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Broken Windows

Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested "on suspicion" or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. Our experience is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer.

The police will soon feel helpless, and the residents will again believe that the police "do nothing. But the reality of police-citizen encounters is powerfully altered by the automobile. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows. It was named after a distinguished black who had been, during the 1940s, chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. 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.

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. Order maintenance became, to a degree, coterminous with "community relations. If these things could be done, social scientists assumed, citizens would be less fearful. 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.

Until well into the nineteenth century, volunteer watchmen, not policemen, patrolled their communities to keep order. What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods. Fights occur.

If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way.

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.

Moreover, you can more easily retain some anonymity if you draw an officer aside for a private chat. 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).

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. Most police departments do not have ways of systematically identifying such areas and assigning officers to them. There are hundreds of such efforts today in communities all across the nation.

And doubtless they remained aware of their responsibility for order. 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. The officer says to one, "C'mere.

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. 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. If someone violated them, the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator.