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Disorderly behavior damages communities, so goes the central theme of Kelling & Coles's <em>Fixing Broken Windows</em>, a book about "restoring order and reducing crime". Kelling & Coles proceed to back this assertion up with both logical argument and evidence from a small but impressive set of studies of community policing. Their arguments tend to be rather persuasive, and will likely resonate with anyone who's fond of Etzioni's Communitarianism.

Disorder, Kelling & Coles argue, breeds many things in a community: fear on the part of residents; further disorder; and eventually "serious" crime. Disorder promotes decay as streets cease to be areas where community standards are enforced, or where those standards are to the detriment of the majority of the members of the community.

From Kelling & Coles perspective, before the 60's, police were far more integrated with the communities they served, in part by virtue of regular contact with residents as they walked beats. This enabled them to have a much better understanding of the particular needs and standards of the communities they work in. Even more importantly, it allowed them to prevent crime, rather than simply respond to it.

The police of today, Kelling and Coles argue, are not only not efective at reducing disorder, they are ineffective at preventing crime, and not terribly good at responding to crime. The 911 model limits police contact with the general citizenry, and prevents them from developing the kinds of relationship that allow them to intervene effectively without resorting to overtly coercive or threatening behaviors.

One particular study cited by Kelling and Coles stands out to me, in which they looked at fear, one of the crucial factors in their model. Robert Trojanowicz(1982), they report, found that officers alone on foot patrol were less fearful that officers patrolling two to a car in the same areas.

Kelling & Coles supply not only examples of what they consider successful and unsuccessful attempts at order maintenance proograms, they also review the legal foundation for such activities, as well as the legal challenges to such efforts as "aggressive panhandling" ordinances. Their analysis helps a lay reader understand different burdens that a law might come under in order to show that it is attempting to meet a compelling government interest, as well as how limitations on personal behavior may be legally justified in the interest of preserving safe & orderly public fora.

The main weakness of the book, and the argument, in my opinion, is the lack of adequate examination of how community power struggles and class issues will likely play out in the development of community standards of behavior for an area. It is a very significant concern that the order police may have helped in the past, while they were more integrated into their communities, was a much more segregated one, where being the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood was disorderly enough to merit attention. This is not a fatal flaw in the book, nor in the idea of community policing, but establishing adequate internal controls and external oversight deserves much more attention.

This book established the notion of Zero Tolerance policing and is probably one of the more influential books on policing policy. Zero Tolerance policing is however a different concept from what the plain meaning of the words would suggest. The book basically argues against the techniques of policing developed in the 60's and argues for a more community based approach.

In the 1960's the structure of cities had changed from that of the thirties. Suburbs had increased the physical size of cities and made old policing techniques such as street patrols difficult due to the lack of sufficient police officers. To deal with this a form of policing based on rapid response to emergency calls was substituted. That is a central control room would receive telephone calls from the victims of crime and they would have power to send a squad care to deal with the emergency.

The authors of this book suggest that such a strategy has failed. They quote a number of reasons for that but broadly what they say is that by the time police arrive the person who has committed the crime has left. In previous years crime detection would occur because police had links with a community. People would tell them what happened and they could investigate crimes with the cooperation of communities. The rapid response policy had the effect of severing contacts between police and communities. Especially in black and immigrant communities police seem to be outsiders.

What the book suggests is that the key to combating crime is to prevent the sort of decay which allows the development of a criminal culture. The absence of police from an area allows people to start committing minor crimes. These can be fare evasion or breaking windows. The existence of broken windows acts as a signal to criminals that they can move in.

The book uses as a proof of this thesis the work of William Bratton who headed the Transit Police in New York. His technique was to try to remove all forms of petty crime including fair evasion and illegal squatting on the underground train platforms. As his officers arrested fair evaders they found that they were arresting people who had warrants out for their arrest or who were carrying firearms. The realization of the risk of arrest meant that serious offenders tended to stay clear of the subway system. This in turn led to a collapse not only of fair evasion and graffiti offences but of robberies and assaults. The book thus suggests that by a zealous approach to preventing all offending the prevention of more serious crime follows.

It is actually interesting to read Bratton's autobiography Turnaround to have him recount what happened on the subways. He describes the situation when he took over the Transit Police as a force in chaos. The officers simply had stopped arresting people. They were dispersed in such a way that it was easy for fare evaders to avoid them. The officers also had a sense of being an inferior part of the police because their weapons and cars were different from other parts of the police force.

Bratton organized to give them bigger guns and cars to rebuild their morale but he also insisted that they arrest people. The mechanics of arrest prior to Bratton taking over were that if an offender was arrested he would have to be taken to a court and charged. This mean that an arrest would take hours. What Bratton told his officers to do was to arrest one offender handcuff him to a fence and then arrest more. This meant that each officer could increase the rate of arrests by about eight times what had previously been possible. As the police started to find the people they arrested had warrants out for serious matters or that they possessed firearms their morale improved as they felt they were doing something important rather than raising ticket revenue. When Bratton moved on to run the New York Police he did similar things. That is he used labor saving techniques to maximize the availability of police on the streets and used neighborhood crime reports to concentrate them in areas where they were needed.

The reality is that Bratton rather than using a particular strategy or technique has in the case of the Transit Police taken over a unit that was very poorly run and from an objective point of view on its last legs. With such a poorly run unit it is not surprising that the subway system had such crime problems. From this point of view the book is somewhat flawed as it suggests a rather over simplistic solution is available to problems which are complex. Still and interesting and readable book and one that has generated much debate.

In 1982, Wilson and Kelling proposed a link between disorder and crime that they expressed through the metaphor of the "broken window." Leave the broken window unrepaired and soon the rest of the windows will be broken as well. Leave all the windows broken and the building becomes a signal to offenders that this place -- this street, neighborhood, city -- is a place in which disorder is accepted, or at least tolerated. Victimization and crime take root in such places. Malcolm Gladwell has more recently expressed this as the power of "context." (Tipping Point)

"Broken windows" over the intervening 18 years has become a commonplace of public policy. Most writers neglect even to cite Wilson and Kelling as its creator. However, as is the case when an attractive idea migrates from the terrain of scholars to the public marketplace, the notion has come to mean many different things for many different commentators.

IN FWB, Kelling & Coles set the definition stratight, in lucid, concrete policy analysis and writing. Most importantly, the book serves as a highly-readable manual for practitioners. The power of the idea is expressed through the success stories it has spwawned, from the NYC subways to the streets of Seattle. All serious students of public safety policy and the policing process must read it.