Fixing Broken Windows. - book review

As concerns about the economy have faded in 1996, crime has emerged as one of the dominant political issues. To some, this may seem puzzling. After years of partisan wrangling, a significant crime bill was enacted in 1994, and more police are now appearing on our streets. Sentences have been lengthened, and the number of incarcerated Americans has more than doubled. Violent crime has actually declined through much of the 1990s, especially in large cities.

In spite of these promising developments, the public's continuing concern is hardly inexplicable. Crime rates remain far above the levels recorded a generation ago. Americans who take the 1950s and early 1960s as their baseline are deeply troubled by the changes they see: In many neighborhoods, doors are double-locked, windows protected with bars, and streets avoided because of crime. (These concerns are especially prevalent among the elderly, who make up a steadily increasing share of the U.S. population.) Until a welcome pause last year, crime committed by the very young (ages 12 to 17) had been rising rapidly. Combined with the crack epidemic, soaring out-of-wedlock birth rates and fatherless families helped to create a new generation of "superpredators" - fatalistic youngsters, without impulse control or empathy, setting a low value on their own lives as well as those of their victims.

It is thus not surprising that crime, along with several other concerns - about the disintegration of essential social institutions and practices, such as families, neighborhoods, civility, and moral boundaries - has come to define the center of American politics today. And crime is also linked to another dominant theme of American politics - the loss of public trust. As William J. Bennett, John J. DiIulio, Jr., and John Walters observe in their new book, Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs:(*)

In 1993 and again in 1994, there was but one public institution in which people had less confidence than they did in the U.S. Congress, namely - the criminal justice system.... Government's failure to restrain convicted violent or repeat criminals has done as much as any other policy failure of the last thirty years to bring about the loss of public trust and confidence in our political institutions.

Public trust is a lagging indicator, however. There are some hopeful signs that, after decades of failed strategies, we have begun to find new and effective ways of fighting crime. The two books under review address crime from different vantage-points. Bennett, DiIulio, and Walters claim to know the root causes of crime; George Kelling and Catherine Coles, in Fixing Broken Windows,(**) do not. But what these two sets of authors have in common is the belief that we can make progress against crime without first attacking its root causes - whatever they may be.

In 1982, Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Broken Windows," that is now regarded as a classic. Its core thesis is that disorder is the precursor of crime. If windows go unrepaired, if graffiti accumulates, if disruptive or anti-social behavior pervades public spaces, then citizens will conclude that no one - not the community, not the public authorities - cares enough to stem the tide of disorder. Law-abiding citizens will retreat from streets and public spaces into self-protective privacy, while those who prey on law-abiders will be emboldened. The result is a downward spiral of violence and fear.

Kelling and Coles expand this analysis in two directions. First, they explain why, starting in the mid 1960s, communities came to experience higher levels of disorder. Part of the explanation is familiar: The legal triumph of rights-based individualism left communities with fewer defenses against nonviolent, but distasteful, behavior, lowering the quality of public spaces. Public drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, disorderly conduct, loitering - all these and more came to enjoy a higher level of legal protection against the order-preserving efforts of public authorities. At the same time, the deinstitutionalization of mental patients filled the streets with individuals acting in odd and threatening ways. New legal safeguards for the rights of former patients made it very difficult for public authorities to reinstitutionalize them, even for their own good, let alone to improve public order.

The other part of the explanation for rising disorder is less familiar. By the 1960s, many police forces had adopted a new, professional understanding of their mission. No longer would police patrol neighborhoods on foot to keep the peace and to prevent crime. Instead, they were to respond rapidly, in cars, to reports of criminal acts. Unfortunately, this new rapid-response strategy abandoned the task of prevention, without reaping commensurate gains in enforcement. According to Kelling and Coles, rapid response, which focused on "911" calls, placed police in a reactive mode while leading to arrests in only 3 percent of serious crimes. Not only did the drive to centralize police administration - sparked by an understandable desire to eradicate widespread corruption - eliminate the discretionary authority that front-line police require for containing daily threats to public order but it also severed bonds of trust between the police and local communities.