kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory-6.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Broken windows theory	7/8	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T15:21:43.774356+00:00	kb-cron

Broken windows policing has sometimes become associated with zealotry, which has led to critics suggesting that it encourages discriminatory behaviour. Some campaigns such as Black Lives Matter have called for an end to broken windows policing. In 2016, a Department of Justice report argued that it had led the Baltimore Police Department to discriminate against and alienate minority groups. A central argument is that the term disorder is vague, and giving the police broad discretion to decide what disorder is will lead to discrimination. In Dorothy Roberts's article, "Foreword: Race, Vagueness, and the Social Meaning of Order Maintenance and Policing", she says that the broken windows theory in practice leads to the criminalization of communities of color, who are typically disfranchised. She underscores the dangers of vaguely written ordinances that allow for law enforcers to determine who engages in disorderly acts, which, in turn, produces a racially skewed outcome in crime statistics. Similarly, Gary Stewart wrote, "The central drawback of the approaches advanced by Wilson, Kelling, and Kennedy rests in their shared blindness to the potentially harmful impact of broad police discretion on minority communities." According to Stewart, arguments for low-level police intervention, including the broken windows hypothesis, often act "as cover for racist behavior". The theory has also been criticized for its unsound methodology and its manipulation of racialized tropes. Specifically, Bench Ansfield has shown that in their 1982 article, Wilson and Kelling cited only one source to prove their central contention that disorder leads to crime: the Philip Zimbardo vandalism study (see Precursor Experiments above). But Wilson and Kelling misrepresented Zimbardo's procedure and conclusions, dispensing with Zimbardo's critique of inequality and community anonymity in favor of the oversimplified claim that one broken window gives rise to "a thousand broken windows". Ansfield argues that Wilson and Kelling used the image of the crisis-ridden 1970s Bronx to stoke fears that "all cities would go the way of the Bronx if they didn't embrace their new regime of policing." Wilson and Kelling manipulated the Zimbardo experiment to avail themselves of the racialized symbolism found in the broken windows of the Bronx. Robert J. Sampson argues that based on common misconceptions by the masses, it is implied that those who commit disorder and crime have a clear tie to groups suffering from financial instability and may be of minority status: "The use of racial context to encode disorder does not necessarily mean that people are racially prejudiced in the sense of personal hostility." He notes that residents make a clear implication of who they believe is causing the disruption, which has been termed as implicit bias. He further states that research conducted on implicit bias and stereotyping of cultures suggests that community members hold unrelenting beliefs of African Americans and other disadvantaged minority groups, associating them with crime, violence, disorder, welfare, and undesirability as neighbors. A later study indicated that this contradicted Wilson and Kelling's proposition that disorder is an exogenous construct that has independent effects on how people feel about their neighborhoods. In response, Kelling and Bratton have argued that broken windows policing does not discriminate against law-abiding communities of minority groups if implemented properly. They cited Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods, a study by Wesley Skogan at Northwestern University. The study, which surveyed 13,000 residents of large cities, concluded that different ethnic groups have similar ideas as to what they would consider to be "disorder". Minority groups have tended to be targeted at higher rates by the broken windows style of policing. Broken windows policies have been used more heavily in minority neighborhoods where low-income, poor infrastructure and social disorder were widespread, causing minority groups to perceive that they were being racially profiled under broken windows policing.

=== Class bias ===

A common criticism of broken windows policing is the argument that it criminalizes the poor and homeless. That is because the physical signs that characterize a neighborhood with the "disorder" that broken windows policing targets correlate with the socio-economic conditions of its inhabitants. Many of the acts that are considered legal but "disorderly" are often targeted in public settings and are not targeted when they are conducted in private. Therefore, those without access to a private space are frequently criminalized. Critics, such as Robert J. Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush of Harvard University, see the application of the broken windows theory in policing as a war against the poor, as opposed to a war against more serious crimes. Since minority groups in most cities are more likely to be poorer than the rest of the population, a bias against the poor would be linked to a racial bias. According to Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub, and James McCabe, applying the broken windows theory in policing and policymaking can result in development projects that decrease physical disorder but promote undesired gentrification. Often, when a city is so "improved" in this way, the development of an area can cause the cost of living to rise higher than residents can afford, which forces low-income people out of the area. As the space changes, the middle and upper classes, often white, begin to move into the area, resulting in the gentrification of urban, poor areas. The residents are affected negatively by such an application of the broken windows theory and end up evicted from their homes as if their presence indirectly contributed to the area's problem of "physical disorder".