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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broken windows theory | 6/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:21:43.774356+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Statistical evidence === A 2015 meta-analysis of broken windows policing implementations found that disorder policing strategies, such as "hot spots policing" or problem-oriented policing, result in "consistent crime reduction effects across a variety of violent, property, drug, and disorder outcome measures". As a caveat, the authors noted that "aggressive order maintenance strategies that target individual disorderly behaviors do not generate significant crime reductions," pointing specifically to zero tolerance policing models that target singular behaviors such as public intoxication and remove disorderly individuals from the street via arrest. The authors recommend that police develop "community co-production" policing strategies instead of merely committing to increasing misdemeanor arrests.
== Criticism ==
=== Other factors === Several studies have argued that many of the apparent successes of broken windows policing (such as New York City in the 1990s) were the result of other factors. They claim that the "broken windows theory" conflates correlation with causality: reasoning prone to fallacy. David Thacher, assistant professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan, stated in a 2004 paper:
[S]ocial science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it. ... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces. C. R. Sridhar, in his article in the Economic and Political Weekly, also challenges the theory behind broken windows policing and the idea that the policies of William Bratton and the New York Police Department was the cause of the decrease of crime rates in New York City. The policy targeted people in areas with a significant amount of physical disorder and there appeared to be a causal relationship between the adoption of broken windows policing and the decrease in crime rate. Sridhar, however, discusses other trends (such as New York City's economic boom in the late 1990s) that created a "perfect storm" that contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly than the application of the broken windows policy. Sridhar also compares this decrease in crime rate with other major cities that adopted various policies and determined that the broken windows policy is not as effective. In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York in the 1990s. Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic, unrelated growth in the prison population due to the Rockefeller drug laws, and that the number of imprisoned males from ages 16 to 24 was dropping regardless of the shape of the US population pyramid. It has also been argued that rates of major crimes also dropped in many other US and non-US cities during the 1990s, both those that had adopted broken windows policing and those that had not. It is thought that this is due to the exposure of children to environmental lead, which leads to loss of impulse control and hence, when they reach young adulthood, criminal acts. There appears to be a correlation between a 25-year lag between the addition and removal of lead from paint and gasoline and rises and falls in arrests for murder. In his book, Baltimore criminologist Ralph B. Taylor argues that fixing windows is only a partial and short-term solution. His data supports a materialist view: changes in physical decay, superficial social disorder, and racial composition do not lead to higher crime, but economic decline does. He contends that the example shows that real, long-term reductions in crime require that urban politicians, businesses, and community leaders work together to improve the economic fortunes of residents in high-crime areas. In 2015, Northeastern University assistant professor Daniel T. O'Brien criticised the broken window theory model. Using his Big Data based research model, he argues that the broken window model fails to capture the origins of crime in a neighbourhood. He concludes that crime comes from the social dynamics of communities and private spaces and spills into public spaces.
=== Relationship between crime and disorder === According to a study by Robert J. Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush, the premise on which the theory operates, that social disorder and crime are connected as part of a causal chain, is faulty. They argue that a third factor, collective efficacy, "defined as cohesion among residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of public space," is the cause of varying crime rates observed in an altered neighborhood environment. They also argue that the relationship between public disorder and crime rate is weak. In the winter 2006 edition of the University of Chicago Law Review, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig looked at the later Department of Housing and Urban Development program that rehoused inner-city project tenants in New York into more-orderly neighborhoods. The broken windows theory would suggest that these tenants would commit less crime once moved because of the more stable conditions on the streets. However, Harcourt and Ludwig found that the tenants continued to commit crimes at the same rate. Another tack was taken by a 2010 study, which questioned the theory's legitimacy concerning the subjectivity of disorder as perceived by persons living in neighborhoods. It concentrated on whether citizens view disorder as separate from crime or identical to it. The study noted that crime cannot be the result of disorder if the two are identical, agreed that disorder provided evidence of "convergent validity" and concluded that the broken windows theory misinterprets the relationship between disorder and crime.
=== Racial bias ===