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 “quality of life” 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 The minimum wage should be repealed to encourage employers to create more jobs for “low-value labor.” The state should give “intensive birth-control guidance to the incompetent poor.” 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 “whose 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.”
Banfield’s ideas were authoritarianism run amok. The broken window theory just dressed them up a bit.