Handouts

From the earliest days of the nation, the police function was seen primarily as that of a night watchman: to maintain order against the chief threats to order--fire, wild animals, and disreputable behavior. Solving crimes was viewed not as a police responsibility but as a private one.

But this slowly gave way to detective work, a shift they would like to see rolled back.

A great deal was accomplished during this transition, as both police chiefs and outside experts emphasized the crime-fighting function in their plans, in the allocation of resources, and in deployment of personnel. The police may well have become better crime-fighters as a result. And doubtless they remained aware of their responsibility for order. But the link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten.

One important piece of the authors' program is the further spread of "community policing," which was already gaining popularity before their article appeared. An officer in a squad car is too safely sealed away from the people to be part of the neighborhood, they say, too far removed to know who's who on the street and to function as a dampening influence on would-be small-time miscreants in the neighborhood. Officers on foot, on regular beats, become fixtures of the community, and as such have stabilizing influence: "What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent that they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods."

The greater part of the Broken Windows prescription, though, is the shift in police focus from major crimes themselves to what might once have been called nuisances--litter, public drunkenness, panhandling, teenagers. In these small beginnings, we are told, real crime takes root. In quelling the small disruptions of street life, we snuff crime before it begins.

The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is no merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization--namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window.

So, does it work? That of course has always been the question at the heart of the furor over the theory: do the broken windows,