Broken Windows and New York
The Bulgarian article on this site retells Malcolm Gladwell’s account (in The Tipping Point) of New York’s crime drop and Broken Windows policing — including the subway graffiti campaign and quality-of-life enforcement. Below is an excerpt from Gladwell’s discussion. For the full chapter, see the book.
Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes: Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions.
This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious – just as a fashion trend is contagious – that it can start with a broken window and spread to an entire community. The Tipping Point in this epidemic, though, isn’t a particular kind of person – a Connector like Lois Weisberg or a Maven like Mark Alpert. It’s something physical like graffiti. The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment.
After the election of Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of New York in 1994, William Bratton, a disciple of Broken Windows, was appointed head of the New York City Police Department, and he applied the same strategies to the city at large as he did to the Transit Authority. He instructed his officers to crack down on quality-of-life crimes. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Source: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (excerpt)
Original: https://www.gladwellbooks.com/titles/malcolm-gladwell/the-tipping-point/9780316346627/
Also see Wilson & Kelling, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic (1982): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/