BROKEN WINDOWS
How a theory shook the foundations of law enforcement and helped heal a city by LORI MONTGOMERYIn the 13th Precinct station house in midtown Manhattan, the walls are covered with maps. There's a map for robbery, a map for murder, maps for every kind of crime. The maps are dotted with pushpins, one for each criminal incident, updated daily, hot off the streets.
In January, these maps steered the 13th Precinct to a man who was following women home and robbing them with a butcher's cleaver. They helped snag a ring of auto thieves stealing cars outside a movie theater while their victims caught a show. But around New York City police headquarters, the 13th Precinct's most famous catch is Milton Cox.
Cox is accused of pulling more than 70 robberies in barely two months late last summer, allegedly following people into elevators and robbing them with a knife. His prolific career created a trail of pushpins across a map in the 13th Precinct station house, a trail that eventually showed the cops "more or less where he was going to be,'' said precinct commander Michael Darby. So Darby dispatched a cadre of plainclothes officers to find Cox. Sure enough, he walked right past a pair of them one day last October. They followed him into the lobby of 31 East 28th Street and watched him board an elevator with just one lonely rider. The cops grabbed Cox when he came back down, before his final victim could even dial 911. "You could see the life drain out of his face," said arresting officer Michael O'Shea. "He knew he was nabbed."
Three years ago, New York City police might never have spotted the robbery pattern that led to Cox's arrest. They didn't have maps. They didn't have daily crime tracking. They didn't have top executives breathing down their necks, checking precinct crime stats every week. They didn't have Comstat. But since 1994, when former Police Commissioner William Bratton engineered a transformation that refocused the full attention of the NYPD on combating petty street crime, the results have been astonishing.
Citywide, crime is down dramatically in all 76 precincts, to levels not seen since the early 1970s. From 1993 through 1995, murder dropped 39 percent and burglary went down by a quarter. Last year, 36 percent fewer cars were stolen, 31 percent fewer people were robbed, and 400 fewer people wound up on slabs at the city morgue. While the number of major crimes dropped sharply last year across big-city America, New York has been the leader, with a crime rate that seems to be falling faster than any demographic trend or sociological theory can explain. Crime in New York was down 15 percent last year, compared with a national drop of just two percent. Among the nation's 25 largest cities, New York's crime rate ranked 23rd behind San Diego and San Jose. These days, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani proudly proclaimed, New York is "just about the safest large city in America."
It's an astonishing turn of events. Police officials from Australia to Zimbabwe have journeyed to the Big Apple to observe this strange phenomenon. Even the U.S. Justice Department has commissioned a study to figure out what's going on.
What's the NYPD's secret? At One Police Plaza, the New York Police Department's monolithic headquarters wedged between Wall Street and Chinatown in downtown Manhattan, top commanders say it's very, very simple: small crimes must be taken as seriously as big crimes.
You've got an open 40-ouncer? There's a law against drinking in public, and you're outta here. Urinating in the alley, panhandling on the sidewalk, jumping turnstiles in the subway? The old NYPD let it slide. But the new NYPD will nab you, demand to see your ID, run a warrant check, probably run you into the station for a debriefing, and-if anything turns up-you might end up in jail.
This new approach is a well-planned combination of very basic policing tools and tactics coupled with a few high-tech flourishes, like state-of-the-art crime-mapping software and twice-weekly Comstat-short for computer statistics-strategy sessions where the department's top command focuses on the crime patterns in a handful of precincts. The NYPD claims to have woven these basic ideas, along with "quality of life" patrols, into a potentially seamless dragnet.
As New York cops get more efficient and more relentless, former Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple-who was the NYPD's crime-control guru until April-predicted with perfect confidence that crime in the city eventually will come down another 20 percent. All because of good police work.
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The strategy being implemented in New York is based on an idea called the "Broken Windows Theory." First expressed by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, the theory holds that if someone breaks a window in a building and it is not quickly repaired, others will be emboldened to break more windows. Eventually, the broken windows create a sense of disorder that attracts criminals, who thrive in conditions of public apathy and neglect.
The theory was based on an experiment conducted 26 years ago by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo. He took two identical cars, placing one on a street in a middle-class Palo Alto neighborhood and the other in a tougher neighborhood in the Bronx. The car in the Bronx, which had no license plate on it and was parked with its hood up, was stripped within a day. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for a week, until Zimbardo smashed one of its windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, it was stripped.
According to Wilson, a professor of public policy at UCLA, "There are two sources of disorder: offenders and physical disorder. [Both] lead people to believe the neighborhood is run down. The central problem for police is to take the small signs of disorder seriously and deal with them. That could be dealing with small-time offenders, or dealing with physical disorder, or some combination of both."
I never questioned whose "idea" it was. I just think it takes a lot of work and political skill and determination to carry out the idea on the scale Giuliani did. And Wilson may have been the first to publish the idea, but lots of neighborhoods (and homes) have operated on the principle for years before that -- it's not exactly counterintuitive.