Policing Urban Crimes: The Broken Windows Theory

He who steals an egg steals an ox.  - A French saying quoted from The Scholarly Myths of the New Law and Order by Doxa

Just two days before the French riots of Oct 27,2005, sparked by the deaths of two African teenagers in the underprivileged northeastern suburbs of Paris, the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy famously remarked, "Vous en avez assez de cette bande de racaille? Eh bien, on va vous en débarrasser." ("You've had enough of the dregs of society? Well, we're going to get rid of them for you.”) The Interior Minister took a tough stand on fighting crime on the streets by saying that certain cities in France needed ‘nettoyer au Kärcher’ (power washing).

These comments proved inflammatory among the poor African youth, already facing racism, and the riots soon spread to nearly 300 cities of France leading to widespread torching of cars and destruction of public property.

From the perspective of criminology, Mr. Sarkozy’s semantics about fighting crime and enforcing order is certainly colourful and controversial but conceptually not a novel idea. His police strategy towards urban crime is borrowed from the key concepts of broken windows and zero tolerance enunciated in American criminology. In fact, "over the past several years French politicians (as well as their English, Italian, Spanish, and German colleagues) of the Left as well as the Right," writes Loic Wacquant, "have travelled as one on a pilgrimage, to signify their newfound resolve to crush the scourge of street crime and, for this purpose, to initiate themselves into the concepts and measures adopted by the US authorities."[1] This new security doxa found favour with liberals as it was perceived as a rational policy resting on effectiveness and seemingly devoid of any ideological bias.

The concept of broken windows was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling who published their article titled Broken Windows: The police and Neighbour Safety in the March, 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The authors posited their theory in the following words: "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 run-down 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)."[2] "The essence of Broken Windows," explains Charles Pollard, "is that minor incivilities (such as drunkenness, begging, vandalism, disorderly behaviour, graffiti, litter etc.), if unchecked and uncontrolled, produce an atmosphere in a community or on a street in which more serious crime will flourish."[3] In other words, crimes flourish because of lax enforcement.

Article Author: Socrates

A Tinto Brass fan and a cynical Bangalorean who's been known to display Chomsky-ist leanings.

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