Newark

A Record Murder Rate in the City That Inspired Broken Windows Policing

Newark may be a place where crime waxes and wanes (and mostly waxes for the last 40 years), but while other cities brought in new approaches to fighting crime over the past 15 years, Newark has remained the same, which helps explains this year's spike in the murder rate, to what's likely to be a record harvest by year's end, and a per capita murder rate three times that of New York City.

The irony is that Newark is the place where Broken Windows co-author George Kelling first came to see the efficacy of foot patrols. The city's failure to participate in the policing revolution of the 1990s is a story of institutional failure over the 20-year mayoralty of Sharpe James.

That's good news in a sense: It means that new mayor Corey Booker has a golden opportunity to reshape the city and its culture of policing and orderliness, and to pick off the low-hanging fruit of easily-prevented crimes—getting guns off the street and aggressively enforcing small laws in order to weed out career criminals and restore a culture with a self-perpetuating bias toward orderly and legal behavior—gains that cities like New York accomplished years ago.

In the short run, this has almost as much to do with changing an area's culture and expectations as it does with fighting crime, a point Kelling and co-author James Q. Wilson made in the unfortunately more often referenced than read original Broken Windows essay, which opens with the following:

In the mid-l970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.

Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a "good pinch." In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along.

Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.

These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer.

But how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down--in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear--the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.

The full essay can be read here.

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