James Q. Wilson & George L. Kelling (1982)

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[…] At the community level, disorder and crime are inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence.  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 neighbourhoods 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.)

                Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory.  He arranged to have an automobile without licence plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California.  The car in the Bronx was attacked  by ‘vandals’ within ten minutes of its ‘abandonment.’  The first to arrive were a family – father, mother, and young son – who removed the radiator and battery.  Within twenty-four hours virtually everything of value had been removed.  Then random destruction began – windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped.  Children began to use the car as a playground.  Most of the adult ‘vandals’ were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites.  The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week.  Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer.  Soon, passersby were joining in.  Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed.  Again, the ‘vandals’ appeared to be primarily respectable whites.

                Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding.  Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx – its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of ‘no-one caring’ - vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behaviour is costly.  But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers – the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility – are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no-one cares.’

                We suggest that ‘untended’ behaviour also leads to the breakdown of community controls.  A stable neighbourhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in an few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.  A piece of property is abandoned, weeks grow up, a window is smashed.  Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy.  Families move out, unattached adults move in.  Teenagers gather in front of the corner store.  The merchant asks them to move; they refuse.  Fights occur.  Litter accumulates.  People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off.  Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

                At this point it  is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur.  But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behaviour accordingly.  They will use the streets less often, and when on the streets will stay apart from their fellows, moving with averted eyes, silent lips, and hurried steps.  ‘Don’t get involved.’  For some residents, this growing atomization will matter little, because the neighbourhood is not their ‘home’, but ‘the place where they live.’  Their interests are elsewhere;  they are cosmopolitans, but it will matter greatly to other people, whose lives derive meaning and satisfaction from local attachments rather than worldly involvement; for them, the neighbourhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends whom they arrange to meet.

                Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion.  Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behaviour by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped.  That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes’ customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently.  That muggings will occur.

                Among those who find it difficult to move away from this are the elderly.  Surveys of citizens suggest that the elderly are much less likely to be the victims of crime than younger persons, and some have inferred from this that the well-known fear of crime voiced by the elderly is an exaggeration: perhaps we ought not to design special programs to protect older persons; perhaps we should even try to talk them out of their mistaken fears.  This argument misses the point.  The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a drunken panhandler can be as fear-inducing for defenceless persons as the prospect of meeting an actual robber; indeed, to a defenceless person, the two types of confrontation are often indistinguishable.  Moreover, the lower rate at which the elderly are victimized is a measure of the steps they have already taken – chiefly, staying behind locked doors – to minimize that risks they face.  Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are far easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more.

                Nor is the connection between disorderliness and fear made only by the elderly.  Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, has recently gathered together a number of surveys on the sources of public fear.  One, done in Portland, Oregon, indicated that three-fourths of the adults interviewed cross to the other side of the street when they see a gang of teenagers; another survey in Baltimore, discovered that nearly half would cross the street to avoid even a single strange youth.  When an interviewer asked people in a housing project where the most dangerous spot was, they mentioned a place where young people gathered to drink and play music, despite the fact not a single crime had occurred there.  In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest.  Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider with the ‘inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests.’

                In response to fear, people avoid one another, weakening controls.  Sometimes they call the police.  Patrol cars arrive, an occasional arrest occurs, but crime continues and disorder is not abated.  Citizens complain to the police chief, but he explains that his department is low on personnel and that the courts do not punish petty or first-time offenders.  To the residents, the police who arrive in squad cars are either ineffective or uncaring; to the police, the residents are animals who deserve each other.  The citizens may soon stop calling the police, because ‘they can’t do anything.’

                The process we call urban decay has occurred for centuries in every city.  But what is happening today is different in at least two important respects.  First, in the period before, say, World War II, city dwellers – because of money costs, transportation difficulties, familial and church connections – could rarely move away from neighbourhood problems.  When movement did occur, it tended to be along public-transit routes.  Now mobility has become exceptionally easy for all but the poorest or those who are blocked by racial prejudice.  Earlier crime waves had a kind of built-in, self-correcting mechanism: the determination of a neighbourhood or community to reassert control over its turf.  Areas in Chicago, New York, and Boston would experience crime and gang wars, and then normalcy would return, as the families for whom no alternative residences were possible reclaimed their authority over the streets.

                Second, the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community.  Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested ‘on suspicion’ or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed.  ‘Rights’ were something enjoyed by decent folk, and perhaps also by the serious professional criminal, who avoided violnce and could afford a lawyer. 

[…]  Serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked.  The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window.  Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions.  If the neighbourhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.

                Some police administrators concede that this process occurs, but argue that motorized-patrol officers can deal with it as effectively as foot-patrol officers.  We are not so sure.  In theory, an officer in a squad car can observe as much as on officer on foot; in theory, the former can talk to as many people as the latter.  But the reality of police-citizen encounters is powerfully altered by the automobile.  An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street-people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can help him manage whatever is about to happen.  And he can never be certain what that will be – a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation, a teasing remark, a confused babble, a threatening gesture.

                In a car, an officer is more likely to deal with street-people by rolling down the window and looking at them.  The door and the window exclude the approaching citizen; they are a barrier.  Some officers take advantage of this barrier, perhaps unconsciously, by acting differently if in the car than they would on foot.  We have seen this countless times.  The police car pulls up to a corner where teenagers are gathered.  The window is wound down.  The officer stares at the youths.  They stare back. The officer says to one, ‘C’mere.’  He saunters over, conveying to his friends by his usual elaborately casual style the idea that he is not intimidated by authority.  ‘What’s you name?’  ‘Chuck.’  ‘Chuck who?’  ‘Chuck Jones.’  ‘What’ya doing, Chuck?’  ‘Nothin’.’  ‘Got a P.O. [parole officer]?’  ‘Nah.’  ‘Sure?’  ‘Yeah.’  ‘Stay out of trouble, Chuckie.’  Meanwhile, the other boys laugh and exchange comments among themselves, probably at the officer’s expense.  The officer stares harder.  He cannot be certain what is being said, nor can he join in and, by displaying his own skill at street banter, prove that he cannot be ‘put down.’  In the process, the officer has learned almost nothing, and the boys have decided the officer is an alien force who can safely be disregarded, even mocked.

                Our experience is that most people like to talk to a police officer.  Such exchanges give them a sense of importance, providing them with the basis for gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them (whereby they gain a modest but significant sense of having ‘done something’ about the problem).  You approach a person on foot more easily, and talk to him more readily, than you do a person in a car.  Moreover, you can more easily retain some anonymity if you draw an officer aside for a private chat.  Suppose you want to pass on a tip about who is stealing handbags, or who offered to sell you a stolen TV.  In the inner-city, the culprit, in all likelihood, lives nearby.  To walk up to a marked patrol car and lean in the window is to convey a visible signal that you are a ‘fink.’

[…]  Even in areas that are in jeopardy from disorderly elements, citizen action without substantial police involvement may be sufficient.  Meetings between teenagers who like to hang out on a particular corner and adults who want to use that corner might well lead to an amicable agreement on a set of rules about how many people can be allowed to congregate, where, and when.

                Where no understanding is possible – or if possible, not observed – citizen patrols may be a sufficient response.  There are two traditions of communal involvement in maintaining order.  One, that of the ‘community watchmen,’ is as old as the first settlement of the New World.  Until well into the nineteenth century, volunteer watchmen, not policemen, patrolled their communities to keep order.  They did so, by and large, without taking the law into their own hands – without, that is, punishing persons or using force.  Their presence deterred disorder or alerted the community to disorder that could not be deterred.  There are hundreds of such efforts today in communities all across the nation.  Perhaps the best known is that of the Guardian Angels, a group of unarmed young persons in distinctive berets and T-shirts, who first came to public attention when they began patrolling the New York City subways but who claim now to have chapters in more than thirty American cities.  Unfortunately, we have little information about the effect of these groups on crime.  It is possible, however, that whatever their effect on crime, citizens find their presence reassuring, and that they thus contribute to maintaining a sense of order and civility.

                The second tradition is that of the ‘vigilante.’  Rarely a feature of the settled communities of the East, it was primarily to be found on those frontier towns that grew up in advance of the reach of government.  More than 350 vigilante groups are known to have existed; their distinctive feature was that their members did take the law into their own hands, by acting as a judge, jury, and often executioner as well as policeman.  Today, the vigilante movement is conspicuous by its rarity, despite the great fear expressed by citizens that the older cities are becoming ‘urban frontiers.’  But some community-watchmen groups have skirted the line, and others may cross it in the future.  An ambiguous case, reported in The Wall Street Journal, involved a citizens’ patrol in the Silver Lake area of Belleville, New Jersey.  A leader told the reporter ‘We look for outsiders.’  If a few teenagers from outside the neighbourhood enter it, ‘we ask them their business,’ he said.  ‘If they say they’re going down the street to see Mrs. Jones, fine, we let them pass, but then we follow them down the block to make sure they’re really going to see Mrs. Jones.’

                Though citizens can do a great deal, the police are plainly the key to order-maintenance.  For one thing, many communities, such as the Robert Taylor Homes, cannot do the job by themselves.  For another, no citizen in a neighbourhood, even an organized one, is likely to feel the sense of responsibility that wearing a badge confers.  Psychologists have done many studies on why people fail to go to the aid of persons being attacked or seeking help, and they have learned that the cause is not ‘apathy’ or ‘selfishness’ but the absence of some plausible grounds for feeling that one must personally accept responsibility.  Ironically, avoiding responsibility is easier when a lot of people are standing about.  On streets and in public places, where order is so important, many people are likely to be ‘around,’ a fact that reduces the chance of any one person acting as the agent of the community.

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