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 Banfield’s 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 wouldn’t expect Bratton to change policies on his own. He’s 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 ‘sexiness,’ most people (75% by the article’s own statistics) cannot relate to the issue, most people can’t 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 Giuliani’s 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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I’ve read the original 1982 work. The authors of the broken window theory speak of the importance of beat cops’ 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 that’s 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 we’re 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 don’t 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 didn’t 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. It’s the one thing red states and blue states, rural and urban areas seem to be united in – the slow but continuous creep toward full-blown Authoritarianism.
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I don’t understand this story. Traffic violations go to warrant when ignored, everywhere, don’t they? It was certainly the case in the late 60’s 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 can’t figure out why I said “late 60’s”. The correct time frame would be early 70’s.
yea, yea. thought it was wordy, too.
They stole the phrase “broken windows” 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.
That’s 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.
I’m not a statistician and don’t know where you’d 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 “broken windows policing,” where “quality of life offenses” 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 someone’s driver’s license and also of warrants 15 years old. Is there, say, any notation of open warrants when someone renews a license?
Oh I’m sorry. Did you not read the the stuff in the DOJ report on Ferguson i.e. the report on all police departments and judiciary municipalities ?
New York City makes money on this just like Ferguson does.
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This might be a little off topic, but at least twice in my life and once in my late dad’s life, we got letters for unpaid parking tickets in cities or places to which we had never been. I presume it was a matter of a typo or some such with plate numbers.
In each case we wrote, copy of the letter attached, explaining that we could not possibly be the person involved: We were not in that place on that date or had never been there. We never got a reply.
I still have copies of that correspondence. I’ve subsequently been stopped by police for traffic violations at least 3 times, so I have to assume that I’m not in a data base of people with warrants attached to their names.
However, just the thought of being carted off in irons is, in itself, a nightmare, if only because I have medical issues that require attention several times per day.
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Excellent point. You have pointed out how these observations get taken out of context to justify draconian police actions mostly against minorities and the homeless.
It becomes an out of context “intellectual” or “expert” justification for further oppressive actions against the poor and minorities in general.
Add to throw out all the 100s of thousands of “tickets” issued to people/vehicles that have never been in the city. In 2000, I moved from Rochester, NY (Western NY) to Seattle. When I went to get my Washington State drivers license I found out that I had an unpaid parking ticket from NYC dated October 1966. Washington State would not issue my license until I cleared up the ticket. On the phone I talked to NYC police and they claimed I was ticketed, I asked how as at the time and day cited I was in a firefight in Vietnam, they did not care, they just wanted the initial $125 plus $1500 as an accumulated penalty. I said OK send me proof and gave them my address, not a word has been heard since. Washington State eventually issued a license and when I returned to New York State on a job transfer years later nothing was mentioned.