broken window theory philip zimbardo

Broken Windows Theory of Criminology

Charlotte Ruhl

Research Assistant & Psychology Graduate

BA (Hons) Psychology, Harvard University

Charlotte Ruhl, a psychology graduate from Harvard College, boasts over six years of research experience in clinical and social psychology. During her tenure at Harvard, she contributed to the Decision Science Lab, administering numerous studies in behavioral economics and social psychology.

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Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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The Broken Windows Theory of Criminology suggests that visible signs of disorder and neglect, such as broken windows or graffiti, can encourage further crime and anti-social behavior in an area, as they signal a lack of order and law enforcement.

Key Takeaways

The Broken Windows theory, first studied by Philip Zimbardo and introduced by George Kelling and James Wilson, holds that visible indicators of disorder, such as vandalism, loitering, and broken windows, invite criminal activity and should be prosecuted.
This form of policing has been tested in several real-world settings. It was heavily enforced in the mid-1990s under New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, Lowell, Massachusetts, and the Netherlands later experimented with this theory.
Although initial research proved to be promising, this theory has been met with several criticisms. Specifically, many scholars point to the fact that there is no clear causal relationship between lack of order and crime. Rather, crime going down when order goes up is merely a coincidental correlation.
Additionally, this theory has opened the doors for racial and class bias, especially in the form of stop and frisk.

The United States has the largest prison population in the world and the highest per-capita incarceration rate. In 2016, 2.3 million people were incarcerated, despite a massive decline in both violent and property crimes (Morgan & Kena, 2019).

These statistics provide some insight into why crime regulation and mass incarceration are such hot topics today, and many scholars, lawyers, and politicians have devised theories and strategies to try to promote safety within society.

One such model is broken windows policing, which was first brought to light by American psychologist Philip Zimbardo (famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment) and further publicized by James Wilson and George Kelling. Since its inception, this theory has been both widely used and widely criticized.

What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

The broken windows theory states that any visible signs of crime and civil disorder, such as broken windows (hence, the name of the theory), vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and transportation fare evasion, create an urban environment that promotes even more crime and disorder (Wilson & Kelling, 1982).

As such, policing these misdemeanors will help create an ordered and lawful society in which all citizens feel safe and crime rates, including violent crime rates, are low.

Broken windows policing tries to regulate low-level crime to prevent widespread disorder from occurring. If these small crimes are greatly reduced, then neighborhoods will appear to be more cared for.

The hope is that if these visible displays of disorder and neglect are reduced, violent crimes might go down too, leading to an overall reduction in crime and an increase in public safety.

Source: Hinkle, J. C., & Weisburd, D. (2008). The irony of broken windows policing: A micro-place study of the relationship between disorder, focused police crackdowns and fear of crime. Journal of Criminal Justice, 36(6), 503-512.

Academics justify broken windows policing from a theoretical standpoint because of three specific factors that help explain why the state of the urban environment might affect crime levels:

social norms and conformity;
the presence or lack of routine monitoring;
social signaling and signal crime.

In a typical urban environment, social norms and monitoring are not clearly known. As a result, individuals will look for certain signs and signals that provide both insight into the social norms of the area as well as the risk of getting caught violating those norms.

Those who support the broken windows theory argue that one of those signals is the area’s general appearance. In other words, an ordered environment, one that is safe and has very little lawlessness, sends the message that this neighborhood is routinely monitored and criminal acts are not tolerated.

On the other hand, a disordered environment, one that is not as safe and contains visible acts of lawlessness (such as broken windows, graffiti, and litter), sends the message that this neighborhood is not routinely monitored and individuals would be much more likely to get away with committing a crime.

With a decreased likelihood of detection, individuals would be much more inclined to engage in criminal behavior, both violent and nonviolent, in this type of area.

As you might be able to tell, a major assumption that this theory makes is that an environment’s landscape communicates to its residents in some way.

For example, proponents of this theory would argue that a broken window signals to potential criminals that a community is unable to defend itself against an uptick in criminal activity. It is not the literal broken window that is a direct cause for concern, but more so the figurative meaning that is ascribed to this situation.

It symbolizes a vulnerable and disjointed community that cannot handle crime – opening the doors to all kinds of unwanted activity to occur.

In neighborhoods that do have a strong sense of social cohesion among their residents, these broken windows are fixed (both literally and figuratively), giving these areas a sense of control over their communities.

By fixing these windows, undesired individuals and behaviors are removed, allowing civilians to feel safer (Herbert & Brown, 2006).

However, in environments in which these broken windows are left unfixed, residents no longer see their communities as tight-knit, safe spaces and will avoid spending time in communal spaces (in parks, at local stores, on the street blocks) so as to avoid violent attacks from strangers.

Additionally, when these broken windows are not fixed, it also symbolizes a lack of informal social control. Informal social control refers to the actions that regulate behavior, such as conforming to social norms and intervening as a bystander when a crime is committed, that are independent of the law.

Informal social control is important to help reduce unruly behavior. Scholars argue that, under certain circumstances, informal social control is more effective than laws.

And some will even go so far as to say that nonresidential spaces, such as corner stores and businesses, have a responsibility to actually maintain this informal social control by way of constant surveillance and supervision.

One such scholar is Jane Jacobs, a Canadian-American author and journalist who believed sidewalks were a crucial vehicle for promoting public safety.

Jacobs can be considered one of the original pioneers of the broken windows theory. One of her most famous books, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, describes how local businesses and stores provide a necessary sense of having “eyes on the street,” which promotes safety and helps to regulate crime (Jacobs, 1961).

Although the idea that community involvement, from both residents and non-residents, can make a big difference in how safe a neighborhood is perceived to be, Wilson and Keeling argue that the police are the key to maintaining order.

As major proponents of broken windows policing, they hold that formal social control, in addition to informal social control, is crucial for actually regulating crime.

Although different people have different approaches to the implementation of broken windows (i.e., cleaning up the environment and informal social control vs. an increase in policing misdemeanor crimes), the end goal is the same: crime reduction.

This idea, which largely serves as the backbone of the broken windows theory, was first introduced by Philip Zimbardo.

Examples of Broken Windows Policing

1969: philip zimbardo’s introduction of broken windows in nyc and la.

In 1969, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo ran a social experiment in which he abandoned two cars that had no license plates and the hoods up in very different locations.

The first was a predominantly poor, high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx, and the second was a fairly affluent area of Palo Alto, California. He then observed two very different outcomes.

James-And-Karla-Murray-NYC-Untapped-Cities

After just ten minutes, the car in the Bronx was attacked and vandalized. A family first approached the vehicle and removed the radiator and battery. Within the first twenty-four hours after Zimbardo left the car, everything valuable had been stripped and removed from the car.

Afterward, random acts of destruction began – the windows were smashed, seats were ripped up, and the car began to serve as a playground for children in the community.

On the contrary, the car that was left in Palo Alto remained untouched for more than a week before Zimbardo eventually went up to it and smashed the vehicle with a sledgehammer.

Only after he had done this did other people join the destruction of the car (Zimbardo, 1969). Zimbardo concluded that something that is clearly abandoned and neglected can become a target for vandalism.

But Kelling and Wilson extended this finding when they introduced the concept of broken windows policing in the early 1980s.

This initial study cascaded into a body of research and policy that demonstrated how in areas such as the Bronx, where theft, destruction, and abandonment are more common, vandalism would occur much faster because there are no opposing forces to this type of behavior.

As a result, such forces, primarily the police, are needed to intervene and reduce these types of behavior and remove such indicators of disorder.

1982: Kelling and Wilson’s Follow-Up Article

Thirteen years after Zimbardo’s study was published, criminologists George Kelling and James Wilson published an article in The Atlantic that applied Zimbardo’s findings to entire communities.

Kelling argues that Zimbardo’s findings were not unique to the Bronx and Palo Alto areas. Rather, he claims that, regardless of the neighborhood, a ripple effect can occur once disorder begins as things get extremely out of hand and control becomes increasingly hard to maintain.

The article introduces the broader idea that now lies at the heart of the broken windows theory: a broken window, or other signs of disorder, such as loitering, graffiti, litter, or drug use, can send the message that a neighborhood is uncared for, sending an open invitation for crime to continue to occur, even violent crimes.

The solution, according to Kelling and Wilson and many other proponents of this theory, is to target these very low-level crimes, restore order to the neighborhood, and prevent more violent crimes from happening.

A strengthened and ordered community is equipped to fight and deter crime (because a sense of order creates the perception that crimes go easily detected). As such, it is necessary for police departments to focus on cleaning up the streets as opposed to putting all of their energy into fighting high-level crimes.

In addition to Zimbardo’s 1969 study, Kelling and Wilson’s article was also largely inspired by New Jersey’s “Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program” that was implemented in the mid-1970s.

As part of the program, police officers were taken out of their patrol cars and were asked to patrol on foot. The aim of this approach was to make citizens feel more secure in their neighborhoods.

Although crime was not reduced as a result, residents took fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (such as locking their doors). Reducing fear is a huge goal of broken-windows policing.

As Kelling and Wilson state in their article, the fear of being bothered by disorderly people (such as drunks, rowdy teens, or loiterers) is enough to motivate them to withdraw from the community.

But if we can find a way to make people feel less fear (namely by reducing low-level crimes), then they will be more involved in their communities, creating a higher degree of informal social control and deterring all forms of criminal activity.

Although Kelling and Wilson’s article was largely theoretical, the practice of broken windows policing was implemented in the early 1990s under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And Kelling himself was there to play a crucial role.

Early 1990s: Bratton and Giuliani’s implementation in NYC

In 1985, the New York City Transit Authority hired George Kelling as a consultant, and he was also later hired by both the Boston and Los Angeles police departments to provide advice on the most effective method for policing (Fagan & Davies, 2000).

Five years later, in 1990, William J. Bratton became the head of the New York City Transit Police. In his role, Bratton cracked down on fare evasion and implemented faster methods to process those who were arrested.

He attributed a lot of his decisions as head of the transit police to Kelling’s work. Bratton was just the first to begin to implement such measures, but once Rudy Giuliani was elected as mayor in 1993, tactics to reduce crime began to really take off (Vedantam et al., 2016).

Together, Giuliani and Bratton first focused on cleaning up the subway system, where Bratton’s area of expertise lay. They sent hundreds of police officers into subway stations throughout the city to catch anyone who was jumping the turnstiles and evading the fair.

And this was just the beginning.

All throughout the 90s, Giuliani increased misdemeanor arrests in all pockets of the city. They arrested numerous people for smoking marijuana in public, spraying graffiti on walls, selling cigarettes, and they shut down many of the city’s night spots for illegal dancing.

Conveniently, during this time, crime was also falling in the city and the murder rate was rapidly decreasing, earning Giuliani re-election in 1997 (Vedantam et al., 2016).

To further support the outpouring success of this new approach to regulating crime, George Kelling ran a follow-up study on the efficacy of broken windows policing and found that in neighborhoods where there was a stark increase in misdemeanor arrests (evidence of broken windows policing), there was also a sharp decline in crime (Kelling & Sousa, 2001).

Because this seemed like an incredibly successful mode, cities around the world began to adopt this approach.

Late 1990s: Albuquerque’s Safe Streets Program

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, a Safe Streets Program was implemented to deter and reduce unsafe driving and crime rates by increasing surveillance in these areas.

Specifically, the traffic enforcement program influenced saturation patrols (that operated over a large geographic area), sobriety checkpoints, follow-up patrols, and freeway speed enforcement.

The effectiveness of this program was analyzed in a study done by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (Stuser, 2001).

Results demonstrated that both Part I crimes, including homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and theft, and Part II crimes, such as sex offenses, kidnapping, stolen property, and fraud, experienced a total decline of 5% during the 1996-1997 calendar year in which this program was implemented.

Additionally, this program resulted in a 9% decline in both robbery and burglary, a 10% decline in assault, a 17% decline in kidnapping, a 29% decline in homicide, and a 36% decline in arson.

With these promising statistics came a 14% increase in arrests. Thus, the researchers concluded that traffic enforcement programs can deter criminal activity. This approach was initially inspired by both Zimbardo’s and Kelling and Wilson’s work on broken windows and provides evidence that when policing and surveillance increase, crime rates go down.

2005: Lowell, Massachusetts

Back on the east coast, Harvard University and Suffolk University researchers worked with local police officers to pinpoint 34 different crime hotspots in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of these areas, local police officers and authorities cleaned up trash from the streets, fixed streetlights, expanded aid for the homeless, and made more misdemeanor arrests.

There was no change made in the other half of the areas (Johnson, 2009).

The researchers found that in areas in which police service was changed, there was a 20% reduction in calls to the police. And because the researchers implemented different ways of changing the city’s landscape, from cleaning the physical environment to increasing arrests, they were able to compare the effectiveness of these various approaches.

Although many proponents of the broken windows theory argue that increasing policing and arrests is the solution to reducing crime, as the previous study in Albuquerque illustrates. Others insist that more arrests do not solve the problem but rather changing the physical landscape should be the desired means to an end.

And this is exactly what Brenda Bond of Suffolk University and Anthony Braga of Harvard Kennedy’s School of Government found. Cleaning up the physical environment was revealed to be very effective, misdemeanor arrests were less so, and increasing social services had no impact.

This study provided strong evidence for the effectiveness of the broken windows theory in reducing crime by decreasing disorder, specifically in the context of cleaning up the physical and visible neighborhood (Braga & Bond, 2008).

2007: Netherlands

The United States is not the only country that sought to implement the broken windows ideology. Beginning in 2007, researchers from the University of Groningen ran several studies that looked at whether existing visible disorder increased crimes such as theft and littering.

Similar to the Lowell experiment, where half of the areas were ordered and the other half disorders, Keizer and colleagues arranged several urban areas in two different ways at two different times. In one condition, the area was ordered, with an absence of graffiti and littering, but in the other condition, there was visible evidence for disorder.

The team found that in disorderly environments, people were much more likely to litter, take shortcuts through a fenced-off area, and take an envelope out of an open mailbox that was clearly labeled to contain five Euros (Keizer et al., 2008).

This study provides additional support for the effect perceived order can have on the likelihood of criminal activity. But this broken windows theory is not restricted to the criminal legal setting.

2008: Tokyo, Japan

The local government of Adachi Ward, Tokyo, which once had Tokyo’s highest crime rates, introduced the “Beautiful Windows Movement” in 2008 (Hino & Chronopoulos, 2021).

The intervention was twofold. The program, on one hand, drawing on the broken windows theory, promoted policing to prevent minor crimes and disorder. On the other hand, in partnership with citizen volunteers, the authorities launched a project to make Adachi Ward literally beautiful.

Following 11 years of implementation, the reduction in crime was undeniable. Felony had dropped from 122 in 2008 to 35 in 2019, burglary from 104 to 24, and bicycle theft from 93 to 45.

This Japanese case study seemed to further highlight the advantages associated with translating the broken widow theory into both aggressive policing and landscape altering.

Other Domains Relevant to Broken Windows

There are several other fields in which the broken windows theory is implicated. The first is real estate. Broken windows (and other similar signs of disorder) can indicate low real estate value, thus deterring investors (Hunt, 2015).

As such, some recommend that the real estate industry adopt the broken windows theory to increase value in an apartment, house, or even an entire neighborhood. They might increase in value by fixing windows and cleaning up the area (Harcourt & Ludwig, 2006).

Consequently, this might lead to gentrification – the process by which poorer urban landscapes are changed as wealthier individuals move in.

Although many would argue that this might help the economy and provide a safe area for people to live, this often displaces low-income families and prevents them from moving into areas they previously could not afford.

This is a very salient topic in the United States as many areas are becoming gentrified, and regardless of whether you support this process, it is important to understand how the real estate industry is directly connected to the broken windows theory.

Another area that broken windows are related to is education. Here, the broken windows theory is used to promote order in the classroom. In this setting, the students replace those who engage in criminal activity.

The idea is that students are signaled by disorder or others breaking classroom rules and take this as an open invitation to further contribute to the disorder.

As such, many schools rely on strict regulations such as punishing curse words and speaking out of turn, forcing strict dress and behavioral codes, and enforcing specific classroom etiquette.

Similar to the previous studies, from 2004 to 2006, Stephen Plank and colleagues conducted a study that measured the relationship between the physical appearance of mid-Atlantic schools and student behavior.

They determined that variables such as fear, social order, and informal social control were statistically significantly associated with the physical conditions of the school setting.

Thus, the researchers urged educators to tend to the school’s physical appearance to help promote a productive classroom environment in which students are less likely to propagate disordered behavior (Plank et al., 2009).

Despite there being a large body of research that seems to support the broken windows theory, this theory does not come without its stark criticisms, especially in the past few years.

Major Criticisms

At the turn of the 21st century, the rhetoric surrounding broken windows drastically shifted from praise to criticism. Scholars scrutinized conclusions that were drawn, questioned empirical methodologies, and feared that this theory was morphing into a vehicle for discrimination.

Misinterpreting the Relationship Between Disorder and Crime

A major criticism of this theory argues that it misinterprets the relationship between disorder and crime by drawing a causal chain between the two.

Instead, some researchers argue that a third factor, collective efficacy, or the cohesion among residents combined with shared expectations for the social control of public space, is the causal agent explaining crime rates (Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999).

A 2019 meta-analysis that looked at 300 studies revealed that disorder in a neighborhood does not directly cause its residents to commit more crimes (O’Brien et al., 2019).

The researchers examined studies that tested to what extent disorder led people to commit crimes, made them feel more fearful of crime in their neighborhoods, and affected their perceptions of their neighborhoods.

In addition to drawing out several methodological flaws in the hundreds of studies that were included in the analysis, O’Brien and colleagues found no evidence that the disorder and crime are causally linked.

Similarly, in 2003, David Thatcher published a paper in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology arguing that broken windows policing was not as effective as it appeared to be on the surface.

Crime rates dropping in areas such as New York City were not a direct result of this new law enforcement tactic. Those who believed this were simply conflating correlation and causality.

Rather, Thatcher claims, lower crime rates were the result of various other factors, none of which fell into the category of ramping up misdemeanor arrests (Thatcher, 2003).

In terms of the specific factors that were actually playing a role in the decrease in crime, some scholars point to the waning of the cocaine epidemic and strict enforcement of the Rockefeller drug laws that contributed to lower crime rates (Metcalf, 2006).

Other explanations include trends such as New York City’s economic boom in the late 1990s that helped directly contribute to the decrease of crime much more so than enacting the broken windows policy (Sridhar, 2006).

Additionally, cities that did not implement broken windows also saw a decrease in crime (Harcourt, 2009), and similarly, crime rates weren’t decreasing in other cities that adopted the broken windows policy (Sridhar, 2006).

Specifically, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig examined the Department of Housing and Urban Development program that placed inner-city project residents into housing in more orderly neighborhoods.

Contrary to the broken windows theory, which would predict that these tenants would now commit fewer crimes once relocated into more ordered neighborhoods, they found that these individuals continued to commit crimes at the same rate.

This study provides clear evidence why broken windows may not be the causal agent in crime reduction (Harcourt & Ludwig, 2006).

Falsely Assuming Why Crimes Are Committed

The broken windows theory also assumes that in more orderly neighborhoods, there is more informal social control. As a result, people understand that there is a greater likelihood of being caught committing a crime, so they shy away from engaging in such activity.

However, people don’t only commit crimes because of the perceived likelihood of detection. Rather, many individuals who commit crimes do so because of factors unrelated to or without considering the repercussions.

Poverty, social pressure, mental illness, and more are often driving factors that help explain why a person might commit a crime, especially a misdemeanor such as theft or loitering.

Resulting in Racial and Class Bias

One of the leading criticisms of the broken windows theory is that it leads to both racial and class bias. By giving the police broad discretion to define disorder and determine who engages in disorderly acts allows them to freely criminalize communities of color and groups that are socioeconomically disadvantaged (Roberts, 1998).

For example, Sampson and Raudenbush found that in two neighborhoods with equal amounts of graffiti and litter, people saw more disorder in neighborhoods with more African Americans.

The researchers found that individuals associate African Americans and other minority groups with concepts of crime and disorder more so than their white counterparts (Sampson & Raudenbush, 2004).

This can lead to unfair policing in areas that are predominantly people of color. In addition, those who suffer from financial instability and may be of minority status are more likely to commit crimes in the first place.

Thus, they are simply being punished for being poor as opposed to being given resources to assist them. Further, many acts that are actually legal but are deemed disorderly by police officers are targeted in public settings but aren’t targeted when the same acts are conducted in private settings.

As a result, those who don’t have access to private spaces, such as homeless people, are unnecessarily criminalized.

It follows then that by policing these small misdemeanors, or oftentimes actions that aren’t even crimes at all, police departments are fighting poverty crimes as opposed to fighting to provide individuals with the resources that will make crime no longer a necessity.

Morphing into Stop and Frisk

Stop and frisk, a brief non-intrusive police stop of a suspect is an extremely controversial approach to policing. But critics of the broken windows theory argue that it has morphed into this program.

With broken-windows policing, officers have too much discretion when determining who is engaging in criminal activity and will search people for drugs and weapons without probable cause.

However, this method is highly unsuccessful. In 2008, the police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York, but only one-fifteenth of one percent of those stops resulted in finding a gun (Vedantam et al., 2016).

And three years later, in 2011, more than 685,000 people were stopped in New York. Of those, nine out of ten were found to be completely innocent (Dunn & Shames, 2020).

Thus, not only does this give officers free reins to stop and frisk minority populations at disproportionately high levels, but it also is not effective in drawing out crime.

Although broken windows policing might seem effective from a theoretical perspective, major valid criticisms put the practical application of this theory into question.

Given its controversial nature, broken windows policing is not explicitly used today to regulate crime in most major cities. However, there are still traces of this theory that remain.

Cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, are heavily policed and the city issues thousands of warrants a year on broken window types of crimes – from parking infractions to traffic violations.

And the racial and class biases that result from such an approach to law enforcement have definitely not disappeared.

Crime regulation is not easy, but the broken windows theory provides an approach to reducing offenses and maintaining order in society.

What is the broken glass principle?

The broken glass principle, also known as the Broken Windows Theory, posits that visible signs of disorder, like broken glass, can foster further crime and anti-social behavior by signaling a lack of regulation and community care in an area.

How does social context affect crime according to the broken windows theory?

The Broken Windows Theory proposes that the social context, specifically visible signs of disorder like vandalism or littering, can encourage further crime.

It suggests that these signs indicate a lack of community control and care, which can foster a climate of disregard for laws and social norms, leading to more severe crimes over time.

How did broken windows theory change policing?

The Broken Windows Theory influenced policing by promoting proactive attention to minor crimes and maintaining urban environments.

It led to strategies like “zero-tolerance” or “quality-of-life” policing, focusing on reducing visible signs of disorder to prevent more serious crime.

Braga, A. A., & Bond, B. J. (2008). Policing crime and disorder hot spots: A randomized controlled trial. Criminology, 46(3), 577-607.

Dunn, C., & Shames, M. (2020). Stop-and-Frisk data . Retrieved from https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data

Fagan, J., & Davies, G. (2000). Street stops and broken windows: Terry, race, and disorder in New York City. Fordham Urb. LJ , 28, 457.

Harcourt, B. E. (2009). Illusion of order: The false promise of broken windows policing . Harvard University Press.

Harcourt, B. E., & Ludwig, J. (2006). Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city social experiment. U. Chi. L. Rev., 73 , 271.

Herbert, S., & Brown, E. (2006). Conceptions of space and crime in the punitive neoliberal city. Antipode, 38 (4), 755-777.

Hunt, B. (2015). “Broken Windows” theory can be applied to real estate regulation- Realty Times. Retrieved from https://realtytimes.com/agentnews/agentadvice/item/40700-20151208-broken-windws-theory-can-be-applied-to-real-estate-regulation

Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities . Vintage.

Johnson, C. Y. (2009). Breakthrough on “broken windows.” Boston Globe.

Keizer, K., Lindenberg, S., & Steg, L. (2008). The spreading of disorder. Science, 322 (5908), 1681-1685.

Kelling, G. L., & Sousa, W. H. (2001). Do police matter?: An analysis of the impact of new york city’s police reforms . CCI Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan Institute.

Metcalf, S. (2006). Rudy Giuliani, American president? Retrieved from https://slate.com/culture/2006/05/rudy-giuliani-american-president.html

Morgan, R. E., & Kena, G. (2019). Criminal victimization, 2018. Bureau of Justice Statistics , 253043.

O”Brien, D. T., Farrell, C., & Welsh, B. C. (2019). Looking through broken windows: The impact of neighborhood disorder on aggression and fear of crime is an artifact of research design. Annual Review of Criminology, 2 , 53-71.

Plank, S. B., Bradshaw, C. P., & Young, H. (2009). An application of “broken-windows” and related theories to the study of disorder, fear, and collective efficacy in schools. American Journal of Education, 115 (2), 227-247.

Roberts, D. E. (1998). Race, vagueness, and the social meaning of order-maintenance policing. J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 89 , 775.

Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1999). Systematic social observation of public spaces: A new look at disorder in urban neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology, 105 (3), 603-651.

Sampson, R. J., & Raudenbush, S. W. (2004). Seeing disorder: Neighborhood stigma and the social construction of “broken windows”. Social psychology quarterly, 67 (4), 319-342.

Sridhar, C. R. (2006). Broken windows and zero tolerance: Policing urban crimes. Economic and Political Weekly , 1841-1843.

Stuster, J. (2001). Albuquerque police department’s Safe Streets program (No. DOT-HS-809-278). Anacapa Sciences, inc.

Thacher, D. (2003). Order maintenance reconsidered: Moving beyond strong causal reasoning. J. Crim. L. & Criminology, 94 , 381.

Vedantam, S., Benderev, C., Boyle, T., Klahr, R., Penman, M., & Schmidt, J. (2016). How a theory of crime and policing was born, and went terribly wrong . Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-policing-and-the-origins-of-stop-and-frisk-and-how-it-went-wrong

Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic monthly, 249 (3), 29-38.

Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In Nebraska symposium on motivation. University of Nebraska press.

Further Information

Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows. Atlantic monthly, 249(3), 29-38.
Fagan, J., & Davies, G. (2000). Street stops and broken windows: Terry, race, and disorder in New York City. Fordham Urb. LJ, 28, 457.
Fagan, J. A., Geller, A., Davies, G., & West, V. (2010). Street stops and broken windows revisited. In Race, ethnicity, and policing (pp. 309-348). New York University Press.

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How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong

Shankar Vedantam

Chris Benderev

Renee Klahr

Maggie Penman

Jennifer Schmidt

The broken windows theory of policing suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crime as well. Getty Images/Image Source hide caption

The broken windows theory of policing suggested that cleaning up the visible signs of disorder — like graffiti, loitering, panhandling and prostitution — would prevent more serious crime as well.

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up.

After just 10 minutes, passersby in New York City began vandalizing the car. First they stripped it for parts. Then the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched for more than a week.

Finally, Zimbardo did something unusual: He took a sledgehammer and gave the California car a smash. After that, passersby quickly ripped it apart, just as they'd done in New York.

This field study was a simple demonstration of how something that is clearly neglected can quickly become a target for vandals. But it eventually morphed into something far more than that. It became the basis for one of the most influential theories of crime and policing in America: "broken windows."

Thirteen years after the Zimbardo study, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote an article for The Atlantic . They were fascinated by what had happened to Zimbardo's abandoned cars and thought the findings could be applied on a larger scale, to entire communities.

"The idea [is] that once disorder begins, it doesn't matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control," Kelling tells Hidden Brain.

In the article, Kelling and Wilson suggested that a broken window or other visible signs of disorder or decay — think loitering, graffiti, prostitution or drug use — can send the signal that a neighborhood is uncared for. So, they thought, if police departments addressed those problems, maybe the bigger crimes wouldn't happen.

"Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighborhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods," says Kelling. "People claim their public spaces, and the store owners extend their concerns to what happened on the streets. Communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained, and it is that dynamic that helps to prevent crime."

Kelling and Wilson proposed that police departments change their focus. Instead of channeling most resources into solving major crimes, they should instead try to clean up the streets and maintain order — such as keeping people from smoking pot in public and cracking down on subway fare beaters.

The argument came at an opportune time, says Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt.

"This was a period of high crime, and high incarceration, and it seemed there was no way out of that dynamic. It seemed as if there was no way out of just filling prisons to address the crime problem."

An Idea Moves From The Ivory Tower To The Streets

As policymakers were scrambling for answers, a new mayor in New York City came to power offering a solution.

Rudy Giuliani won election in 1993, promising to reduce crime and clean up the streets. Very quickly, he adopted broken windows as his mantra.

It was one of those rare ideas that appealed to both sides of the aisle.

Conservatives liked the policy because it meant restoring order. Liberals liked it, Harcourt says, because it seemed like an enlightened way to prevent crime: "It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves."

Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton, focused first on cleaning up the subway system, where 250,000 people a day weren't paying their fare. They sent hundreds of police officers into the subways to crack down on turnstile jumpers and vandals.

Very quickly, they found confirmation for their theory. Going after petty crime led the police to violent criminals, says Kelling: "Not all fare beaters were criminals, but a lot of criminals were fare beaters. It turns out serious criminals are pretty busy. They commit minor offenses as well as major offenses."

The policy was quickly scaled up from the subway to the entire city of New York.

Police ramped up misdemeanor arrests for things like smoking marijuana in public, spraying graffiti and selling loose cigarettes. And almost instantly, they were able to trumpet their success. Crime was falling. The murder rate plummeted. It seemed like a miracle.

The media loved the story, and Giuliani cruised to re-election in 1997.

George Kelling and a colleague did follow-up research on broken windows policing and found what they believed was clear evidence of its success. In neighborhoods where there was a sharp increase in misdemeanor arrests — suggesting broken windows policing was in force — there was also a sharp decline in crime.

By 2001, broken windows had become one of Giuliani's greatest accomplishments. In his farewell address, he emphasized the beautiful and simple idea behind the success.

"The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti," he said. "Well, you can't be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society."

Questions Begin To Emerge About Broken Windows

Right from the start, there were signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative.

"Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing," says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. "And of course what we witnessed from that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it's a remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what's so remarkable about it is how widespread it was."

Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is really interesting because Los Angeles was wracked with terrible policing problems during the whole time, and crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York," says Harcourt.

There were lots of theories to explain the nationwide decline in crime. Some said it was the growing economy or the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Some criminologists credited harsher sentencing guidelines.

In 2006, Harcourt found the evidence supporting the broken windows theory might be flawed. He reviewed the study Kelling had conducted in 2001, and found the areas that saw the largest number of misdemeanor arrests also had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Harcourt says the earlier study failed to consider what's called a "reversion to the mean."

"It's something that a lot of investment bankers and investors know about because it's well-known and in the stock market," says Harcourt. "Basically, the idea is if something goes up a lot, it tends to go down a lot."

A graph in Kelling's 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this small view gives us a selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines. And each time, the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean.

Kelling acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime. But he thinks it still has value.

"Even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world," he says. "Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime."

Order might be an end in itself, but it's worth noting that this was not the premise on which the broken windows theory was sold. It was advertised as an innovative way to control violent crime, not just a way to get panhandlers and prostitutes off the streets.

'Broken Windows' Morphs Into 'Stop And Frisk'

Harcourt says there was another big problem with broken windows.

"We immediately saw a sharp increase in complaints of police misconduct. Starting in 1993, what you're going to see is a tremendous amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing, with complaints skyrocketing, with settlements of police misconduct cases skyrocketing, and of course with incidents, brutal incidents, all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip."

The problem intensified with a new practice that grew out of broken windows. It was called "stop and frisk," and was embraced in New York City after Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001.

If broken windows meant arresting people for misdemeanors in hopes of preventing more serious crimes, "stop and frisk" said, why even wait for the misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop, question and search anyone who looked suspicious?

There were high-profile cases where misdemeanor arrests or stopping and questioning did lead to information that helped solve much more serious crimes, even homicides. But there were many more cases where police stops turned up nothing. In 2008, police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York for what they called furtive movements. Only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of those turned up a gun.

Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly?

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder . They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In his article, he and James Q. Wilson write: "How do we ensure ... that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question."

In August of 2013, a federal district court found that New York City's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional because of the way it singled out young black and Hispanic men. Later that year, New York elected its first liberal mayor in 20 years. Bill DeBlasio celebrated the end of stop and frisk. But he did not do away with broken windows. In fact, he re-appointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

And just seven months after taking over again as the head of the New York Police Department, Bratton's broken windows policy came under fresh scrutiny. The reason: the death of Eric Garner.

In July 2014, a bystander caught on cellphone video the deadly clash between New York City police officers and Garner, an African-American. After a verbal confrontation, officers tackled Garner, while restraining him with a chokehold, a practice that is banned in New York City.

Garner died not long after he was brought down to the ground. His death sparked massive protests, and his name is now synonymous with the distrust between police and African-American communities.

For George Kelling, this was not the end that he had hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like wildfire.

But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never intended and could not control.

"When, during the 1990s, I would occasionally read in a newspaper something like a new chief comes in and says, 'I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow,' I would listen to that with dismay because [it's] a highly discretionary activity by police that needs extensive training, formal guidelines, constant monitoring and oversight. So do I worry about the implementation about broken windows? A whole lot ... because it can be done very badly."

In fact, Kelling says, it might be time to move away from the idea.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

These days, the consensus among social scientists is that broken windows likely did have modest effects on crime. But few believe it caused the 60 or 70 percent decline in violent crime for which it was once credited.

And yet despite all the evidence, the idea continues to be popular.

Bernard Harcourt says there is a reason for that:

"It's a simple story that people can latch onto and that is a lot more pleasant to live with than the complexities of life. The fact is that crime dropped in America dramatically from the 1990s, and that there aren't really good, clean nationwide explanations for it."

The story of broken windows is a story of our fascination with easy fixes and seductive theories. Once an idea like that takes hold, it's nearly impossible to get the genie back in the bottle.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain , and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

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How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken-windows policing

The harmful policy was built on a shaky foundation.

2019 marked the 50th anniversary of a study that unwittingly contributed to the violent and racialized policing that dominates our criminal justice system today. In 1969, social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo published research that became the basis for the controversial broken-windows theory of policing, which emerged in a 1982 Atlantic article penned by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. These two social scientists used the Zimbardo article as the sole empirical evidence for their theory, arguing, “If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.”

The problem? Wilson and Kelling distorted the study to suit their purposes. In short, the broken-windows theory was founded on a lie.

Even in the face of direct and damning challenges by the Movement for Black Lives and scholars of policing , the broken-windows theory has maintained its hold on police precincts across the nation. Most recently, broken windows has seen a resurgence in the subways of New York, where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority police doubled down on its assault against fare evasion.

By laying bare the fabrications at the foundation of the broken-windows theory, we can see what critics have long alleged and what those targeted by the policy have known to be true: By focusing on low-level offenses, this theory of policing works to criminalize communities of color and expand mass incarceration without making people safer.

This isn’t what Zimbardo set out to do. In the immediate wake of the 1960s urban uprisings, Zimbardo wanted to document the social causes of vandalism to disprove the conservative argument that it stemmed from individual or cultural pathology. His research team parked an Oldsmobile in the South Bronx and Palo Alto, Calif., surveilling the cars for days. Zimbardo hypothesized that the informal economies of the Bronx would make quick work of the car.

He was right.

Although the research team was surprised that the first “vandals” were not youths of color but, rather, a white, “well-dressed” family, Zimbardo considered his basic hypothesis confirmed: The lack of community cohesion in the Bronx produced a sense of “anonymity,” which in turn generated vandalism. He concluded, “Conditions that create social inequality and put some people outside of the conventional reward structure of the society make them indifferent to its sanctions, laws, and implicit norms.”

The Palo Alto Oldsmobile, in contrast, went untouched. After a week-long, unremarkable stakeout, Zimbardo drove the car to the Stanford campus, where his research team aimed to “prime” vandalism by taking a sledgehammer to its windows. Upon discovering that this was “stimulating and pleasurable,” Zimbardo and his graduate students “got carried away.” As Zimbardo described it, “One student jumped on the roof and began stomping it in, two were pulling the door from its hinges, another hammered away at the hood and motor, while the last one broke all the glass he could find.” The passersby the study had intended to observe had turned into spectators and only joined in after the car was already wrecked.

Zimbardo’s conclusions were the stuff of liberal criminology: Anyone — even Stanford researchers! — could be lured into vandalism, and this was particularly true in places like the Bronx with heightened social inequalities. For Zimbardo, what happened in the Bronx and at Stanford suggested that crowd mentality, social inequalities and community anonymity could prompt “good citizens” to act destructively. This was no radical critique; it was an indictment of law-and-order politics that viewed vandalism as a senseless, unpardonable act. In a line that could have been lifted directly out of the countless “riot reports” published in the late 1960s, Zimbardo asserted, “Vandalism is a rebellion with a cause.”

Zimbardo’s study claimed little immediate impact outside academic circles. Almost 15 years later, Wilson and Kelling gave it new life, building their broken-windows theory atop a fundamental misrepresentation of Zimbardo’s experiment. In Wilson and Kelling’s account, Zimbardo’s experiment proved that “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

Their misleading recap of Zimbardo’s study not only conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments but also so distorted the order of events that it routed readers away from Zimbardo’s conclusions. In their version, “the car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in.” What they conveniently neglected to mention was that the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car.

By omitting this crucial detail, Wilson and Kelling manipulated Zimbardo’s experiment to draw a straight line between one broken window and “a thousand broken windows.” This enabled them to claim that all it took was a broken window to transform “staid” Palo Alto into the Bronx, where “no one car[ed].” The problem is, it wasn’t a broken window that enticed onlookers to join the fray; it was the spectacle of faculty and students destroying an Oldsmobile in the middle of Stanford’s campus. In place of Zimbardo’s critique of inequality and anonymity, Wilson and Kelling had invented a broken window and invested it with the ability to spur vandalism.

Why would Wilson and Kelling go through the trouble of introducing Zimbardo’s study only to misrepresent it? Because what they got out of the study was not its empirical evidence, but the evocative, racialized image of the Bronx’s broken windows, which had already been drilled into the national psyche.

During the 1970s, journalists frequently invoked the South Bronx as “the American urban problem in microcosm,” in the words of one New York Times article. These reports about the Bronx featured photographs of empty-eyed tenements and opened with lines like “abandoned buildings, with smoke stains flaring up from their blind and broken windows.” Media outlets thereby weaponized the broken windows of the Bronx as a symbol of urban and racial degeneration.

So potent and “unnerving” was the symbol of the broken window that one of the few municipal housing initiatives in the early-1980s Bronx was devoted to papering over empty window frames that faced commuters on the Cross Bronx Expressway. The vinyl decals the city installed depicted “a lived-in look of curtains, shades, shutters and flowerpots.”

It was the symbol of the “unnerving” broken window that Wilson and Kelling sought to fold into their theory. In their telling, the Bronx’s “thousand broken windows” were juxtaposed with Palo Alto’s one. For them, the danger was proliferation — the creation of many Bronxes — through small signs of disorder. The racist subtext rang loud and clear. Citing Zimbardo’s experiment allowed Wilson and Kelling to sound alarms over the possibility that all cities would go the way of the Bronx if they didn’t embrace their new regime of policing. What was missing, of course, was Zimbardo’s restrained, but resolute, focus on structural causation and systemic inequality.

By exploiting this set of fears and meanings, the broken-windows theory gained currency in policy circles and police precincts across the nation and globe. Accordingly, to “ dislodge this boulder ,” in the words of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we need to challenge its intellectual foundations head-on. The movement against this criminological cockroach has largely drawn attention to the violence that broken windows policing has inflicted on communities of color. This is urgent and essential work, which can be bolstered by the project of exposing and then obliterating the shaky intellectual ground upon which it stands.

From its origins to its ruinous rise, the broken-windows theory was just that — broken. It’s time to tear it down.

What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

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The broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime in urban areas lead to further crime. The theory is often associated with the 2000 case of Illinois v. Wardlow , in which the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that the police, based on the legal doctrine of probable cause , have the authority to detain and physically search, or “stop-and-frisk,” people in crime-prone neighborhoods who appear to be behaving suspiciously.

Key Takeaways: Broken Windows Theory

The broken windows theory of criminology holds that visible signs of crime in densely-populated, lower-income urban areas will encourage additional criminal activity.
Broken windows neighborhood policing tactics employ heightened enforcement of relatively minor “quality of life” crimes like loitering, public drinking, and graffiti.
The theory has been criticized for encouraging discriminatory police practices, such as unequal enforcement based on racial profiling.

Broken Windows Theory Definition

In the field of criminology, the broken windows theory holds that lingering visible evidence of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil unrest in densely populated urban areas suggests a lack of active local law enforcement and encourages people to commit further, even more serious crimes.

The theory was first suggested in 1982 by social scientist, George L. Kelling in his article, “Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety” published in The Atlantic. Kelling explained the theory as follows:

“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

“Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”

Kelling based his theory on the results of an experiment conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1969. In his experiment, Zimbardo parked an apparently disabled and abandoned car in a low-income area of the Bronx, New York City, and a similar car in an affluent Palo Alto, California neighborhood. Within 24 hours, everything of value had been stolen from the car in the Bronx. Within a few days, vandals had smashed the car’s windows and ripped out the upholstery. At the same time, the car abandoned in Palo Alto remained untouched for over a week, until Zimbardo himself smashed it with a sledgehammer. Soon, other people Zimbardo described as mostly well dressed, “clean-cut” Caucasians joined in the vandalism. Zimbardo concluded that in high-crime areas like the Bronx, where such abandoned property is commonplace, vandalism and theft occur far faster as the community takes such acts for granted. However, similar crimes can occur in any community when the people’s mutual regard for proper civil behavior is lowered by actions that suggest a general lack of concern.

Kelling concluded that by selectively targeting minor crimes like vandalism, public intoxication, and loitering, police can establish an atmosphere of civil order and lawfulness, thus helping to prevent more serious crimes.

Broken Windows Policing

In1993, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton cited Kelling and his broken windows theory as a basis for implementing a new “tough-stance” policy aggressively addressing relatively minor crimes seen as negatively affecting the quality of life in the inner-city.

Bratton directed NYPD to step up enforcement of laws against crimes like public drinking, public urination, and graffiti. He also cracked down on so-called “squeegee men,” vagrants who aggressively demand payment at traffic stops for unsolicited car window washings. Reviving a Prohibition-era city ban on dancing in unlicensed establishments, police controversially shuttered many of the city’s night clubs with records of public disturbances.

While studies of New York’s crime statistics conducted between 2001 and 2017 suggested that enforcement policies based on the broken windows theory were effective in reducing rates of both minor and serious crimes, other factors may have also contributed to the result. For example, New York’s crime decrease may have simply been part of a nationwide trend that saw other major cities with different policing practices experience similar decreases over the period. In addition, New York City’s 39% drop in the unemployment rate could have contributed to the reduction in crime.

In 2005, police in the Boston suburb of Lowell, Massachusetts, identified 34 “crime hot spots” fitting the broken windows theory profile. In 17 of the spots, police made more misdemeanor arrests, while other city authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, and enforced building codes. In the other 17 spots, no changes in routine procedures were made. While the areas given special attention saw a 20% reduction in police calls, a study of the experiment concluded that simply cleaning up the physical environment had been more effective than an increase in misdemeanor arrests.

Today, however, five major U.S. cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and Denver—all acknowledge employing at least some neighborhood policing tactics based on Kelling’s broken windows theory. In all of these cities, police stress aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws.

Despite its popularity in major cities, police policy based on the broken windows theory is not without its critics, who question both its effectiveness and fairness of application.

In 2005, University of Chicago Law School professor Bernard Harcourt published a study finding no evidence that broken windows policing actually reduces crime. “We don’t deny that the ‘broken windows’ idea seems compelling,” wrote Harcourt. “The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work as claimed in practice.”

Specifically, Harcourt contended that crime data from New York City’s 1990s application of broken windows policing had been misinterpreted. Though the NYPD had realized greatly reduced crime rates in the broken windows enforcement areas, the same areas had also been the areas worst affected by the crack-cocaine epidemic that caused citywide homicide rates to soar. “Everywhere crime skyrocketed as a result of crack, there were eventual declines once the crack epidemic ebbed,” Harcourt note. “This is true for police precincts in New York and for cities across the country.” In short, Harcourt contended that New York’s declines in crime during the 1990s were both predictable and would have happened with or without broken windows policing.

Harcourt concluded that for most cities, the costs of broken windows policing outweigh the benefits. “In our opinion, focusing on minor misdemeanors is a diversion of valuable police funding and time from what really seems to help—targeted police patrols against violence, gang activity and gun crimes in the highest-crime ‘hot spots.’”

Broken windows policing has also been criticized for its potential to encourage unequal, potentially discriminatory enforcement practices such as racial profiling , too often with disastrous results.

Arising from objections to practices like “Stop-and-Frisk,” critics point to the case of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man killed by a New York City police officer in 2014. After observing Garner standing on a street corner in a high-crime area of Staten Island, police suspected him of selling “loosies,” untaxed cigarettes. When, according to the police report, Garner resisted arrest, an officer took him to the ground in a chock hold. An hour later, Garner died in the hospital of what the coroner determined to be homicide resulting from, “Compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” After a grand jury failed to indict the officer involved, anti-police protests broke out in several cities.

Since then, and due to the deaths of other unarmed Black men accused of minor crimes predominantly by white police officers, more sociologists and criminologists have questioned the effects of broken windows theory policing. Critics argue that it is racially discriminatory, as police statistically tend to view, and thus, target, non-whites as suspects in low-income, high-crime areas.

According to Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, established historic evidence shows that persons of color are more likely than whites to be detained, questioned, searched, and arrested by police. Larkin suggests that this happens more often in areas chosen for broken windows-based policing due to a combination of: the individual’s race, police officers being tempted to stop minority suspects because they statistically appear to commit more crimes, and the tacit approval of those practices by police officials.

Sources and Further Reference

Wilson, James Q; Kelling, George L (Mar 1982), “ Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety .” The Atlantic.
Harcourt, Bernard E. “ Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City & a Five-City Social Experiment .” University of Chicago Law Review (June 2005).
Fagan, Jeffrey and Davies, Garth. “ Street Stops and Broken Windows .” Fordham Urban Law Journal (2000).
Taibbi, Matt. “ The Lessons of the Eric Garner Case .” Rolling Stone (November 2018).
Herbert, Steve; Brown, Elizabeth (September 2006). “ Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal City .” Antipode.
Larkin, Paul. “ Flight, Race, and Terry Stops: Commonwealth v.Warren .” The Heritage Foundation.
Criminology Definition and History
How the Illinois v. Wardlow Case Affects Policing
The History of Modern Policing
What Is a Criminal Infraction?
5 Common Misconceptions About Black Lives Matter
What Is Restorative Justice?
Why Racial Profiling Is a Bad Idea
What Is Retributive Justice?
Racial Profiling and Why it Hurts Minorities
An Overview of Labeling Theory
What Is Procedural Justice?
Terry v. Ohio: Supreme Court Case, Arguments, Impact
Racial Bias and Discrimination: From Colorism to Racial Profiling
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What's the Difference Between Probation and Parole?

How a 50-Year-Old Study Was Misconstrued to Create Destructive Broken-Windows Policing

The problem? Wilson and Kelling distorted the study to suit their purposes. In short, the broken-windows theory was founded on a lie.

He was right.

From its origins to its ruinous rise, the broken-windows theory was just that — broken. It’s time to tear it down.

Broken Windows Thesis

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Incivilities thesis ; Order maintenance

Few ideas in criminology have had the type of direct impact on criminal justice policy exhibited by the broken windows thesis. From its inauspicious beginnings in a nine-page article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in The Atlantic Monthly , the broken windows thesis has impacted policing strategies around the world. From the “quality of life policing” efforts in New York City (Kelling and Sousa 2001 ) to “Zero Tolerance” policing in England (Dennis and Mallon 1998 ), police agencies around the world have embraced Wilson and Kelling’s idea that focusing on less serious offenses can yield important benefits in terms of community safety and prevention of more serious crime. Despite this broad policy influence, research on the theory itself has been relatively weak and has produced equivocal findings as will be detailed in this entry.

The Broken Windows Model

In a nutshell, the broken windows thesis (Wilson and Kelling 1982 )...

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Hinkle, J.C. (2014). Broken Windows Thesis. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_14

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Broken Windows Theory

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

The broken windows theory states that visible signs of disorder and misbehavior in an environment encourage further disorder and misbehavior, leading to serious crimes. The principle was developed to explain the decay of neighborhoods, but it is often applied to work and educational environments.

What Is the Broken Windows Theory?
Do Broken Windows Policies Work?

The broken windows theory, defined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, drawing on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, argues that no matter how rich or poor a neighborhood, one broken window would soon lead to many more windows being broken: “One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Disorder increases levels of fear among citizens, which leads them to withdraw from the community and decrease participation in informal social control.

The broken windows are a metaphor for any visible sign of disorder in an environment that goes untended. This may include small crimes, acts of vandalism, drunken or disorderly conduct, etc. Being forced to confront minor problems can heavily influence how people feel about their environment, particularly their sense of safety.

With the help of small civic organizations, lower-income Chicago residents have created over 800 community gardens and urban farms out of burnt buildings and vacant lots. Now, instead of having trouble finding fresh produce, these neighborhoods have become go-to food destinations. This example of the broken windows theory benefits the people by lowering temperatures in overheated cities, increasing socialization, reducing stress , and teaching children about nature.

George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson popularized the broken windows theory in an article published in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic . They asserted that vandalism and smaller crimes would normalize larger crimes (although this hypothesis has not been fully supported by subsequent research). They also remarked on how signs of disorder (e.g., a broken window) stirred up feelings of fear in residents and harmed the safety of the neighborhood as a whole.

The broken windows theory was put forth at a time when crime rates were soaring, and it often spurred politicians to advocate policies for increasing policing of petty crimes—fare evasion, public drinking, or graffiti—as a way to prevent, and decrease, major crimes including violence. The theory was notably implemented and popularized by New York City mayor Rudolf Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton. In research reported in 2000, Kelling claimed that broken-windows policing had prevented over 60,000 violent crimes between 1989 and 1998 in New York City, though critics of the theory disagreed.

Although the “Broken Windows” article is one of the most cited in the history of criminology , Kelling contends that it has often been misapplied. The implementation soon escalated to “zero tolerance” policing policies, especially in minority communities. It also led to controversial practices such as “stop and frisk” and an increase in police misconduct complaints.

Most important, research indicates that criminal activity was declining on its own, for a number of demographic and socio-economic reasons, and so credit for the shift could not be firmly attributed to broken-windows policing policies. Experts point out that there is “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship,” contends Columbia law professor Bernard E. Harcourt. The causes of misbehavior are varied and complex.

The effectiveness of this approach depends on how it is implemented. In 2016, Dr. Charles Branas led an initiative to repair abandoned properties and transform vacant lots into community parks in high-crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia, which subsequently saw a 39% reduction in gun violence. By building “palaces for the people” with these safe and sustainable solutions, neighborhoods can be lifted up, and crime can be reduced.

When a neighborhood, even a poor one, is well-tended and welcoming, its residents have a greater sense of safety. Building and maintaining social infrastructure—such as public libraries, parks and other green spaces, and active retail corridors—can be a more sustainable option and improve the daily lives of the people who live there.

According to the broken windows theory, disorder (symbolized by a broken window) leads to fear and the potential for increased and more severe crime. Unfortunately, this concept has been misapplied, leading to aggressive and zero-tolerance policing. These policing strategies tend to focus on an increased police presence in troubled communities (especially those with minorities and lower-income residents) and stricter punishments for minor infractions (e.g., marijuana use).

Zero-tolerance policing metes out predetermined consequences regardless of the severity or context of a crime. Zero-tolerance policies can be harmful in an academic setting, as vulnerable youth (particularly those from minority ethnic/racial backgrounds) find themselves trapped in the School-to-Prison Pipeline for committing minor infractions.

Aggressive policing practices can sour relationships between police and the community. However, problem-oriented policing—which identifies the specific problems or “broken windows” in a neighborhood and then comes up with proactive responses—can help reduce crime. This evidence-based policing strategy has been shown to be effective.

We question the contribution made by criminology to the practicalities of policing and suggest that police officers would be better off acquainting themselves with psychology.

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Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien

Broken Windows Theory (Wilson & Kelling)

28. November 2023 | zuletzt aktualisiert am 28. November 2023 von Christian Wickert

The Broken Windows Theory was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. According to the two authors, the broken window must be repaired as quickly as possible to prevent further destruction in the neighborhood and an increase in the crime rate. Destruction in urban areas is therefore inextricably linked to crime and causes it. A seemingly harmless phenomenon can therefore have serious consequences.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Main proponents

George L. Kelling , James Q. Wilson

Wilson and Kelling had a major influence on the American policing strategies of the time. In their studies, they focused on police foot patrols as a method of policing. Although their studies proved that foot patrols had no effect on crime rates, they demonstrated that the presence of police made neighborhood residents feel safer. To illustrate their point of view, they developed the so-called Broken Windows Theory:

In the Broken Windows Theory, the authors refer to an experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo (1969). He parked a car in the Bronx in New York and another in Palo Alto in California with the number plates removed and the bonnet open. In the Bronx, within minutes, residents began to dismantle usable parts of the car and then destroyed it completely. The car in Palo Alto, however, was left untouched. A concerned passer-by simply closed the open hood. It was only when Zimbardo intervened in the experiment and demolished the car himself with a sledgehammer that the car was finally cannibalised by local Californians. Zimbardo concluded that the vandalism was partly due to visible previous damage and partly to the experience of social disorder/neglect in the neighbourhood. He writes:

We might conclude from these preliminary studies that to initiate such acts of destructive vandalism, the necessary ingredients are the acquired feelings of anonymity provided by the life in a city like New York, along with some minimal releaser cues. Where social anonymity is not a “given” of one’s everyday life, it is necessary to have more extreme releaser cues, more explicit models for destruction and aggression, and physical anonymity—a large crowd or the darkness of the night. (Zimbardo, 1969, S. 292)

Wilson and Kelling take up Zimbardo’s study results and conclude:

Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of “no one caring”—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares.” (Kelling & Wilson, 1982)

Following on from Zimbardo’s experiment, Wilson and Kelling apply the Broken Windows approach to signs of decay in social spaces. Wilson and Kelling see urban decay, such as broken windows, as a trigger for criminal behaviour. The broken windows symbolise dilapidated parts of the city. The visible decay signals a lack of control to the residents of the neighbourhood, which is also perceived by other (unwanted) visitors to the neighbourhood. The presence of these people and the signs of physical neglect fuel a fear of crime among long-time residents, who are now beginning to leave the area as a result of these changes. The departure of ‘decent citizens’ leads to a decline in social control, which objectively facilitates the commission of crime. More residents now leave the neighbourhood, setting in motion a virtuous circle.

Wilson and Kelling distinguish between signs of a lack of formal and informal social control (also known as incivilities):

physical disorder (such as dilapidated buildings, abandoned properties, graffitied walls, etc.) and
social disorder (stray groups on the streets, homeless people, aggressive beggars, drug scene, etc.).

Schema der "Funktionsweise" der Broken Windows Theorie von Wilson und Kelling

Implications for Criminal Policy

Newly elected Mayor Rudolph Giuliani appointed William Bratton as Police Commissioner in 1994, and together they pursued a comprehensive crime reduction strategy that included zero-tolerance policing as a central element. Giuliani was a strong supporter and advocate of aggressive enforcement of low-level crime laws, emphasising the Broken Windows theory.

Zero tolerance policing in New York City involved cracking down on low-level offences such as fare evasion, public drunkenness and vandalism. The police focused on rigorously enforcing the law and making arrests for even minor violations. This approach was credited with a significant reduction in the city’s overall crime rate during this period.

However, the strategy was criticised for its potential to disproportionately affect minority communities and for the controversial use of stop-and-frisk tactics. Critics argued that the aggressive enforcement of minor offences led to the profiling of certain demographic groups, raising concerns about civil liberties and racial discrimination.

The implementation of zero-tolerance policing during the Giuliani administration was associated with a significant decline in crime rates in New York City, contributing to the perception that the strategy was successful. However, it also sparked debates about the ethical implications of aggressive policing tactics and their impact on certain communities.

Whether and to what extent zero-tolerance policing is successful is a matter of debate among criminologists. In fact, other major US cities experienced significant reductions in crime during the 1990s without using this policing strategy. This suggests that other factors, such as demographic changes and developments in the illegal drug market, were responsible for the drop in crime in New York City and other major cities. William Bratton later tried to build on his success in New York and became police commissioner in Los Angeles. However, zero-tolerance policing failed to bring about a significant reduction in crime.

Another implication of the Broken Windows Theory for crime policy would be to strengthen communities (e.g. through community policing) and to focus more on situational crime prevention .

Critical Appraisal & Relevance

The Broken Windows Theory is one of the best known and most cited of the criminological theories of crime. The success of the theory is undoubtedly due to its simple assumption of a causal relationship between public order and crime.

However, critics such as the American criminologists Sampson and Raudenbush (1999) argue that this assumed causal relationship is based on a false assumption. Rather, they argue that the postulated direct link between (dis)order and crime is mediated by the degree of social cohesion in a community and the shared expectation of social control in the residential environment. Representatives of cultural criminology argue in a similar vein, criticising that incivility is understood primarily as an aesthetic value judgement and that the explanatory link between social control and crime is often ignored. In addition, the assessment of phenomena described as disorder is more complex and ambiguous (e.g. graffiti).

The assumed link between incivility and fear of crime is also criticised, as the perception of disorder phenomena would be selective and primarily affect people who have a higher level of fear of crime to begin with. The argument is therefore tautological.

Zero tolerance policing has been, and continues to be, subject to fierce criticism. Critics such as Hess (2004) question the effectiveness of the policing method. They argue that other factors, particularly social factors, are responsible for the decline in crime in New York. Other critics complain that the policing method is racist and discriminatory, as socially disadvantaged non-white people in poorer neighbourhoods are particularly affected by the policing measures (see, for example, Harcourt, 2001).

Primary Literature

Kelling, George L; Coles, Catherine M (1997): Fixing broken windows. Restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. New York: Simon & Schuster .
Kelling, George L.; Wilson, James Q. (1982): Broken Windows. The police and Neighborhood Safety. The Altlantic. [Volltext]

Secondary Literature

Dreher, G.; Feltes, T. (Hrsg.) (1997). Das Modell New York: Kriminalprävention durch “Zero Tolerance”?: Beiträge zur aktuellen kriminalpolitischen Diskussion. Veröffentlicht in Empirische Polizeiforschung 12. Online verfügbar unter: https://publikationen.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/78229/epf_12.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Harcourt, B. E. (2001). Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Harvard University Press.
Hess, H. (2004): Broken Windows: Zur Diskussion um die Strategie des New York Police Department. Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft. Band 116, Heft 1, Seiten 66–110.
Sampson, Robert J.; Raudenbush, Stephen W (1999): Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces: A New Look at Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods. American Journal of Sociology. 105 (3): 603–651.
Schwind, H.-D. (2008): Kriminologie. Eine praxisorientierte Einführung mit Beispielen. S. 326-330.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order versus Deindividuation, Impulse and Chaos. In: Arnold, W. J. & Levine, D. (Hrsg.). Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. S. 237-307.

Further Information

[ YouTube Video: Broken Windows Theory – Criminology ]

You Tube Video: Applying the Broken Window Theory to Cars

[ YouTube Direktlink ]

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong ( NPR, 01.11.2016 )

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About SozTheo

SozTheo is a collection of information and resources aimed at all readers interested in sociology and criminology. SozTheo was created as a private page by Prof. Dr. Christian Wickert , lecturer in sociology and criminology at the University of Applied Sciences for Police and Public Administration in North Rhine-Westphalia (HSPV NRW). The contributions and linked articles available here do not necessarily reflect the official opinion, attitude or curricula of the HSPV NRW.

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The Strange History and Impact of Broken Windows

Tracey meares, october 25, 2022.

A leading scholar rethinks her relationship to broken windows.

“Broken windows” comes from the title of an article that George Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1982, 40 years ago. A piece of their theory was an experiment by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo arranged to have a car parked without license plates with its hood up on streets in the Bronx and in Palo Alto. Within 10 minutes in the Bronx, a family came by and removed the battery and radiator. Within 24 hours, almost everything of value had been removed from the car. After that, random destruction occurred to the car. The car in Palo Alto remained untouched until Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer before a group of onlookers. Others joined in. Zimbardo described those who vandalized the cars in both cities as “respectable well-dressed whites.” Wilson and Kelling wrote that we could learn from Zimbardo’s experiment. Their conclusion? If police took care to make sure disorder was cleaned up, then it stood to reason that their efforts would prevent crime.

In 1990, there were more than 2,200 homicides in New York City. When I became a fledgling law professor in 1994, the count fell below 1,600 — an astonishing drop, but still orders of magnitude higher than the 488 posted in 2021. How to deal with violence — shootings, homicides, robberies and the like — was a serious policy problem of the day. Few law professors were working on this problem as I began my career, but it was a problem I started to think about in earnest with the encouragement of social scientists mentoring me at the time — William Julius Wilson in particular, whose work centered the neighborhood in thinking about policies to address what Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver call “ race-class subjugated communities .”

The prevailing conceptual framework for law professors thinking about how to address criminal behavior, in contrast, centered a “law and economics” paradigm that focused primarily on the incentives that individual law-breakers faced, to the exclusion of other macro-level dynamics. The law-and-economics approach asserted that to persuade Homo economicus to engage in less robbery, say, a policy-maker should increase the severity of the penalty a potential offender faced, increase the likelihood that the offender would ultimately be caught or both. Attendant policies supported a “tough on crime” narrative that was consistent with more imprisonment.

I wanted to think about approaches that addressed violence without leading inexorably to long prison sentences, so my co-author Dan Kahan and I argued that broken-windows policing might be a prime example of the way in which legal policy could usefully harness social norms for the purpose of enhancing law-abidingness. We maintained that, while social scientists had long pointed to social norms as an important regulator of daily life, what many law enforcers had missed was the potential for law and norms to interact in ways that might affect illegal conduct. This brand of legal scholarship was called the “ New Chicago School ” to mark it as distinct from the old law-and-economics approach. We even (to my chagrin today) had a New Yorker article written about us!

Those of us in the norms-focused Chicago School were interested in exploring multidisciplinary approaches to human interaction and informal (read, nonstatist) methods of achieving compliance as opposed to formal sanctions. We found “broken windows” fascinating because, while a statist approach, nothing in the standard law-and-economics approach to developing criminal law policy suggested that attacking visible signs of disorder in the form of relatively trivial types of misconduct — such as panhandling, graffiti, prostitution or public drunkenness — would impact more serious crime. We also appreciated that, if effective, the approach was seemingly less costly than the stiff formal penalties advocated by the standard law-and-economics school. Moreover, we thought the new approach more immediately feasible to implement than waiting to correct long-standing social inequities often asserted to be the root causes of crime.

How people perceive disorder is intertwined with how they perceive race and class.

Our argument was normative as well as empirical. It was important to us that there was mounting evidence that those residing in neighborhoods where violence was a too regular occurrence seemingly supported a suite of law enforcement strategies that appeared to offer residents the opportunity to shape their own norms. We were not sanguine about the fact that there potentially was disagreement in the relevant communities about the best approach to crime reduction. We maintained, however, that community deliberation about the best approach to address crime was an important exercise in community self-determination. We believed the very process could lead to an improvement in collective efficacy, which other scholars, such as Robert Sampson, had demonstrated to be a precursor to crime reduction. In short, we thought broken-windows policing potentially was about the promotion of democracy at the neighborhood level.

Naturally, there were those who disagreed with us. Indeed, I now disagree in many ways with myself, and I have explained why in print . Here is a summary of why: first, there is now an extensive body of research questioning the very mechanics of the theory of broken windows. For example, Rob Sampson and Steve Raudenbush wrote a game-changing piece on systematic social observation, which called into question the basic precepts of broken-windows theory. Newer work has evaluated the impact of so-called broken-windows policing on crime itself.

Historically, the groups that bear the brunt of violence also are the groups who must bear the costs of whatever statist strategy designed to address this problem.

Second, researchers have begun to focus in very targeted ways on the psychology of the perception of disorder. Importantly, the broken-windows thesis is about how people translate their perceptions of physical disorder into information about their social world. Social cues matter to people interpreting disorder as well as physical cues. Sampson and Raudenbush demonstrate that how people perceive disorder is intertwined with how they perceive race and class. Black people perceive less physical disorder than white people living in the same neighborhood. All respondents’ perceptions of physical disorder increased, no matter their identified race, as their perception of the percentage of Black people living in the neighborhood increased. Importantly, there is no reason to think that police carrying out law enforcement tasks would respond any differently from Sampson and Raudenbush’s respondents.

When people are treated by the legal authorities in ways they perceive to be legitimate, they are more likely to voluntarily comply with the law.

The question to answer is whether and how a local government entity might carry out tasks critical to well-functioning and self-governing communities that promote the goal of safety. Addressing violence in communities is critical, and so is the fact that historically the groups that bear the brunt of violence also are the groups who must bear the costs of whatever statist strategy is designed to address this problem. These groups have too often been shut out of the political process, and they deserve a local government apparatus that is responsive and attentive to their particular needs, treats them with dignity and respect, listens to their concerns and engenders an expectation among them of benevolent treatment by legal authorities. Much scholarship supports the conclusion that when people are treated by the legal authorities in ways they perceive to be legitimate, they are more likely to voluntarily comply with the law and cooperate and engage with these authorities to address problems. The problem is that broken-windows policing, as carried out in many cities, is fundamentally inconsistent with legitimacy. The question is: What exactly might the state do for its citizens to achieve the critical goal of helping citizens help themselves promote safety?

Historian Benjamin Justice and I have argued that institutions that enforce criminal laws play a powerful and pervasive role in providing a formal education in what it means to be a citizen. We demonstrate that, through overt and hidden curricula, the criminal justice system educates citizens on the proper relationship they should have with the state just as surely as public schools do. While the overt curriculum is framed as educative in a positive sense — encouraging or changing behavior to align with the democratic goals of the state — the hidden curriculum of the criminal justice system manages and promotes education that is the positive image’s photographic negative.

Interactions with police officers play a key role in shaping an individual’s civic identity whether one has direct contact with police or secondary contact through family and friends. Importantly, there is both an overt and a hidden curriculum that shapes those interactions. The overt curriculum of policing lies in the U.S. Constitution. According to this curriculum, police officers are empowered to constrain our liberty interests and intrude on our privacy interests, but only in ways carefully limited by law, especially certain constitutional amendments. This legal regime, taught to kids in civics classes, is designed to convey concern for rights. People’s interests in autonomy, privacy and bodily integrity ought not be subject to the whim of an individual police officer. We are a government of laws designed to restrain state power against the individual.

We might add to the law another aspect of the overt curriculum of policing, which is our expectation that police should fight crime and help residents of neighborhoods and communities to be safe. Interestingly, this motivator of police activity is of relatively recent vintage. The conventional wisdom, at least from the 1960s until the mid-1990s, was that police had very little impact on crime rates. Today, we have a different view of the capacity of policing agencies to influence crime, and because of it, broken-windows policing brought many, many people into contact with cops on the street in New York City — literally hundreds of thousands of them.

Imagine a world in which New York City residents’ experiences with being stopped were consistent with an overt curriculum emphasizing rights: that everyone be treated as a valued citizen. In that world, the message conveyed to those stopped might be, “We are working for your good and especially for the good of those who live in high-crime communities. We are fighting crime while respecting your freedom and autonomy. Our goal is to maximize freedom, your freedom from crime and predation and your freedom from the arbitrary power of the state.”

Instead, in certain areas of New York City, the hidden curriculum of such policing strategies sends the opposite message, showing certain citizens clear signals that they are a special, dangerous and undesirable class. At the end of 2011, the year in which “stop, question and frisk” was still in full force, more than 680,000 people were stopped and frisked in New York City. Approximately 10 percent of these encounters resulted in arrest or summons, which raises questions about the reasonableness of the officer’s basis for encounter in the first place. Additionally, and incredibly, New York City police officers recover weapons in fewer than two percent of encounters. And the racial disparities among these encounters is now well known.

The overt curriculum of policing, grounded in the Fourth Amendment, complicates the facts on the street, in that jurisprudence encourages anyone observing a person stopped by police on the street to say to themselves, “I wonder what they did?” The fact that nothing in the overt curriculum of policing requires police to treat those whom they stop with dignity and respect — numerous complaints about incivility suggest that police do not — compounds the problem that police practice is incongruent with the principles underlying most people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of legal authorities. Poor, urban-dwelling people of color bear the brunt not only of privacy and autonomy intrusions, but also of the constant stream of official messaging they could easily interpret — and appear to interpret — as insulting.

Just as kids do not learn all that the public schools offer in their overt and hidden curricula, people who interact with the criminal justice system do not necessarily learn the alarmingly negative lessons on citizenship that it offers. What people learn from any curriculum depends in part on the degree and frequency of exposure, and on individual and community resilience. Acts perceived as unjust have the potential to incite radicalization, resistance and solidarity — as well as anger, insecurity and despair. For those who swim in an environment saturated with negative messages about the criminal justice system, the lessons of lived experience with the hidden curriculum are pervasive and consistent. Policy-makers must consider the consonance between their policies and the lessons that people actually learn about what is most worth knowing about being an American citizen.

“The Message”: Order Maintenance and Its Discontents

Michael Javen Fortner

Broken Windows Theory

In 1969 the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo reported on an experiment he conducted in which two comparable cars were left on the city streets of The Bronx in New York City and Palo Alto, California. The Bronx car had no license plates and its hood up. Within a short time vandals ransacked the car for valuables and over time destroyed it. Meanwhile, the Palo Alto car remained untouched until Zimbardo destroyed parts of it, and only then did vandals and passersby ransack and then destroy it. In both neighborhoods the vandals were observed to be well dressed and white.

“Broken windows” is the theory from this and similar experiments that abandoned or untended property is an invitation to vandalize the property because its owners no longer care what happens to it. This theory has been extended to neighborhoods in which abandoned buildings invite vandalism, again, because no one cares. The consequence is a downward spiral of neighborhood deterioration in which owners abandon other buildings, vandalism spreads, community order breaks down, and the streets are occupied by disorderly elements such as gangs, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Violent crime is not necessarily an immediate result of community disorder, but disorderliness may reach a level of lawlessness that increases the neighborhood's vulnerability to violent crime.

In 1982 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson popularized this theory in an article titled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” Kelling and Wilson were both criminologists, and their attention naturally turned to the role of the police in neighborhoods plagued by disorder and violence. But there was the rub. Should the police focus on community order or violent crime? Historically, the traditional role of the police was that of the night watchman responsible for the maintenance of order. Police patrolled the streets on foot, provided the physical presence of the law, rousted troublemakers, and kept the streets clear of riffraff. As urban violence increased, the police gradually became more involved in their secondary role of crime solvers, and they were assigned on that basis either to patrol neighborhoods with high crime rates or to respond to calls for help.

Kelling and Wilson advocated a renewed emphasis on the role of the police in maintaining community order while not ignoring criminal apprehension and responding to calls. They argued that police departments should assign police to marginal neighborhoods with high vulnerability to criminal invasion where police patrols could do the most good in reversing disorder and reclaiming a sense of community. They recommended the use of foot patrols, and they urged police to relentlessly maintain order even on the buses, subways, and trains they ride to and from duty. Community support is essential; but uniformed city police should patrol the streets, should be adequately trained to do so, and should be evaluated on their success in doing so. “Above all,” the authors conclude, “we must return to our long-abandoned view that the police ought to protect communities as well as individuals…. Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police—and the rest of us—ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows” ( 1982, 10 ).

New York City famously implemented the broken windows theory first in policing its mass-transit system and then citywide beginning in 1993 under the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton. Their policy called for “zero tolerance” of disorderly conduct and small crimes, from public drunkenness to graffiti, on the grounds that such crimes helped create an environment of neighborhood deterioration and disorder within which larger crimes and violence could flourish. To hold commanders accountable for crime trends in their precincts, the city also put in place the Compstat research and evaluation process, which entails continuous monitoring of locally collected crime data and mapping.

Minor and major crimes rates in New York City steadily declined over a sustained period of time. Commissioner Bratton credited the success of the broken windows theory. The zero-tolerance policy toward public disorder quickly spread to other cities, where crime rates also went down. Bratton helped that diffusion process as head of the Boston and then Los Angeles police departments before returning in 2013 to his position as New York City police commissioner.

Community theories like broken windows require a delicate balance when put into police practice. To work well, community members and police must function as partners engaged in a common pursuit of maintaining or restoring community health. Safe streets and safe public spaces are important goals, but how those goals are pursued matters. One great danger of the broken windows policy is that the police may become too aggressive in their pursuit of community order and less discriminate in whom they stop and question, especially in communities in which the police are predominantly white and the community predominantly black. When police widen their sweeps, community perceptions of police behavior can turn from maintaining order in the community to harassment. This can create a downward spiral of disrespect and distrust on both sides ( Anderson 2014 ). Another danger is that the broken windows theory overemphasizes the police role in maintaining order and punishing minor crimes while too many major violent crimes go unsolved ( Leovy 2015 ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Elijah. “What Caused the Ferguson Riot Exists in So Many Other Cities, Too.” Washington Post, August 13, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/13/what-caused-the-ferguson-riot-exists-in-so-many-other-cities-too/ .

Bratton, William, and George L. Kelling. “The Assault on ‘Broken Windows’ Policing.” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2014. http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-bratton-and-george-kelling-the-assault-on-broken-windows-policing-1418946183 .

Kelling, George L., and James Q. Wilson. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic, March 1, 1982, 1–10. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/ .

Leovy, Jill. Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015.

Stephen Schechter Russell Sage College

The theory of broken windows and Zimbardo's experiment

Let's think for a moment about the image projected by a building with a broken window, which takes months or even years. Probably, as we are concentrating on it, let us imagine how the building in question is covered by a layer of dust, as well as the fact that it is poorly attended. It is probable that we even imagine it totally abandoned.

The thought that many have come to mind is "nobody cares anymore". And this thought can be dangerous: the behavior of many people towards the building in question will be modified by being perceived with respect to it. This is what the theory of broken windows proposes , of which we are going to talk throughout this article.

Related article: "The Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo"

The broken windows theory

The theory of windows is a well-known theory linked to criminology, which proposes mainly existence of emergence and infection of criminal conduct from the perception of the relevance or absence of relevance of the stimulus or element with which we treat. Thus, how we perceive what surrounds us influences our behavior towards it, and can even modify our consideration of what is moral, legal and legitimate about what is being done.

The image that the name suggests the theory is a clear analogy: the existence of a broken window implies a certain abandonment of the building or vehicle in question, something that diminishes the responsibility towards what happens to it. Likewise, the damages presented make it easier to add, at the beginning little by little but with time more pronounced, other damages: this is what happens with abandoned buildings, to which adolescents and children usually throw paving stones to break the rest of windows The incivility is contagious Considering that the attack is unimportant and that nobody cares .

The opposite would also be applicable: a good care of the elements that are part of a stimulus make it difficult to be considered unappreciated and that univocal behaviors appear by mere contagion.

This seemingly simple theory, developed at the criminological level by Wilson and Kelling in 1982 from the results of an experiment by Philip Zimbardo, has profound implications: it is the perception of what surrounds us that explains our behavior towards it . The idea that something has little value or is abandoned facilitates criminality, as well as the fact that obvious incivilities have been carried out on which no action has been taken (for example, a wall with a graffiti that has not been erased). facilitates that others also draw on it), something to take into account at the institutional level when it comes to preventing some behaviors and at the same time revitalizing some areas of the cities.

And not only at the criminal level: also in many other senses this theory can push us to monitor our behavior about what and what we want (Do not forget that the broken window, although in this case it can be a real stimulus, it is also usable as a metaphor).

Related article: "What is Social Psychology?"

The Zimbardo experiment

The theory of broken windows arose from an experiment in social psychology carried out by Philip Zimbardo, in 1969. For this, he would have two cars in perfect state of identical color, make and model in two different points: the Bronx ( New York neighborhood with very few resources known for high crime rates, especially at that time) and Palo Alto (rich California area with little crime). Once there, I would tear off license plates and leave the doors open, in order to observe what happened.

Initially, the behavior observed in both was different. The car parked in the Bronx was quickly robbed , said car being practically destroyed in a few days. By cons, the car parked in Palo Alto remained unharmed for a week.

However, the experiment continued: after that time Zimbardo decided to attack the vehicle and cause some damage, including the rupture of one of its windows, and later retired to observe. From that moment, seeing clear signs of abandonment of the vehicle, the residents of Palo Alto had the same behavior to the car that the Bronx: looted and destroyed.

The conclusions of the experiment supported the theory of broken windows: the perception that something is abandoned and that its fate does not matter to anyone can trigger behaviors that can even contradict the beliefs of those who carry them out, can reach the commission of crimes or negligence or ignorance regarding what happens with that element.

Likewise, we can not fail to see that what at first sight and could lead one to think of the existence of poverty as an element that elicits criminal behavior has proven to be false: the acts committed against the Palo Alto car were the and in this case the purchasing power of those who committed them was high. Although today this is something that misses very few people, at that time there was still a high level of classism in the social perception that considered it unlikely that people with high socio-economic positions would commit crimes.

A theory that can be extrapolated to other realities

The broken windows theory has been associated with crime and crime in the form of robbery, theft and vandalism , but we can also observe a similar effect in small things of the day to day of which we do not realize. This is what happens for example in relationships, whose neglect can lead to the emergence of conflicts and ruptures, the escalation of violence in a fight between two people if no control mechanism is put in place or the fact of lying, that can lead to the need to elaborate more and more complex lies and at the same time that others do not believe us.

It has also been observed as at the urban level the presence of specific points where there is neglect and neglect are likely to generate an increase around neglected areas and even the commission of small crimes. Example of this would be the neighborhoods that little by little have reduced their social prestige, in some cases until they are considered marginal.

But in addition to the above, it can also be associated with much more serious criminal acts (although in these cases a certain component of lack of empathy, values and responsibility is also required).

For example, today we see how the indigent tend to be systematically ignored by most people, and even in some cases they are attacked and vexed. Although the latter is not common, it can be associated with the theory of broken windows: it is someone who is socially not seen or taken into account, someone abandoned by society, which decreases the level of empathy and concern towards this kind of subject. The same goes for alcoholics and drug addicts.

It is also something that has happened with abandoned and stray animals (although nowadays it is not usual for society to be more aware of animal suffering). Crashes, attacks and persecutions that have even ended the life of the poor animal have been frequent throughout history, especially if the animal had any deformity or disability.

Bibliographic references

Wagers, M .; Sousa, W. & Kelling, G. (2008) Broken windows. Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis. UK. William Publishing.

Broken Windows Theory (April 2024).

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Broken Windows (page 3) | 2 |3| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Second, at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.) Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment." The first to arrive were a family--father, mother, and young son--who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began--windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the "vandals" appeared to be primarily respectable whites. Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx--its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"--vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers--the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility--are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares." We suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers. At this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior accordingly. They will use the streets less often, and when on the streets will stay apart from their fellows, moving with averted eyes, silent lips, and hurried steps. "Don't get involved." For some residents, this growing atomization will matter little, because the neighborhood is not their "home" but "the place where they live." Their interests are elsewhere; they are cosmopolitans. But it will matter greatly to other people, whose lives derive meaning and satisfaction from local attachments rather than worldly involvement; for them, the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends whom they arrange to meet. Such an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes' customers will be robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will occur. Among those who often find it difficult to move away from this are the elderly. Surveys of citizens suggest that the elderly are much less likely to be the victims of crime than younger persons, and some have inferred from this that the well-known fear of crime voiced by the elderly is an exaggeration: perhaps we ought not to design special programs to protect older persons; perhaps we should even try to talk them out of their mistaken fears. This argument misses the point. The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a drunken panhandler can be as fear-inducing for defenseless persons as the prospect of meeting an actual robber; indeed, to a defenseless person, the two kinds of confrontation are often indistinguishable. Moreover, the lower rate at which the elderly are victimized is a measure of the steps they have already taken--chiefly, staying behind locked doors--to minimize the risks they face. Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more. Nor is the connection between disorderliness and fear made only by the elderly. Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, has recently gathered together a number of surveys on the sources of public fear. One, done in Portland, Oregon, indicated that three fourths of the adults interviewed cross to the other side of a street when they see a gang of teenagers; another survey, in Baltimore, discovered that nearly half would cross the street to avoid even a single strange youth. When an interviewer asked people in a housing project where the most dangerous spot was, they mentioned a place where young persons gathered to drink and play music, despite the fact that not a single crime had occurred there. In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest. Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti. As Nathan Glazer has written, the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider with the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests." | 2 |3| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Home / Architecture / The Broken Windows Theory

The Broken Windows Theory

Kids playing on an abandoned car in the Bronx, NY, USA, 1975.

Giuseppe Gallo

The broken windows theory is not only one of the most known and discussed theories in behavioural psychology, it’s also of great value to architects and designers. This is because it concerns the environment in which we live and its ability to influence human behaviour. A subject that plays a central role in any design activity, but despite advances in research, we still don’t know enough because it’s linked to one of the most mysterious objects in the universe: the human brain.

Philip Zimbardo’s experiment

The history of the Broken Windows Theory begins in 1969 when Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducts a social experiment to observe human behaviour in public spaces.

Zimbardo “abandons” a car on a street in the Bronx in New York and in a residential neighbourhood in Palo Alto, California. Two diametrically opposed socio-economic contexts in which his research group hides to record the behaviour of citizens at the abandoned car.

It takes ten minutes for the Bronx’s car to be vandalised by a family of three who removes the battery and radiator. Within 24 hours, the car has already lost all its valuable parts and is at the mercy of the vandals who destroy the glasses and bodywork. It’s here that Zimbardo makes a first unexpected observation. Most of those who vandalised the car doesn’t fit the classic definition of thugs but are well-dressed people from whom one wouldn’t expect anti-social behaviour.

Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, the car is still intact. After a week, no one has vandalised it or tried to remove valuable parts. So Zimbardo decides to break a car window. This particular detail is enough for what has already happened in the Bronx to also happen in Palo Alto. Within hours, the car is attacked and vandalised, quickly becoming a scrap. Once again, the researchers observe the vandals are apparently respectable people who only needed a smashed car window to break the law.

The broken windows theory by Wilson and Kelling

Zimbardo’s experiments spark an important debate in the research community. This includes James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, who in 1982 published their article on the broken windows theory. According to the authors, vandalism can occur anywhere, regardless of the social context. All it takes to affect the common barriers of mutual respect and civility obligations is a signal of neglect and disinterest.

In an infamous context where cars are abandoned and things are frequently stolen or vandalised, even people who’d normally never think of vandalising a car could to do it. In Palo Alto, in a more comfortable environment where the norm is to play by the rules of law, a broken window is enough to start the vandalism: it’s the signal that nobody cares.

A broken window in an abandoned car conveys a sense of decay, of disinterest, of carelessness, a sense of breaking the codes of coexistence, of the absence of norms, of rules. Negative values characteristic of neighbourhoods where crime is highest and where neglect, dirt, disorder and abuse are most common.

The Application of the Broken Window Theory in New York City

In 94, a few months after his election as mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani announces “zero tolerance”, a policy based on the theory of broken windows and on tightening police measures against petty crimes such as littering, graffiti and minor vandalism. In a few months, New York City’s municipality will begin a major cleaning campaign, painting and restoring public furnishings, walls and floors, in keeping with the motto “a cleaner city is a safer city”.

Two Cops Patrolling Subway, Bronx, NY, 1981 ©Martha Cooper

As the city’s crime rate drops several points, Giuliani gives credit to his zero-tolerance policy and advocates its spread, despite much criticism from the public and researchers.

Architecture and the broken windows theory

Regardless of the success and legitimacy of its application in New York, the broken windows theory is of great value to architecture and design. Not only because it confirms how the space we live in influences our behaviour, but also because it signals how great that influence is. If a broken window is enough to signal carelessness and lack of attention leading to vandalism, how much of what we do results directly from the spaces and architectures we dwell on every day?

Zimbardo, P.G., 1969. The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In Nebraska symposium on motivation. University of Nebraska Press.
Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L., 1982. Broken windows. Atlantic monthly, 249(3), pp.29-38.
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Theory of Broken Windows: Why The Little Things Matter The Most

In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist had two cars to spare and decided to conduct a small experiment. He arranged to have one parked with its hood up, open doors, without license plates, on a street in the Bronx, NY - a place that was poor, dangerous, and full of crime. The other one was parked on a street in Palo Alto, California, like any other normal car, with its hood down and license plates intact. It looked like it belonged to somebody.

The car in the Bronx was attacked by vandals within 10 minutes. After three days there was nothing of value in the car and it was ultimately wrecked totally. While the car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo got bored and decided to intervene. He smashed a window of it with a sledgehammer to add some fun. Thus, the car went from being in perfect condition to showing signs of abuse and neglect. A few hours later, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Just like the first one.

Broken Windows as a theory was developed by sociologists James Wilson and George Kelling in the 1980s.

Broken Windows Theory states that when low level crimes like vandalism (e.g., breaking windows of cars and buildings) are ignored, larger and more serious crimes start to happen soon.

Broken windows left unrepaired leads to breaking of the rest of windows as well. This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in bad ones. Window-breaking does not occur as some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by good hearted window-lovers. Rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares about it, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. In the above example from 1969, breaking the windows of the second car had primed the people in Palo Alto that nobody cares about it, so why should they!

Broken windows set a new norm of behaviour for the community, which is slightly closer to the criminal or anti-social behaviour, and people adjust their normal behaviour accordingly. As the level of normalcy goes down, it sets a vicious cycle in motion that gradually causes a neighbourhood to become more and more run-down and dangerous.

Say you’re smoking a cigarette on the side walk. You finish the cigarette. Where do you throw the stub? If you’re standing on a clean side walk with no signs of litter, it’s likely you’ll wait to throw the stub in the next trash can.

However, if the street is littered with cigarettes, you won’t make an effort to try to find a trash can. You’ll just throw it on the ground with all the others. Since it’s already littered, what difference would your one cigarette stub make.

What the Broken Windows Theory means is simple: if in a building a broken window is not fixed soon, immediately other windows will end up being destroyed by vandals. Why? Because the message which is being transmitted is: here nobody cares about this; this is abandoned.

Although though littering streets with cigarette stubs isn’t a criminal behaviour, the ethos is similar to breaking windows of abandoned cars and buildings. It sets a new standard where such activities are tolerated.

In 1993, a series of policies based on the Broken Windows Theory were enacted that emphasised addressing crimes that negatively affect quality of life. All kinds of petty crimes like subway fare evasion, public drinking, public urination, and graffiti were dealt with very seriously. According to a 2001 study of crime trends, rates of both petty and serious crime fell significantly after that. Furthermore, crime continued to decline for the following ten years.

Like neighbourhoods and societies, businesses, work cultures, and products can have broken windows too. When short-term solutions or quick and dirty fixes build up in your culture, these act like vandalism and neglect in a neighbourhood. A “We tolerate bullshit” norm is set and the vicious cycle slowly begins without us knowing.

If the design of a product is already ugly and hard to work with, adding one more quick and dirty feature without putting any thought in it feels like less of a big deal. You optimise for speed and efficiency over quality. And so without ever consciously making a decision to do so, you lower your standards even further.

This doesn’t only affect employees; it’s almost certainly affects you, the leader too. You’re becoming more willing to build up technical and business debt, and less likely to prioritise paying it off. You create a culture of ineptitude. You started off tolerating business hacks, broken codes, small technical incompetencies, and now you’ve got epidemic car theft and are on the path to gang warfare.

The solution to a product, business, or a culture in this situation is the same as for a neighbourhood. You take a break and fix the windows that are already broken. You also have to make it a point that you don’t let any broken windows go unprepared in the future. If you yourself let your business or product have broken windows, don’t expect others not to throw stones at it.

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THE BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY

Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist at Stanford University, conducted, in 1969, an interesting experiment that ended up making up a theory through the work of James Wilson and George Kelling. It was called “The Broken Windows Theory”. And it is so worthy knowing, as it can apply and cover large areas of our life.

Let’s go back to 1969. The experiment consisted of leaving a car in the Bronx, the wasted one from that time: poor, dangerous, controversial and full of crime. Zimbardo stopped the vehicle there, with torn registration plates and open doors to just observe what would happen. It happened just after ten minutes, that the car started to be robbed. After three days there was nothing of value in the car and from that time on the car was just wrecked totally.

But the experiment did not end there. There was a second part consisting of leaving another identical and in similar conditions vehicle, but in this case it went to a very rich and quiet area: Palo Alto, California. For a week, nothing happened to the vehicle. But Zimbardo decided to intervene, so he took a hammer and hit some parts of the vehicle, including one of its windows, which broke. Thus, the car went from being in perfect condition to showing signs of abuse and neglect. And then, the hypothesis was confirmed by Zimbardo. What happened? From the moment the car looked in disrepair, residents of Palo Alto were primed with the vehicle at the same speed that had the people of the Bronx done.

The interpretation of this theory can be extrapolated to many areas of everyday life. If someone painted on the wall of your house and you would not repaint after, it shall become a wall full of graffiti in a few days. If the referee allows a small breach in the match, it’s likely for more and more violent actions to be appearing until it forms a brawl. If you start yourself telling white and little lies, you will believe them and will end up generating more. If you tolerate the invoice without VAT or evade taxes, then do not complain if there are no funds to pay your unemployment or your father’s pension. If you download contents illegally, then do not ask anyone to give any value to your creative work and claim it a good salary. If you do not watch your relationship with your partner and start avoiding the little details, you are sowing opportunities that can accelerate deterioration. And the list is endless. In short, if you allow vices and do not repair them soon, then do not be surprised if you find yourself in the middle of a quagmire in which you have been part actively or passively. The snowball out of neglect, abuse, injustice, laziness or lying tends to grow rapidly when external signs show it and are not repaired quickly. The not so immediate repair of damage issues a message to society: impunity is allowed, we all can burn it all down. If the message about any action which respects and cares for what we have is not transmitted, and we let deterioration, abandonment or resignation win the game, then the entropy, disorder, damage, incivility, abuse, bullying or any form of infamy and degradation tend to spread quickly. In conclusion, if we want to avoid it, let’s fix the broken window as soon as possible.

Immanuel Kant expressed this principle in what he called the “Categorical Imperative”: work so you can only hope that the maximum of your action becomes a universal law. Put it in another way: would you want people around you broke, robbed, defrauded or were ripping alien heritage? Obviously, not. So be aware not only not to break any physical or emotional window of others, but to repair them as soon as possible to avoid darker evils. For as we can be the cause of the spreading damage and make it grow, we can also cause collective redress, and that’s not a utopia.

Álex Rovira

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COMMENTS

Broken Windows Theory of Policing (Wilson & Kelling)
The Broken Windows theory, first studied by Philip Zimbardo and introduced by George Kelling and James Wilson, holds that visible indicators of disorder, such as vandalism, loitering, and broken windows, invite criminal activity and should be prosecuted. This form of policing has been tested in several real-world settings.
Broken windows theory
Before the introduction of this theory by Wilson and Kelling, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, arranged an experiment testing the broken-window theory in 1969. Zimbardo arranged for an automobile with no license plates and the hood up to be parked idle in a Bronx neighbourhood and a second automobile, in the same condition, to be set ...
Broken Windows Theory
The broken windows theory, defined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, drawing on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, argues that no ...
Broken Windows
In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. ... "The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street ...
How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken
In 1969, social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo published research that became the basis for the controversial broken-windows theory of policing, which emerged in a 1982 Atlantic article penned by ...
What Is the Broken Windows Theory?
The broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime in urban areas lead to further crime. The theory is often associated with the 2000 case of Illinois v. Wardlow, in which the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that the police, based on the legal doctrine of probable cause, have the authority to detain and physically search, or "stop-and ...
How a 50-Year-Old Study Was Misconstrued to Create Destructive Broken
In 1969, social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo published research that became the basis for the controversial broken-windows theory of policing, which emerged in a 1982 Atlantic article penned by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. These two social scientists used the Zimbardo article as the sole empirical evidence for their theory, arguing ...
Broken Windows Thesis
Finally, Wilson and Kelling's ideas were greatly influenced by a social-psychological experiment conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1969, as indicated by the detailed discussion of the experiment in their broken windows article. Zimbardo abandoned a car with its hood up in two places - the Bronx in New York City and on ...
Broken Windows Theory
The broken windows theory, defined in 1982 by social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling, drawing on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, argues that no ...
Broken Windows
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on ...
Reimagining Broken Windows: From Theory to Policy
Since its first utterance by Wilson and Kelling (1982), broken windows has become a powerful and enduring part of the criminological nomenclature, with deep influences in both the disciplines' scholarly and applied traditions.Upon the death of Wilson in 2012, obituaries and personal remembrances often led with his contribution to the broken windows perspective.
Broken Windows Theory (Wilson & Kelling)
To illustrate their point of view, they developed the so-called Broken Windows Theory: In the Broken Windows Theory, the authors refer to an experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo (1969). He parked a car in the Bronx in New York and another in Palo Alto in California with the number plates removed and the bonnet open.
PDF Broken Windows Kelling and Wilson Excerpt.
Broken Windows Kelling and Wilson Excerpt. Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California.
Vital City
A leading scholar rethinks her relationship to broken windows. "Broken windows" comes from the title of an article that George Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1982, 40 years ago. A piece of their theory was an experiment by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo arranged to have a car parked without license ...
Broken Windows Theory
In 1969 the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo reported on an experiment he conducted in which two comparable cars were left on the city streets of The Bronx in New York City and Palo Alto, California. ... "Broken windows" is the theory from this and similar experiments that abandoned or untended property is an invitation to ...
The theory of broken windows and Zimbardo's experiment
The theory of broken windows arose from an experiment in social psychology carried out by Philip Zimbardo, in 1969. For this, he would have two cars in perfect state of identical color, make and model in two different points: the Bronx ( New York neighborhood with very few resources known for high crime rates, especially at that time) and Palo ...
Does Broken Windows Policing Reduce Crime?: An Analysis from the
1969 that would help the argument for broken windows theory. Zimbardo's experiment involved . the abandonment of two cars in different areas, ... In the Bronx, Philip Zimbardo witnessed the .
[PDF] Broken windows
BackTalk I n 1969, Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment on human nature. He abandoned two similar cars in different neighborhoods - one in the heart of the Bronx, N.Y., the other in an affluent neighborhood in Palo Alto, Calif. He removed the license plates, left the hoods open, and chronicled what happened. In the Bronx, within 10 minutes of abandonment ...
The Atlantic
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on ...
The Broken Windows Theory and Architecture
The history of the Broken Windows Theory begins in 1969 when Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducts a social experiment to observe human behaviour in public spaces. Zimbardo "abandons" a car on a street in the Bronx in New York and in a residential neighbourhood in Palo Alto, California.
Theory of Broken Windows: Why The Little Things Matter The Most
In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist had two cars to spare and decided to conduct a small experiment. He arranged to have one parked with its hood up, open doors, without license plates, on a street in the Bronx, NY - a place that was poor, dangerous, and full of crime. ... Broken Windows as a theory was developed by sociologists ...
The Broken Windows Theory
Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist at Stanford University, conducted, in 1969, an interesting experiment that ended up making up a theory through the work of James Wilson and George Kelling. It was called "The Broken Windows Theory". And it is so worthy knowing, as it can apply and cover large areas of our life. Let's go back to 1969.

Broken Windows Theory of Criminology

Key Takeaways

What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

Examples of Broken Windows Policing

1982: Kelling and Wilson’s Follow-Up Article

Early 1990s: Bratton and Giuliani’s implementation in NYC

Late 1990s: Albuquerque’s Safe Streets Program

2005: Lowell, Massachusetts

2007: Netherlands

2008: Tokyo, Japan

Other Domains Relevant to Broken Windows

Major Criticisms

Misinterpreting the Relationship Between Disorder and Crime

Falsely Assuming Why Crimes Are Committed

Resulting in Racial and Class Bias

Morphing into Stop and Frisk

What is the broken glass principle?

How does social context affect crime according to the broken windows theory?

How did broken windows theory change policing?

Further Information

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong

An Idea Moves From The Ivory Tower To The Streets

Questions Begin To Emerge About Broken Windows

'Broken Windows' Morphs Into 'Stop And Frisk'

How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken-windows policing

What Is the Broken Windows Theory?

Key Takeaways: Broken Windows Theory

Broken Windows Theory Definition

Broken Windows Policing

Sources and Further Reference

How a 50-Year-Old Study Was Misconstrued to Create Destructive Broken-Windows Policing

Broken Windows Thesis

The Broken Windows Model

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Broken Windows Theory

Broken Windows Theory (Wilson & Kelling)

Main proponents

Implications for Criminal Policy

Critical Appraisal & Relevance

Primary Literature

Secondary Literature

Further Information

You Tube Video: Applying the Broken Window Theory to Cars

How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong ( NPR, 01.11.2016 )

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The Strange History and Impact of Broken Windows

“The Message”: Order Maintenance and Its Discontents

Broken Windows Theory

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The theory of broken windows and Zimbardo's experiment

The broken windows theory

The Zimbardo experiment

A theory that can be extrapolated to other realities

Bibliographic references

Broken Windows Theory (April 2024).

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The Broken Windows Theory

Giuseppe Gallo

Philip Zimbardo’s experiment