The police and neighborhood safety Broken Windows

Abstract

Some neighborhoods are so demoralized and crime-ridden as to make foot patrol useless; the best the police can do with limited resources is respond to the enormous number of calls for service. What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in the neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this “order-maintenance” function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both parties. The police may well have become better crime-fighters as a result. And doubtless they remained aware of their responsibility for order. But the link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten. That link is similar to the process whereby one broken window becomes many. Just as physicians recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police—and the rest of—ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.