One of the most recent impactful choices in the attempt to curb crime has been “broken windows” or “quality-of-life” policing approaches. This type of policing builds upon a well-known theory in policing called Broken Windows Theory (Kelling and Wilson, 1982), which states that allowing disorder (generally seen as nonviolent criminal violations and social issues like gambling, prostitution, homelessness, vandalism, and similar issues) in a community lets people with criminal intent know that those communities will likely not address more serious crime, either. As law-abiding people abandon public spaces due to disorder, these spaces are taken up by those who break the law, and more and more serious crimes may occur. Kelling and Wilson noted that arrests for disorder are not necessary – merely addressing the disorder is – but many law enforcement agencies have chosen to reduce disorder by focusing law enforcement activity like arrests and summonses on quality-of-life offenses like bicycling on the sidewalk or open container violations. Research indicates that this may have unintended consequences of breaching cooperation between the public and police, actually backfiring and causing more crime because people who do not trust the police do not call the police to report crimes or cooperate with investigations of criminal activity. However, there may still be a way to reduce disorder without enforcement activity.
Devise a proposed policy solution to reduce disorder while simultaneously reducing police reliance on arrests and summonses to do so. What other legislation or community efforts may help? What evidence do you have for such solutions? What can police do differently to rebuild community trust, such police themselves don’t end up unintentionally becoming a force for disorder by causing law-abiding people to abandon public spaces out of fear of overpolicing?
Guidelines: ● Explain the problem, in an accessible way ● Summarize key points from relevant theories and empirical data about this problem ● Explain what the policy initiative tries to do and why; explain the context for this real-world initiative ● Analyze how the design and implementation of the policy initiative are appropriate (or not) for the problem and the context ● Analyze the potential outcomes of the policy and consider what will work and what won’t and why
Make sure that you operationalize (i.e. functionally define) what you consider to be the “disorder” you think would be addressed by your policy solutions. Similarly, pay attention to how scholars operationally define “broken windows policing” in your external sources. Note that it is likely that “disorder” is not actually one large group of behaviors that all function the same way or can be addressed by the same approaches, and so you may wish to focus on specific social issues that are currently addressed by enforcement activity, but may be better addressed by another approach.
