BROKEN WINDOWS/BROKEN PEOPLE

by Richa  -  April, 2000

     The "broken windows" theory, first widely promoted by James Wilson and George Kelling in 1982[1], has been translated into, and is often seen to be synonymous with, "zero tolerance" policy. This theory has had considerable influence on police practice nationwide, and beyond. Harry Dolan, who became police chief here in Grand Rapids in April, 1998, has been promoting it strongly.

     The theory holds that such things as broken windows left unrepaired, trash not picked up, and toleration of "offensive" behavior are "signals" which indicate that people in the neighborhood don't care. The result, the authors claim, is that a neighborhood deteriorates, and crime increases.

     The solution proposed, basically, is strict police enforcement of "quality of life" crimes, like littering and public drinking, that typically have gone unenforced. This is to be done in part by restoring the "beat cop", who would be permanently stationed in a neighborhood, regularly "walk the beat" there, and get to know the neighborhood well.

     Wilson's and Kelling's prominent use of the term "broken windows" is misleading, as their main concern is clearly a class of people they refer to as "disorderly". And who are these "disorderly people"? They say: "Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed."[2]

     Note the labeling here. The authors do not refer to people who have been made so poor and feel they have so few options that they are reduced to begging, people who are so overwhelmed by pain that they attempt to obliterate the pain through destructive chemicals, young people with lots of energy but who lack constructive outlets for it, women who are forced to continually degrade themselves in order to satisfy the desires of men, people with little to do because they have been largely excluded from mainstream society, etc. How different people appear when you get past labels and see them as fallible human beings - as we all are!

     Also unspoken is that the people referred to often don't meet middle class norms, and are primarily poor. Rich people don't generally panhandle. Quite a few people of means are drunks and addicts and "rowdy teenagers" and "loiterers", but they have homes and clubs and other places to go where they are not as publicly visible. They also tend to have the understanding and support of others who are well-off, and they have the option of getting quality help for their addictions and other problems. Both prostitutes and the mentally disturbed are, on the other hand -- as those of us who have been there or have opened our hearts to those who have been there know -- among the most abused victims of our society. Again, how differently we view people depending on whether we see them as victims of their own irresponsibility or victims of a political/economic order that systematically crushes the spirits of many in order to preserve gross inequalities!

     Unsurprisingly, given this outlook, police departments that have bought into it have tended to step up their harassment, and sometimes their brutality. From my experience, and what i have heard from others, there is a notable increase in harassment of the poor and disempowered in Grand Rapids. That does not mean that the poor are suddenly being targeted for police action; the poor have always been so targeted. But it provides a rationale which extends the reach and power of the police, and makes that targeting more acceptable to citizens generally. We, the poor, are now increasingly being treated as "trash" to be "swept away".

     As for brutality, it still happens occasionally, though there does not seem to be any substantial increase.

     My assessment on these issues is based upon surveying (for the Mayor's Justice 2000 Task Force) hundreds of people in 1998, mostly on Grand Rapids' near Southeast Side, and more recently upon talking with dozens of the most disempowered people in and around the Heartside neighborhood, as well as numerous fellow arrestees in the course of over a dozen arrests starting in July, 1999.

     Claims for the effectiveness of zero tolerance policy in reducing serious street crime are contradictory. The best evidence i can find indicates it can be (but is by no means always) effective in the short term in reducing crime (more so in reducing the fear of crime), but is not effective--in fact, may well be counterproductive--in the long term. It should be expected to have some effect in the short term, because so many of the poor and disempowered who are likely to be rounded up under this policy are disaffected enough to commit "street" crimes, and have long been targeted by police, unlike those who commit the far more destructive--and lucrative--"suite" crimes. The criminal justice system has already caught a substantial portion of our society's most disempowered people in its net, especially young Black men in inner cities, as studies have pointed out.[3] Of course, this racist and elitist attack on the basic freedoms of a substantial number of citizens is hardly compatible with a democratic society. Taken to its extreme, street crime could be reduced to zero if everyone were locked up!

     As for the long term, Sherman notes that an arrest record makes it more difficult to secure employment, arrests for minor law violations may permanently lower police legitimacy both for the arrestee and for those close to the arrestee, and such arrests may make arrestees more defiant and violent.[4] Such arrests also tend to divide rather than unite communities, as community policing is supposed to do, thus undermining police effectiveness. That has been the case for Grand Rapids' Black community, as the Justice 2000 survey made clear. I have also seen this happen in Heartside in the past year.

     As for the "beat cop" idea, be careful about romanticizing the 1950s or earlier and the era of the beat cop. In those times police brutality was common, as was police corruption. If your skin was dark you were barred from many places and opportunities that are available today. If you were female your roles were much more rigidly limited. If you were physically disabled you often could not get to many places that are accessible today. If you were mentally disabled you were likely locked up in the back ward of an asylum that would be considered atrocious by today's standards. If you arranged your hair or dressed in unconventional ways you were ostracized. If you exercised your Constitutional right to dissent from government policy you may have been harassed by police and others in government. If you were poor you likely had no recourse against severe abuse, which was often overt, and which you never knew when to expect.

     The authors of the broken windows theory defend it partly on the basis that aggressively keeping neighborhoods nice is of value regardless of the effect on crime. But that can be done largely without police enforcement. Of greater concern is their defense of increased repression against those already most disempowered. Because these two authors have both been prominent in shaping criminal justice policy, they deserve a much closer look.

     Wilson is an apologist for several reactionary groups that are mostly funded by wealthy business owners and executives. Notably, Wilson is also a long-time colleague of the authors of "The Bell Curve" (a disguised pseudo-scholarly attempt to revive some racist and elitist ideas[5]), is ideologically in basic agreement with them, and, in fact, co-authored a book with one of them (Crime and Human Nature, with Richard J. Herrnstein, 1985) that probably helped pave the way for a revival of repressive and racist thought and action, including that later, more notorious book.[6] That earlier book was a similar pseudo-scholarly work in which the authors persistently selected data that they believed could be used to support their pre-ordained conclusions--sometimes going to extraordinary lengths to do so--and ignored or found ways to discount contrary data.[7] It also was a thinly disguised elitist and racist work.[8]

     In trying to convince readers that punitive deterrence "works", Wilson was forced to acknowledge defects in various studies that lent, or might have lent, a degree of support to that contention. In looking for one that supposedly lacked any of these defects, Wilson came up with a study of "The Deterrent Effect of Legal Sanctions on Draft Evasion".[9] As if draft "evasion" had anything to do with the street crime which was the focus of Wilson's concern! Moreover, as a former draft resister who has talked with numerous other draft resisters and read a good deal on the subject, i can assure the reader that sanctions did not influence the rate of draft law violation nearly as much as the social support for or intolerance toward this act in particular areas--which also was the major influence on the degree of sanctions. In other words, it is a classic case of confusing correlation with causation.

     Criminologist Elliott Currie provides a far more realistic view, stating, "Indeed, the finding that formal punishment is often associated with an increase in crime is one of the most consistent in criminological research."[10] Miller notes a basic part of the reason for this, that "coercive policies tend to increase disrespect for law rather than the reverse."[11]

     Kelling has been a consultant to police in New York City, where he claims implementation of his ideas has brought about dramatic reductions in crime without any increase in police abuse. Kelling produced no evidence for that last allegation, but others have provided contrary evidence. Herbert, for instance, uncovered a shooting of two teenagers against whom the police, who had tried to cover it up, had no evidence of any crime. Citing police behaviors from harassment of law-abiding citizens on the street to brutal murders, Herbert says the shooting of these teenagers "typified the over-the-top, overly aggressive behavior that has become the hallmark of policing under Mayor Giuliani".[12] Shapiro, referring to Kelling's "zero tolerance" strategy, cites a 41% increase in reports of "excessive force" by New York City police, and says, "evidence in the US has gradually accumulated that the strategy has unleashed a wave of police misconduct unseen in decades."[13] In any case, New York City police remain notoriously brutal, and the jails and prisons (unmentioned by Kelling) where many of those swept away by the police end up are considerably worse. He in fact contributes to this climate of abuse by painting, in emotional terms, many of the poor as disturbing or dangerous, while calling those who defend their rights "radical libertarians" who ignore civic obligations and the rights of others.[14]

     Kelling co-authored a book with Catherine Coles, "Fixing Broken Windows", in which the authors "don't even mention police brutality as a policy issue, though they attack civil libertarians for trying to restrict police conduct. In one particularly telling omission, Kelling and Coles elaborately praise a public campaign that took back New York's Grand Central Station from the legion of homeless people who sought shelter there in the 1980s. They offer not even a footnote acknowledging that beatings by a notoriously brutal goon squad, documented on the front page of the New York Times, did much of the taking back."[15]

     Litigation filed by some of the "radical libertarians", according to Lardner, may have done as much to reduce disorder (and whatever crime may have been associated with it) as any police action. They forced the City to rely more on nonprofits as shelter providers and managers, and to build more low-cost shelter spaces. Additionally, greater attention to serious crime and inspirational leadership also may have been factors in the crime reduction of that period.[16] Shapiro, noting that Rudolph Giuliani, New York's mayor, took credit for much reduced crime levels in New York City, convincingly shows that still other factors were largely responsible, and notes that other cities had similar drops in crime during the same period. At least one of those cities, New Haven, took a "polar opposite" approach. Shapiro then puts Wilson's and Kelling's hypotheses, and similar claims by others, into perspective: "Zero tolerance policing unquestionably makes for effective campaign rhetoric, and the original Wilson and Kelling broken window hypothesis is an easy sell to any society frightened by seemingly uncontrollable crime. On its deepest level, however, it is not about crime at all, but a vision of social order disintegrating under glassy-eyed liberal neglect. Much of Wilson and Kelling's original argument, and Kelling and Cole's recent book, is devoted not to crime policy but to repeated attacks on civil libertarians, advocates for the homeless and social liberals."[17] One professional community justice advocate cautioned that beneath the "moderate rhetoric" of this book, supposedly about "community policing", was not only a repressive, but an "anti-community" message.[18]

     Like Wilson, Kelling and Coles are highly selective in their use of sources, pulling out data and ideas that support their agenda while ignoring or downplaying anything contrary. For instance, their main support for their thesis that disorder causes crime was Wesley Skogan's, book, "Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods",[19] but they left out Skogan's concluding remarks on much of the cause of that disorder. Skogan wrote, "In sum, it should be clear that many factors that appear to engender disorder, or may counter its spread, are shaped by conscious decisions by persons in power. Those decisions reflect the interests of banks, real-estate developers, employers, government agencies, and others playing for large economic and political stakes."[20]

     The broken windows theory/zero tolerance policy is often justified with superficial surveys which typically ask people if they would support police "cleaning up" the "disorderly" people. Most citizens, given no alternative, say yes. "Do something" about the "gang" that hangs out by the local party store? Sure! However, when presented with alternatives, not to mention the real costs and long-term ineffectiveness of "zero tolerance", most people usually favor the alternatives. We could set up constructive recreation and educational programs for these kids at a fraction of the cost? They and their families otherwise end up resenting the police and the entire social system they see the police representing? Those sent to jail will come back to the community, sometimes as heroes to their younger siblings and their friends? Well, uh.... Obviously, this requires more extensive and honest dialogue than what we have had so far as a community.

     These theories are desperate attempts to deal with social problems caused, in part, by increasingly impersonal and elitist government, and probably even more by economic limitations imposed by ever-more-powerful corporate actors. The social problems tend to be most severe in large, ethnically diverse cities. While they may exist to a small extent in Grand Rapids, with the potential of getting worse, the two situations are hardly comparable. Essentially, these are theories designed for big-city problems, which generally succeed only to a degree even in their specific objectives, and which cause other problems as bad as or worse than those they supposedly solve. When applied to a mid-size city like Grand Rapids, with its "small-town" traditions, they can be devastating.

     These and other ideological reactionaries only get taken seriously due to the power behind them. Miller notes how government power accounts for much of this: "The ready availability of research monies from an ideologically driven U.S. Justice Department led to the ascendancy of a new stable of researchers who all but jettisoned any critical sense....Critical theory was replaced by an obsession with techniques directed toward finding better ways to identify and catch the criminal, widen police authority, improve prosecutorial efficiency, develop more intrusive and lethal anticrime armamentaria, justify harsher sanctions, and build and manage more jails, prisons, and camps. The research agenda followed the money, and the conclusions followed the power."[21]

     The reputation for scholarship of Harvard University, pre-eminent among educational and research institutions, also accounts for some of this power. Even some of Wilson's (a former Harvard professor) strongest critics, such as Elliott Currie, tend to at least take Wilson seriously.[22] David Friedrichs, who has written the best overview of white collar crime i have seen, explicitly articulates this view: "I have many reservations on Wilson and Herrnstein, but...[w]hether one likes it or not, they were both tenured professors at Harvard, with substantial reputations."[23] 

     In referring more generally to Wilson's influential earlier work, "Thinking About Crime", Miller also articulates this view, then puts it in critical context: "His Harvard association provided academic cover for his politically driven solutions." But Wilson mostly "eschewed the peer-review process of standard academic and scientific publications in criminology, preferring to write for conservative magazines....This was a process entirely foreign to the academic criminological researchers Wilson had left in the dust, in much the same fashion as social-welfare experts would later be undone by Charles Murray's well-financed and well-marketed jeremiads against welfare. It was to become a common strategy of neoconservative 'think tanks' on social-policy matters. The tactics all but guaranteed that by the time the bona fide experts got around to replying in the professional journals, they had already lost the day in the media and in the minds of policymakers."[24]

     Some have stated that people like Wilson and Kelling (there are many more) are needed in order to prop up the ideological foundations of a crumbling system. Currie, for instance, says such people "provide the intellectual underpinning for an approach to crime and punishment that threatens to bankrupt us both fiscally and morally while demonstrably failing to protect us from the violence that continues to haunt our collective experience."[25] Currie goes on to say:

Our spectacular investment in punishment isn't an isolated development but part of a larger vision of society--a vision we have been pursuing in the United States, with only modest deviations, for more than a quarter century. America's primitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal-justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor, often justified in the name of 'personal responsibility' and the 'free market.' To acknowledge that our crime policies have failed to bring a reasonable degree of safety to our streets and homes would call into question not just the crime policies themselves but the success--indeed the humanity--of the vision as a whole."[26]

     In short, blaming the victims in order to take the spotlight off those who would enrich themselves at the expense of the poor and vulnerable, and off government policy that supports such enrichment by slashing support for low-income housing and other basic needs, is what the promoters and practitioners of "zero tolerance" policy are about.

ENDNOTES

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