Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Even More Broken Windows

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

New York’s new mayor recently announced a new strategy to fight crime. As the New York Daily News proclaims: BROKEN WINDOWS is back!  In this ToE we examine the roots of this policing theory and the individuals who first planted it. We revisit CRIME FILES a Police Foundation TV show from the 80s to better understand where this theory came from and how we might rid ourselves of this insidious idea once and for all.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Even More Broken Windows. I'm here at the First Avenue station on the L train, the station at 14th Street. It's my stop, or the closest station to where I live in the East Village in New York. The last time I was here with a microphone was in February of 2020. It was either the 5th or the 6th. I know it was before the 8th because on the 8th, the city closed these first avenue entrances in order to do some work on the stairs. After the 8th, riders had to use the new entrances on Avenue A to access this station. And I wanted to record here on these stairs at First Avenue because it was here on these

stairs where six white transit cops assaulted a young black artist named Michael Stewart back on September 15, 1983. The transit cops claimed they arrested Michael Stewart because he was tagging, but Michael Stewart wasn't a graffiti artist like some of his friends. He was an artist. Also, these cops who swore that Michael Stewart became violent after they cuffed him and had no choice but to drag him up and down and back up these stairs were the same cops a bystander noticed get angry when Michael kissed his white girlfriend goodbye on the street just before descending into the station. Thirteen days after this brutal beatdown, Michael Stewart died from his injuries.

His murder and the ensuing trial and acquittal of these six transit cops is just one of thousands of similar tales. But what's always fascinated me about Michael Stewart's story is its connection to a theory of policing called broken windows that was popularized at almost the exact same moment. In theory, broken windows policing is aimed at quality of life crimes, turnstile jumping, public drinking graffiti but its critics have always made the case that in practice broken windows policing leads to profiling abuse and murder back in february of 2020 i was hard at work on a mini series looking into the history of broken windows

the michael stewart story was going to be one of the main threads. But then, well, first came the lockdown, and then the murder of George Floyd, and then the nationwide protests against the kind of brutality that killed Michael Stewart and countless others. In the fall of 2020, when I finally did get my broken windows episode out, I was actually of the mind that the theory was now irrelevant. Broken windows, I thought, was finished forever. But then, a few weeks ago, I saw this video online. Four New York City transit cops restraining a woman for fare juggling. The mayor says that a minor crime like fare evasion deserves attention as well.

And then New York's new post-pandemic mayor, Eric Adams, jumped in. We're moving in a new direction. It's about going down and dealing with the quality of life issues we're seeing. And that's the plan we're putting in place to address it. Mayor Adams says he's directed his police to once again focus their efforts on quality of life crimes like fare jumping, public drinking, and graffiti. As the New York Daily News put it, Broken Windows is back. And so I've decided to reconfigure my Broken Windows episode to better reflect my original intention.

The only way to truly deal with this insidious idea is to dig deep and pull it up by the roots. Our story begins in 1970 when the brand new Police Foundation opens up its doors and its coffers to a new generation of scholars and academics committed to reinventing law and order. One of its first academic stars was a political scientist named James Q. Wilson. In his 1968 book, Varieties of Police Behavior, Wilson argued against the bureaucratization of policing, warning that if officers have to follow too many rules and regulations, they'll be less effective. And in his 1975 essay, Lock Him Up, he called for a massive expansion of the prison system.

Yeah, Wilson was a big ideas man. He wanted to make policing great again. And so when the Police Foundation created a TV show in the early 80s to showcase some of their research, they installed James Q. Wilson in the host chair. Hello, I'm James Wilson. When people are threatened by crime or disorder, they usually turn to the police. They assume the police will know what to do, but do they? It's unclear how these shows were disseminated or who watched them. I don't know how foundations distributed their own advocacy journalism back then. Today, you'd just create a podcast or a YouTube channel. That's where I found the Crime Files Archives on YouTube. Watching Crime Files today,

you get a sense of what reform meant to the police foundation and what kinds of questions they hope to answer. Is there any real connection between general economic conditions and the crime rate? Is there any special advantage to your program in the fact that it's run by a private firm? The question is, can any policy help a police officer make that agonizing, split-second, life-or-death decision, shoot or don't shoot? For Crimefile and for the Police Foundation, I'm James Wilson.

James Wilson really liked playing a make-believe TV show host. And he was good at it. Sometimes I even forgot he was selling his own product. Don't assume you know what works. Find out. When people evaluate their own work, they tend to find that everything works. What's truly amazing about these old crime files, though, is the light they shed on one of the most contested theories of police reform.

How can the police most effectively combat crime and reduce disorder? You see, in 1982, just before James Q. Wilson started hosting Crime Files, he co-authored an article for the Atlantic Monthly called Broken Windows. I very much subscribe to the Broken Windows. Broken Windows. I very much subscribe to the Broken Windows. This 1982 article was Rudy Giuliani's Bible for his crackdown on New York City street crime in the early 90s. And the idea of it is you had to pay attention to small things.

Aggressive panhandling. The squeegee operators that would come up to your car and wash the window of your car whether you wanted it or not. The street-level drug dealing, the prostitution, the graffiti. All these things that were deteriorating the cities. Now, Rudy Giuliani totally embraced broken windows to the point where he's historically linked with it, as well as the police brutality and murders that came with it. But what's important to understand is that for a lot of folks,

like former Mayor Bill de Blasio, the problem was always Rudy, not the theory. I think broken windows policing got a bad name in part because it was associated with the Giuliani administration. There's a lot of reasons

to be highly critical of the Giuliani administration. But I think the underlying principle was the right principle. If we start saying, it's all right for you to jump to turnstile. Eric Adams, administration. But I think the underlying principle was the right principle. Eric Adams, New York's current mayor, clearly sees things the same way. So it's time to take a closer look at some of these underlying principles. And we're going to do that by diving into crime files. Hello, I'm James Wilson.

For a long time, what the police did depended mostly on conventional wisdom about what works in policing. The first major police experiment in modern times took place in Kansas City, Missouri, in the early 1970s. Its purpose? To find out if preventive patrol really prevented anything. Here to discuss this with me is George Kelling, one of the persons who carried out the Kansas City experiment. George, how is it that the Kansas City Police Department ever came to question the conventional wisdom? The debate began amongst the officers, and I was working for the Police Foundation, and I was brought in, of course it was a researcher's dream. In a Crime Files episode called, What Works in Policing?

Wilson highlights George Kelling's Kansas City experiment, which calculated the effectiveness of police officers patrolling in their cars. But it turns out that what we've discovered was that just being out there, riding around in cars, doesn't seem to have a lot of value. This revelation led Kelling to his next experiment. In Newark, New Jersey, police officers were removed from their cars

and sent out on foot. Here's how it worked. Foot patrol was randomly assigned to specific neighborhoods and withdrawn from others. For one year, officers kept track of what happened on their beats. Researchers interviewed citizens about their neighborhoods. How safe did they feel in their homes and on the streets? Had they ever been attacked? How helpful were the police? Official reports of crimes and arrests were analyzed. The results of the experiment, there was no

reduction in crime. But in neighborhoods where officers were assigned to foot patrol, citizens felt safer. People can see a police officer on the street, they see his presence, so therefore they feel that the criminal's not gonna do anything while the police officer's around. So if you feel safe, you are safe. This idea that police can reduce crime by first making people feel safer deeply resonated

with James Q. Wilson, and he asked George Kelling to co-write an article with him for The Atlantic. That's how Broken Windows comes into being. In fact, their article begins just as this episode of Crime Files does, with a deep dive into Kelling's experiments. What I noticed in Newark and have noticed in other cities, police become very much involved in order maintenance activities. That is issues of drunks down, prostitutes, drug dealing, those kinds of street activities while maybe not on the surface very threatening to individuals or maybe not even criminal events, nevertheless frighten people enormously. Citizens were much more afraid of disorder than they were of serious crime. This is the key underlying principle of broken windows.

People feel safer when police officers crack down on disorder. And if people feel safer in the short term, then crime will go down in the long term. Well, at least that's the theory. Now, because it's called broken windows, it's natural to assume the theory has something to say about actual broken windows, empty lots, community blight. It doesn't. Broken windows policing sends officers out into the community to clean up by targeting individuals who frighten ordinary citizens. The police have always come to the aid of victims of crime. Now they are beginning to

help people who fear crime. Wilson and Kelling never talk explicitly about broken windows on crime files, but they do reprise the underlying principles of their theory in an episode dedicated to foot patrol. Here with me in the studio is Dr. George Kelling, research fellow at Harvard University, and Hubert Williams, director of police of the city of Newark, New Jersey. Hubert Williams, many citizens are worried about gangs of youth hanging around on street corners. What do the police do to handle loiterers when they encounter them? In Newark, we have a number of strategies. One is called selective area field enforcement, where we actually target these corners where the youth are hanging out there, sending a motorized car around to tell them to leave. When they refuse to leave, then there's

a significant police presence brought into the area. We've learned after a period of use of this particular strategy, police have found it necessary to make arrests and let people know that they're not going to tolerate this kind of activity. In effect, he's telling his police officers, move them along, sweep the corners, get them off the streets. Now, is that really enforcing the law, or is that simply establishing a certain level of order that the community may want? Well, police officers enforce not only criminal law,

but they enforce certain principles of order that are different from community to community. It's sort of a tough, hard-nosed approach, but it's only necessary in the beginning. After that, people will move towards voluntary compliance. One of the tough consequences of broken windows policing is that when disorder is criminalized, individuals with no criminal background or arrest history are often swept off of street corners and sucked into a criminal justice system

that is notoriously difficult to escape from. But when police officers put the theory into practice, there are no innocent bystanders. Again, broken windows theory makes the claim that when disorderly individuals are removed from the streets, crime will go down in the long run. Therefore, when police officers profile disorderly individuals, they are actually targeting future criminals. We need to decide who the high-rate offenders are. This means finding a way to predict how many crimes a person is likely to commit in the future.

Some say it can't be done and shouldn't be tried. Others disagree. Today, even defenders of broken-windows policing will concede that if it's done by racist cops or bad mayors, then sure, profiling could become a problem, potentially. But on Crime Files, we only hear the upsides of profiling. You can't tell who is a criminal just by looking at people or by measuring their skulls. But in the 1940s, an American physician named William Sheldon discovered that delinquent boys were much more likely to have a distinctive body type than were non-delinquent boys. This body type, called a mesomorphic endomorph, is characterized by being much more muscular and somewhat fatter and shorter than the average male.

Some of these crime file episodes suggest the police foundation was deeply invested in profiling and predictive policing. On an episode called Biology in Crime, Wilson highlights the potential of IQ tests. Several very large sets of data have shown that the typical offender is a person whose IQ is in the region of 90 to 93. This has at least a substantial genetic component. That certainly is a factor that enters into criminal behavior for many people and passes from parents to children. That's Richard Hernstein. He co-authored a book with James Wilson called Crime and Human Nature,

the Definitive Study of the Causes of Crime. In their book, they present female-headed families, especially those living on welfare, as breeding grounds for delinquency. They also explore IQ and how it can help society predict certain criminal behaviors in individuals. They reject the idea, though, that IQ tests might be biased in favor of whites. The average difference in height between Swedes and Japanese does not prove a bias in yardsticks. On Crime Files, Hernstein goes even further. He assures us that Americans have nothing to fear from IQ tests or any biometric database. Doesn't this mean that society is going to try

to identify at an early age these born offenders and do something about them, stigmatize them, lock them up? Well, I think individuals are protected by due process. I don't think we have to worry about the more hair-raising consequences that you mention in our country. On the other hand, this kind of information is tremendously useful. The work these two did together formed the basis for Herrnstein's later, more famous book,

which he co-wrote with Charles Murray. The bell curve makes the case that black people score low on IQ tests, not because of biases in the testing or social economic factors, but rather because black people are stupid. Hernstein and Wilson were both obsessed with IQ and how it could be used as a tool. But on Crime Files,

Hernstein does admit that when it comes to policing, IQ is not a magic bullet. I might add that when we talk about the typical criminal, what we're talking about is the kind of offense that occurs most often rather than every single criminal. That is, there may well be criminals who show none of these characteristic traits that we're talking about.

They would be forgers or embezzlers or... Precisely. Corporate presidents or professors. Professors. Especially, I think. Especially professors. That's a funny one. Of course white-collar criminals

have different characteristics than... The flood of drug offenders challenging the criminal justice system to come up with innovative ways to deal with them. After watching all these crime files, I can't help but note Wilson's stark black and white view on policing and crime. In an episode on prison overcrowding, Mr. Lock Em Up himself opens up to the idea of white-collar criminals doing their time at home.

Being on house arrest gives me a chance to stay home, take care of my obligations to my family, and keep me out of jail. Of course, for the low-IQ, mesomorphic, endomorph-collar criminal, well, there's only one solution. Shock incarceration. Wilson and Kelling both went to their graves, insisting that their theory was not racist. This denial is the most dangerous underlying principle of broken windows. And that's what really stands out

after binge-watching all these crime files. of broken windows. And that's what really stands out after binge-watching all these crime files. Not the systemic racism, but rather the lengths to which the system will go to deny any racial bias exists. Many people have made the criticism that the police in some places are more likely to shoot at blacks than whites under similar circumstances. Now, you've studied this personally in New York City. What are your conclusions? Well, your conclusion is accurate. Blacks are more likely to be shot than whites.

But that has to do with the different rates at which blacks and whites expose themselves to those kind of circumstances. So in New York and most of the other cities I've looked at, I found no evidence at all that police were, quote, discriminating with their trigger fingers. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's theory of everything. This installment is called Even More Broken Windows. me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. You can find links to all of the Crime Files episodes we sampled from on the show page at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia.

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