And that leads us to what may be the real issue: revenue. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi argues that the main objective of the enforcement slowdown is to hit Mayor de Blasio where it hurts: the city budget. Revenue, after all, is the underlying, unacknowledged purpose of most petty law enforcement, including Broken Windows. And police brutality, to a large extent, is a matter of power tripping cops reacting brutally when the serfs stiffen their backs against street-side, impromptu tax collection. Revenue collection, after all, is the only thing Broken Windows policing accomplishes, aside from indulging the vindictiveness its well-to-do supporters harbor toward riff raff. The Broken Windows Theory, introduced in 1982 by James Wilson and George Kelling, is just as wrong as the Broken Window Fallacy debunked by Frederic Bastiat in 1850, as we can see from a comparison of the two. - From my essay, The Fat Blue Line and the Other Broken Window Fallacy.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 22:39:05 +0000
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