As cities rebuild, remember that people don’t just fear crime. They fear disorder.
I share the concerns about overzealous policing and statistical mirages, and yet when I went back and reread the original article, I found it was somewhat different — more nuanced and more relevant — than I’d realized.
I revisited Kelling and Wilson because I was trying to solve a mystery. On a recent reporting trip to New York City to ask bankers, policy analysts and real estate brokers about the city’s economic future, I kept hearing that crime was a major risk, as it had been when I was growing up there, around the time that Kelling and Wilson were writing.
This was surprising. Crime had plummeted to a fraction of its former rate since I’d left for college in 1990, and gradually, it had stopped being a topic of conversation. Now, suddenly I heard that crime might tilt the city toward something like the urban crisis of the 1970s, when crime exacerbated already-severe out-migration.
My interviewees weren’t wrong that violent crime has been rising — but the murder rate is still lower than it was in 2010, when New York was growing and they hadn’t been particularly concerned. None of them had been recently victimized, or knew anyone who had. Why were they so worried?
When I probed, I found that they talked less about violent crime than disorder. Homeless encampments were flourishing, panhandling had become more aggressive, and minor crimes like public urination or open drug use were not just more visible, but making the papers. The summer had brought looting and riots close to home as well. Moreover, many of them saw this as a result of the city’s deliberate decision to ignore the “quality of life” offenses that broken windows had emphasized.
Which is how I returned to Wilson and Kelling’s original work. When I did, I realized that they had focused less on major crimes than I’d remembered, and more on disorder itself.
The original article begins with a foot patrol experiment in Newark, which didn’t reduce violent crime at all, yet somehow still made residents feel safer. Were they deluded? No, say Kelling and Wilson; the patrols had reduced disorder. And disorder itself makes people feel unsafe, particularly if they are elderly or otherwise vulnerable.
Over time, that may lead to worsening crime — for example, as law-abiding citizens stay home or leave town and cede the streets to scofflaws. But even if it doesn’t, fear and avoidance behaviors are themselves bad.
Police, therefore, should not just focus on solving crimes but keeping order in communities. This may sound uncomfortably close to suggesting that poorer, often minority people have to be policed so affluent White people can feel more secure. But Kelling and Wilson were careful to emphasize that police should be helping local communities enforce their own standards, not imposing order from outside; the Newark neighborhoods they cite were mostly Black.
Moreover, affluent White people are most likely to be among the class of those whose interests lie outside the neighborhood, and who Kelling and Wilson suggest therefore escape the worst effects of disorder. It is those whose lives are rooted in neighborhoods, who “derive meaning and satisfaction from local attachments,” they argue, for whom “the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a few reliable friends they arrange to meet.”
The last year, however, has thrown even cosmopolites back on small areas and local attachments. Small wonder many of those I spoke to became worried about the growing disorder they saw there.
That’s not reason to bring back the worst excesses of “broken windows” policing, which even Kelling ultimately decried. But as newly fragile cities try to rebuild themselves, it is a reason to take disorder seriously, along with undeniable increases in more serious crime.
Ideally, that would be less about policing than about treating drug use and mental illness, and getting homeless people into shelters, and minor scofflaws into jobs or school. If policing is necessary, it must, as Wilson and Kelling originally emphasized, work with communities, instead of against them.
That’s a nuanced point, of course, and properly nuanced policy is easier described than done. But it’s also pretty easy to let a few broken windows slide. Fixing what happens next often proves much more difficult.
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