Broken windows theory of policing

He said that he envisioned Broken Windows as a tactic in a broader effort in community policing. Officers should use their discretion to enforce public order laws much as police do during traffic stops, he said.

So an officer might issue a warning to someone drinking in public, or talk to kids skateboarding in a park about finding another place to play. Summons and arrests are only one tool, he said.

In practice, Broken Windows has come to be synonymous with misdemeanor arrests and summonses. In New York, the largest city to implement the practice, between and , police issued 1. Felony crime rates, meanwhile, declined.

Some policing experts say that Broken Windows is a flawed theory, in part because of the focus on disorder. Kelling argues that in order to determine how to police a community, residents should identify their top concerns, and police should — assuming those issues are legitimate — patrol accordingly. It can also lead police to use minor offenses inappropriately as a pretext to search for more serious contraband, like guns or drugs, he said.

In Newark, police saw the effect of blue summonses on their community first-hand. Those cited also appeared to be disproportionately black or Latino. You know, I would think not. Share Flipboard Email. Government U. Foreign Policy U. Liberal Politics U. By Robert Longley Robert Longley. Robert Longley is a U. Learn about our Editorial Process. Key Takeaways: Broken Windows Theory The broken windows theory of criminology holds that visible signs of crime in densely-populated, lower-income urban areas will encourage additional criminal activity.

The theory has been criticized for encouraging discriminatory police practices, such as unequal enforcement based on racial profiling. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Longley, Robert. What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

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Perhaps the most prominent adoption of a broken windows approach to crime and disorder has occurred in New York City.

In other agencies though, broken windows policing has been synonymous with zero tolerance policing, in which disorder is aggressively policed and all violators are ticketed or arrested. The broken windows approach is far more nuanced than zero tolerance allows, at least according to Kelling and Coles and so it would seem unfair to evaluate its effectiveness based solely on the effectiveness of aggressive arrest-based approaches that eliminate officer discretion.

Thus, one problem may be that police departments are not really using broken windows policing when they claim to be. A second concern is how to properly measure broken windows treatment. The most frequent indicator of broken windows policing has been misdemeanor arrests, in part because these data are readily available. Arrests alone, however, do not fully capture an approach that Kelling and Coles describe as explicitly involving community outreach and officer discretion.

Officers must decide whether an arrest is appropriate and many police stops and encounters with citizens in broken windows policing do not end in arrest. As opposed to a zero-tolerance policy focused only on arresting all minor offenders, Kelling and Coles describe a more community-oriented approach to partnering with residents and community groups to tackle disorder collectively in a way that still respects the civil liberties of offenders.

Whether the NYPD was able to adopt this model successfully remains up for debate but it does suggest that the intervention is complex and difficult to evaluate. Third, the broken windows model suggests a long term indirect link between disorder enforcement and a reduction in serious crime and so existing evaluations may not be appropriately evaluating broken windows interventions.

If there is a link between disorder enforcement and reduction in serious crime generated by increased informal social control from residents, we would expect it would take some time for these levels of social control in the community to increase. Policing studies usually use short-follow up periods and so may not capture these changing neighborhood dynamics.