‘Broken Windows’ Theory Was Right … About the Windows

Whether or not “Broken Windows” policing tactics actually work is one of those debates that will never really end, mainly because there are so many different understandings of what Broken Windows means. “Whenever somebody mentions Broken Windows, the question should be which version?” says Princeton University political scientist Jonathan Mummolo, who is dubious of Broken Windows-linked claims about the efficacy of stop-and-frisk tactics and high-volume misdemeanor arrests.

You know which version of Broken Windows really does appear to work? Fixing broken windows.

The term “Broken Windows” comes from a 1982 Atlantic magazine article by criminologist George L. Kelling and political scientist James Q. Wilson. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree,” they wrote, “that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” As empirical evidence for this assertion, Kelling and Wilson offered a clever if not exactly dispositive late-1960s experiment by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who arranged to park one car with the hood up and no license plate on a street in the impoverished New York City borough of the Bronx, and another on a street in affluent Palo Alto, California. Thieves and vandals attacked the Bronx car and stripped it of everything of value in 24 hours, while the one in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed it in a few places with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, locals had torn the car apart and turned it upside down.