The Busted Theory of ‘Broken Windows’ Still Has Media Defenders

For the better part of two years, New York City tabloids have been hyping up a return to the “bad old days” in the city. Front-page stories about homeless people and street performers dirtying up the gains of a city that has become impossibly safe alluded to a turn away from the policing method that supposedly saved the city: the Broken Windows theory. This followed years of political and media support for this so-called “quality-of-life” policing style, which held that strong enforcement against low-level infractions and “disorder” lowered violent crime as well. Broken Windows enjoyed, for many years, a reputation as public safety gospel and the miracle solution to New York’s crime-ridden past.

But now a report by the New York Police Department’s inspector general’s office has undermined the premise of the city’s famed crime-fighting philosophy, widely embraced throughout the country. The report found that over an eight-year period, low-level enforcement had had no bearing on felony crimes. Media reported as if the agency’s findings were a bombshell, despite the fact that they mirrored years of academic research that long ago had said the Broken Windows theory didn’t work.

Defenses sprung from the usual conservative quarters of the city: the New York Post, as well as the Manhattan Institute and its quarterly magazine City Journal. Heather McDonald, a Post columnist, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributor, summed up the right’s allegiance to Broken Windows with a column published just before the report was released, “Broken Windows Doesn’t Target Minorities, It Saves Them” (6/19/16):

There is no New York City institution more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than the New York Police Department; thousands of black men are alive today who would have been killed years ago had data-driven policing not brought down the homicide levels of the early 1990s.

McDonald’s provocative (some might say insulting) analysis that no one values black lives more than cops hinges on the correlation between low-level enforcement and serious crime. While some, like Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, have pointed out that serious crime began to fall before then-mayor Rudy Giuliani and a younger Bill Bratton implemented Broken Windows at the NYPD, the myth that it caused the crime decline was widely embraced—and not only by conservatives.

Bernard Harcourt, whose seminal 2001 book Illusion of Order was one of the first to debunk the Broken Windows myth, remembers the love affair with Bratton’s approach during the Clinton years. He aligns the theory with “middle of the road” liberals who wanted a “gentler” alternative to the right’s obsession with mass incarceration. Harcourt’s book points out early examples of what he describes as “reverence” for Broken Windows from the media.

“It worked,” proclaimed the Los Angeles Times in 1997 (8/10/97): The Broken Windows experiment had “succeeded” in New York. US News and World Report (5/25/98) came to the similar early conclusion that “smarter policing was spectacularly decisive in some cities like New York.” A 1997 Christian Science Monitor headline (2/18/97) credited George Kelling, one of the theory’s co-founders, with the miracle cure of a lifetime: “One Man’s Theory Is Cutting Crime in Urban Streets.” The New York Times (8/22/98) published a story on the other Broken Windows godfather, conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson, that read like a love poem: “If the ultimate reward for a man of ideas is to see an idea make a difference in the real world, then James Q. Wilson should feel rewarded indeed.”

Kevin Cullen, a Boston Globe columnist who contributed to follow-up reporting on the Boston church abuse scandal highlighted in the film Spotlight, was an early cheerleader for quality-of-life policing. He established Broken Windows as the “bible of policing” and “the blueprint for community policing” just three years into its implementation (Boston Globe Magazine, 5/25/97). Cullen, however, proved loyal to Bratton decades later, with multiple fawning articles on the former Boston cop: “How Boston’s Bill Bratton Is Making Over the NYPD” (Boston Globe Magazine, 4/24/15), “Another Bratton Revolution for the New York City Police” (Boston Globe, 2/1/15). He even wrote about how Bratton’s parents met (Boston Globe, 3/5/16).

Another notable booster was the Daily Beast‘s Michael Daly (3/14/14), who took a subway ride along with Bratton and Kelling that described a courageous confrontation where Bratton questioned two noisy men in the next car. I mean, a real cop!  Clearly, many in the media were worshiping too vehemently at the altar of Bratton and of Broken Windows.

When NYPD plainclothes detective Daniel Pantaleo choked Staten Island’s Eric Garner to death in July 2014, room for criticism of the theory was opened. Protests, some that I was involved in, were launched. Many activists pointed to Broken Windows as not only creating the interaction that led to Garner’s death (Garner had been accused of selling “loosie” cigarettes), but of criminalizing untold numbers of people of color in New York City and beyond. A national debate ensued. Celebrated author and public thinker Malcolm Gladwell, whose career-launching 2000 book, The Tipping Point, credited the NYPD’s low-level crackdowns with a safe city (and sold Broken Windows to a wider audience), told CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria (1/27/15) that he may have “oversold” the theory’s effects.

Oops.

Locally, the New York Times editorial board (7/26/14)—more than 20 years after the fact—took the position that Broken Windows’ benefits were “hypothetical.” The New York Post was, well, the New York Post (6/23/16), finding a way to blame Mayor Bill de Blasio for the IG report’s findings. The New York Daily News, which had published pretty damning statistics on the crush of quality-of-life policing on black and Latino New Yorkers (8/4/14), took editorial outrage at the Inspector General’s report undermining the city’s most-cherished policing method (6/23/16). What the News described as “88 pages of embarrassment” was “a jabberwocky’s mouthful of statistical mumbo-jumbo.” Still fuming three days later (6/26/16), the editorial board made the strange case that a report critical of policing policy was flawed because the agency that created the report was “filled with prosecutors and cops.”

Of course, lost amid all the back and forth on policing and the city’s crime decline are the voices of those most affected by the ideas put forward by Broken Windows: the poor, the homeless, immigrants, street vendors, street and subway performers, youth, LGBT and people of color more broadly. A theory started by two white men (Kelling and Wilson) and implemented by two others (Bratton and Giuliani) continues to be debated and written about in circles that have historically had little contact with police. So even if the theory is on the ropes, the costs paid by poor communities of color will likely never be repaid.

Broken Windows was always about constant police contact with vulnerable groups of people. A buffet of interactions, the theory was in some ways just a crude, physical form of surveillance. The fact that it never worked was secondary to what did work: creating a politically accepted justification for crackdowns on those populations. After all, the theory implied that the squeegee man, the subway dancers, the “loosie” sellers and the homeless were responsible for the murder rate. Broken Windows was not a failure but a hugely successful communications strategy that promoted the idea that the poor were dangerous and that the cops should be unshackled to deal with them.

It’s time to bury that idea and reverse that strategy by listening to the stories of those who’ve been dealing with the fallout of decades of a law and order onslaught.

Josmar Trujillo is a former columnist for Extra! who writes at the Huffington Post, Newsday and amNY. He is also an organizer with the Coalition to End Broken Windows and New Yorkers Against Bratton.