Discussion for article #239042
We had a discussion about this within the last year. Seems simple enough - put a team together to categorize those open warrants. Sort by name to see if there are serial violators. Then assess the actual âviolationsâ. Nonviolent crimes: out. Any citation that would bring less than a $500 fine: out. Possession of marijuana: out. So on and so forth until you have it whittled down to the people the cops really need to be looking for.
(dusts hands off) Problem solved.
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As Councilman Antonio Reynoso, co-chair of City Councilâs Progressive Caucus, put it in a phone interview: âI donât think anyoneâs freedom should be toyed around with so lightly.â
Thatâs my opinion, too.
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From the article:
Influenced by a 1982 article published in The Atlantic by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, the broken windows theory argues that aggressively pursuing minor, so-called âquality of lifeâ offenses prevents the kind of community disorder that allows more serious crime to flourish.
The theory is classist and racist. One of its authors studied under a guy named Edward Banfield. [Banfield] argued, rather than waste time and public money implementing policies based on the false notion that all men were created equal, better to just face facts and acknowledge the natural divisions that exist. Members of the lower classes should leave school in ninth grade, to get a jump on a lifetime of manual labor. The minimum wage should be repealed to encourage employers to create more jobs for âlow-value labor.â The state should give âintensive birth-control guidance to the incompetent poor.â And the police should feel free to crack down on young lower-class men.
Banfield advocated clearing the streets of lower class youth as a way to prevent crimes by those âwhose propensity to crime is so high that no set of incentives that it is feasible to offer to the whole population would influence their behavior.â
Banfieldâs ideas were authoritarianism run amok. The broken window theory just dressed them up a bit.
Broken window? Reading the list of possible violations what I saw is just a big city, modern set of Jim Crow laws. The only difference is that these laws destroy, demean, and persecute more than just blacks. They are designed to prey upon all poor, uneducated, confused ,and weak people.
This isnât just âauthoritarianism run amok.â This is class warfare.
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I agree broken windows policing is bad, but this linked article is just guilt by association. A more direct argument should be made.
You are correct.
The modern police force was created to control the poor and the working class. The broken window theory and Banfieldâs ideas fit right in with that POV.
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Reading that report shows NYC is not much different than Ferguson, Missouri. Broken Windows is a broken method of policing, but I wouldnât expect Bratton to change policies on his own. Heâs invested heavily in it.
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An amazingly gripping article about a subject that is painfully in need of more public discussion. The problem, as I see it, is that the subject is boring, lacks news media âsexiness,â most people (75% by the articleâs own statistics) cannot relate to the issue, most people canât even begin to imagine the horror that is sitting in a jail cell with predatory and/or insane people free to act out however their demons direct and a subject that must be experienced to truly empathize with those who are tossed in jail for the first time. This conversation has been intentionally overlooked for in excess of 35 years.
This issue goes back further than Rudy Giulianiâs tenure as mayor to the argument of law enforcement being used to enforce morality, at the expense of enforcing amoral (amoral not in a bad way) laws against crime objectively far more damaging to societal order. I can recall several long discussions of this problem as an undergraduate in criminal justice courses that were part of the required course of a political science major.
This article does a masterful job of making a gripping subject of an issue that can, to say the least, create an instant cure for insomnia. Kudos to Ms. Kirkland.
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Iâve read the original 1982 work. The authors of the broken window theory speak of the importance of beat copsâ silencing rowdy teenagers and getting loiterers off the streets. Indeed, they viewed these tasks as more important in police work than solving crime.
Wilson, the one who studied with Banfield, focused heavily on low level blue collar crime. Indeed, he was willing to tolerate a certain level of white collar crime if thatâs what it took to keep commerce or a big city operating. Similarly, Banfield felt that a certain amount of corruption was actually efficient and productive, and small time clue collar disruptive behavior was the bigger threat.
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So we can see that Stop and Frisk was nothing more than an add-on to Broken Windows.
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So, on one hand, we have a body of powerful statistical and neurological evidence showing that the crime rate correlates closely with atmospheric lead levels at precisely the lag interval you would expect to see when damaged kids grow into damaged adults and then eventually age out of the criminal population. And, on the other, we have a thirty three year old article from the eminent peer reviewed scholarly journal known as The Atlantic by a couple of prominent experts armed with some anecdotes and their own lofty ipse dixit pronouncements.
Of course weâre still making policy based on the latter. Because 'Murica.
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Handcuffs for a traffic ticket? Wow, talk about overkill, and how interesting it is that police donât think twice about using that overkill. I really, really hope this problem gets addressed. I can see that this could generate revenue for the system because more people would be willing to clear their records if they didnât have to interact with the criminal justice system over petty offenses like parking fines.
The more people are dragged, against their will, into the system, the more incidents will happen. I also think this gives cops the feeling that pretty much everyone is a perp waiting to be taken in. 1.2 million outstanding arrest warrants!?
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This story, and the story about the little kid with learning disabilities being handcuffed in school, are two sides of the same Authoritarian coin. Itâs the one thing red states and blue states, rural and urban areas seem to be united in â the slow but continuous creep toward full-blown Authoritarianism.
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I donât understand this story. Traffic violations go to warrant when ignored, everywhere, donât they? It was certainly the case in the late 60âs in LA, when I let a warning (not even a violation) for a burnt out tail light go to warrant and get me arrested.
-edit- I canât figure out why I said âlate 60âsâ. The correct time frame would be early 70âs.
yea, yea. thought it was wordy, too.
They stole the phrase âbroken windowsâ too.
It used to mean something simpler and more benign. It used to mean simply that if you left a house or a building with a broken window, it would attract vandals to break more windows, and in a cascading effect the whole neighborhood would decline.
It was not a criticism of minorities or classes⌠it was essentially pro-urban beautification. It was an encouragement for neighborhoods to form block clubs to report damaged street signs so the city would repair them, for cities to help people keep up neighborhoods, to provide grants for new facades, etc., and especially for cities to maintain their own properties⌠for cities to mow the lawns of, fix the windows of, and secure the doors of those houses and abandoned factories that the city had taken possession of due to back taxes, instead of letting them rot as rust belt cities too often do.
Thatâs the biggest thing - it was a call for cities to SERVE disadvantaged neighborhoods and for cities to be responsible for their own properties to prevent downsliding and creating urban blight.
And these racists turned that effect and that phrase into yet another reason to oppress, another reason to enrich police unions and politicians, another reason to enrich private prisons.
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If jaywalking can result in a summons and bench warrant then the entire population of NYC except those too young to walk is at risk. People walking along major streets like Broadway simply do not pay attention to pedestrian lights on the cross streets are major 2-way cross-towns like 79th or 96th. You step off the curb, check for oncoming cars and then go, red light or no. I would guess that there are at least a million (literally!) jaywalking violations a day in Manhattan alone.
Iâm not a statistician and donât know where youâd find data, but actuaries and statisticians could assess the possibility: I think that if you start out with the expectation that a neighborhood is going to have a higher rate of crime, so you put most of your most aggressive policemen there, they are going to arrest more people and so, yeah, that neighborhood has a higher crime rate. Then you add in âbroken windows policing,â where âquality of life offensesâ often are counter to the existing customs and mores. Your crime rate for that neighborhood is going through the roof, so you need to assign more, and more aggressive, cops there.
I wonder how many of these people who were issued a a summons (assuming for the moment that they were issued, rather than a summons written out to keep the stats up) knew they had a court date, knew that they had an open warrant, etc. I noticed mention of running someoneâs driverâs license and also of warrants 15 years old. Is there, say, any notation of open warrants when someone renews a license?