IN PRAISE OF BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING

The Idea That Made America’s Cities Safe

By William McGurn

The Wall Street Journal
December 29, 2018

HANOVER, N.H. -- When it comes to crime, America has undergone a political sea change. Last week President Trump signed the First Step Act, which passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support and aims to relieve the problem of “overincarceration.” Many states—including right-leaning Georgia, Texas, South Dakota and Utah—have enacted criminal-justice reforms with the same goal.

What a difference 30 years makes. In 1988 George H.W. Bush, seeking the presidency against Gov. Michael Dukakis, made an issue of Massachusetts’ lenient prison-furlough program. Four years later Gov. Bill Clinton was so anxious to prove himself tough on crime that he left the campaign trial and returned to Arkansas to sign the death warrant for a murderer who had damaged his own brain in a pretrial suicide attempt.

Crime has since declined dramatically. The number of homicides nationwide peaked in 1991, at 24,703, and declined some 42% by 2014, to 14,249, even as the U.S. population increased by one-fourth.

Substantial credit for the decline goes to criminologist George L. Kelling, who along with the late political scientist James Q. Wilson came up with the idea of “broken windows.” It began in 1982 as a metaphor. A decade later, it became the operating philosophy of the New York City Police Department, where it helped transform America’s biggest city into one of its safest.

In an article for the Atlantic, Mr. Kelling and Wilson made the case for a form of community policing that emphasizes maintaining order in public spaces. “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired,” they wrote, “all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” Broken windows are “a signal that no one cares”—an emboldening message for those who would commit serious crimes.

“What Jim and I wanted to do was to empower residents to control their own public spaces,” Mr. Kelling tells me in his quiet living room. He and his wife—Catherine Coles, a lawyer, anthropologist and sometime professional collaborator—moved here years ago when she was teaching at Dartmouth, and liked it so much they stayed.

Mr. Kelling is 83, and Wilson died in 2012. Broken-windows policing is sure to outlive them both, but it remains controversial—even in New York, where its success made it famous.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in office since 2014, has sent mixed signals. On the one hand, he hired William Bratton as police commissioner. Mr. Bratton had implemented a broken-windows strategy during earlier stints as chief of the city’s Transit Police (1990-92) and the NYPD (1994-96). On the other hand, Mr. de Blasio’s New York has been gradually scaling back enforcement of quality-of-life offenses such as public drinking and urination, sleeping in the streets, and subway-fare evasion.

“I think it’s a high risk,” says Mr. Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “I can see why you might want to pull back on a few things. But to do so in such a public way, the danger is that people who see others behaving badly will copy it. That’s how the disorder spreads. You don’t know where the tipping point is.”

Mr. Kelling says one problem is that his critics often don’t understand what broken-windows policing is. Some complain that it makes criminals of young African-American men over minor infractions. Others conflate it with tactical approaches such as “zero tolerance” or “stop and frisk.”

“Broken Windows isn’t one-size-fits all, and it isn’t about increasing arrests,” Mr. Kelling says. “It’s about maintaining order and giving police more discretion.” It entails adapting to local conditions: What works in the South Bronx may not work in East Los Angeles—or even in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood. To figure out what works, beat cops constantly listen to citizens in the communities they police. “You can have a plan that is perfect in theory, mathematically sound and scientifically valid,” Mr. Kelling says, “yet it fails in practice because of one variable.”

The confusion of broken windows with excessive arrests especially rankles Mr. Kelling, who says avoiding an arrest is sometimes more effective. He offers this example: Officers come across two men fighting. The traditional response would be to haul them to the station and charge them. But a better alternative might be for the cops to break it up and tell the men to move on. The police need that kind of discretion, Mr. Kelling says, and neighborhoods need cops who have the local knowledge and professional training and judgment to exercise it.

The example illustrates another point: The ways in which police measure results don’t always make sense. The officers responding to the fight in the traditional way would get credit for two arrests. If they break it up informally, there’s nothing to count.

For men who transformed modern policing, neither Wilson nor Mr. Kelling came to the issue as a wannabe cop. Wilson was an established scholar. Mr. Kelling had worked as a probation officer and an administrator for residential programs for aggressive and disturbed youths, but he started in a Lutheran seminary. “I wasn’t a good seminarian,” he says with a smile, “but I still wanted to do good.”

Broken-windows theory began with work Mr. Kelling and Wilson had done, separately but on parallel tracks. In the early 1970s Mr. Kelling was part of a study in Kansas City, Mo., which found that patrolling neighborhoods in police cars wasn’t preventing crimes or making residents feel safer. In 1981, Mr. Kelling followed this up with a study of Newark, N.J., this time finding residents reporting greater satisfaction when officers patrolled on foot.

Meanwhile, Wilson in 1975 published “Thinking About Crime,” a book challenging the prevailing idea that dealing with “root causes,” such as poverty and racial bias, was a necessary prerequisite for reducing crime.

“This is a period,” Mr. Kelling notes, “when nothing seemed to work, and almost everyone had given up on the idea police could really do anything about crime.” Policing tended to be reactive: Officers would wait for a crime to happen, then try to catch the perpetrator. Broken-windows policing focused on preventing crime by maintaining public order, giving cops (and other authority figures) more discretion about how to go about it.

Mr. Kelling and Wilson based their ideas on conversations with residents of troubled neighborhoods. Somewhat to their surprise, they found the residents seldom listed violence as their worst problem. What they complained about most was everyday assaults on the civilized order: men urinating on their front porches, prostitutes soliciting on street corners, open-air drug dealing, vagrants sleeping in parks and transit stations, aggressive panhandling and so on.

Mr. Kelling found that law-abiding residents of troubled neighborhoods were anxious for a robust police presence and aggrieved at the incivility and indignity they had to endure. And why shouldn’t they be? If the idea of focusing on minor infractions to reduce serious crimes seems radical, consider that it’s what police in low-crime suburbs do more or less by default. When I mention my New Jersey hometown, Mr. Kelling dryly notes: “You don’t worry about people peeing on your front steps in Madison.”

In the 1980s and early ’90s, most of the police establishment wasn’t interested in what Mr. Kelling and Wilson were finding. But Bill Bratton was. The revolution in New York’s policing started with Mr. Bratton when he headed the Transit Police, then a separate force. New York’s subways were infamous for danger and chaos, with cars covered in graffiti and riders vulnerable to criminals. In 1974’s “Death Wish,” Charles Bronson portrayed a subway rider who shoots two men when they try to mug him. Ten years later, life imitated art when “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz shot and seriously wounded four teenage boys he believed were trying to rob him.

Mr. Bratton became chief in 1990 and hired Mr. Kelling as a consultant. Then as now, activists fought the police efforts—with cynicism and cruelty, as Mr. Kelling tells it. Homeless people, many of whom were mentally ill, were sleeping inside tunnels. Some died of hypothermia, burned to death while huddling near a hot plate for warmth, or were electrocuted by the third rail. Mr. Kelling and police tried to coax them onto buses, where they would be fed and taken to a shelter. Activists “were encouraging them not to come out,” Mr. Kelling says.

Soon Mr. Bratton’s policies paid off. Subway crime declined, riders felt safer, and the morale of the Transit Police improved. After a stint as Boston’s police commissioner, Mr. Bratton returned to New York to head the NYPD when Rudy Giuliani became mayor in 1994. That allowed him to take broken windows to a much larger stage—again including the subways when the Transit Police merged into the NYPD in 1995.

Mr. Bratton, again with Mr. Kelling as a consultant, introduced several innovations. One was Compstat, a computerized system to track crime that had begun with the Transit Police. The idea was to make policing smarter by deploying resources where the crimes were occurring—and hold local commanders responsible for their areas. Gradually Mr. Bratton reclaimed bus and train stations, parks and other above-ground public spaces that had succumbed to disorder. Violent crime declined even more steeply in New York than in the nation as a whole.

The trend continued under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, both of whom served from 2002-13. But by 2014, when Mr. Bratton returned to New York under the progressive Mr. de Blasio, the political winds had shifted and the police were on the defensive—in part because of highly publicized accusations of police brutality, and in part because crime seems less menacing when it is so much less prevalent. “I’m not for just locking them up,” Mr. Kelling says. “But you can’t look at the 1990s through the lens of 2018.”

History can, however, give us some perspective on the present. “I measure success by whether women feel safe walking a neighborhood’s streets, children are free to play in the park, and harmony has been restored to a neighborhood,” Mr. Kelling says. “And I see New York policing as being a singular paradigm shift, a once-in-a-generation event that, despite all the criticism, remains a powerful primary crime-prevention method.”

What about the First Step Act, which will mean shorter sentences and more job training for federal prisoners? “It has no relation to broken windows,” Mr. Kelling says. “No one is going to federal prison for a broken-windows misdemeanor.”