The return of broken windows and other stopgaps

Broken windows theory, often confused with CPTED, is a police strategy to cut crime
- photo by Smallbones, Creative Commons

by Gregory Saville

Last year, in frustration over increasing incidents of violence, the NYPD returned to their broken window theory to cut crime, a much-criticized program from the past.

Can cops really prevent crime? There is a big difference between responding to emergencies and apprehending offenders, versus preventing crime. They are not the same. 

If you ask the Frustrated or the Cynical, they say no! Crime goes up and down regardless of police actions. Even people like urban writer Jane Jacobs said that police, while important, are not the main way to prevent crime – people in the community are. 

If you ask the Supporters or the Optimistic, they say yes! Problem-oriented policing seems to cut crime, at least in some cases. But it is a rare strategy in policing nowadays.

What of other strategies? Consider predictive policing and especially hotspot policing, a tactic that goes back decades. When I was a cop we called this showing-the-flag in troubled areas. Flag showing put cops into high crime areas at just the right time.

Some researchers, like criminologist David Weisburd, are big hotspot policing advocates. He points to research that shows early success. Still, there are plenty of questions. When Denver police tried it, they cut gun crime in 3 of 5 hotspots, but citywide gun crime increased anyway.

POLICE CRIME PREVENTION

What about crime prevention officers? Crime prevention specialists do some good work, but they are a tiny fragment of the total police roster. They split their time between a myriad of disconnected programs and they seldom work within the operational goals of a neighborhood-based safety plan. 

What about technology? The research is not convincing. CCTV in public places, for example, has a spotty record with dubious results. We have blogged on CCTV before. We've also blogged on the problems with Shotspotter Acoustic Gun Detection technology. The NYPD domain awareness system is the latest technology in this regard. Unfortunately, crime in NY is still increasing.

What about tough-on-crime like zero-tolerance enforcement, stop-and-frisk tactics, and broken windows policing? Does it work? The research is inconclusive. In fact, parts of the NYPD stop-and-frisk strategy were ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. 

TOUGH ON CRIME? 

Tough-on-crime programs rely on what criminologists call deterrence theory – strict prison sentences, mandatory sentencing, and other punishments. Deterrence theory has one of the longest research histories in criminology. It shows that deterrence does not prevent much crime! It might work on minor infractions like speeding. But for hardcore criminals, substance addicts, gang members, and others, it does little. 

Jail is also part of deterrence theory and while it may incapacitate an offender for the duration of the sentence, without intensive programming (like Colorado’s horse whisper program) and post-release supports, results are discouraging. If a convict exits prison and returns to the same blight, poverty, and desperate conditions that led him or her to prison in the first place, not much will change. 

Great programs exist but they are too few and too underfunded. 

Fire prevention...not the same as crime prevention. But close enough!
- photo Hungryogrephotos Creative Commons

FIRE PREVENTION

In the final analysis, stop-and-frisk, hotspot policing, CCTV, tough-on-crime, and many others are little more than stopgaps. They calm the winds, but the hurricane continues. 

Fire prevention takes a whole different approach. Fire officials learned long ago that driving around blindly on random patrol waiting for the fire was futile. They might send fire specialists to places where fires often break out – fire hotspots (pardon the pun), and then dispatch the engines. But those are nothing but stopgap measures.

Instead, they learned about the root causes of fire, the materials, and the types of situations where fire was likely. They developed preventive education about risky situations, like smoking in bed. They created building codes with fire-resistant materials and regulations requiring extinguishers in new construction. That is how they prevent fire. They dug at the roots and used scientific knowledge about the causes.

Paradox: noun - par.a.dox [a statement that is self-contradictory or logically untenable] 

THE CRIME PREVENTION PARADOX 

It may not be exactly the same as crime, but it is close enough! And that leads to the conclusion that all the stopgap measures above have one simple paradox: In order to work, those measures need already-committed crimes. There can be no crime hotspot unless existing crime already makes a place hot. Crime prediction is impossible unless you already have an existing pattern of crime from which to make your predictions.

The paradox gets even worse when you deploy stop-and-frisk, showing the flag, or tough-on-crime, all of which show up in the hotspots where poverty, inequities, blight, and fear already exist. Stopgap programs are unlikely to prevent those things that have existed for decades. You cannot prevent something that already exists. You can mitigate it once you discover it and stop it from recurring. That is all fine and good. But it is not prevention, per se. 

The fire people are right that to prevent something, you must understand and diagnose it. You must have a local, long-term plan with specific goals. 

This deeper and more comprehensive fire prevention method is more difficult with crime because the causes of crime are complex and multi-faceted. Of course, that is no excuse to stay confined within the walls of stopgap measures. There are more collaborative ways to build communities out of crime. 

WHAT NOW?

One answer is to get the police to collaborate with neighborhoods on the kind of community-building we describe in SafeGrowth: Building Neighborhoods of Safety and Livability. This method has been well-established and previous books have outlined early versions, such as Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio’s Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival.

Another answer, also linked to SafeGrowth, is Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky’s Building Our Way Out of Crime. That too describes deeper ways out of stopgaps and towards more comprehensive prevention. 

Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky published their summary of community transformation. An abbreviated summary is at POP Center Library. The full book is available online

All this points toward one particular answer to the question: Can police prevent crime? There are ways for police to prevent crime and all of them start and end with collaborations directly with the community. 

Quality-of-life policing - re-dressing broken windows?

With the increase in street disorder and homelessness, NYPD has
reinstated the controversial "Quality-of-Life" policing strategy

by Mateja Mihinjac

Over the past few years, there has been a growing focus on improving liveability and quality of life within neighbourhoods and cities. This includes our conceptualisation of 3rd Gen CPTED – Third Generation Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) – a theory capitalizing on the concept of liveability that embeds safety from crime and fear.

One potential manifestation of this liveability trend translates into policing with an increasing emphasis on quality-of-life enforcement where individuals are targeted for minor offences and misdemeanours that contribute to crime and disorder. 

QUALITY-OF-LIFE POLICING IN NEW YORK CITY

Quality-of-life policing has been most prominent in New York City, which is undergoing an interesting change under the leadership of new Mayor Eric Adams.

After years of a downward trend in arrests and incarcerations for misdemeanour offences, stats for these activities have started to increase owing to a new stricter enforcement of so-called petty crimes. The petty crimes include fare evasion, petty theft, jumping subway turnstiles, sleeping on a park bench, taking up two seats on the subway, public drinking, public urination, dice games, and similar. According to reports, arrests for these offences have jumped by 25% between January and June of this year.

Nearly 90% of those arrested were people of colour.

This is the first increase since 2014 and the first significant increase since 2007 when the stop and frisk practice was ruled unconstitutional. 

Street incivilities, like graffiti, have returned to New York City

Yet the NYPD maintains that New Yorkers desire, if not demand, addressing the quality-of-life issues. They justify this with a poll showing three-quarters of respondents stated they perceive crime as a very serious issue. 

Of course, the survey simply reflects public perceptions of crime and quality of life, not what specifically the community would like done about crime and quality of life. To translate that into quality-of-life policing would seem to commit the error of what policing expert Professor Herman Goldstein called the “means over ends syndrome”, the process whereby police conflate the ends with the means and place more emphasis on the policing operational tactics than on effective solutions that actually resolve the problem at hand.

Quality-of-life policing enforces minor offences,
like littering and dogs-off-leash

BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING 2.0

Some argue this new era of quality-of-life policing is simply the return of broken windows/order maintenance policing, a policing practice that received much criticism for being unethical and ineffective. 

Its critics argue that quality-of-life policing practices are abusive, they harass predominantly individuals of colour and criminalise people for being poor.

Moreover, in the era of aiming to re-establish positive police-community relationships following all the recent police-community crises (the protest movement after George Floyd’s death; the defund the police movement), it would seem that more aggressive and confrontational policing practices may undermine these efforts for positive changes.

Like residents in all cities around the world, people in New York City
desire a livable city with places that are healthy, fun, and safe

THE FUTURE

My fear is that returning to more repressive policing tactics could also increase the gap between prevention strategies such as CPTED and the disadvantaged communities that gain the most from effective and low-cost practices.

As recently as last year CPTED was vilified by some critics for alleged discriminatory practices when they wrongfully conflated CPTED with broken windows policing. 

We certainly do not need another “prevention” strategy that causes more harm than good – especially since it already did that once. I hope it does not come to that.

"Once we fix the broken windows, then what?"

Policing New York with Broken Windows

How does democratic policing differ from military regimes and police states? That question was best asked in the now classic Policing a Free Society by Herman Goldstein, the leading police scholar of the past 25 years.

Nowhere do those differences surface more sharply than when social unrest arises or public confidence falters. How do democratic cops respond? Adhering to democratic principles, Goldstein suggests, is the key.


DEMOCRATIC POLICING

In truth, democratic policing shows up when leaders step up, admit fault, and set sail upon the turbulent sea of reform.

Such sailing shows up in the recent statements and actions of two police leaders - NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsay (now retired).

In New York police have made a major shift in enforcement strategies.

The article "Why Manhattan isn't going to arrest people for littering and public drinking", describes the end of the quality-of-life enforcement model of the Broken Window theory instituted in the early 1990s under Commission Bill Bratton.


BROKEN WINDOWS FIXED

Quality-of-life enforcement and Broken Windows was controversial from the start. Research has not been kind to it - crime declines occurred in places without it. The unintended consequence of Broken Windows was alienation of law-abiding minority communities who saw racism in every arrest.

In New York again, twenty years later, Commissioner Bratton is modifying policing strategies. That is one meaning of democratic policing - changing to meet the times, the data, and public sentiment.

And 90 miles south, in his brilliant Ted Talk, Commissioner Ramsay asks; "Once we fix the broken windows, then what?" Once we fix the broken windows, then what? The critical missing question!

Today it is answered pragmatically in SafeGrowth and academically in Robert Sampson’s book Great American City.

As Bratton and Ramsay demonstrate, great democratic policing is not when cops enforce the law, as important as that occasionally might be. It is when cops embrace the power of cohesive communities (and the dignity of human rights within them), adopt strategies that build them, partner with organizations that master them, and then guard them with every fiber.

Reassurance policing and useless studies

Sir Leon Radzinowicz was a giant in criminology. Escaping from the Nazi’s in WW2, he founded the first-ever department of criminal science at Cambridge in 1941 and then the world famous Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959. He wrote some of the most influential works in criminology, spoke multiple languages and was knighted for his excellence in British criminology.

In 1999, a year before he died, I watched one of his last lectures. He was formal, insightful and he spoke with such élan! He was remarkable! His topic: the increasing repressiveness in the justice systems around the world.

That was before 911 security laws, exploding US prison populations and the ascendency of the combat cop over the community cop. Radzinowicz was a latter-day soothsayer. He nailed it!

USELESS STUDIES

I thought of Sir Leon this week regarding another trend he feared: the increasing paranoia by new scholars to publish simply to keep their jobs. In his last interview (below) Radzinowicz spoke of the then new publishing climate where studies provide little value and where statistics are overused and say nothing.

Then I read a recent study about reassurance policing, an academic fad with UK academics regarding so-called signal crime, or how disorderly behavior disproportionately increases crime fears. Kind of a BBW…Brit-Broken-Windows.

Their study examined how well mall shoppers identify cops and security guard uniforms from photos of cops and security guards. Their goal: find out whether different uniformed patrol officers patrolling in shopping malls created “different effects on feelings of safety about crime.”

The results? Uniform police officers might foster anxiety among some members of the public because they suggest crime is a problem, basically what Wendy Sarkissian reported in her guest blog last year. But they also found uniformed police officers reassure other members of the public because they signal formal "guardianship" (I’m not making this up! Honest!)

Sir Leon, please forgive us! I can just feel him cringing.

ANOTHER WAY?

How about we actually make the community safer and involve the community doing so? Maybe they can co-design their spaces with designers, co-manage the space with property managers, and take some defensible space ownership of their shopping venue!

That way they would be safe and they would feel safe since they would have a hand in making it that way. It would be “reassurance policing” without so much formal “guardianship”, fancy uniforms and more useless studies! And then we can let Sir Leon rest in peace.

New chairs at the Comstat table

The headlines proclaim victory. Are they right?

Last blog I talked about what caused dips in NY crime. There is no doubt something remarkable began in New York during the 1990s. It coincided with a wholesale reform in the New York Police Department. There is doubt whether those reforms caused the crime declines.

In NYPD Battles Crime, Eli Silverman says it was those reforms that did the job. Conversely, in The Great American Crime Decline Franklin Zimring suggests demographics and other factors probably triggered most, but not all, of New York's (and the entire country's) declines.

Most, but not all? He tantalizes us by adding that NYPD's reforms may have accounted for up to 35% of their decline. If that's the case he says, "it would be by far the biggest crime prevention achievement in the recorded history of policing."

There were many parts to those reforms, for example the broken windows theory (which I argue is less a theory and more a group of descriptive symbols). The most famous of those reforms was called Comstat (sometimes called Compstat).

Crime maps are the cornerstone of comstat

Comstat is short for comparison statistics, Comstat uses current crime statistics and maps to hold mid-level supervisors accountable for cutting crime. They do this in regular (sometimes heated) meetings at the Comstat table with the Chief as inquisitor. As my last blog suggests, senior officers often hate being hauled on the Comstat carpet for crime increases.

Today, some police executives have adopted it, such as in New Orleans, while others doubt that it works. Baltimore police suspended it at one point.

Advocates war with critics and journalists eat it up. This is especially the case in recent scandals.

I think sitting at the Comstat table did bring the neighborhood crime pulse to mid-level commanders in a new way. Accountability for crime is not a bad table to sit at even though it is a lopsided table with missing chairs. Why lopsided? Because cops can't do it all.

Police can tackle crime as it happens, catch bad guys on a crime spree, or stem a flow of drugs and gun shootings. Comstat helps them do that better. It's an overdue step forward. Sadly, as with all progress, one step forward can become two steps backwards.

HOLDING THE CENTER?

As Silverman describes, as time went on cops resorted too often on heavy use of force, alienating some of the community. Surveys showed a downturn in public confidence. About the future of Comstat and the leadership reforms Silverman asks: "Can the center hold?"

That's the wrong question. The police are not the center - the community is! Police are untrained to tackle the roots of crime, the social, economic and psychological causes. The comstat table needs chairs for those more able to tackle those roots: non-profits, business associations, faith groups, and community development organizations. Consider the importance of schools, social services, housing, cultural activities, transportation, and investors.

It won't be easy to sit at the same table. Not all crime data and discussions are appropriate in public. Neighborhoods are not always representative or properly organized. For their part police are accustomed to re-acting, not pro-acting. After all, comstat crimes are always after-the-fact (otherwise they wouldn't show up on a crime map). And the Intelligence-Led Policing folk might think of the new chairs as eyes and ears for cops rather than smarter brains for everyone.

Still, because the discussion is difficult doesn't excuse others from the table especially given what's at stake - creating opportunities to develop communities and combine the roots with the branches of the crime tree.

The incoming New Orleans police chief has taken a small step forward by inviting community representatives to observe his comstat meetings.

Geller and Belsky's new book provides a more thorough path to tread

Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky's new book Building Our Way Out of Crime shows what the next step might look like.

Ultimately, when it comes to tackling crime, holding the center is easier when it is more thoroughly and legitimately shared with resourceful hands outside the organization.

Sin-city and crime generators

What I learned in Vegas...

A funny thing happened to me in Las Vegas last week. No, it's not what you're thinking! It's not really about clear-headed thinking at all. It's about some fuzzy thinking that replaces coherent understanding about preventing crime.

I've said before the CPTED and Design Out Crime folks don't talk much about the theories behind their work. A few of those thorny theory issues showed up in my blogs last year, such as ROTO (Research-On-The-Obvious).

There is another side to that coin. I'm referring to the fuzzy thinking of some academicians who study crime-and-place and their kin (crime mappers, police crime analysts).

Let's remember the main purpose of theory, at least in the empirical sciences, is to provide a plausible and testable explanation of why something happens, in this case crime. Events surrounding that explanation - where and when crime occurs - are merely descriptive symbols of the main event, not the actual theory that explains "why" the event happens in the first place.

From this point of view, CPTED and Design Out Crime have very few actual theories - only descriptive symbols.


DOES IT MATTER?

Descriptive symbols are useful. Describing where malaria starts killing people may help us isolate the outbreak and target treatment. Symbols may point us in the right direction toward explanation. But they do not explain the biology of malaria - and that is what kills us! Mosquito nets may help us and we need them. Ultimately, we need to be working toward a cure. We mustn't rest with nets. Same with crime.

What about gambling, casinos, and sin-city?

As I walked around Las Vegas last week I began thinking about all the casino's, the craziness, and all the activity. In Advanced CPTED there is something called "crime generators". These are locales in the city that tend to generate crime opportunities. Large casinos fit the crime generator tag. If mappers scoured the crime patterns, no doubt they'd find lots of hotspots with pick-pocketing, assaults, drug dealing, and fraud in and around the casinos. Or perhaps casino security displaces it to venues just outside the Strip? Either way, no doubt someone would come up with a "theory of casino crime locations", which isn't really a theory at all.

This is exactly what happened with the Broken Windows "theory". Crime went down in New York. Unfortunately for Broken Window Theory, as Professor Zimring showed in his book, The Great American Crime Decline, crime went down in places with no Broken Window programs. That's because descriptive symbols won't really stop crime in the long run. Only prevention based on sound theories can do that.

Yes, theories matter.

Does that make casino's crime generators? Casinos no doubt "generate" direct and indirect crime. But if we could calculate per capita crime rates around casinos, would they be any more crime-prone than other high activity places?

Do activity generators = crime generators?

Probably not in the case of large political rallies (except if you find yourself in Thailand this week). How about in the case of large football games with thousands of drunken fans? Those probably do generate similar (or more) assaults, except if we limit alcohol sales and the home team wins.

That's the problem with descriptive symbols versus real theory. They tell us something about where, and little about why.

THE CASINO CRIME GENERATOR?

It might be simple to conclude sin-city Vegas is also crime city. But FBI crime stats don't show that. We can argue all we want about unreported crime, gambling impact on family life, and so forth (those things are true and serious). Yet according to the 2008 FBI crime rates, Las Vegas wasn't even in the top 20 cities for total violent crime nor in the top 50 for total property crime cities.

So much for crime generators.



Personally, I'm no fan of the Strip in Las Vegas. There are no doubt many tragic realities that arise in that famous (infamous?) epicenter of self-absorption.

Whatever those realities, we must not confuse descriptive symbols that plot when and where with actual theories explaining why crime happens. Descriptive symbols may help us target crime and temporarily reduce it with 1st Generation CPTED and Design Out Crime. But they won't help us prevent it in the long run. Nor will they replace proper and robust theories that help us build safer places - including entertainment meccas like Vegas - in the years to come.

Preventing crime in LA

Check out this video. It explains the approach adopted by Bratton and mentioned by J. Q. Wilson in the previous blogs.

2007 - From the video clip: "We can talk crime prevention all day...if we're not engaged with the community, if the community is not engaged with us to point out who is doing what...there are too few of us to be in every neighborhood." Jim McDonnell, LAPD Assistant Chief. 2007

1961 - From Jane Jacobs: "The public peace of cities is ...kept primarily by an intricate, network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down." Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

ROTO Nasties - the paralysis of analysis

The Thinker. Academic reports without action - the paralysis of analysis
- photo by Douglas O'Brien, Creative Commons

by Gregory Saville

I was thinking about what folks have said to these posts (thanks everyone for such great comments!) It brought to mind the LA Times article by J. Q. Wilson about inconclusive poverty/crime research. Yet I still can't shake one nagging question: How does our inability to precisely nail down the cause for crime excuse our inaction? I get that we don't want unintended consequences to our actions. Yes, that makes sense. It does make one wonder; What is state-of-the-art in research? So I did a bit of my own research to find out. Here's what I found.

 

Wilson incidentally is pretty pleased with LAPD's crime mapping and their aggressive policy of searching people on the streets for guns! (No surprise. He's one of the pioneers of the approach in a theory called "broken windows".)



That's not such a bad thing, really. Especially if it makes things better! But notice how aggressive policing is so easily used to explain crime reductions, whereas tackling poor neighborhoods needs more study! That sounds like a double standard to me. Is the "science" for aggressive policing and crime mapping better than the science about poverty/crime?

Not - pardon the gun-pun - by a long shot.

Read Hsieh and Pugh's 1993 article in Criminal Justice Review, "Poverty and income inequality are each associated with violent crime". Or read Kennedy's 1998 study in Social Science and Medicine. What does he conclude? "Studies have shown that poverty and income are powerful predictors of homicide and violent crime."

Are we to believe THAT research isn't good enough yet the crime mapping/zero tolerance research IS good enough?

MAKING IT COUNT 

Then I came across a book by Stan Lieberson from Harvard, Making It Count, Leiberson says that although most social research is non-experimental many researchers treat their data as though it was experimental. Why does it matter? It matters because social science data gets turned into numbers and then chopped and diced and served up as proof of this or that. It is all about counting the numbers. And that, Lieberson says, is part of the problem. Just look at J. Q. Wilson's numbers in the LA Times article.

For me, Lieberson hits a chord:

"There is a double standard used by academics in that evidence supporting an undesirable conclusion or theory is subjected to much tougher standards than evidence supporting other conclusions."

Bingo!

In other words, it seems convenient to trash the poverty/crime link because stats seem inconclusive. It seems simpler to support a get-tough, broken windows theory with zero tolerance enforcement. To be fair, I know LAPD uses other methods too. I also have seen how competent problem-oriented policing paired with updated training methods does make a big difference. Getting the guns off the streets too will help. I agree we should do more of all those things. Those things produce some good short term results.

But we mustn't stop there. Ultimately we must deal with the dysfunctional roots growing in deprived neighborhoods, neighborhoods where gang breeding and violence is cultivated in a bed of broken families and poverty. Those too are the broken windows that need fixing.

Social research is always done in a muddy social world where nothing lends itself to clean, experimental, laboratory tests. If we wait for definitive answers we'll wait forever.

NO MORE ROTO

J. Q. Wilson should be applauded for heading up a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice to look for more answers. But pleeeeese let's not bury the obvious in yet more academic reports. Doing yet more research on the obvious won't change anything. We DO know what's going on there. Let's get going to help neighbors to change it!

True, ignoring research findings isn't wise. But so is more ROTO - Research-On-The-Obvious! ROTO has lots of nasties, like the unintended consequence of hold-backs from government funding while we wait for "conclusive" answers. Or worse; misdirection of funding onto band-aids like zero-tolerance enforcement.