|
|
'Broken
windows' and social pseudoscience
By Dallas Hansen
Saturday, May 27, 2006
During the months preceding the 1999 Pan-Am Games, much mention
was being made of the “Broken Windows”-style
policing
that had supposedly been responsible for plummeting crime rates in New
York City. In a nutshell, the idea is that signs of social
disorder—loitering, public drinking, graffiti,
prostitution, panhandling, squeegee men, etc.—and
physical disorder—noise, abandoned vehicles or buildings,
dogs, sidewalk litter, trash in vacant lots,
etc.—create
an ambiance of lawlessness that invite more serious crime such as
robbery, assault, burglary, rape, or murder.
Between the the Pan-Am Games leaving town almost seven years ago and
former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's visit here earlier this
month, Broken Windows theory wasn't mentioned much in Winnipeg, but
now it's the talk of the town's policymakers. Even the Winnipeg
Real Estate News has recently devoted front-page space to this timely
topic. Everyone seems to be looking forward to getting down to the
business of establishing law-and-order upon Winnipeg's crime-saturated
streets.
Indeed, not only do statistics—whatever their
inaccuracies—confirm that Winnipeg is among this country's
most
dangerous cities, there is plenty of supporting anecdotal evidence.
Friends of mine, sponsored street skateboarders whose ability to
make a living rests on procuring fresh footage of tricks and stunts
upon urban architecture, have no qualms about travelling the downtown
sidewalks at night with thousands of dollars worth of laptop computers
and video recording equipment in Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto,
San Francisco, or even Barcelona. But to do the same in Winnipeg
is considered inadvisable.
Can Broken Windows-style policing make our city safe enough to remedy
our reputation? Can we cut crime the way New York City did? Likely
not.
New York City's streets are filled with buildings that offer the
benefit of what criminologists call “natural
surveillance” and urbanists call “people
watching”: sidewalk storefronts, with people living up
above. New Yorkers tend to be keenly interested in what goes on in
the sidewalks below and often a yell from a window is all it takes to
stop a crime in progress. Besides, sociologists are divided on
whether Broken Windows deserves the credit for New York City's drop in
crime. Bernard E. Harcourt, writing in the November, 1998
issue of the Michigan Law Review, is one of many academics who
suggest that the New York City's mid-1990s crime plunge is nothing more
than coincidence.
“Criminologists have suggested a number of possible factors
that may have contributed to the declining crime rates in New York
City. These include significant increase in the New York
City
police force, a general shift in drug use from crack cocaine to
heroin, favorable economic conditions in the 1990s, new
computerised tracking systems that speed up police responses to crime
[COMSTAT], a dip in the number of eighteen- to
twenty-four-year-old males, an increase in the number of hardcore
offenders currently incarcerated in city jails and state prisons, the
arrest of several big drug gangs in New York, as well as possible
changes in adolescent behavior.” To that I would add a
renewed
interest in middle-class urban living and the subsequent neighbourhood
gentrification that followed the “white flight”
to the
suburbs that marked the decades previous.
Broken Windows theory is the brainchild of professors James Q. Wilson
and George L. Kelling, who first introduced the idea in an
eponymous 1982 essay in the Atlantic Monthly. Among his many
other achievements, Wilson is known for his defense of racial
profiling and his suggestion of genetic predispositions to
criminality. As an occasional contributor to the conservative
National Review, he published a pro death-penalty piece titled
“Executing the Retarded.” Wilson doesn't believe
in
bringing back truant officers; he thinks “[P]olice...
can
be effective truant officers by stopping and questioning young people
of apparent school age standing on street corners at a time when school
is in session. If they cannot show that they have a reasonable excuse
for not being in school, then the police should escort them to either
their home or the school.” As for why London has enjoyed a
much
lower rate of murder than New York City every year for the last 200
years, Wilson explains, “It took England several
centuries
of tough rule, brutal punishment and the inculcation of class-based
values to achieve a low homicide rate.”
Under Broken Windows, the line between “honest,
hardworking
citizen” and “criminal” gets
blurred. Dare to
crack open a beer in a park, or even to jaywalk, and you could
receive a not a warning, nor even a ticket, but a good day or two
in a holding cell. You might get worse—complaints about
police
brutality skyrocketed after Giuliani took office. Here in Canada,
one public drinker paid the ultimate price when Ian Bush, 22, a
millworker from Houston, BC, took a bullet to the head after being
handcuffed and detained by the RCMP for having an open beer outside a
hockey game.
Is Broken Windows theory useless? No—there's no question
graffiti-proofing New York's subway trains helped to restore a sense of
safety underground. But there are limits to its efficacy, and
treating every minor violation like a felony is not just a waste of
resources but a way down a slippery slope, at the bottom of which
lies a police state.
|
|
|
|
