Broken Windows Policing

Abstract

The 1980s saw sweeping changes occur in policing nationwide. Disorder (sometimes also called incivilities) rose to the top of the police agenda with the publication of studies showing that physical decay and socially undesirable behaviors inspire more fear than crime does. Crime is a relatively rare event, but physical disorder (graffiti, vandalism, and the like) and social disorder (such as aggressive panhandling or people being intoxicated in public) are far more prevalent. Broken windows theory drew from concepts embedded within criminological and social psychological theories. According to this perspective, the cause of crime is disorder that goes unchecked and is permitted to spread throughout a neighborhood or community. Disorder is theorized to scare people and makes them believe that their neighborhood is unsafe. These people subsequently withdraw from public spaces. The disorderly environment and empty streets invite crime and criminals. Offenders feel emboldened to prey on people and property because the environmental cues suggest a low likelihood that anyone will intervene or call the police. At this point, the neighborhood’s disorder problem becomes a crime problem. In the broken windows viewpoint, police are the front line of disorder reduction and control. Police are seen as needing to actively combat disorder in order to make neighborhood residents feel safe so that they will continue participating in the social fabric of their community. Broken windows theory does not contain a set of directions for precisely how police should go about preventing and eliminating disorder. Police leaders wanting to use the tenets of broken windows theory in their communities have to figure out how to put these concepts into practice. What evolved to be called order maintenance policing still varies from agency to agency. One of the most popular (and controversial) strategies is to aggressively enforce laws against nuisance and public-order offending (loitering, public drunkenness, and so on). The signature tactic of order maintenance policing is the street stop, which is a brief field detention and questioning. Police officers who have reasonable suspicion to believe an individual is engaged in criminal behavior can detain that person for questioning. Aggressive enforcement using street stops as a core tactic is not universal and there are other options (e.g., community policing, target hardening, utilizing government services, conveying reliable information) for police agencies to engage in disorder-reduction activities. The disorder-reduction strategy relying on street stops and arrests for low-level offenses goes by names such as “broken-windows policing” and “zero-tolerance policing.” The term “aggressive order-maintenance policing” is adopted for present purposes, as some broken-windows proponents have taken issue with terms like “zero tolerance.” This bibliography provides an overview of studies of broken windows theory and of some of the police efforts to employ the logic of this theory to reduce disorder, fear, and crime. Methodological rigor has been a recurrent topic in the discussion about the merits of broken windows theory and order maintenance policing, so this will be reflected in the bibliographies where relevant.