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.

Windows 10 Search Not Working? Try These Fixes

Troubleshooting tips to get you back on track

The search tool in Windows 10 has, with different feature updates of the operating system, both increased and decreased its integration with both Cortana and with File Explorer. These often-shifting changes to how search works leads to glitches—some of which present an easy fix.

These instructions apply to all versions of Windows 10.

Causes of Windows 10 Search Problems

When Windows search isn’t working, it’s almost always a simple software problem. The system may just need a restart to get it working again. Other possible causes could be network-related or the search system itself having a service interruption.

How to Fix Windows 10 Search Problems

You’ll use a lot of the same methods to fix problems with search as other minor errors. Here are some options to try and get the system back to work.

Check your network connectivity. If you aren’t connected to the internet, Windows 10 search won’t work. Before you try anything more serious, make sure your network is functioning properly.

Restart your device. It’s basic advice, but there’s a reason it’s the first port of call for most Windows errors—reboots often work wonders. If you haven’t tried restarting your device, do so now, as a simple reboot of the system flushes memory and disk-cache glitches that adversely affect system performance. It’s better to perform a restart than shut down too, as shutdowns occasionally send your Windows 10 PC into hibernation mode.

Turn Cortana off and on again. Since Cortana is so entwined with Windows 10’s search function, turning it off and on again sometimes corrects Windows 10’s file-search problems.

Run Windows Troubleshooter. Microsoft’s Windows troubleshooter may not be able to fix every problem it comes across, but it can often send you in the right direction to learn more or at least pinpoint what the actual problem might be. The same goes for problems with the Windows 10 search bar not working.

Open the troubleshooter by opening the Start menu and going to Settings > Update and Security > Troubleshoot > Search and Indexing. Click the Run the troubleshooter button to go through the diagnostics.

Verify the Search service is running. It’s possible the Windows Search service itself has been disabled for some reason.

Press Win+R to open the Run window, then type “Services.msc” and press Enter.

When the Services window appears, scroll down the list of services to find Windows Search. If it’s already running, right-click it or tap and hold, then select Restart. Alternatively, if it’s disabled or has a blank Status, right-click or tap and hold, then select Start.

Rebuild the Windows 10 search indexing options. It may be that Windows 10 has forgotten where certain files and folders are. To help it remember, rebuild its indexing options. Start by accessing the Control Panel in Windows 10.

Select Indexing Options from the main menu icons, and then click Advanced. In the Advanced options, Click Rebuild.

The rebuilding process may take a short time to complete depending on the size of your drive and how full it is.

If none of the above tips helped get your Windows 10 search bar working again, try some more advanced Cortana help tips or opt for a full Windows reset.

Tropics of Meta

Political scientist James Q. Wilson died last week at the age of 80. The Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, Wilson was friend to politicians like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and a contributor to journals such as Public Interest, which promoted the notion that well-intentioned policies often have “unintended consequences.” This idea was popular among conservatives and ex-liberals, who had grown skeptical when the once dominant philosophy of liberalism floundered in the face of inflation, crime and joblessness in the 1970s and 1980s.

The idea for which Wilson is most famous, of course, is the “broken windows theory.” It proposes that policing minor infractions can generate big gains in public safety; when people see their fellow citizens jump a subway turnstile or smoke marijuana on a city street, it contributes to a general atmosphere of lawlessness. This is the spirit of “going down the tubes” and “there goes the neighborhood.” One broken window will lead to a lot more.

Wilson presented his theory in an essay written with George Kelling in 1982. It came at the dawn of the horrible decade that stretched from the recession of the early Eighties, through the carnage of the crack epidemic and the clusterfuck of racial tension, police brutality, and widespread fear that gripped David Dinkins’s New York in the early Nineties. Murder statistics tell the story: homicides spiked in 1979-1982 and then again in 1990-1994, but have steadily declined ever since.

“Broken windows” has assumed almost talismanic status among many policymakers. Politicians have embraced Wilson’s ideas, especially at the municipal level, leading to zero tolerance programs that crack down on graffiti, drug use, and other nonviolent offenses. Even before Rudy Giuliani rode into New York to declare war on artists, the homeless, street vendors and other public menaces, Ed Koch spent millions to scrub the subways of spraypaint and fight the young artists who tagged the city’s train yards. (This, as hip-hop historian Jeff Chang points out, at a time when NYC still struggled financially, and justified cuts to social services due to a chronic shortage of funds.)

Academic critics such as Mike Davis look at this campaign against relatively inconsequential crimes as not merely missing the point—graffiti does not cause people to kill people—but as part of a bigger militarization of public space, a sort of classist and racist crusade against the poor. But the results seem to speak for themselves. Crime has dropped substantially on almost all measures since the early 1990s, and continued to do so during the Great Recession of 2007-present, when one might reasonably expect economic anxieties to drive more property crimes and even violence. If Wilson’s ideas came at just the time when American society seemed to be spinning out of control, and cities were plunging into an abyss of addiction and violence, some would credit Wilson for contributing to the creation of a safer society. Did “broken windows” really work?

The question is hard to answer, and our best and worst minds have been hard at work at figuring out why crime has declined. Some theories have been controversial, in part because of their mechanistic nature—for example, the proposal that the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade led to a drop in unwanted children, who never grew up to become menaces to society, or economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes’s contention that the 1978 ban on lead paint led to fewer children experiencing cognitive defects that made them prone to violence. Others have suggested that the passing of the epic wave of crack addiction in the 1980s left many younger people aware of the dangers, having seen their older siblings and neighbors ravaged by the sickness. And after the wave receded, it was followed by the proliferation of addiction to new drugs, such as methamphetamine and prescription medications. While these substances can have devastating effects on individuals and communities, abuse has been less prevalent in cities than suburbs and rural areas. T of M has written about the as the emergence of the ‘burbs as a site of social dysfunction since the 1990s, as well as the persistence of the crack trade in cities like Virginia Beach and Baltimore. Drug abuse and the drug trade continue, of course, but the social landscape of drug use has grown more diffuse; the damaging effects of addiction are not so visibly concentrated in Americans cities today as they were in 1992.

Alternatively, the improved economy of the 1990s has been credited with trickling down benefits to those who most suffered the economic and social disclocations of the 1970s and 1980s. Real wages actually rose (a little) for many workers in the Clinton years, and African Americans enjoyed a degree of upward mobility and improved access to homeownership (though the Great Recession has wiped out many of those gains since 2004).

One should also consider whether the vast expansion of the war on drugs under Reagan and Clinton put people behind bars who might otherwise be committing crimes. While many nonviolent drug offenders have been caught up in the net of incarceration, the removal of such a large number of people from the general population is bound to have some kind of effect. On one hand, the loss of parents and wage-earners has undoubtedly disrupted families and communities across the country—a shift that might lead to greater rates of crime. On the other hand, the drug war has detained thousands of people who would need jobs, healthcare and housing on the outside, which means they do not show up in measures of crime and unemployment. Mass incarceration, in this view, is a blunt way of putting a lot of potential social problems in a box, albeit a very expensive one—both fiscally, for taxpayers, and personally, for the individuals trapped in it. Imprisonment is surely the most literal expression of Du Bois’s famous line about how it feels “to be a problem.” (The unprecedented growth of the prison population in recent decades is a subject that scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Heather Thompson, and our own Joel Suarez have begun to explore.)

For this writer, the subject is not one of idle speculation. Well, I may be idle and I may be speculating, but the problems are real enough—and the change in American society seems palpable. My own mother was held up at gun and/or knife point at least six times when I was a kid, and even locked in a freezer by a crackhead at one point. Where I grew up in Gastonia, NC, it was not uncommon for drug-dealing, violence, and even shootings to be seen in the streets. Police were absent or at least indifferent. Crack was still a problem there in the early 1990s and, for some people, still is. And while I’ve gotten to enjoy a new taste of pervasive insecurity since moving to Atlanta after seven peaceful years in NYC, it does not quite taste the same as when I was young.

Solving the mystery of declining crime is beyond me and beyond most of the experts. Improved methods of policing and community organizing may play a part, as suggested by David M. Kennedy’s book Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner City America. My own intuition is that American society regained some kind of equilibrium that was lost during the grinding crisis of deindustrialization and the abandonment of cities after World War II—the real reasons why the Bronx was burning in 1978. Communities were demolished, jobs were lost, and cities’ coffers were emptied. A lot of people got hurt and a good deal of disorder resulted, whether the windows were broken or not.

But to weigh the benefits or demerits of James Q. Wilson’s theory should be easier. Chad Freidrichs’s marvelous documentary The Pruitt Igoe Myth (2011) brings out the core problem brilliantly. While the St. Louis housing project has become notorious as a symbol of many things—the hopelessness of public housing, the failure of liberal efforts to help the poor, and, above all, the pathology of the poor themselves—the film reveals a forgotten history. Some former residents were forever scarred by their violent experiences at Pruitt-Igoe, but others looked back on the place with great fondness. Pruitt-Igoe was a step up for many of the former slum dwellers, who had left deep poverty in the South for dangerous, cramped conditions in the city. In the beginning, the projects were a sparkling mirage of upward mobility for poor families who had never had proper plumbing or electricity. It was the “poor man’s penthouse,” as one resident declared.

How Pruitt-Igoe went from a monument to modernism, liberalism, and social welfare to a hulking monstrosity is a bitter story, but not a complicated one. The federal government was happy to throw money at St. Louis to build housing, and city planners were happy to take it—clearing slums was good business for demolition companies, as the work of Francesca Ammon has shown, and both contractors and unions were ready and willing to build the towers. But no one ever planned for how to maintain and keep up the structures on an ongoing basis.

In a stroke of negligence that borders on malice, the city housing authority (and the federal government) apparently never gave a thought to the revenue streams that would be necessary to preserve decent conditions in so many towers housing so many people. Pruitt-Igoe had to function on the paltry rents that could be charged of its poor and working class tenants. Poor people’s housing was poor, in part, because they were poor. Providing better housing than struggling families could afford is the point of public housing—to shelter those for whom the market does not or cannot provide adequate homes.

With the revenue from rents insufficient and the city unwilling to pay to support the projects, they went into decline. When windows or pipes were broken, they were not fixed. Elevators ceased functioning. Trash piled up. Those families who were better off got out, and the community’s population became poorer on the whole. Empty apartments drew criminals and addicts. The white middle class, which was in no hurry to live near poor African Americans in any case, looked on in horror, and wondered how those animals could want to live that way.

Surely, the widespread perception of anomie and disorder contributed to a climate conducive to crime, but broken windows were a symptom of poverty, not its cause. They were a sign of the abandonment of the projects’ residents by the city, and by an economy that either could not provide jobs—as factories closed and the middle class fled to the government-subsidized suburbs—or simply could not provide employment at a wage that could pay the rent necessary for decent housing.

What does this all mean for broken windows, urban governance, and crime today? The problems of New York and the Bronx in particular in the 1980s were not radically different from those of St. Louis in the 1960s. The city was struggling, losing tax revenues, jobs, and population. Young people responded to an atmosphere of hopelessness by joining gangs, tagging walls, and inventing hip-hop. While Jeff Chang may lionize the gangs too much in his history, deemphasizing the real harm they did to themselves and their communities, they did represent one reaction to a crisis of drugs, violence, and general disorder that plagued the Bronx. That same frustration could also be channeled into art and music, as an outlet for creativity and as a kind of protest against authorities who seemed indifferent or even malignant.

Cleaning a subway or fixing a window will not solve the problem. No one holding a gun says to himself, “I’m not going to go shoot this guy because they really cleaned up the neighborhood recently.” The broken windows theory seems to be a classic case of mistaking an effect for a cause. It does serve the purpose of providing easy, doable solutions to deep, intractable problems like unemployment and poverty, though. And for that reason, it makes sense that its popularity has been so durable.