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This Is America

June 10, 2013

James Q. Wilson Changes Policing in America

Wilson said preventing small crimes, like breaking windows, could decrease bigger crimes

Welcome to This Is America with VOA Learning English.

Today, we are talking about political and social scientist James Q. Wilson. Wilson was interested in a great many subjects. But he was best known for his research into the behavior of criminals and police. He helped change the way policing is done is America.

Wilson died in March 2012 at the age of eighty. He had been receiving treatment for leukemia.

This week on our program Bob Doughty and Faith Lapidus look back at Wilson’s influence on modern policing.

They also look at some of the ways technology is leading law enforcement into the future.

In March 1982, the Atlantic magazine published an article that described a theory of community policing. That theory would come to influence a new direction in American law enforcement.

James Q. Wilson wrote the article with criminologist George Kelling. Crime and disorder in a community are usually linked, they said, and they used an example. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones,” they wrote.

The idea was that keeping order in a community and fighting low-level crime can lead to a reduction in more serious crimes. The article was called “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.

” The theory came to be known as the “broken windows” theory.

The ideas the authors presented were largely based on psychology and how people form opinions about the safety of a neighborhood.

Their research showed that people base their opinions less on the actual crime rate and more on whether the area appears safe and orderly.

They said “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares.” If a window is broken and then quickly fixed, it sends a message that people care enough to keep order in the neighborhood.

The link that the two researchers made between disorder and crime is indirect. Disorder leads to citizen fear, which leads to weakened social controls. And those weakened controls create conditions where crimes are more likely to occur.

The solution, the authors said, was a kind of community policing centered on preventing crimes rather than just reacting to them.

The broken windows theory represented a very different way to look at policing methods at a time when, in many cities, crime seemed out of control.

John DeCarlo is a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. He says crime rates in the United States rose sharply from the 1960s to the middle of the 1990s.

“We had seen crime rates during the 80s that the country had literally never seen before. The violent crime rate and the property crime rate were exceptionally high. Criminologists across the United States had pretty much given up hope that police could have any effect on crime.”

That crime wave included the so-called crack wars, the violent competition between drug dealers in the rise of crack cocaine.

In the 1990s, the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, began a crime reduction program in the city. His first police commissioner, William Bratton, used ideas similar to what James Q. Wilson had been writing about. These included putting more police officers on foot instead of in cars.

More attention went into targeting low-level criminals and keeping order in neighborhoods.

Professor DeCarlo says this was the beginning of a new way of operating within a police force.

“When Bratton came into New York he concentrated on low-level criminals rather than higher-level criminals, thinking that taking care of the low level criminals would automatically take care of the higher-level criminals because, indeed, they were the same pe