Though the theory would later be simplified to suggest that one could reduce crime by stamping out disorder—drunkenness, public urination, sidewalk gambling—the authors were actually making a far more modest claim. They were interested in psychology. Police, they argued, could be used to make people feel safer even if they weren’t actually improving overall safety:
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. What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these 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.
Kelling and Wilson were explicitly offering a police strategy designed to produce a collective psychological effect, one intended to satiate the neuroses of anxious urban dwellers who worried that the neighborhood was going downhill, and to stem the contagion that came with that unraveling. “A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change,” they observed, “in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.”
The jungle. The primordial land of disorder and unruly natives, the precincts outside civilization’s control. And this disorder, they suggested, could also eventually lead to crime in a self-fulfilling vicious circle.
At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
Kelling spent time with a white Newark foot patrolman he called Kelly and watched as he enforced order in a rundown but bustling transit hub in the city: telling teenagers to quiet down, instructing drunks to keep their bottles in paper bags and drink only on side streets rather than the major thoroughfares: “Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as ‘enforcing the law,’ ” Kelling and Wilson noted, “but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.”
Here we see one of the earliest articulations of the theoretical distinction between the Colony and the Nation. Newark circa 1982 was a city in the midst of massive white flight in the wake of pitched battles over school busing and housing integration. It was poor and mostly black. Kelling and Wilson were arguing, unapologetically, that in these precincts of the Colony, order should matter more than law.
Hundreds of years of historical weight rode on such a pronouncement, and yet the authors repeatedly referenced race only to quickly wave it away. At a few moments they seemed painfully unaware of their own racial blind spots. “Our experience,” they wrote, “is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer.”
Really?
“Broken windows” was an impulse before it was a theory. Kelling and Wilson were up front about the fact they were offering nothing new but rather a return to the “folk wisdom” of those residents who believed that disorder was contagious. They fondly recalled the good old days, when cops could just do whatever they felt necessary to keep the toughs in line.
The police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested “on suspicion” or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. “Rights” were something enjoyed by decent folk.
This last line about rights is important. Kelling and Wilson seem implicitly to have been hostile to the kind of rights-based proceduralism that flowed from the Warren Court. They were urging the return to a bygone era when cops were local authorities who enforced community norms of order, rather than enforcers of the law within the confines of explicit constitutional rights. They suggested that police could help a community maintain order, but that the standards for order must come from the community itself.
In this sense, the “broken windows” approach began as a call for what liberals today approvingly call “community policing”—the “community” and the police collaborating to identify problems and protect citizens. The article is predicated on a study that required cops to get out of their cars and actually walk their beats, a key pillar of today’s “community policing.” Yet in the modern vocabulary of policing theory, “broken windows” has become shorthand for the polar opposite: aggressive, community-antagonistic, clean-’em-up vigilantism.