Hidden Brain - Episode 50: Broken Windows

Episode Date: November 1, 2016

In the early 1980s, a couple of researchers wrote an article in The Atlantic that would have far reaching consequences. The article introduced a new idea about crime and policing. It was called Broken Windows. The idea was simple: A broken window is a sign of a neglected community, and a neglected community is a place where crime can thrive. The researchers said, if police fixed the small problems that created visible signs of disorder, the big ones would disappear. Today, we explore how ideas sometimes get away from those who invented them.. And then are taken to places that were never intended.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidantam. In the early 1980s, a couple of researchers wrote an article in The Atlantic that would have far-reaching consequences. The article introduced a new idea about crime and policing. It was called Broken Windows. The idea was simple. A broken window is a sign of a neglected community. And a neglected community is a place

where crime can thrive. The researchers said, if police could fix the small problems, the big ones would disappear. So the broken windows theory was this magical solution that basically everybody could like. It quickly became seen as a panacea for crime. Today we explore how ideas sometimes get away from those who invented them.

And then are taken to places that were never intended. It's a beautiful story and it's a myth. Our story begins in 1969. The psychologist, Philips Zimbato ran an interesting experiment. He abandoned two cars on the street, one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of the Bronx in New York City, and the other in an affluent neighborhood in Palo Alto, California. Both cars were left without license plates, parked with the hoods up. With 10 minutes of leaving the car in the Bronx, passers-by began taking things of value. The car was quickly stripped for parts.

Then, the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But for more than a week in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched. Until Zombardo himself gave the car a smash with a sledgehammer and once the car was damaged it became fair game. This is George L. Kelling.

He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In 1982, I co-authored an article called Broken Windows with James Q. Wilson. This article has gotten considerable attention in the policing and non-policing world. George was fascinated by what had happened in Palo Alto. Once the car was damaged, things played out exactly as they had in the Bronx. The idea that once disorder begins, it doesn't matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control. George reasoned that the same thing might be true for communities as a whole.

A broken window in a neighborhood sends the signal that the neighborhood is uncared for. So if police departments address the little crimes and misdemeanors that might create visible signs of disorder, maybe, just maybe, the bigger stuff wouldn't happen either. Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighborhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods. And people claim their public spaces and store owners,

extend their concerns to what happened on the streets, residents control park spaces, communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained, and it is that dynamic that helps to prevent crime. This wasn't what many police departments were doing. Officers were focused on solving major crimes. Georgianist co-author suggested police departments ought to change their focus. They ought to clean up the streets, keep people from smoking pot in public, crack down on subway

fairbeaters. As it turned out, this was exactly what many communities wanted. If right now we were to go to some neighborhood meeting about problems in the neighborhood, at least three, and probably four of those will be problems of disorder. And that is, use taking over a park, prostitutes, hustling fathers and front of their children, drug dealers hanging around corners. Those are the kinds of things that comprise a good share of the calls that come to police departments and

demand that's based on police to do something about these problems. The argument came at an opportune time. This was a period of high crime and high incarceration and it seemed as if there was no way out of that dynamic and it seemed as if there was no way out of just filling prisons as a way to address the crime problem. This is Bernhard Hartquart, professor of law at Columbia University. As policymakers was scrambling for answers to crime, a new mayor in New York came to power

offering a solution. Ladies and gentlemen, the mayor of the city of New York, Rudolf W. Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani won election in 1993, promising to reduce crime and clean up the streets. Very quickly, he adopted broken windows as his mantra. It was one of those rare ideas that appealed to people on both sides of the aisle. Consovatives liked the policy because it meant restoring order, and liberals liked it, Bernard says, because it seemed like an enlightened way to prevent crime. All of a sudden, it seems as if, well, instead of, you know, throwing people in prison and cracking down, all you really had to do was just pick up the trash and get rid of a homeless person and fix an

abandoned building, just these small forms of disorder. That course were pretty widespread in a city like New York. Rudy Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton, focused first on cleaning up the subway system. George Kelly again. Here was a system that was entirely out of control. Writership was dropping. Lawlessness rained in the subway,

and 250,000 people a day weren't being there fair. The mayor and the police commissioner sent hundreds of police officers into the subway to crack down on turn-style jumpers and vandals. Very quickly, they found confirmation for their theory. Going off to petty crime led the police to violent criminals. In some station it was found that as many as one in ten people who were not paying the fare were either wanted on a warrant for a felony or were carrying

an illegal weapon. Not all fair beaters were criminals but a lot of criminals were fair beaters. It turns out that serious criminals are pretty busy. They commit minor offenses as well as major offenses. The policy was quickly scaled up from the subway system to the entire city of New York. Police ramped up misdemeanor arrests for things like smoking marijuana and public, spraying graffiti, selling loose cigarettes. Almost instantly, they were able to trumpet their success. Crime was falling.

The murder rate plummeted. It seemed like a miracle. The media loved the story. At first, people laughed when he launched a politeness campaign. We begin with sociologist George Kelly and his ideas about how to reduce serious crime by restoring public ordering communities. It's called broken windows go after quality of life offenses to help reduce bigger crimes. George Kelly and another researcher found what they believed was clear evidence of the success

of broken windows. In neighborhoods where there was a sharp increase in misdemeanor arrests, suggesting broken windows policing was enforced, there was also a sharp decline in crime. By the time Rudy Giuliani was giving his farewell address at the end of 2001, broken windows had become one of his greatest accomplishments. The reality is that the motto that was adopted for dealing with crime in New York City is the very, very best way to assure that you can keep a city safe. The mayor emphasized the beautiful and simple idea behind the success.

The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, to busy to pay attention to graffiti. Well, you can't be too busy to pay attention to those things because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society. In less than a decade, New York was transformed. That's right. Yeah, everything's going well. If you're on the upper east side.

But not hardcore again. Of course, it's going a lot less well if you're in other boroughs or in other neighborhoods where all of the policing and all of the arrests are taking place. As broken windows policing was coming into force, some critics said it unfairly targeted communities of color. When we come back, we'll talk it unfairly targeted communities of color. When we come back, we'll talk about this idea and a deeper problem. Broken windows may not have been quite the raging success we thought it was.

It's a very sugar-coated idea that would it be true, it would be marvelous. Stay with us. The rise of broken windows policing and the dramatic fall and crime made for a beautiful story. But right from the start, there was signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative. Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing.

And of course, what we witnessed from that period and it's basically from about 91 that crime in the country starts going down is a remarkable remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now what's so remarkable about it is how widespread it was. So widespread in fact that crime dropped not only in New York but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact crime even So widespread, in fact, that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities, where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption

scandals and largely seen as dysfunctional. Los Angeles was racked with terrible policing problems during the whole time. In fact, the period is a book ended on one side by the Rodney King scandal and on the other side by the ramparts scandal. In between the two, the LAPD is pretty much dysfunctional and despite the fact that the LAPD isn't doing anything, basically. I mean, it's then it's certainly not doing broken windows policing. Crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York.

How could this be? Well, there are many theories. Some attribute the nationwide drop in crime to the growing economy, the end of the crack cocaine epidemic, even environmental factors. Some criminologists credit harsher sentencing guidelines. In 2006, Bernard Harcourt reviewed the study George Kelly had conducted in 2001. The earlier study had powerfully made the case that broken windows policing worked. It found that the areas that saw the largest number of misdemeanor arrests also had the biggest drops in violent crime. But it turned out that actually he had failed to include in his study a very common explanation

which is called a reversion to the mean. And it's something that's well known in the stock market, but basically the idea is, you know, if something goes up a lot, it tends to go down a lot. A graph in George Kelly's 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this window of time gives us its selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines.

And each time the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean. George Kelly acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime, but he still thinks it has value. Even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world. Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't

need the justification of serious crime. But it's worth noting that this was not the premise on which the theory was sold. Broken windows policing was advertised as an innovative way to control violent crime, not just a way to get panhandlers and prostitutes off the streets. There was also another big problem with broken windows. Here's Bernard Harcourt again. We immediately saw an increase, a sharp increase in complaints of police misconduct.

And that's actually one of the most interesting things about the period, really, from 1993 to 96, for instance, when Giuliani is implementing the Quality of Life Initiative. We always associated it with greater order, because crime dropped 60%, but complaints of police misconduct increased by 60%. And so you might wonder, well, actually, was it a period of greater order, or was it a period of greater disorder? And of course, this reflects the fact that the notion of orderliness is itself constructed by us and by what we focus on. But if you focus on police civilian relations, starting in 1993,

what you're going to see is a tremendous amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing. With complaints skyrocketing, with settlements of police misconduct cases, skyrocketing, and of police misconduct cases skyrocketing and of course with incidents brutal incidents all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip. The problem intensified with a new practice that grew out of broken windows it was called stop and frisk. It was embraced in New York City after Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001. If broken windows meant arresting people for misdemeanors in

hopes of preventing more serious crimes, stop and frisk said, why even wait for the misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop? Question, search, anyone who looks suspicious. Once Bloomberg became mayor, he turned from a policy of high misdemeanor arrests to a policy of stop and frisk. They substitute for each other because both of them provide something to the police that the police feels is necessary, which is to be able to come up to an individual, ask them questions, do it some kind of a search, whether it's a pat down or a full search upon arrest, possibly do a records check, check for warrants, etc. And so what it does is it gets a lot more

information to the police. You make more informants, you can get fingerprints, and those things are from a policing perspective, those things are always going to be useful. There were high profile cases where misdemeanor arrests or stopping and questioning did lead to information that helped solve much more serious crimes, even homicides. But there were many, many more cases where the police stops turned up nothing. In 2008, police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York for what they called, furtive movements. The police did find guns during these stops, but the numbers might surprise you. Only one-fifteenth of one percent turned up a gun.

Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly? In Chicago, the researchers Robert Samson and Stephen Routenbush, analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods

with more African Americans. It was, I think, a Wednesday or a Thursday night. I was coming home from dinner with a friend. This is Jamal Johnson, he's African-American 40 years old. I'd noticed an increased police presence in the neighborhood because after we had dinner, we literally came across something like nine or ten different cops in about a three-block radius. Jamal was walking with his friend, but eventually the two split off.

And as I was walking on a street, I noticed the cops looking at us, but not really paying us much attention after the initial sort of scan. And then as I rounded the corner to my block, there was police officer on the corner, and at that stage I was by myself, and of course at that stage, I got stopped. of course at that stage I got stopped.

Jemal was carrying a small utility knife. He was a filmmaker and it came in handy on set. I had come from a day of work and I was working on a photo shoot and a police officer noticed that I had had my work knife, which I know to be street legal, but which he sort of asked me to take out and and show to him. And then he asked me for my ID. He then called, he called in a dispatch, once he'd had my ID, he asked me some basic questions about where I lived, what my job was, what I was doing with it with my evening and so forth. And when he couldn't reach dispatch, he then started to take down

my information at which stage I said to him, please don't put me in the system, you know, you know that I live right here. And you also know that my knife, my knife is legal at which point he said that the knife wasn't in fact legal. And then he asked me if I wanted to, if I preferred to go to jail to To which I said, I think you can understand why I wouldn't like to be in the system. I also think you know that I don't want to go to jail tonight. At which point he said, well, don't give me a hard time. My response was, excuse me, sir.

I certainly didn't mean to do that. Thank you. At which stage, he took down my info, told me not to have my knife on me again, and then let me go home with a sort of a sour look. I think it's worse than humiliation to me because it's not personal. And to me, that's worse because when your society can detain you, won't let you speak to them, you know, like in a sense that the guy said,

you know, essentially, why are you talking back to me? When that becomes your relationship with your society, that means that your life or the very least, like your livelihood, like you getting to and from work, is that question. So I don't really necessarily need to feel huge moments of pride from every interaction I have with the police, but I certainly need to feel that my life or even my evening and my police record isn't

in danger just arbitrarily. So that feeling of an impersonal, not friendly government, standing over you, is pretty terrible. George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In our interview, I read him a passage from that article that is proven to be prescient.

We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable than another, but how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable. How do we ensure in short that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no holy satisfactory answer to this important question. Yeah, that's a loaded statement. And it's something that I've struggled with.

In August of 2013, a federal district court found that New York's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional, because of the way it singled out young, black, and Hispanic men. Later that year, New York elected its first liberal mayor in 20 years. Build a Blasio celebrated the end of stop and frisk. Public safety is a prerequisite for the thriving neighborhoods

that create opportunity in this city. And so is respect for civil liberties. We are all hungry for an approach that acknowledges we are stronger and safer as a city, when police and residents work hand in hand. But he did not do away with broken windows. In fact, he reappointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Bill Bratton. It is a great day for New York City because I am proud to announce that I am appointing Bill Bratton as the next police commissioner of the city of New York. Just seven months after taking over again as the head of New York's police department, Bill Bratton's use of broken windows tactics came under fresh scrutiny.

In this video, shot on a bystander cell phone on a sunny July day in New York City in 2014, a man is standing on the sidewalk between two police officers. Several more officers are just outside of the frame. The cops are asking the man whether he was selling loose cigarettes, misdemeanor The man is visibly and audibly upset This is not the first time he has been questioned by police and Then the officers tackle him they bring him to the ground while restraining him with a chokehold a practice that is banned in New York City. The man in the video is Eric Garner. He's African American and his name has become synonymous with the growing distrust between

police and African American communities. He died not long after the interaction you just heard. Commissioner Bill Bratton found himself on the fire from the media not only about Eric Garner's death, but the entire philosophy of broken windows. Here he is talking with CBS News anchor Maurice Dubois in 2014. Commissioner, critics are blaming your broken windows policy. It's been a hail all around the world is successful going after low-level crimes before big ones happen okay so in this case many people are upset however because they feel

it's targeting communities of color how do you respond to that we are not targeting communities to call out we are targeting behavior in the behavior is for George Kelly this was not the end that he had hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like wildfire. But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never intended and could not control. When during the 1990s, broken windows was a hot ticket item.

I would occasionally read in the newspaper something like, a new chief comes in and says, I just read broken windows and I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow. I won't repeat the magic words that go through my mind because we're on the air. But I would listen to that with dismay. Dismay, because he worried that many officials were so enamored with the simplicity of the broken windows metaphor

that they were not willing to stop and think about the nuances. He worried that officers who hadn't received enough training were being asked to exercise discretion and make complex judgments on the very high pressure. And so do I worry about the implementation about broken windows a whole lot? Yes, I worry about the implementation of order maintenance because it can be done very badly. It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken

windows. Broken windows was a powerful metaphor. Jim and I used it. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified. It was easy to communicate. A lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive.

And it carried us for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale. These days, the consensus among social scientists is that broken windows likely did have modest effects on crime, but few believe it caused the 60 or 70% decline in violent crime that it's often credited with. Despite all the evidence, broken windows continues to be popular. Bernhard Hartcourt says there's a reason for that. It's a simple story that people can latch onto and that then is a lot more pleasant to live with than the

complexities of life. The fact is that crime dropped in America dramatically from the 1990s and that there aren't really good, clean, nation-wide explanations for it. The story of broken windows is a story of our fascination with easy fixes and seductive theories. Once an idea like that takes hold, it's nearly impossible to get the genie back in the bottle. This episode of the Hidden Brain Podcast was produced by Maggie Pennman and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Our team includes Brenna Clar and Raina Cohen. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Our unsung hero this week is Jenna Weissberman. She's a producer who used

to work at NPR and she played an important role in getting the Hidden Brain Podcast off the ground. Jenna contributed a lot of reporting to this episode. Over the next few weeks we're going to bring you other stories exploring how race, immigration and religion intersect with politics, policing and the media. Next week we look at new research that asks whether a psychological test can predict how police will interact with people of color. Please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you get that episode.

We're looking forward to having you join us.