Policing Urban Crimes: The Broken Windows Theory - Page 3

There is general agreement among academicians of criminal jurisprudence that crime in New York did drop. Murder decreased by 72% and total violent crimes by 51%.

The remarkable turnaround in crime rates were largely seen as attributable to broken windows or its semantic variant, quality-of-life policing adopted by NYPD. Conservative policy makers lauded the efforts of Giuliani and Bratton in cleaning the streets of New York and assertively claimed that other states would do well to follow the Bratton Miracle. The influential Manhattan Institute together with the Giuliani Group has been propagating the policing philosophy to Latin America for curbing urban crimes. In the year 1998 alone nearly police officials from 150 countries visited NYPD to learn about the innovative techniques of crime control.

In recent years the broken windows theory and the order maintenance strategy has been in the eye of a perfect storm. A note of dissent was struck by Bernard E. Harcourt, a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard University, who said, "the difficulty is that there is no good evidence for the theory that disorder causes crime. To the contrary, the most reliable social scientific evidence suggests that the theory is wrong. The popularity of the broken windows theory, it turns out, is inversely related to the quality of the supporting evidence."[7]

Harcourt backs his conclusion by relying on a comprehensive study conducted by Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush on disorder in urban neighbourhoods. This study was based on careful data collection using trained observers. On a random basis, 15,141 streets of Chicago were selected for analysis. Sampson and Raudenbush found that disorder and predatory crime are moderately correlated, but that, when antecedent neighborhood characteristics (such as neighborhood trust and poverty) are taken into account, the connection between disorder and crime "vanished in 4 out of 5 tests—including homicide, arguably our best measure of violence." Sampson and Raudenbush conclude that attacking public order through tough police tactics may thus be a politically popular but perhaps analytically weak strategy to reduce crime.[8]

Similar doubts were voiced by other research scholars who expressed grave reservation about adopting the New York style of policing. On the basis of a cross-city comparison of policing strategies and homicide rates, Anna Joanes observed that all of this attention has not been positive, as many NYC residents and observers have blamed this policy for the rise in police brutality and racial tensions and the loss of trust and respect for the police. New York has not achieved a greater crime reduction than that of all other U.S. cities. In fact, the three cyclical measures reveal that New York City’s decline was either equal to or below that of several other large cities, including San Francisco, San Jose, Cleveland, San Diego, Washington, St. Louis, and Houston. These other cities employ a variety of policing strategies. The fact that cities like San Diego and San Francisco employed different policing strategies but have experienced similar declines in their crime rates calls into question the claim that the NYPD’s tactics have produced an unrivaled decrease in crime.[9]

Article Author: Socrates

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