop and frisk.

Varnarva • 7 months ago
Perhaps no one else has ruined civil liberties or the quality-of-life in our cities as much as this

clown has. The Atlantic should take full responsibility for that, too. And just look at the way the
police have responded to Occupy Wall Street — directly descended from The Atlantic article.

fabiusthedelayer • 7 months ago • parent
“Broken windows theory” has, as far as I know, nothing to do with spraying someone in
the face with mace at an Occupy Wall Street protest.

Also, the quality of life in cities that have embraced “broken windows theory,” NYC
being the prime example, has improved dramatically since the time this article came out.

Dragon • a month ago (Aug 2012)
…Thus, Giuliani’s “zero-tolerance” roll out was part of an interlocking

set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since
1985. Bratton had the police more strictly enforce the law against
subway fare evasion, public drinking, urination, and the “squeegee men”
who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment.
According to the 2001 study of crime trends in New York by George
Kelling and William Sousa,[3] rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and
significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years…

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B…

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Broken Windows

The police and neighborhood safety

By George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson