Broken windows reconsidered

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Eli Lehrer

THE 1990s marked the greatest period of crime reduction in American history: Grime rates declined in 47 out of 50 states and in about 190 of the biggest 220 cities. In the popular press much credit for this turn of events has gone to a policing strategy known as "broken windows." Broken windows is a new name for the old idea that police must fight not only overt criminal acts such as murder, robbery, and rape but also disorderly actions such as drinking, graffiti scrawling, and aggressive panhandling. Advocates of the broken-windows approach argue that high levels of disorder create an environment in which criminals, noticing that authorities fail to respond to smaller crimes, assume that more serious crimes will go unpunished as well.

Two recent books, Ralph B. Taylor's Breaking Away from Broken Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the Nationwide Fight Against Crime, Grime, Fear and Decline and Bernard E. Harcourt's Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, contend that enthusiasm for the broken-windows strategy has gone too far. On the basis of extensive field research, Taylor finds only partial support for the broken-windows theory. Harcourt, writing from a more ideological perspective, paints the broken-windows approach as a repressive plot to "punish and exclude" those who violate supposedly arbitrary social norms.

Taylor, a professor at Temple University, presents a rigorous, quantitative look at what he calls the "incivilities thesis" of neighborhood decline. The thesis he examines takes the common version of the broken-windows theory a step further, proposing that obvious signs of neighborhood deterioration like litter, graffiti, and vacant housing will cause more crime and accelerate the decline of neighborhoods by decreasing property values, resident incomes, and residential stability. While some academic work on broken windows supports this thesis, police departments have generally implemented broken-windows patrol strategies on the basis of more modest goals of crime prevention.

Relying on block-by-block field studies conducted in Baltimore in 1980 and 1994 and analysis of data collected elsewhere, Taylor finds that high levels of incivilities do indeed accelerate neighborhood decline, but no more so than other factors such as high poverty rates and high initial crime rates. Thus he argues that cities ought to "break away from broken windows per se and widen the models upon which they rely, both to predict and to preserve safe and stable neighborhoods with assured and committed residents."

THIS is a fair conclusion, but not a very bold one, at least when it comes to police practice. Though some popular accounts (most prominently Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point) have painted the broken-windows strategy as the principal reason for the decline in New York City's crime rates, fighting disorder has in fact played only a modest role in the vast improvements in American policing. In the course of researching a book on America's police departments in the 1990s, I visited over 35 agencies in cities large and small. Only one, a sleepy California suburb, saw the containment of disorder as the center of its policing strategy.

When it comes to the indicators Taylor focuses on-for example, owner occupancy of housing and home values-it is no surprise that containing disorder does not always have a significant effect. As James Q. Wilson, one of the originators of the broken-windows theory, once said, broken-windows policing is only "one part of a broader effort." Taylor himself concludes that police strategies aimed at strengthening neighborhood organizations and community-based governance might do more to promote change than simply cracking down on disorder.

While Taylor begins his book with visits to police departments in two cities that have implemented broken-windows strategies, and periodically revisits questions of police strategy, he writes mainly about neighborhood life. In Baltimore, Taylor makes a solid case for using broken windows as only one component of a broad social and economic effort to heal wounded neighborhoods and stabilize those in decline.

It is not clear, however, that Taylor's thesis applies across the country. His selection of Baltimore to support an argument about the economic fates of neighborhoods may prove flawed. During the 1990s, Baltimore lost almost 85,000 people, the largest total population loss of any American city and the largest percentage decline in any of the nation's 25 largest cities. Nearly every social indicator in Baltimore moved in the wrong direction, even as cities ranging from Chicago to Providence, Rhode Island, were reversing decades of decline in population and vitality. In fairness to Taylor, his data from other cities largely confirms his Baltimore findings and, in any case, the relative severity of Baltimore's decline did not become apparent until last year, when the Census Bureau released its year 2000 population survey. But if the Baltimore case demonstrates the limits of the broken-windows approach, it may miss the potential of this strategy for less depressed cities.