Broken windows theory
Based on Wikipedia: Broken windows theory
One Unrepaired Window
Here's a simple question that sparked decades of controversy in criminology: If someone breaks a window in a building and nobody fixes it, what happens next?
The answer, according to a theory that would reshape American policing, is that all the other windows will soon be broken too. Not because window-breakers congregate in certain neighborhoods. Not because some areas attract vandals while others repel them. But because that single unrepaired pane of glass sends a message. It says: nobody here cares. Breaking another window costs nothing. And let's be honest—it has always been fun.
This idea, which became known as broken windows theory, emerged from an article published in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1982. The authors were James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, two social scientists working with a conservative think tank. Their argument was deceptively simple: visible signs of disorder—a broken window, graffiti on a wall, trash on the sidewalk—create an environment that encourages more disorder, and eventually, serious crime.
The implication for police work was radical. Instead of focusing solely on major crimes like robbery and murder, departments should target minor infractions: vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jumping subway turnstiles. Maintain order in the small things, and you prevent the big things from happening.
The Theory Takes Hold
The article attracted enormous attention. Fourteen years later, Kelling collaborated with Catharine Coles to expand the argument into a full book: Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities.
The book laid out a clear prescription. Fix broken windows within a day or a week, and vandals become less likely to break more. Clean the sidewalk every day, and people stop littering—or at least litter less. Address problems while they're small, before they metastasize into something larger. When residents see their neighborhood maintained, they stay. When they see it crumbling, they flee.
But the theory truly entered mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, when New York City's police commissioner William Bratton began implementing policies directly inspired by Wilson and Kelling's work. Under Bratton, the New York Police Department cracked down on subway fare evasion, public urination, aggressive panhandling, and the so-called "squeegee men" who cleaned car windshields at intersections and demanded payment.
Crime rates in New York fell dramatically during this period. Homicides dropped. Robberies declined. The city that had been synonymous with urban decay in the 1970s and 1980s became, by the early 2000s, one of the safest large cities in America.
Was broken windows policing responsible? That question would generate furious debate for the next three decades.
What a Broken Window Really Signals
To understand why the theory resonated so deeply, you need to understand what its proponents believed a broken window actually communicates.
Think about walking down an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar city. You don't know the neighborhood. You don't know who lives there or what the local norms are. You don't know whether someone is watching from behind a curtain. So you look for clues in the environment itself.
A clean sidewalk, freshly painted storefronts, well-maintained gardens—these signal that someone cares, that the area is monitored, that deviation from acceptable behavior will be noticed and addressed. But a street littered with trash, walls covered in graffiti, abandoned buildings with shattered glass—these tell a different story. They say: nobody's watching. Nobody cares. Do what you want.
The theory proposes that criminals read these signals too. A maintained environment suggests risk—the risk of being seen, reported, caught. A neglected environment suggests opportunity—the freedom to act without consequence.
This isn't just about what potential offenders think. It's about what residents think. According to Wilson and Kelling, when people see their neighborhood deteriorating, they change their behavior. They spend less time on the street. They stop sitting on their porches. They hurry home and lock their doors. The communal life of the neighborhood—the natural surveillance that comes from people simply being present and paying attention—begins to evaporate.
And as residents retreat, the street becomes increasingly hospitable to those who make others uncomfortable: rowdy teenagers, aggressive panhandlers, people with substance abuse problems, sex workers. These aren't necessarily dangerous individuals. But their presence accelerates the spiral. More respectable residents withdraw. Social control weakens further. And eventually, serious criminals realize they can operate with impunity.
Defensible Space
Wilson and Kelling weren't writing in a vacuum. A decade earlier, the architect and city planner Oscar Newman had introduced a related concept called defensible space theory.
Newman's 1972 book Defensible Space made a simple but profound argument: people protect spaces they feel ownership over. A well-designed housing project creates zones that residents perceive as their own—and that perceived ownership motivates them to monitor and maintain those areas. A poorly designed project creates anonymous spaces that belong to no one, and consequently, spaces that no one defends.
Police, Newman argued, cannot maintain safety on their own. They can respond to crimes after they happen. They can patrol visible areas. But they cannot be everywhere, cannot know who belongs and who doesn't, cannot distinguish normal activity from threatening activity. That knowledge lives in the community itself. And it only emerges when residents feel invested enough to pay attention.
The broken windows theory extended Newman's thinking from architecture to maintenance. It's not enough to design spaces that encourage ownership. Those spaces must be continuously maintained. Every broken window repaired, every piece of graffiti removed, every abandoned car towed—these actions demonstrate that the community hasn't given up, that someone is still paying attention.
The Eyes on the Street
Both Newman and Wilson and Kelling drew on ideas that the urban theorist Jane Jacobs had articulated even earlier, in her 1961 masterwork The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Jacobs argued that safe streets are not created by police patrols. They're created by what she called "eyes on the street"—the natural surveillance that occurs when people use public spaces actively and consistently. A street lined with shops, their doors open to sidewalks where pedestrians come and go, is inherently safer than a street of closed facades and empty lots. The shopkeeper knows who belongs. The regular customers recognize strangers. Everyone is watching everyone, not out of suspicion, but simply as a byproduct of going about their daily lives.
Jacobs was writing against the urban renewal projects of her era, which demolished vibrant (if sometimes shabby) neighborhoods to construct towers in plazas—buildings surrounded by open space that nobody used because it belonged to no one. She understood, decades before the broken windows article, that the physical environment shapes social behavior, and that social behavior shapes safety.
What Wilson and Kelling added was the explicit connection to policing. If maintaining order in public spaces prevents crime, then perhaps police should focus less on catching criminals and more on maintaining order. Perhaps the cop walking a beat, getting to know the neighborhood, handling the small problems before they become big ones, matters more than the squad car rushing to respond after the fact.
Regulars and Strangers
The theory distinguishes between what Wilson and Kelling called "regulars" and "strangers." Regulars are people who belong—whose behavior, even when unconventional, fits the neighborhood's established patterns. The eccentric old man who talks to himself. The teenagers who hang out on the corner but scatter when asked. The homeless person who sleeps in the same doorway every night but never causes trouble. Communities often tolerate these figures because they're known, predictable, part of the fabric.
Strangers are different. They don't know the unwritten rules. Their behavior doesn't fit established patterns. And when strangers begin to dominate a space—when their presence signals that the usual order no longer applies—residents grow uncomfortable. The street feels different. What was normal no longer feels normal.
This distinction reveals something important and troubling about the theory. "Disorder" is not an objective category. What counts as disorderly depends on who's making the judgment. The behavior that residents tolerate from people they know, they may find threatening from people they don't. And the people they don't know are often those who look different, dress different, come from different backgrounds.
This opens the door to something the theory's critics would seize upon: the possibility that broken windows policing becomes a mechanism for enforcing social conformity, for removing people whose presence makes certain other people uncomfortable, regardless of whether any actual crime has occurred.
Space Shaping People, People Shaping Space
There's a philosophical puzzle embedded in the broken windows theory. Does the physical environment shape human behavior, or does human behavior shape the environment?
The answer, of course, is both. A neglected environment encourages neglectful behavior—the theory's core claim. But that neglect originated somewhere. Someone chose not to repair that first broken window. Someone stopped cleaning the sidewalk. The environment degrades because people's relationship to it has already changed.
This creates a chicken-and-egg problem for policy. If you repair all the broken windows but don't address why people stopped caring, won't the windows just get broken again? Conversely, if the visible disorder itself discourages people from caring, then perhaps fixing the windows can interrupt the cycle.
The theory leans toward the second interpretation. It suggests that changing the environment can change behavior—that appearance matters, that signals matter, that maintaining order creates its own momentum. But critics would argue this puts the cart before the horse, treating symptoms while ignoring underlying causes.
Fear as the Foundation
Prashan Ranasinghe, a scholar who has written extensively on the theory, argues that fear is actually its most important element—more important than disorder itself, more important than crime.
When people perceive their environment as disordered, they become afraid. That fear changes their behavior. They spend less time in public. They avoid certain streets. They stop participating in community life. Their withdrawal creates opportunities for actual criminals. And those criminals' presence generates more fear, which causes more withdrawal, in an accelerating spiral.
Wilson and Kelling touched on this dynamic but didn't emphasize it. They noted that people avoid one another in response to fear, weakening informal social controls. But Ranasinghe argues that fear deserves central billing. It's the mechanism through which disorder translates into crime. It's why a broken window matters.
This insight suggests a troubling possibility. What if policing aimed at reducing disorder actually increases fear? A 2014 study by Joshua Hinkle and David Weisburd found exactly this. Police interventions targeting minor offenses—precisely the kind of interventions broken windows theory recommends—significantly increased residents' probability of feeling unsafe.
The aggressive enforcement, the visible police presence, the confrontations with people on the street—all of these might reinforce the message that the neighborhood is dangerous, even as they're intended to make it safer.
Zero Tolerance and Its Discontents
Broken windows policing is sometimes described as "zero tolerance" policing, and the terms are often used interchangeably. But William Bratton and George Kelling have pushed back against this characterization.
Zero tolerance implies rigid enforcement: every violation punished, no discretion, no exceptions. But broken windows policing, as originally conceived, was supposed to involve judgment. Officers would address disorder in ways appropriate to the situation. Sometimes that meant an arrest. Sometimes it meant a warning. Sometimes it meant simply asking someone to move along. The point was to maintain order, not to maximize citations.
In practice, however, the distinction often collapsed. Departments under pressure to reduce crime seized on broken windows as justification for aggressive enforcement campaigns. Stop-and-frisk became routine in some cities, with police stopping pedestrians based on minimal suspicion, questioning them, searching them for weapons or contraband. In New York, stop-and-frisk encounters peaked at over 685,000 in 2011 before declining sharply after court challenges and policy changes.
The data from these stops revealed stark racial disparities. Black and Hispanic New Yorkers were stopped at rates far exceeding their share of the population, even in neighborhoods where they were not the majority. Critics argued that broken windows policing had become a pretext for harassment, for over-policing communities of color, for criminalizing poverty and homelessness.
Did It Actually Work?
This is the question that divides criminologists. Crime fell dramatically in New York during the 1990s. But crime also fell dramatically everywhere else.
The United States experienced a nationwide decline in violent crime beginning around 1993 and continuing for roughly two decades. Cities that implemented broken windows policing saw crime drop. So did cities that didn't. Some of the steepest declines occurred in places with completely different policing philosophies.
Researchers have proposed numerous explanations for the crime decline: the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic, changing demographics, increased incarceration, improved economic conditions, even (controversially) the legalization of abortion in the 1970s reducing the number of unwanted children who might have become criminals two decades later.
Separating the effect of broken windows policing from all these other factors is methodologically challenging. Some studies found that order-maintenance policing did contribute to crime reduction. Others found no significant effect. A comprehensive review of the evidence concluded that while cleaning up the physical environment might reduce some types of crime, aggressive enforcement of minor offenses didn't clearly work better than other approaches.
The theory's claims fall into two categories. The first—that improving neighborhood conditions reduces petty crime and antisocial behavior—has relatively strong support. Places that look cared for tend to attract less vandalism and less littering. This seems intuitive and matches common experience.
The second claim—that addressing minor disorder prevents major crime—is far more contested. This is the causal chain that matters most for policing policy. And this is where the evidence remains genuinely uncertain.
The Costs of Getting It Wrong
Even if broken windows policing reduced some crime, was that reduction worth the costs? This question became increasingly urgent as evidence of those costs accumulated.
There were the human costs: the millions of people stopped, questioned, and searched. The indignity of being treated as a suspect while walking in your own neighborhood. The criminal records accumulated from minor offenses—records that could disqualify someone from employment, housing, educational opportunities.
There were the community costs: the erosion of trust between police and the communities they served. Research consistently shows that perceived legitimacy affects cooperation with law enforcement. People who believe police treat them fairly are more likely to report crimes, provide information, and comply with officers' requests. Aggressive enforcement campaigns undermine that legitimacy, potentially making communities less safe in ways that don't show up in simple crime statistics.
There were the constitutional costs: the stop-and-frisk program in New York was ultimately found to violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. A federal judge ruled that the city had adopted a policy of indirect racial profiling.
And there were the opportunity costs: the resources devoted to enforcement of minor violations could have been directed elsewhere. Community investment. Social services. Drug treatment. Mental health care. The theory focused on maintaining order through policing, but order can be maintained in other ways too.
The Deeper Questions
Beneath the debates about evidence and effectiveness lie harder questions that the broken windows theory raises but cannot resolve.
What constitutes disorder? The theory assumes we know it when we see it. But disorder is socially constructed. Teenagers playing music on a corner might be disorder to some residents and community life to others. A homeless encampment might be an eyesore to some and someone's only shelter. Who gets to decide what belongs and what doesn't?
Whose vision of order prevails? Communities are not monolithic. Different residents want different things. When police enforce a particular vision of public order, they're inevitably favoring some interests over others. The broken windows approach tends to favor the interests of property owners, business operators, and residents with conventional lifestyles over those whose lives don't fit that template.
Is visible poverty itself a form of disorder? Many of the targets of broken windows policing—panhandlers, people sleeping in public, street-level sex workers—are poor. They're visible in public space because they don't have private space to occupy. Removing them from view doesn't solve their problems. It just moves them elsewhere, makes them someone else's concern, or forces them into more precarious situations.
Can order-maintenance prevent crime without enforcement? Some scholars have suggested that the beneficial effects of the broken windows approach—if they exist—come from improving the physical environment, not from aggressive policing. Fix the actual broken windows. Clean up the litter. Provide better lighting. Invest in public spaces. These interventions might send the same signals of care and monitoring without the costs of confrontational enforcement.
Where Things Stand
The broken windows theory remains influential, though its reputation has evolved considerably since its heyday in the 1990s. Few serious scholars now accept the simple version—that cracking down on minor offenses reliably prevents major crimes. The evidence doesn't support such a clean causal story.
But the underlying intuition hasn't disappeared. The idea that visible disorder matters, that environmental signals affect behavior, that small problems can grow into big ones if neglected—these insights continue to inform thinking about crime, urban planning, and public space.
What has changed is the understanding that order-maintenance is not synonymous with aggressive policing. Communities can maintain order in many ways: through investment in public spaces, through community organizations, through services that address the root causes of disorder. Police can play a role, but it's not the only role, and police action can create as many problems as it solves.
The theory also illuminated something about policing that its originators may not have intended to emphasize: the enormous discretion that police exercise in deciding what constitutes disorder and who counts as disorderly. That discretion, exercised millions of times in millions of encounters, shapes the relationship between communities and the state. When it's exercised fairly, it builds trust. When it's not, it breeds resentment.
Perhaps the lasting legacy of the broken windows debate isn't a definitive answer about what works. It's a sharper awareness of the stakes—of how much depends on getting these questions right, and how much can go wrong when we don't.