Is `broken windows theory broken? No. Its a vital, proven policy that is helping save lives. Michael Jenkins Assistant Professor of criminal justice at the University of Scranton The death of Eric Garner at the hands of police is undoubtedly heartbreaking. As Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bill Bratton have said, the city has an obligation to figure out what went wrong -- and to learn to do better in the future. There are many reasons why police interactions with a citizen might turn unnecessarily deadly, including ineffective training, poor supervision and the officers personality, biases or misinterpretations of the situation. But broken windows policing is not part of the problem, and its time to stop blaming police attention to small laws for terrible tragedies like this. Only rarely does that attention involve force in just 1.5% of the tens of millions of police-citizen interactions nationwide. The use of excessive force is even less common. And the main predictor of the officers use of force is the suspects actions -- not the race of the suspect, the race of the cop or the type of crime thats being addressed. Citizens who care about quality of life -- and there are millions of them in New York City -- will continue to demand that police do something about lower-level offenses. Police will intervene when they have reasonable suspicion to believe that someone is involved in an unlawful act. That is their job, and it should remain their job. The broken windows policing tactic is based on a theory presented by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson in 1982. They posited, based on Kellings observations of foot patrols in Newark, N.J., a connection between disorder -- e.g., broken windows, like farebeating and public drinking-- and more serious crime. Critics say it hasnt been proven. But a good bit of high-quality research does indeed find a strong link between levels of disorder and crime. From Jane Jacobs iconic 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, to psychologist Philip Zimbardos 1969 experiment leaving a car without plates and its hood up to see how long it took for people in different neighborhoods to strip it, to the prolific criminologist Wes Skogans work in the 1990s, scholars have shown many forms of the relationship between general disorder and other kinds of law-breaking. There is nothing revelatory about this. What has been exceptional, however, is the broken windows theorys remarkable influence on the ability of police to make communities safer in recent decades. One need only look at the precipitous decline in murders from more than 2,000 in the early 1990s to just over 400 in 2014. The two biggest policy shifts that drove that drop are CompStat -- more efficient and proactive deployment of cops to crime hot spots -- and the NYPDs far more serious attempt to address not only life-anddeath crimes but supposedly small ones. Anyone who travels around New York City neighborhoods can intuitively understand that when cops look the other way rather than dealing with graffiti, farebeating, street-corner drug sales and other such offenses, it creates a climate where other types of crimes will likely thrive. Prof. Kees Keizer and his colleagues controlled field experiments demonstrate this. They found that the presence of disorder (like graffiti and litter) doubled the percentage of people who stole a decoy envelope of money. Unfortunately, there are those who seek to halt police attempts to respond to the small crimes and civic disorder. They point to evidence like a recent New York Times article that laments the rising misdemeanor-to-felony arrest ratio from 1995 to last year. Critics of the NYPD are also using Garners passing to support their assault against the NYPDs attention to lower-level crimes. Before we give in to them, lets first consider other interpretations of the data. The New York Times unintentionally makes a prima facie case for the increased use of arrest for lower-level offenses. When misdemeanor arrests were low in 1995, crime was high. When misdemeanor arrests were comparatively high in 2013, crime was near-historic lows. In the 1990s, felony arrests were higher; in 2013 they were lower. In other words, when felony crime was high, more official police activity was devoted to those felonies. This does not necessarily mean that police involvement in lower-level offenses was non-existent. It might mean that when police interacted with a citizen on a lower-level offense, that the individual was more likely to have been involved in or wanted on a felony. So what was thought to be a low-level offense wound up getting officially recorded as a felony arrest. None of this is to argue that every single low-level crime should result in an arrest, or in a hostile confrontation between cops and citizens. New technologies (such as body-worn cameras) offer advanced methods of holding police accountable. But the bottom line is that police attention to broken windows, in this case the selling of loose cigarettes, did not cause the death of Eric Garner. Turning the focus away from the real causes of police use of excessive force and toward an assault on a proven policing practice will only further compromise the safety of neighborhoods and stifle the necessary changes police should make. Jenkins is an assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Scranton. His forthcoming book (with John DeCarlo), Police Leaders in the New Community Problem - Solving Era, will be published in December 2014.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 13:36:05 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015