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Broken Windows
by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
March 1982
In the mid-l970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean
Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life
in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money
to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign
them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were
enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many
police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty
much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had
difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened
headquarters control over patrol officers.
Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons:
it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it
reduced their chances for making a "good pinch." In some departments,
assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment.
And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any
impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a
sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local
authorities were willing to go along.
Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in
Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project.
Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out
chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly
anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the
foot
patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other
areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take
fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the
doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas
had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living
elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job
satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their
neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.
These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right-
foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into
thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the
authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the
citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol
officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized
officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact
make their neighborhoods safer.
But how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone
down--in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we
understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many
citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime
involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real,
in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source
of fear--the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent
people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or
unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers,
prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.
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