The problem with “community policing,” then and now, is that so often the cops being called to enforce community norms are not part of the community. And Kelling and Wilson’s celebrated “earlier period” of lone wolf policing looks pretty different to black residents of major cities. In the study that inspired the article, the cops were almost all white and the citizens of the Newark neighborhoods almost all black. Just how likely was it that hundreds of young white men in inner-city Newark were going to be the vessels through which that predominantly African American community enforced its own norms and order? Kelling and Wilson recognized this problem but ultimately shrugged their shoulders.
How do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?
We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question.
And yet Kelling and Wilson offered a comforting vision, at least for some: police as neighborhood watchmen, telling the unruly boys to knock it off and helping the old ladies cross the street. Assessing the city after desegregation and the great crime wave, they gave expression to and quasi-social-scientific justification for a generalized feeling, a hunch, lying in the white American subconscious: that all this disorder, this dirtiness, this filth and graffiti and brokenness must be cleaned. It must be washed. It must be ordered. This was the cri de coeur of the (oddly sympathetic) sociopathic Travis Bickle, who surveyed the New York of 1976 in Taxi Driver and said,
All the animals come out at night.
Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.
Sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come and wash this scum off the streets.
As a theory, “broken windows” played a perfect explanatory role for politicians and policy makers. If disorder leads to crime, well then, we need to crack down on disorder. And cracking down on disorder was something the police could do. The liberal theory of the causes of crime—that it was born of racism, segregation, oppression, poverty, and disinvestment—painted a picture of the problem that required a set of solutions far above what the local beat cops could provide. The federal and state governments would have to not just cooperate with such an agenda but prioritize it, mobilize for the domestic policy equivalent of war. Wealth would have to be redistributed, students would have to be bused, housing laws would have to be enforced, and on and on. Getting rid of the “ghetto” as an institution would require a full, multigenerational commitment to making racial equality a genuine, lived economic reality in America. That was a social project for which, frankly, white voters had (and continue to have) little appetite.
“Broken windows,” on the other hand, offered an elegantly simple and eminently implementable program. No need for messy discussions about integration, equality, racial justice, and capital flows. No need to face the wrath of angry parents at town halls furious that their kids were being sent to a “bad school” thirty minutes away. Just start enforcing order, and the signal would be sent to criminals to behave.
Back in 1982, when Kelling and Wilson wrote their famous article, they didn’t even pretend to claim that enforcing order would lead to reductions in crime. Their argument was about the sentiment of the community (making residents “feel” safer). And they threw up their hands at the intractability of crime in the most desolately disinvested neighborhoods: “Some neighborhoods are so demoralized and crime-ridden as to make foot patrol useless.”
Despite these caveats, “broken windows” soon became an article of faith among the nation’s law enforcement leaders, chief among them Bill Bratton, who had been hired in 1990 to run the police department of New York’s transit authority. Kelling had been hired in 1985 as a consultant. Bratton embraced the man as his intellectual mentor and set about putting his theory into practice, ramping up enforcement of fare jumping, graffiti, and open containers. The highly publicized results were striking to even casual commuters: the subways became cleaner, less graffiti-riddled, and more pleasant to occupy. The year after Bratton assumed office, the total number of violent crimes in the subways declined 15 percent.
Three years later, when Rudy Giuliani was elected on a “quality of life” platform that promised, in its own way, to wash the city clean with a “real rain,” Bratton was promoted to take over the entire NYPD. He set about ridding the city of the scourge of the squeegee men, who for Giuliani had become a kind of iconic symbol of the city’s disorder.
At this very moment crime in America reached a national tipping point. In 1993 crime started dropping in pretty much all categories nationwide, and then it just kept dropping. Nowhere in the country did it drop as swiftly or as dramatically as New York City. “While there is some variance by type of crime, the best rule of thumb for comparing the magnitude of New York City’s crime decline to that of the rest of the United States is that any crime drop for the rest of the United States is doubled in New York City,” criminologist Franklin Zimring observes. “In the same spirit that media were prone to choose a city as the ‘murder capital’ of the United States when crime statistics were issued, New York City was beyond dispute the Crime Decline Capital of the United States in the 1990s.”