Question

Read over the Broken Windows article that appeared in the Atlantic Magazine in March of 1982.

Answer 1

"Broken Windows, The Police and Neighborhood Safety" was an article written by authors George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson and published in The Atlantic Magazine in 1982. In essence, this paper is a report on an attempt by police in the U.S to diminish crime and the perception of fear by the common citizen. It uses as its central argument a trial made by New Jersey police to change some of its police force and turn them into foot patrol policemen instead of motorized patrollmen. This research paper shows the results that arose from this trial and concludes several things; the first, that people, at least in New Jersey, start to feel more secure with these foot patrols because it makes them feel closer to their police force and this gives them a sense of security, second, that a perception of crime and fear in citizens is not necessarily linked to violence but rather a sense of disorder and the presence of strangers, or misbehaved people, in a vicinity and finally, it shows the way that police action has evolved throughout time and the roles that police forces in the U.S had from their beginnings up until today, starting first as simple night watchmen to enforcers and crime-fighters. This particular change takes place in the 1960´s and afterwards, when there is an escalation nationwide on gang appearance and violence. It also talks about different psychological and sociological theories of both policing and crime that seek to help understand these two factors. The Broken Windows theory then states that when a possession, be it land, person or property, show a state of disrepair or lack of care, even in the best-behaved and most principled communities criminal and incorrect tendencies may arise simply because people tend to think that no one will care. In essence, the Broken Window theory states that if a building sports one unrepaired and broken window, then soon more windows fill share the same fate unless something is done to change this pattern of behavior. This theory was proven in 1969 by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who placed similar broken cars with broken windows in two places; the Bronx and Palo Alto, California. Although the timeframe between the two places for the citizens to start vandalizing the rest of the car differed, being faster in the Bronx, the result also was the discovery that regardless of the place and time, property that is left abandoned and damaged without any care will be vandalized even by well-behaved citizens. This led to a system of policing in which measures were taken to ensure that a criminal problem was taken care of from the start, even if it meant going over a few civil rights and liberties, Especially in the 1960´s, this meant that many police forces became crime-fighters and enforced the laws and rules of a city at any cost, sometimes violating rules themselves, to the detriment of citizen´s rights. At some point, during the 60´s in fact, people tended to believe that the more arrests the police made, the more secure they were and that tough action meant less crime. This not only proved to be wrong but ineffective, as especially with gangs, they would just replace the losses with new members and the crime rates were proven not to abate at all.

Finally, community policing was simply a strategy used by the police forces in which they encouraged the support of the community to be able to deal with minor criminal activities and the presence of undesirable people and behaviors within a community that did not require major intervention by the police. This strategy had a lot to do with the Broken Windows theory as it became a response to the idea from the theory that it is easier to take care of a minor problem and solve it fast before it becomes a major problem. By recruiting the help of the citizens, the police were taking care of minor issues that freed their lacking resources to respond to bigger problems.