Broken Windows Citichat 24 May 2002

CITICHAT 20 /2002 - 24 May 2002


Rudy, George and Broken Windows

Many people incorrectly attribute the ‘broken windows’ theory to the ex-police chief of New York City, William Bratton and/or that city’s ex-mayor Rudolph Giuliani. As I have written previously, Giuliani whilst claiming all the credit for New York’s turn around, happened to be in the right place at the right time and capitalised on it. In other words Rudy was a consummate politician. I am not denying his general contribution to New York’s reversal of fortune, nor his leadership at the end of his term through the Sept 11 crisis. But the facts are that the foundations for the city’s revitalisation started way back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when specific areas decided to take control of their deteriorating situations and established Business Improvement Districts. Union Square, Times Square, the Grand Central District extending into 34th Street and Bryant Park and a host of others started cleaning up their immediate areas. Their ‘Clean and Safe’ approach resulted in sidewalks being maintained, ‘City Ambassadors’ provided on the streets as a highly visible evidence of public space management, environmental and streetscape upgrading and engagement with social issues. All of these were well advanced before Giuliani even arrived on the scene! He obviously was quite threatened by the activities of New York’s BIDs which he saw as a threat to his being seen as the ‘saviour’ of the city. After having one BID Chief Executive whom he considered to be far too high profile removed from office, he ‘froze’ the contributions or levy income that constitutes the major proportion of BID incomes for a number of years, thereby preventing them from extending their work, neutralising any increase in their contribution to the city’s revitalisation and actually placing most of them under severe financial strain..

I was reminded of this on two occasions this last fortnight. The first was through a recent article in the New York Times that recorded that Giuliani’s successor, Michael R Bloomberg, has come out enthusiastically supporting the city’s 44 BIDs. The article talks about “the mayor’s warm embrace of ….the public-private partnerships known as BIDs”.

Bloomberg wants to see the BIDs play a bigger role in the city’s economic growth and has ended the budget freeze; unveiled policy changes that will speed up the BID formation process; provided seed money to finance the BID planning process for poor and middle-income neighbourhoods; will provide technical assistance and training for BID staff; enabled BIDs to issue long-term debt for capital improvement projects and will even help in showcasing BIDs most creative and successful efforts. Quite a turn-around and one richly deserved when one becomes aware of the major contribution that BIDs have made to the city. Whilst the article makes no mention of him, clearly the newly appointed Commissioner for New York City’s Business Services, my friend Rob Walsh, has had no little part in the new administration’s approach. Some Citichat readers will remember Rob, then CE of the Charlotte Downtown Partnership, who visited South Africa a few years ago to help us promote BIDs as a revitalisation tool.

The other occasion was through one of the speakers at the London conference covered in last week’s Citichat, George Kelling. I had the privilege of first hearing George Kelling in the States some years ago and it was exciting to be reminded of his work again last Thursday at the Warden’s Conference and subsequently at a working lunch with a number of senior civil servants and London businessmen and women.

George co-authored the seminal work “Fixing Broken Windows” with his wife, Catherine M.Coles and their work inspired the change in attitude in New York and by American city authorities to a wide variety of issues from drug legalisation and crime control strategies to the extent to which public spaces should be protected. Kelling and Coles show how order in public places can be maintained at minimal cost to civil liberty.

Drawing on the original philosophies that inspired Robert Peel to establish the first successful police force in the world – “the police are the people and the people are the police", George spelt out the background to the changes happening in American policing. From reactive to preventative through presence, persuasion of people to behave and by reducing opportunities for crime to happen. Up to the late ‘80s, streets in many American cities were controlled by gangs and drug dealers. Although police were responding to crime and the courts were working apparently effectively, on the streets it was disaster. He suggested that there are five basic ideas that have developed over twenty years that have resulted in a major change leading to the effective re-policing of American cities.

1. Police were incident oriented. When an incident was reported you called the police, the police came, recorded the incident and got back in their cars. All incidents were handled in the same way, from wife beating to theft! Social scientists started to understand that incidents are merely symptoms of problem; why wait for a man who has beaten up his wife three times to do it a fourth? The police needed to understand that they didn’t own the problem and that problems were usually more complex than the incident itself.

2. In March 1982, James Q Wilson and George Kelling published an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “Breaking Windows” They used the image of broken windows to explain how neighbourhoods might decay into disorder and even crime if no one attends faithfully to their maintenance. “If a factory or office window is broken, passers by observing it will conclude that no one cares or no one is in charge. In time a few will begin throwing rocks to break more windows. Soon all the windows will be broken, and now passers by will think that, not only is no one in charge of the building, no one is in charge of the street on which it faces. Only the young, the criminal or the foolhardy have any business on an unprotected avenue, and so more and more citizens will abandon the street to those they assume prowl it. Small disorders lead to larger and larger ones, and perhaps even to crime.” The paradigm at the time was to concentrate on serious crime and ignore smaller crimes or disorder - the new paradigm the article suggested was that fear of crime is more related to minor than major offences and concentration needed to be shifted to dealing with issues of disorder. Subsequent studies have shown that the linkages between disorder and serious crime are real, yet police concentration remained on serious crime.

3. A realisation that the maxim that in a democracy you have to have the consent of the people to police does not go far enough – you have to go beyond consent to collaboration and this is where Kelling sees a major strength in BIDs.

4. The intelligent use of data – here is where Bratton first came into the picture. Bratton introduced the use of data to deal with problems and accountability for the statistics. Crime stats had to be available publicly for every precinct on a daily basis and precinct commanders were accountable to the communities. “There were 3 rapes in the area yesterday, why? what are you doing to stop rapes in our area? what progress are you making at apprehending the perpetrators? etc.etc

5. “Pulling leverage” – the term emerged out of a totally lawless situation that had developed in Boston. It was found that 5% of offenders committed 50% of all crime, everyone knew who they were but no one was doing anything about it. The problem wasn’t that there were insufficient laws or organisations, but that no one was talking to each other about resolving the problem. There were constant ‘walls of blame’. Police said they did their work, the courts tossed out prosecutions on technicalities, but there was no communication. Only when everyone started ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ did they start making a difference.

We’ve heard this all before, and everyone nods sagely, but we continue to travel down the failed routes of the past. We know better! First World policies can’t be applied to developing countries! We just don’t care! I think it is the last which, sadly, holds true. Apart from the disregard for basic disorder on our streets, for probably three years now we have been trying to get the Council to abide by written agreements in regard to the usage of Gandhi Square. The perpetrators are council employees who consider themselves above the law, we’ve even had a metro police official refusing to act against them because ‘we all belong to the same trade union’! It is rather like the police officer who shouted at Kelling, “Where in the hell did you ever get the crazy idea that disorder was police business? Our job is fighting crime.”


Regards, neil