As if to give an example of the point I made about a policy “not working” Fred Hiatt chimes in to say that “broken window policing” does not work in Washington, DC in the 21st century:
The broken-windows theory, introduced by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, was enthusiastically embraced by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, when they came to office in New York City in 1983. The idea was that minor violations could bring down a neighborhood and so encourage much more serious crime, like the murders and crack cocaine use that were rampant then. Bratton, who is back in New York today as police chief, went after graffiti artists, fare-gate jumpers, public drinkers, squeegee panhandlers and other misdemeanants — and the serious crime rate in New York City went down, too.
It’s hard to remember today that this apparent success was seen as a boon not only to the well-heeled of Manhattan but to New York’s poor residents, who were the primary victims both of broken-window squalor and of serious crime. There was less attention paid, at least at first, to the multitudes of poor men getting caught up in the criminal justice system for relatively minor offenses. Instead, an obsessively statistical approach celebrated increasing numbers of arrests as proof of success.
Lanier, by contrast, is proud that the number of arrests in D.C. has declined — from 53,000 in 2007 to 42,000 last year — while crime rates also have gone down. Whatever the connection between zero tolerance and declining crime rates in the 1980s and 1990s — and scholars argue the question — Lanier says it certainly makes no sense for Washington today.
I don’t know whether “broken window policing” worked in New York in the 1980s. I don’t know whether it has been tried in Washington, DC. I don’t know whether it would “work” in Washington, DC and there’s no way for me to determine whether it would without providing the parameters for what working would mean. Mr. Hiatt implies but does not say that its objective is to optimize the number of arrests and crime rates. I believe that the objective in New York was somewhat different: to reduce the number of crimes full stop. To arrive at an agreement on whether a strategy is working you’ve got to define its objectives. So, define your terms.
There probably is no single right way for cities to protect their citizens’ persons and property. The problems, standards, and requirements undoubtedly vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. They could always use the strategy for reducing crime that Chicago did: just stop reporting crimes.
