James Q. Wilson’s Broken Windows

The era of the 1960s was marked by an unpopular war in Vietnam, social unrest in the country, and an increasing crime rate in the cities. Although Barry Goldwater made crime an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson, who was running to hold on to the presidency he assumed after the Kennedy assassination, declared crime to be a state issue. The federal government didn’t have the power – nor should it have – to fight crime, candidate Johnson said.

And yet 47 years ago this week, President Johnson, in a pontifical message to Congress, announced the formation of a federal Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. It would be composed, he wrote, of “men and women of distinction who share my belief that we need to know far more about the prevention and control of crime.” With typical Johnsonian hubris, he declared:

No agency of government has ever in our history undertaken to probe so fully and deeply into the problems of crime in our nation. I do not underestimate the difficulty of the assignment. But the very difficulty which these problems present and the staggering cost of inaction make it imperative that this task be undertaken.

Two years later the commission had consumed the efforts of 19 commissioners, 63 staff members, 175 consultants, and “hundreds” of advisers according to the Summary of its report entitled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Like the work product of most federal government commissions, the recommendations of this one were little more than platitudes, clichés, and slogans which were not actionable, measurable, or related to crime prevention. Very little of the Commission’s work was analytical – i.e. translating data into meanings. Instead, expert opinion replaced an analysis of hard facts. And a good deal of that was in the form of “feel good” theories about the root causes of criminal behavior – poverty, racism, broken homes, poor education – and unproven assertions, such as the ineffectiveness of incarceration as a crime deterrent. That last argument has always been a puzzle to me, since incarcerated criminals are obviously deterred from preying on society.

The flaws in the Commission’s report did not escape the notice of a young Harvard political scientist – the Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Government – James Q. Wilson. Professor Wilson’s expertise was public administration, most notably criminality. He was far brighter than anyone on the Commission or the incumbent in the White House. Writing in the Fall 1967 edition of The Public Interest (which today is National Affairs) Dr. Wilson mused:

Despite the widespread popular concern with "crime in the streets," the report of the President's Crime Commission … is not likely to be a best-seller. In this, it will be no different from the report of most other blue-ribbon commissions, and for the same reasons: it offers no "solution" to the problem and it provides no convenient answers to the question of what we might do short of solving it.

His article continued:

That famous but anonymous person – the "reasonable man" or the "intelligent layman" – would, I suppose, have some rather obvious questions about crime in America. He would want to know how much crime there is, whether there is more or less today than twenty years ago, what could be done to reduce or prevent it, and how criminals could best be handled to reduce the chance of their causing more mischief. In getting the answers to those questions, he would expect to be told whether we need more policemen; whether foot patrolmen are (as he supposes) better than motorized officers; whether the laws should not be changed to make arrests and interrogations easier for the police; whether the probation and parole system is working and, if it is not or if the issue is in doubt, whether "tougher sentences" should be handed out; how much police "brutality" there is and what can be done about it; whether capital punishment is of value; and how we can get rid of the drug addicts. These, at least, are the subjects of most editorial and political speeches on the subject of crime … [yet] the reader will have to search diligently for answers to these questions [in the Commission’s report.]  

Out of the 200 recommendations produced by the labors of the Commission, Wilson complained, only six were about making the streets safer. In contrast, 25 were devoted to assuring that the criminal was treated fairly by the police and courts. More than a few recommendations focused on rehabilitating the criminal while in the detention system. Some recommendations were mental mush like “hire better people, pay higher salaries, require more training, collect more information.” Of this burlesque of real thinking, Wilson wrote:

The lay reader might respond, "yes, of course, but what do we do tomorrow morning that will reduce the chance of my wife having her purse snatched by some punk on the way to the supermarket?" Not much, it appears.

My purpose here is not to revisit the shortcomings of a musty government report, but rather to reveal the brilliant mind and thought of James Q. Wilson who died last week from leukemia. His grasp of what the Commission should have produced versus what it did produce is classic Wilson. Last month the American Enterprise Institute gathered to honor his intellect by establishing the James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture. Arthur Brooks, the President of the AEI, assured the audience that future occupants of the Chair would “share Jim’s commitment to the highest standards of empirical research …” – standards visibly lacking in the Johnson Commission’s findings.

Following encomiums by George Will and Charles Murray, no intellectual pygmies themselves, Jim Wilson took the podium to a standing ovation, recalling that last time everyone stood up while he was in a room was in recognition of an archbishop who standing behind him. His acceptance speech was devoted to the rationale for the AEI, which he concluded by saying:

… if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.

Yes, Jim Wilson was a conservative thinker, but he was not an ideologue. The arguments displayed in the sweep of his oeuvre – criminality, education, welfare, human character, and morality among them – were anchored in hard data, solid facts, and evidence-driven experience because those qualities were required to comprehend the complex and often unpredictable real world in which his ideas produced policies. In an interview years ago he contrasted ideology and sound thinking:

I know my political ideas affect what I write, but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

Perhaps nowhere among his written work is sound thinking more evident than the article for which he is best known – “Broken Windows” – which appeared in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic magazine. It is online and well worth reading.

Wilson had observed that the role of police gradually changed over time from maintaining order to fighting crime. This shift had begun in the early 1960s when the crime wave coincided with social unrest of that era, but Johnson’s “war on crime” gave the role transformation its impetus and even accelerated it. All of the strategies of the Johnson Commission and other schools of thought about policing failed because they overlooked an obvious fact – any behavior that is tolerated provides an incentive for it to be repeated – often on a larger scale. As Wilson expressed it “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” Negative behaviors that are not confronted cause “disorderly streets” which leads to more disorderly behavior until community breaks down.

Wilson did not reach this conclusion in the vacuum of his research cube. He and his co-author, George L. Kelling, walked the streets with beat cops and rode in the cruisers with motorized patrols so that they could see with their own eyes the evidence that led them to conclude that criminals take their clues from the community’s tolerance for disorder. If drunks are only permitted to drink on side streets from containers in bags, the thoroughfares and intersections will remain clear for the community to use. A drunk who passes out on a main sidewalk is hustled off to jail for disorderly conduct. He is not allowed to sleep it off on the sidewalk. Gang meetings, drug dealings, and rowdy commotions are broken up. Graffiti is quickly removed. Broken windows are repaired. If these things are done, the streets are safe. If they are not done, disorder escalates.

Only by their personal observation were Wilson and Kelling able to see and understand that motorized patrolling was not as effective as walking a beat – contradicting “conventional wisdom.” These were black neighborhoods and the police were white. A police officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people. He is accessible to talk to them and to be talked to by them. Police officers in cars are more likely to roll down the windows to talk with people than to get out of the car. There are many reasons to be seen talking to an officer on foot, whereas, walking up to a marked patrol car and speaking to its occupants through a window can earn the sobriquet “fink.”

When there is order on the streets, the community has a sense of ownership and self-policing. A purse-snatcher is more likely to be reported promptly and even identified. This kind of neighborhood behavior is rooted in a time before policing became an occupation. Protection against crime, fires, and animals was a community responsibility and was staffed by rotating volunteers. With the advent of police forces, neighborhoods began to think that protection was not their responsibility and the community suffered for it.

Community ownership also suffered with the advent of mobility. If the streets become intolerably disorderly, those who could afford it moved out. Unattached adults moved in. Abandoned property was damaged or destroyed. Criminal activity took over the streets. In a time before people had the option or means to move out of a community, they stayed and fought to preserve its values and safety. Disorderly behavior was not permitted in an immobile society and communities were more cohesive because of their intolerance.

But aggressive policing runs counter to the ideology of the liberal left for whom tolerance is a virtue. Against that mindset, Wilson made this compelling argument in “Broken Windows:”

This wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no one" – and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order – is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.

“Broken Windows” describes an experiment that confirmed its theoretical foundation. A car with its hood up and no license tag was purposely left on a street in the Bronx and a similar car was left on a street in Palo Alto, California. The Bronx car was set upon within ten minutes by a family – a father, mother, and a young son – who stole its radiator and battery. Within 24 hours everything of value had been taken, followed by random destruction of the car – windows were broken, upholstery was ripped, and parts were torn off. Most of the “vandals” were well-dressed white people in a black neighborhood.

The Palo Alto car fared better. It was essentially ignored for more than a week. Therefore, the researcher smashed the windshield with a sledgehammer. Within hours, the car was completely destroyed and overturned – again by well-dressed white people who otherwise acted quite respectably.

Like Johnson’s failed wars on poverty and racial discrimination, his war on crime also failed because it was ideologically rooted rather than grounded in experimentation, observation, and more experimentation, thereby yielding facts about how these things worked. But in 1994 Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City and he appointed William Bratton as Police Commissioner. Both men were enlightened enough to admit that “crime fighting” was a failed policing strategy and that it was time to tack the crime wave differently. Policing would be done in accordance with the “Broken Windows” theory. The murder rate fell from 14.5 per 100,000 residents in 1990 to just 4.8 by 2002 when Giuliani left office – an astonishing reduction of two-thirds. Robberies, home break-ins, car theft all fell by similar amounts. As other municipalities adopted “Broken Windows,” they got similar results. Maintaining orderly streets won out over fighting crime.

Giuliani and Bratton took heat from the media and the left, which called their program an assault against the squeegee men. Squeegee men confronted motorists who had stopped at a light and cleaned their windshields, often without permission. Then they aggressively demanded payment. It was a shakedown racket that had been tolerated in the past. In time, motorists by-passed the area and its economy suffered. When squeegee men were no longer tolerated by the police – and they couldn’t move to another neighborhood because there was intolerance there also – the practice ceased and the neighborhood economy revived.

Wilson’s insightful intellect was not confined urban policy. Among the eulogies published upon news of his death was one in the Wall Street Journal entitled “James Q. Wilson in His Own Words.” It printed excerpts from his writings over the years. My favorite, "A Cure for Selfishness," was published in the Journal originally on March 26, 1997:

Perhaps the most powerful antidote to unfettered selfishness is property rights. If we are grazing cattle, we will conserve the land if we own it. If we are catching lobsters off the Maine coast, we can restrict over-fishing by allocating space to groups who informally "own" each space. If we want to conserve elephants, we should let people own the elephants. If we wish to water our rice in Bali, we do better if each village has ownership in a part of the water. If we want to conserve our country's oil reserves, we do better if the reserves are owned by firms than if the government "controls" the whole deposit.

The sheer common sense of his argument here is unimpeachable. Yet it runs counter to government policy which confiscates natural resources and holds them hostage to political ideology.

Wilson’s books and essay compilations are not well-known among mainstream readers. But they are gems of well-thought arguments. On Character is a collection of character essays and a good starting point for a new Wilson reader. But just as provocative is American Politics, Then & Now: And Other Essays or The Moral Sense, whose reviewer called it “the most significant reflection on this matter since Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Book reviews can’t get more effusive than that.

Wilson’s academic career was enviable. After leaving Harvard in 1987, he was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA until 1997, and from 1998 to 2008 he was the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. In 2009 he became Distinguished Scholar in Boston College’s Department of Public Science and its first Senior Fellow at the College’s Gloria and Charles Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.

Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush, the Bradley Prize from the Bradley Foundation, and a lifetime achievement award by the American Political Science Association.

In a memoriam published the day after he died, Arthur Brooks recalled their first meeting when Wilson appeared unannounced at Brooks’ Ph.D. dissertation defense. Brooks confessed that his dissertation could “surely compete for the most tiresome dissertation of all time.” Moreover, observing its length, one of Brooks’ thesis advisers deemed it “a refutation of the axiom that brevity is the soul of wit.”

Brooks, whose area of scholarship was also social science, was taken aback that someone as esteemed in their field as Wilson would care to hear him wax eloquent on the demand strategies for symphony orchestras. Only years later did he understand, as he came to know him better, that Jim Wilson was interested in everything. Life for him “was like a roadside curio shop, full of hidden and unrecognized intellectual treasures.”

Most of our neighborhoods are safer today because of an article written 30 years ago by James Q. Wilson, and those of us who engage in research and analysis in our careers could learn much from his probing intellect. For these gifts we owe him a debt of gratitude.