Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order & Reducing Crime in Our Communities

Advocating a preventive strategy of community-based policing to maintain public order, a social study cites successful implementation of such plans

This book offers a dry but convincing argument for community policing and other approaches to civic order that pay attention to small incivilities like aggressive panhandling and fare-beating. The book's title derives from an influential 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by criminologist Kelling and James Q. Wilson, which argued that obvious neighborhood decay?like unattended broken windows?furthered criminal behavior. The authors cite several factors?including the rise of individualism, the decriminalization of drunkenness and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill?that contribute to public disorder. Many of the homeless, they note, are not merely down on their luck but suffer serious behavioral problems. They explain how civic reforms during the 1950s that professionalized police services shifted police work from crime prevention to crime response, thus creating some of the unintended consequences that more recent reforms have had to address. Beginning most notably with the New York City Transit Police, for whom Kelling consulted, police departments have recently focused on minor offenses, capturing a large number of serious criminals in the process. Other police departments, with the assistance of civic groups, have begun similar work. The authors provide cogent advice, backed by copious endnotes, on how to implement similar strategies. They say too little about the challenges in recruiting and training police for community strategies, however, although they do acknowledge that some New York outreach workers have been accused of abusing street people. Coles is a lawyer and anthropologist.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A thoughtful reexamination of crime prevention. There are any number of ideas out there on how to fight crime, but few have proven so successful as the strategy articulated by crime consultant Kelling and James Q. Wilson in a groundbreaking 1982 article, The Police and Neighborhood Safety. While traditional policing has concentrated on reacting to crime, Kelling and Wilson argued for a more proactive approach. Using the now famous analogy of the ``broken window'' (a broken window leads to more broken windows which lead to graffiti, etc., creating an atmosphere conducive to criminal behavior), they argued that by attacking the quality-of-life crimes traditional policing has largely ignored- -such as public drunkenness and aggressive panhandling--more serious crimes would be deterred. Several cities, most notably New York, which have experimented with these ideas have enjoyed impressive drops in crime. Using these success stories, Kelling and Coles, a lawyer and anthropologist, further elaborate on the practice of ``broken window'' policing and on how to identify and combat specific sources of disorder. Thus, the authors favor more beat cops, more community self-policing, and greater police targeting of public intoxication as well as antisocial behavior typically associated with the homeless. While the authors stress that they are not anti-homeless, they believe that practices such as camping in public spaces and aggressive panhandling are the chief ``broken windows'' in society today. This assertion leads to long--often tedious--discussions of the fate of various cities' anti-panhandling statutes and how to draft laws that might survive challenges on civil-liberties grounds. Not sure if it wants to be a dry, academic monograph, or a more popular account, this book suffers from a certain unevenness of tone. While statistical backing for the authors' specific assertions is light, their larger program appears to have worked wonders wherever it has been tried. This may very well be the future of policing. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Th term broken windows, a metaphor for increasing public community disorder, was coined by Wilson and Kelling in a March 1982 Atlantic article. Their antidote to "broken windows"-community policing- is actually a revival of the 19th-century policeman on the beat. Community policing focuses on quality-of-life crimes (vandalism, fare beating, etc.) rather than felonies and attempts to change the operative police model to one of order maintenance and crime prevention. Kelling has been associated over the last 20 years with the Kennedy School, the National Institute of Justice, the New York City Transit Police, and as a consultant in many locales for pratical research and application of this model. Although he has published much, this readable monograph is his most popular and substantial treatment to date. It includes case studies of New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Seattle and a frank discussion of the biggest problem with community policing: it relies heavily on police discretion. Everyone should read this book; it would inject realism and hope into public policy discussion.
Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.