Broken Windows Theory.pptx used in criminology
- 2. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling • Originally published in 1982 in a magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling entitled ‘Broken Windows: The police and neighbourhood safety’ has become one of the most widely quoted and influential articles within contemporary criminology. • ‘Broken Windows’ looks at the relationship between crime and disorder. • Wilson and Kelling argue that local citizens are particularly concerned about public order and that, moreover, disorder and crime are linked. • In explaining this they make reference to a famous experiment conducted by an American psychologist, Philip Zimbardo.
- 3. Zimbardo Experiment • In this experiment Zimbardo arranged to have two cars without number plates parked with their bonnets up, one on a street in the Bronx in New York, the other in Palo Alto, California. • They reported that the car in the Bronx was attacked within ten minutes. First, the radio and battery were removed; subsequently almost everything else that could be removed was also taken. Then, they say, random destruction began, windows were smashed, parts torn off, and so on. • On the contrary, the vehicle in Palo Alto remained untouched for about a week. At that stage Zimbardo broke one of its windows with a sledgehammer. Almost immediately passers-by joined in. Within hours the car had been overturned and all but destroyed.
- 4. Explanation of Experiment in words of Wilson and Kelling • Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law abiding. • Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx – its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of ‘no one caring’ – vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behaviour is costly. • But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers – the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility – are lowered by actions that seem to signal that ‘no one cares’.
- 5. • Wilson and Kelling used the broken windows of Zimbardo’s cars as a metaphor for the ways in which what they refer to as ‘untended’ behaviour leads to the breakdown of community controls. • Visible signs of disorder that go unchallenged are likely to breed further disorder and possibly lead to more serious offending. • Their argument is that ‘serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked’. • This argument that cracking down on low-level disorderliness is an important strategy for the police service in the maintenance of order, had a particular impact in New York City in the 1990s. • The successful ‘Clean Car Program’ provided a model for other initiatives in the USA and elsewhere – and the impetus to ‘zero-tolerance policing’. • In the same manner another model implemented i.e. ‘squeegeemen’ – people at road junctions and traffic lights who would ‘clean’ windscreens and then ask, or demand, money in return. In New York in the early 1990s they were perceived by many to be a real problem, working at all the major routes into the city and often becoming very threatening. The difficulty the police department felt it faced was that in the absence of actual physical threat to drivers no crime was being committed. The solution adopted was to prosecute everyone engaging in this activity for ‘jaywalking’.