James Q. Wilson, 1931-2012: Originated ‘Broken Windows’ Policing Strategy

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

James Q. Wilson, a wide-ranging social scientist whose “broken windows” theory of law enforcement laid the groundwork for crime reduction programs in New York, Los Angeles and other cities, died on Friday in Boston. He was 80.

The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Matthew, said.

Mr. Wilson, who taught government at Harvard for more than two decades, was the author of disquisitions on politics, the family, the nature of bureaucracies, virtue and vice that both countered and steered intellectual trends.

But he was best known for his research on the behavior of police officers and lawbreakers. Probably his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/nyregion/james-q-wilson-dies-at-80-originated-broken-windows-policing-strategy.html?pagewanted=all

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Wilson is also a conservative, having recently written an opinion piece in the Washington Post against blaming the wealthiest for income inequality. He is also the co-author of the controversial textbook American Government.

[Dawson Leery]

1. "Broken Windows" a.k.a going after minorities while ignoring hard crime.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

2. Lots of law and order for you little folk. Big name players pshaaah... too much work. n/t

[slackmaster]

5. That's a False Dilemma, Joe. Street crime and big, e.g. white collar crime are very different...

...and there is no reason that law enforcement people can't address both kinds.

[izquierdista]

3. How can someone who taught at Harvard be a stupid fucker?

I'll sum it up in two words: incremental thinking. Yes, in a well run society, where all is under control, "less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life" are indicators of how the situation might get out of control. So yes, when everything is stable, small increments are important indicators.

Works the same for economics, when all is running well, you can pay attention to the small perturbations in trying to maintain the system in a state of equilibrium.

HOWEVER, when you chase these small increments while good paying factory jobs are being exported wholesale and the ladder out of poverty is being burned for firewood, when you turn a blind eye to business criminals funneling money to the 1%, when you give in to business criminals whining for less oversight and more deregulation, you become a stupid fucker. Time will be the ultimate judge. In another 30 years anything written by Wilson and Larry Summers will only be kept around as examples of deluded thinking, right in there with Nazi treatises on racial theories.

[slackmaster]

4. I believe Broken Windows worked in New York City. I felt a palpable difference between my visits...

...in 1979 and 1994.

RIP Professor Wilson.