What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

The broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime in urban areas lead to further crime. The theory is often associated with the 2000 case of Illinois v. Wardlow, in which the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that the police, based on the legal doctrine of probable cause, have the authority to detain and physically search, or “stop-and-frisk,” people in crime-prone neighborhoods who appear to be behaving suspiciously.

Key Takeaways: Broken Windows Theory

• The broken windows theory of criminology holds that visible signs of crime in densely-populated, lower-income urban areas will encourage additional criminal activity.
• Broken windows neighborhood policing tactics employ heightened enforcement of relatively minor “quality of life” crimes like loitering, public drinking, and graffiti.
• The theory has been criticized for encouraging discriminatory police practices, such as unequal enforcement based on racial profiling.

Broken Windows Theory Definition

In the field of criminology, the broken windows theory holds that lingering visible evidence of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil unrest in densely populated urban areas suggests a lack of active local law enforcement and encourages people to commit further, even more serious crimes.

The theory was first suggested in 1982 by social scientist, George L. Kelling in his article, “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety” published in The Atlantic. Kelling explained the theory as follows:

“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

“Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”

Kelling based his theory on the results of an experiment conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1969. In his experiment, Zimbardo parked an apparently disabled and abandoned car in a low-income area of the Bronx, New York City, and a similar car in an affluent Palo Alto, California neighborhood. Within 24 hours, everything of value had been stolen from the car in the Bronx. Within a few days, vandals had smashed the car’s windows and ripped out the upholstery. At the same time, the car abandoned in Palo Alto remained untouched for over a week, until Zimbardo himself smashed it with a sledgehammer. Soon, other people Zimbardo described as mostly well dressed, “clean-cut” Caucasians joined in the vandalism. Zimbardo concluded that in high-crime areas like the Bronx, where such abandoned property is commonplace, vandalism and theft occur far faster as the community takes such acts for granted. However, similar crimes can occur in any community when the people’s mutual regard for proper civil behavior is lowered by actions that suggest a general lack of concern.

Kelling concluded that by selectively targeting minor crimes like vandalism, public intoxication, and loitering, police can establish an atmosphere of civil order and lawfulness, thus helping to prevent more serious crimes.

Broken Windows Policing

In1993, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton cited Kelling and his broken windows theory as a basis for implementing a new “tough-stance” policy aggressively addressing relatively minor crimes seen as negatively affecting the quality of life in the inner-city.

Bratton directed NYPD to step up enforcement of laws against crimes like public drinking, public urination, and graffiti. He also cracked down on so-called “squeegee men,” vagrants who aggressively demand payment at traffic stops for unsolicited car window washings. Reviving a Prohibition-era city ban on dancing in unlicensed establishments, police controversially shuttered many of the city’s night clubs with records of public disturbances.

While studies of New York’s crime statistics conducted between 2001 and 2017 suggested that enforcement policies based on the broken windows theory were effective in reducing rates of both minor and serious crimes, other factors may have also contributed to the result. For example, New York’s crime decrease may have simply been part of a nationwide trend that saw other major cities with different policing practices experience similar decreases over the period. In addition, New York City’s 39% drop in the unemployment rate could have contributed to the reduction in crime.

In 2005, police in the Boston suburb of Lowell, Massachusetts, identified 34 “crime hot spots” fitting the broken windows theory profile. In 17 of the spots, police made more misdemeanor arrests, while other city authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, and enforced building codes. In the other 17 spots, no changes in routine procedures were made. While the areas given special attention saw a 20% reduction in police calls, a study of the experiment concluded that simply cleaning up the physical environment had been more effective than an increase in misdemeanor arrests.

Today, however, five major U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Denver—all acknowledge employing at least some neighborhood policing tactics based on Kelling’s broken windows theory. In all of these cities, police stress aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws.

Critics

Despite its popularity in major cities, police policy based on the broken windows theory is not without its critics, who question both its effectiveness and fairness of application.

In 2005, University of Chicago Law School professor Bernard Harcourt published a study finding no evidence that broken windows policing actually reduces crime. “We don’t deny that the ‘broken windows’ idea seems compelling,” wrote Harcourt. “The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work as claimed in practice.”

Specifically, Harcourt contended that crime data from New York City’s 1990s application of broken windows policing had been misinterpreted. Though the NYPD had realized greatly reduced crime rates in the broken windows enforcement areas, the same areas had also been the areas worst affected by the crack-cocaine epidemic that caused citywide homicide rates to soar. “Everywhere crime skyrocketed as a result of crack, there were eventual declines once the crack epidemic ebbed,” Harcourt note. “This is true for police precincts in New York and for cities across the country.” In short, Harcourt contended that New York’s declines in crime during the 1990s were both predictable and would have happened with or without broken windows policing.

Harcourt concluded that for most cities, the costs of broken windows policing outweigh the benefits. “In our opinion, focusing on minor misdemeanors is a diversion of valuable police funding and time from what really seems to help—targeted police patrols against violence, gang activity and gun crimes in the highest-crime ‘hot spots.’”

Broken windows policing has also been criticized for its potential to encourage unequal, potentially discriminatory enforcement practices such as racial profiling, too often with disastrous results.

Arising from objections to practices like “Stop-and-Frisk,” critics point to the case of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man killed by a New York City police officer in 2014. After observing Garner standing on a street corner in a high-crime area of Staten Island, police suspected him of selling “loosies,” untaxed cigarettes. When, according to the police report, Garner resisted arrest, an officer took him to the ground in a chock hold. An hour later, Garner died in the hospital of what the coroner determined to be homicide resulting from, “Compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” After a grand jury failed to indict the officer involved, anti-police protests broke out in several cities.

Since then, and due to the deaths of other unarmed Black men accused of minor crimes predominantly by white police officers, more sociologists and criminologists have questioned the effects of broken windows theory policing. Critics argue that it is racially discriminatory, as police statistically tend to view, and thus, target, non-whites as suspects in low-income, high-crime areas.

According to Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, established historic evidence shows that persons of color are more likely than whites to be detained, questioned, searched, and arrested by police. Larkin suggests that this happens more often in areas chosen for broken windows-based policing due to a combination of: the individual’s race, police officers being tempted to stop minority suspects because they statistically appear to commit more crimes, and the tacit approval of those practices by police officials.

The Economist explains
What “broken windows” policing is

Cracking down on minor crimes is thought to prevent major ones. Does it?

IN JULY 2014 an unarmed black man named Eric Garner died at the hands of a police officer after allegedly resisting arrest. Garner’s presumed crime was selling “loosies”, or untaxed cigarettes, on a street corner in Staten Island. His death, along with that of other unarmed black men accused of petty offences by white police officers, has raised questions about police tactics. Some say the problem is “broken windows” policing, an approach to law enforcement based on the theory that cracking down on minor crimes helps to prevent major ones. Critics argue that the effect is discriminatory, as police statistically tend to target non-whites. Defenders such as Bill Bratton (pictured), the head of the New York Police Department (NYPD), and George Kelling, the architect of the original theory, champion the theory as the reason why crime is plummeting in so many cities. So what exactly is “broken windows” policing, and does it really explain the drop in crime?

The term “broken windows” refers to an observation made in the early 1980s by Mr Kelling, a criminologist, and James Wilson, a social scientist, that when a building window is broken and left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken too. An unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, they argued, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. More profoundly, they found that in environments where disorderly behaviour goes unchecked—where prostitutes visibly ply their trade or beggars accost passers-by—more serious street crime flourishes. This theory is supported by a number of randomised experiments. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, for example, found that people were twice as likely to steal an envelope filled with money if it was sticking out of a mailbox covered in graffiti. What this means for law enforcement, Messrs Kelling and Wilson prescribed, is that when police officers keep streets orderly, and punish even small signs of misbehaviour with a warning or an arrest, people will behave in a more orderly way.

When the “broken windows” theory was first published, urban crime was a seemingly uncontainable problem in America and around the world. But in the past two decades crime has fallen at an extraordinary rate. This change has been especially profound in New York City, where the murder rate dropped from 26.5 per 100,000 people in 1993 to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2013—lower than the national average. Plenty of theories have been concocted to explain this drop, but the city’s decision to take minor crimes seriously certainly played a part. While Mr Bratton was head of New York’s transit police in 1990, he ordered his officers to arrest as many turnstile-jumpers as possible. They found that one in seven arrested was wanted for other crimes, and that one in 20 carried a knife, gun or other weapon. Within a year, subway crime had fallen by 30%. In 1994 Rudy Giuliani, who had been elected New York’s mayor after promising to clean up the city’s streets, appointed Mr Bratton as head of the NYPD. Scaling up the lessons from the subway, Mr Bratton found that cracking down on misdemeanour offences, such as illegal gun possession, reduced opportunities for crime. In four years, the city saw about two fewer shootings per day.

“Broken windows”-style policing has arguably helped to reduce crime. But other factors have also helped. Many police departments, particularly in big cities, have got better at using data to locate criminal hot-spots and target resources more effectively. The sharp decline in crime also coincided with the end of the crack-cocaine epidemic, improved security technology (it has never been harder to steal a car) and a reduction in the amount of lead in the atmosphere, which some studies show may reduce impulsive behaviour. Yet “broken windows”-style policing has also drawn serious criticism, with some saying it increases friction between police and citizens, particularly in poor and minority areas. Such neighbourhoods tend to receive a disproportionate amount of police attention, in part because they experience more crime: though blacks and Hispanics made up 53% of New York city’s population in 2013, they were 83% of its murder victims. But there are also signs of racial discrimination. Evidence that drug arrests imposed disproportionate costs on poor and minority residents, for example, encouraged the NYPD to relax its marijuana policy in November. But for all the complaints about uneven enforcement and racial prejudice, a majority of New Yorkers—both black and white—still say they want their broken windows fixed.

Broken Windows Works

Broken Windows Works

Broken Windows policing receives credit—rightly—for being part of the crime turnaround that saved New York and other cities. The theory, originating with George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, argued that tolerating too much local disorder created a climate in which criminal behavior, including serious crimes, would become more likely, since criminals would sense that public norms and vigilance were weak. In practice, this meant that police should crack down on so-called low-level offenses. When the NYPD started doing this during the 1990s, aided by the Compstat crime-mapping and accountability system, it became clear that the low-level offenders were also often wanted for more serious felonies. In short, there was a continuity of bad behavior, just as Broken Windows suggested, and order-maintenance policing, as the Broken Windows approach is also called, reduced disorder and led to the apprehension of many serious criminals, helping reinvigorate formerly-troubled neighborhoods. The last quarter-century in New York offers a powerful case for the theory’s accuracy.

Now, a professor says that Broken Windows theory is bunk. Writing in the New York Daily News, Northeastern University professor Dan O’Brien, who conducted a series of studies along with several colleagues, insists that Broken Windows “is inaccurate and that we as a nation need to move away from the policing strategies that it inspired.” O’Brien, et al. found a small but significant association suggesting that areas with greater social disorder had greater crime—but, they concluded, once other control variables were considered, that association became insignificant. Thus, the foundation on which Broken Windows is built “doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

Like too much scholarly work in academic criminology, however, the new study offers more sophistry than sense. The scholars’ meta-analysis—that is, a study of a collection of studies—purports to disprove Broken Windows, but in fact more often simply restates its core principles. Though “disorder might not elicit crime,” the authors claim, they agree that “there are certain types of disorder that can create ecological advantages for criminal activity.” The creation of such environments is exactly how Kelling and Wilson described the process of neighborhood disorder—absent community control—leading to the promotion of antisocial behavior. “Disorder does not encourage crime,” O’Brien and his coauthors go on, “but makes it easier to commit crimes.” This, too, merely paraphrases Kelling and Wilson, who wrote in 1982 of the “folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.”

Elsewhere, O’Brien, et al. use narrower definitions of key Broken Windows concepts to attempt to discredit its conclusions. They radically understate the concept of urban disorder, for example, by describing it as “the presence of litter or graffiti.” They dismiss the idea that trash on the ground “could inspire people to commit acts that they have never even considered,” but the notion of disorder that Broken Windows described was about much more than just litter or graffiti. When Wilson and Kelling’s Atlantic article appeared in 1982, New York and many large American cities were in crisis. Disorder wasn’t benign; residents were plagued by more than dirty streets and defaced walls: abandoned buildings, stripped automobiles, flagrant prostitution, open-air drug use and drug-dealing, vacant lots strewn with junk, and much more. Transients, serial criminals, and gang members controlled entire parcels of the city, including parks and subway stations. Many commentators saw disorder and crime as intractable problems that had be tolerated; there was no way to fix them. Cities’ abdication of their responsibility for civility and public safety signaled to everyone, including potential wrongdoers, that no one was in charge.

But Broken Windows, and the proactive, assertive policing strategies that it empowered, changed the narrative. Critics allege that the theory is anecdotal and lacking scientific basis, but part of its basic logic is thoroughly empirical. Criminals are generally versatile in their offending and thus commit transgressions of all sorts. Arresting people who commit low-level offenses like vandalism, fare evasion, prostitution, and public drug use not only reduces those problem behaviors but also, as New York discovered, turns up fugitives with outstanding felony warrants, who are carrying firearms and other contraband, and who may be suspects in more serious crimes—including murder, sexual assault, and armed robbery. Many of today’s successful criminal-justice programs and interventions, including the Department of Justice’s Operation Weed and Seed program, incorporate Broken Windows thinking.

With the advent of Broken Windows and other policing reforms in 1994, New York experienced the largest homicide declines in its history. The city transformed from an increasingly dystopian wasteland to America’s City. So why are so many criminologists declaring that Broken Windows doesn’t work, and why are advocates and the media trumpeting methodologically weak findings? The answer: they’re ideologically opposed to the proactive policing that Broken Windows fosters, because it draws sharp moral lines and is unafraid to make judgments about environments and behaviors.

My colleague John Wright and I have shown that some theories in criminology are embraced and lauded if they’re liberal in approach, while others are shunned or pilloried, if they have conservative overtones. In academia, a conceptual framework that contributed to record-setting declines in homicides, gun assaults, armed robberies, rapes, and public-order crimes—making cities safer and more prosperous—is considered conservative, and thus, wrong. But in the real world, the positive impact of Broken Windows has been profound. No amount of shifting or narrowing definitions can undo its lessons.

Matt DeLisi is Coordinator of Criminal Justice Studies, Dean’s Professor in the Department of Sociology, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.