The Broken Windows Policing

J.J. Baloch

The Economist, January 27th, 2015, captions Broken Window Policing as “Cracking down on minor crimes are thought to prevent major ones”. The article further describes:

“The term ‘broken windows’ refers to an observation made in the early 1980s by Mr Kelling, a criminologist, and James Wilson, a social scientist, that when a building window is broken and left unrepaired, the rest of the windows will soon be broken too. An unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, they argued, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. More profoundly, they found that in environments where disorderly behaviour goes unchecked—where prostitutes visibly ply their trade or beggars accost passers-by—more serious street crime flourishes. This theory is supported by a number of randomized experiments. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, for example, found that people were twice as likely to steal an envelope filled with money if it was sticking out of a mailbox covered in graffiti. What this means for law enforcement, Messrs Kelling and Wilson prescribed, is that when police officers keep streets orderly and punish even small signs of misbehaviour with a warning or an arrest, people will behave in a more orderly way”.

The surge in urban crime gave birth to zero tolerance on crime and on the causes of crime so describes the Economist report.

“When the “broken windows” theory was first published, urban crime was a seemingly uncontainable problem in America and around the world. But in the past two decades crime has fallen at an extraordinary rate. This change has been especially profound in New York City, where the murder rate dropped from 26.5 per 100,000 people in 1993 to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2013—lower than the national average. Plenty of theories have been concocted to explain this drop, but the city’s decision to take minor crimes seriously certainly played a part. While Mr Bratton was head of New York’s transit police in 1990, he ordered his officers to arrest as many turnstile-jumpers as possible. They found that one in seven arrested was wanted for other crimes and that one in 20 carried a knife, gun or another weapon. Within a year, subway crime had fallen by 30%. In 1994 Rudy Giuliani, who had been elected New York’s mayor after promising to clean up the city’s streets, appointed Mr Bratton as head of the NYPD. Scaling up the lessons from the subway, Mr Bratton found that cracking down on misdemeanour offences, such as illegal gun possession, reduced opportunities for crime. In four years, the city saw about two fewer shootings per day…“Broken windows”-style policing has arguably helped to reduce crime. But other factors have also helped”.

This model was first adopted by the New York Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, who was criticized for police killings of citizens. Broken window policing is used interchangeably with zero tolerance policing, implying the core belief that for controlling major and serious crimes like terrorism, serial killings, and street crimes, it is very essential to crack down on very minor crimes, the negligence of which leads to social non-conformity. This model emphasises on minor violations and their impunity cause bigger crisis and anarchy.

The police can play a key role in disrupting this process. If they focus in on disorder and less serious crime in neighbourhoods that have not yet been overtaken by serious crime, they can help reduce fear and resident withdrawal. Promoting higher levels of informal social control will help residents themselves take control of their neighbourhood and prevent serious crime from infiltrating. A recent systematic review by Braga, Welsh and Schnell (2015) found that policing strategies focused on disorder overall had a statistically significant, modest impact on reducing all types of crime. Not all of the interventions included in the Braga et al. (2015) review, however, are true tests of broken windows theory. Indeed, the broken windows model as applied to policing has been difficult to evaluate for a number of reasons.

First, agencies have applied broken windows policing in a variety of ways. A second concern is how to properly measure broken windows treatment. The most frequent indicator of broken windows policing has been misdemeanour arrests, in part because these data are readily available. Arrests alone, however, do not fully capture an approach that Kelling and Coles (1996) describe as explicitly involving community outreach and officer discretion. Third, the broken windows model suggests a long-term indirect link between disorder enforcement and a reduction in serious crime and so existing evaluations may not be appropriately evaluating broken windows interventions. Fourth, there is much debate over the impact of New York policing tactics on reductions in crime and disorder in the 1990s. Broken windows policing alone did not bring down the crime rates (Eck & Maguire, 2000), but it is also likely that the police played some role. Fifth, there is concern that any effectiveness of broken windows policing in reducing crime (where the evidence, as noted above, is mixed) may come at the expense of reduced citizen satisfaction and damage to citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of police.

Finally, there is also no consensus on the existence of a link between disorder and crime, and how to properly measure such a link if it does indeed exist. For example, Skogan’s (1990) research in six cities did suggest a relationship between disorder and later serious crime, but Harcourt (2001) suggested in a re-analysis of Skogan’s (1990) data that there was no significant relationship between disorder and serious crime. Hence, there is no clear answer as to the link between crime and disorder and whether existing research supports or refutes broken windows theory.

In Pakistan, we have seen this school of thought for zero tolerance policing which have been very touchy on minor violations or what we call civil or non-police matters that lead to tribal and community bloodsheds. It is famous saying in Pakistan that three things, which are civil in nature, cause all kinds of crimes include, Monetary issues, family honour taboos, and land disputes- the areas or the matters where the police are not to take direct cognizance as per the law in vogue. Such policing models have been adopted by Khyber-Pakhtoonkha province by establishing “Dispute Resolution Committees-DRCs” on the district level for resolving conflicts of civil and private nature so that they may not lead to some serious issues of social order and peace in the society. We don’t have statistical data to assess their impacts but they are generally believed to be very effective in resolving the conflicts and irritants.

Besides this, Police in Pakistan has been very active in getting disputes settled outside the court due to prolonged delays in court decisions. Very interestingly, 21st century Pakistan has witnessed an upsurge in Police encounters with criminals and also rise in police target killings. As a final consequence of all this deadly showdown and police loss of manpower and public reactions, crime and violence have remarkably reduced in Pakistan owing to zero tolerance measures taken by the police in the aftermath of National Action Plan and its implementation.

Now a day, much focus is being put on predictive policing and law enforcement efforts aimed at discouraging and fighting all those factors and causes that lead to violence and crime. However, the broken window policing is somehow losing because it gets police engaged into unnecessary non-cognizable offences that are not always prone to result in bigger crimes; so many fear that empowering police with jingoism and naked authority would earn bad name for the police department  already having the track record of tainted reputation and maligned public image.

The Writer is a scholar, an educator, a novelist and a senior cop at Police Service of Pakistan…

Author: JJ Baloch Vision-Vista

J.J. Baloch is one of the leading scholars in Pakistan on policing, law enforcement, criminal justice, security, conflict, and counterterrorism. He has produced ten acclaimed works in both fiction and non-fiction academic fields. He is also a famous Sufi poet and has recently published Rooh-e-Ishq-e-Javed, A Timeless Poetry Collection in Urdu and Sindhi. He is the author of the Novel Whiter than White. With an MSc in Criminal Justice Policy from LSE, London, UK (2007-08- PDP Scholarship) and an LLM in International Security from the University of Manchester, U.K. (2019-20- British Chevening Scholarship) at his credit, J.J. Baloch has 24 years of work experience in Pakistan’s police departments and law enforcement agencies. Baloch, J.J. has worked in the Punjab Police, Sindh Police, National Highways and Motorway Police, National Police Academy, Federal Investigation Agency, Ministry of Industries and Production, and Balochistan Police. Presently, he is working as DIG Mirpur Khas in Sindh. He is an alumnus of IVLP USA, British Chevening, LSE London, the University of Manchester, and other international authors and law enforcement forums such as the International Police Association. Presently, Baloch is enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Criminology. Baloch’s magnum opus is his recent creative work titled “The Kingdom of Indifference: A Philosophical Probe into the Missing Soul of Society”, which will be in the readers' hands by the end of this year (2024). View all posts by JJ Baloch Vision-Vista