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The Broken Windows Theory

Let's talk about a social condition that many people might be concerned about today. There are a few that I want to touch on but the first one is the one I mentioned in the introduction, crime in New York City. Crime was a problem for a very long time in New York City and it was rising and rising and rising and then it started dropping, and I suppose there could be a number of different reasons for it but I can't really find that anybody really knows exactly for sure what caused it.

Crime is such a fundamentally contagious thing that once we reached a kind of tipping point and once certain influential people in communities hard hit by crime stopped behaving in that way, it was contagious, and there was a kind of sea change that happens all at once.

Maybe we can go into those little triggers, because I find this really interesting because we're talking about such a big change that takes place, being triggered by very small things. And what do you think some of those were?

Well, I'm very impressed by this idea called the “Broken Windows” Theory, which is an idea George Kelling has put forth in New England. He's argued for some time that criminals and criminal behavior is acutely sensitive to environmental cues and he uses the example, the broken window: If there is a car sitting on the street with a broken window, it is an invitation to someone to vandalize the car. Why? Because a broken window on a car symbolizes the fact that no one cares about the car. No one's in charge, no one's watching. And if you think about it, this is a fundamentally different idea about crime than the kind of ideas that we've been carrying for the past 25 years. We have been told by conservatives over and over again that crime is the result of moral failure, of something deep and intrinsic within the hearts and souls and brains of criminals, that a criminal is, by definition in the sort of conservative topology, someone who is insensitive to their environment, right? They just go out and commit crimes because that's who they are, they're criminals. Well, Kelling came along and said, well, no no, a criminal is like all of us, someone who is acutely sensitive to what's going on in the environment, and by making subtle changes in the environment, you can encourage and induce much more socially responsible behavior.

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