Posted by Dr. Bob on May 21, 2001, at 18:51:58
In reply to Re: rtn visits, posted by CrystalX on May 18, 2001, at 23:05:03
Hi, everyone,
Thanks to our loyal opposition, I can now provide you with a link to one of the original "broken windows" articles:
Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety
by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/windows.htm> Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones... one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
> An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can help him manage whatever is about to happen. And he can never be certain what that will be -- a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation, a teasing remark, *a confused babble*, a threatening gesture.
> Until quite recently in many states, and even today in some places, the police made arrests on such charges as "suspicious person" or "vagrancy" or "public drunkenness" -- charges with scarcely any legal meaning. These charges exist not because society wants judges to punish vagrants or drunks but because it wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighborhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.
> A strong and commendable desire to see that people are treated fairly makes us worry about allowing the police to rout persons who are undesirable by some vague or parochial standard. A growing and not-so-commendable utilitarianism leads us to doubt that any behavior that does not "hurt" another person should be made illegal. And thus many of us who watch over the police are reluctant to allow them to perform, in the only way they can, a function that every neighborhood desperately wants them to perform.
>
> This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one" -- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order -- is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.> The people expect the police to "do something" about this, and the police are determined to do just that.
>
> But do what? Though the police can obviously make arrests whenever a gang member breaks the law, a gang can form, recruit, and congregate without breaking the law. And only a tiny fraction of gang-related crimes can be solved by an arrest; thus, if an arrest is the only recourse for the police, the residents' fears will go unassuaged. The police will soon feel helpless, and the residents will again believe that the police "do nothing." What the police in fact do is to chase known gang members out of the project. In the words of one officer, "We kick ass." Project residents both know and approve of this.> None of this is easily reconciled with any conception of due process or fair treatment.
> We have difficulty thinking about such matters, not simply because the ethical and legal issues are so complex but because we have become accustomed to thinking of the law in essentially individualistic terms. The law defines my rights, punishes his behavior and is applied by that officer because of this harm. We assume, in thinking this way, that what is good for the individual will be good for the community and what doesn't matter when it happens to one person won't matter if it happens to many. Ordinarily, those are plausible assumptions. But in cases where behavior that is tolerable to one person is intolerable to many others, the reactions of the others -- fear, withdrawal, flight -- may ultimately make matters worse for everyone, including the individual who first professed his indifference.
> the most important requirement is to think that to maintain order in precarious situations is a vital job.
> Above all, we must return to our long-abandoned view that the police ought to protect communities as well as individuals. Our crime statistics and victimization surveys measure individual losses, but they do not measure communal losses. Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police -- and the rest of us -- ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.
And also one to one advocating alternative sentences and community involvement:
Shattering "Broken Windows": An Analysis of San Francisco's Alternative Crime Policies
by Khaled Taqi-Eddin and Dan Macallair
http://www.cjcj.org/jpi/windows.html> While there is no evidence supporting the claims that the number of officers and arrests per capita affects the crime rate, public perception seems to accept this premise. San Francisco on the other hand utilized an alternative approach to crime that stresses alternative sentences and community involvement. Conservative critics like Guiliani have labeled this approach as "soft on crime" and continuously claim that they do not work.
>
> Despite popular assumptions, San Francisco experienced a larger decline in reported crime than most comparable national cities while enforcing these alternative policies.That's an interesting issue. What "alternative sentences and community involvement" might make sense here?
Officer Bob, on the beat and ready to kick ass :-)
poster:Dr. Bob
thread:1222
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20010315/msgs/1293.html