Stop Attacking Broken Windows Policing

Share and speak up for justice, law & order…

Tens of thousands of lives saved during the last 30 years proves public-order policing enhances public safety.

Let’s defeat the first myth immediately. Broken Windows Policing is not and never is zero tolerance. Zero tolerance is an effective tool that was practiced in crime solving in circumstances where there was a shooting, murder or abduction and it was known that the community contained a number of witnesses within a specific geographic area.

When the community knows that the heat is on, it’s time to enforce every writ for child support, every warrant, every civil ordinance violation, every public order offense within a defined area. If you talk – you walk – on many minor offenses. When there are a couple of murders within a six to eight block area, most citizens understand and appreciate the police doing everything they can to take the killers off the street.

Broken Windows is also not saturation policing, where cops function as an oppressive, occupying force. I’ve seen those projects green-lighted and it has a negative effect on all the performance goals. Too often, it is a tremendous investment in scarce policing resources. A courageous police lieutenant spoke up in a crime meeting where saturation or occupation was on the table due to a recent flare up in a public housing neighborhood. “The good people who live there are going to be stuck inside and the criminals we are after will commit shootings and murders in other areas. Meanwhile my officers will not be making the contacts and arrests to make the city safer.”

Success in New York City
Broken Windows Policing in New York City has been recognized as one of the most successful anti-crime endeavors in contemporary history. Today too many lie and describe it as an organized effort to impose quotas and target minorities.

Broken Windows Policing succeeded in New York due to intentional community involvement. Meetings and town halls were held and community feedback guided the enforcement patterns of the police. The neighborhoods were engaged, and strategies were formed based on their priorities and goals. The foundational members of areas shared their pain points, whether it was open drug markets, littering, public intoxication, and other public order crimes.

Commissioner Bill Bratton’s team found out quickly that few people desired to live with the unnecessary offense of smelly human waste on the streets. All people they met desired health and safety measures for themselves and their families. Each community in every borough came to some degree of consensus, in accord with the principles of Robert Peel, with what they would authorize the police to enforce. A very wise practice by Bratton.

In action, few initiatives are documented as saving so many lives. I grew up near New York City. In the 70s, and while working in the city, my father wouldn’t lock the car for fear of a broken window during a car burglary. He held my hand so tightly as a child in Times Square, there might still be a bruise; it was a place where you could never let your child walk three feet apart from you. Visiting in 1999, under Mayor Giuliani, the city was safe for everybody. Gotham was clean, a city renewed without litter, nearly no graffiti and absent the odor of urine.

You can’t make great friends without making a few enemies.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) propaganda arm, Campaign Zero (CZ), has recently dropped Broken Windows Policing from being at the top of their list on reforms. CZ was the primary contact point for the ‘Eight Can’t Wait’ agenda that was adopted by too many public safety agencies in response to the 2020 unrest. (Current article: DC Mayor changing course on Floyd era police reforms.) There has also been a significant divide between movement leaders Samuel Sinyangwe, DeRay McKesson, Shaun King, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, perhaps as victims of their own success.

Today, the NYPD 12 accuse and sue, the New York Police Department of perpetuating racist quotas on marginalized communities in a systemic fashion. Edwin Raymond speaks to The Grio, a platform prioritizing black concerns, as a whistle blowing lieutenant (but ostensibly as a private citizen) with content exclusive to his role as a police officer in a management role. Raymond is seeking the district 40 seat on the New York City Council.

Author Alex Vitale wrote his book The End of Policing in 2017. Given only six years, it has aged incredibly poorly. Context shows that President Trump was elected but probably not in the oval office quite yet. Vitale’s assertions are paranoid and speculative.

“Broken-windows policing is at root a deeply conservative attempt to shift the burden of responsibility for declining living conditions onto the poor themselves and to argue that the solution to all social ills is increasingly aggressive, invasive, and restrictive forms of policing that involve more arrests, more harassment, and ultimately more violence. As inequality continues to increase, so will homelessness and public disorder, and as long as people continue to embrace the use of police to manage disorder, we will see a continual increase in the scope of police power and authority at the expense of human and civil rights.”

The data tells a different story. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute writes: “Crime rates were much higher 20 years ago, however. In New York City in 1990, for example, there were 2,262 homicides. Last year there were 333, a drop of 85 percent. New York’s crime drop is the steepest in the nation, but crime has fallen at a historic rate nationwide as well – by about 40 percent – since the early 1990s. The greatest beneficiaries of that crime drop have been minorities. More than 10,000 minority males are alive today in New York who would have been dead if the city’s homicide rate had remained at its early 1990s levels.”

Charts show that the benefits are not equally shared. Despite the initiatives, the white murder rate has barely been impacted. Both black and Hispanic communities enjoy lifesaving benefits. Slightly less, but significantly aligned, were the number of black and brown lives not sentenced in murder convictions. This nearly doubles Mac Donald’s chance at life, and hers was a conservative estimate.

Even if a single life is saved…

How many times have we heard (especially in the past three years) that if lives are saved it is worthy of a brief inconvenience. Our brains are conditioned to recognize, in nearly all situations, whether order is maintained or disorder reigns. Our instincts are tuned to associate order with and attention to detail with confidence and competence.

If you ride a bike any distance, you quickly learn what areas present hazards with consequences that you are going to have to walk it home due to running over broken glass. You also quickly learn there are neighborhoods where you don’t have to worry about such things. Many years ago, I biked miles and miles exploring where my first home should be purchased.

Love them or hate them, homeowner associations (HOAs) exist for a reason. When I did buy my home, my HOA was my least favorite part of home ownership. When they work well, their worth is self-evident, and the benefit is shared by the entire development. Given a choice, most would choose to live in the nicer of two neighborhoods. Generally, it is not a complex decision.

George L. Kelling, one of the authors of the philosophy, got out of his office and either onto the streets or in a squad car. He and James Q. Wilson wrote from firsthand experience on the dynamics and negative effects of public disorder and its adversarial relationship with community safety. In 1982, they wrote the foundation of common-sense policing co-authoring in The Atlantic Monthly.

The great concern is that most officers on the street don’t know, haven’t been educated or informed, that enforcing public order crimes statistically saves lives. In fact, more lives will be saved in this fashion than by heroic action. Many join the profession with the dream of saving lives, but those scenarios are talking someone off a bridge, pulling a person from a fiery wreck or stopping a bad guy from killing a good guy. Those occasions may arise, but the best and most reliable way to both ensure citizen survival, and in turn fruitful productive lives, is helping people align with the priorities of their communities.

Please keep all of our first responders in your prayers.

References:

https://files.libcom.org/files/Vitale%20-%20The%20End%20of%20Policing%20(Police)%20(2017).pdf

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/12/broken-windows-policing-doesnt-work-it-also-may-have-killed-eric-garner.html

https://manhattan.institute/article/race-crime-and-police-a-closer-look

https://www.rebelnews.com/dc_mayor_rolls_back_progressive_police_reforms_amid_crime_surge

https://archive.campaignzero.org/brokenwindows.html

(Easter Egg, Glad you checked down here)

The following activities do not threaten public safety and are often used to police black communities. Decriminalize these activities or de-prioritize their enforcement: