Why we need "broken windows" policing

Ample evidence makes clear that Broken Windows policing leads to less crime. The academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed. These ivory-tower studies, frequently treated with reverence by the media, don’t prove what they purport to prove, and they fail to grasp how crime is managed in dense, urban settings.

New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people. Starting in 1994, with the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor and the appointment of Bratton as police commissioner, Broken Windows policing was put into practice citywide (it had been implemented in the subway in 1990)—and crime fell further, faster, and for longer than anywhere else in the country. Today, by far the largest and densest city in the United States has a lower murder rate, at four per 100,000, than the nation as a whole, at 4.5 per 100,000. In 1993, New York accounted for about 7.9 percent of the nation’s homicides; last year, the city’s share was just 2.4 percent. While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times. And those striking figures are emblematic of a broader accomplishment in a city that has seen huge, historic declines in every one of the seven major crime categories.

Broken Windows–style policing was pivotal in achieving these results. Left unchecked, street corners can degenerate into criminogenic environments. The bullies take over. They drink alcohol and take drugs openly, make excessive noise, intimidate and shake down honest citizens, engage in scams and criminal enterprises—and, worst of all, fight with one another, often with firearms. Conditions like these drove up shootings in New York City to 5,269 per year in 1993. To counter the violence, the NYPD undertook a concerted effort, beginning in 1994, to regain control of street corners and commercial strips, using quality-of-life policing as an essential tool. By cracking down on low-level offenders, the police not only made neighborhoods more orderly; they discovered that many misdemeanor offenders were also wanted for serious crimes, from illegal gun possession to murder. In the next four years, annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 incidents—or about two fewer shootings per day. This helped reduce the numbers of murders, too, with New York experiencing the four largest drops in homicide in the city’s history, including spectacular declines of 369 incidents in 1994 and 401 incidents in 1995, cutting murders by more than one a day in each of those years.