(upbeat music) - Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. I am joined today by Professor Bernard Harcourt. He is a professor at Columbia University Law School. He is also the founding director of the Initiative for a Just Society at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. He has also served as a practicing criminal attorney. He's here today because 20 years ago, he authored a book that I think he probably hoped would not have to be read 20 years from its publication, but which does. And that book is Illusion of Order, the False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Professor Harcourt, welcome to Current Affairs. - Thank you, Mr. Robinson, nice to meet. - Am I right that you would have hoped that your book had slipped into a relevance by now? - I would have thought, yes, I would have thought. It was a kind of full-blown critique of this mysterious theory, the Broken Windows Theory, 20 years ago, and I would have thought that by now we wouldn't need to return to these issues because the theory had been buried and done with, but it seems to have a zombie life of its own. - Well, I want to just, you mentioned the zombie life we saw the theory bubbling to the surface most recently last week or September 5th of the New York Times in an op-ed by Pamela Paul, the solution to New York's transit problem is so obvious no one wants to hear it in which she calls for a massive police crackdown on fair jumping in the New York subway and in support of her call for a massive police crackdown, she says, "Broken Windows Theory." As outlined by the social scientist, James Q Wilson and the criminology professor George Kelling in a 1982 essay in Atlantic holds that when minor or lesser kinds of disorder become more apparent, it invites graver forms of crime. And then she says that while progressives have tried to, progressives are loath to admit that Broken Windows Policing works. So we're gonna talk today about Broken Windows. - Surprising that that passed the New York Times fact check, frankly. - I don't know if they do a fact check on the op-ed page. Listen, you know, they do, on opinions. I've written a few for them. The last one was on Alabama's new nitrogen gas asphyxiation method of execution. And they do an extraordinarily tough fact check. So I'm astounded that that sentence, that the idea that the Broken Windows Theory works would be a factual statement that actually should not have gotten through the fact check. - Well, I mean, I think the fact that it can still be stated as a fact speaks to the extraordinary success that this theory had. In fact, it's hard for me to think of other examples where a theory that was published in a magazine, not even in a scholarly journal, but in a popular magazine in 1982, the Atlantic magazine ran the article that Pamela Paul referred to there. And this theory became the most influential theory in American policing and criminology ever. I mean, you document in your book some of the extraordinary. So perhaps you could tell us a little bit first about just how influential this theory became. - Yeah, it is remarkable. I mean, what's remarkable is that the original article which dated back to 1982 and was written by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, it was a narrative article. It was a story article. It wasn't a social science article. It didn't have social science facts to back it up. And in fact, when you read the article, I mean, it's a fascinating short article that's all about the story of what happens to a neighborhood over time. This idea that, you know, the fences start breaking, the grass start growing. There's a lack of upkeep and eventually, right? The minor, tiny, minor forms of disorder start surfacing and then all of a sudden there's major crime in the neighborhood. It really was a story, right? More than a social science hypothesis that had been tested with evidence. It kind of played on our imagination about the way in which neighborhoods might deteriorate. Now, it also played on a lot of racial stereotypes and a lot of moral stereotypes. In other words, James Q. Wilson, of course, was a brilliant political theorist, not just a public policy thinker. He was a brilliant political theorist. He was drawing on the thought of his own mentor, Edward Banfield, who had this idea that there are morally backward societies and that they're morally backward people. And in a way, this was building on this idea that there would be kind of like moral backwardness that would actually lead to serious crime, that it would have these really dangerous implications. Now, the theory was dormant for a long time, really, until the early 1990s when Rudy Giuliani picked it up with his first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, who would become the first police commissioner under Rudy Giuliani and really ran on this theory of broken windows policing. He called it the quality of life initiative. It came under different flavors, but the idea was we need to attack things like turn-style jumping, minor disorder in neighborhoods. Yet he had the idea of drug use, prostitution, but also abandoned buildings and whatnot. The idea was we need to pay attention to these minor forms of disorder because they're gonna result in serious crimes, homicides, murders, rapes and robberies. Pretty much ran on that platform and he was extraordinary with the media. So, I mean, once he came into office and once his police chief, Bill Bratton, seized on this idea of broken windows policing and they went kind of gangbusters on that, there was a massive drop in crime throughout America, right? But Giuliani, who was the master of the media, was able to kind of-- - Back then, younger people might not remember when Rudy Giuliani-- - It'd be a pleasure. - But yeah, back then, back then he was, he was at the top of his game, really. And he would seize credit for the crime drop, which was happening in New York and it was happening everywhere else in the country. And he would seize credit and he would claim that it was broken windows policing. So it was that effect. And then of course, Malcolm Gladwell played a big role with his book Tipping Point, right? Which was a bestseller, New York Times bestseller and one of the central examples that Gladwell used in his book Tipping Point was the broken windows theory. And the idea, I mean, he was kind of trying to interpret it for the lay person, this idea that there was a tipping point, that at some point, if you got a little disorder in the neighborhood at some point, eventually it's gonna pass the tipping point and turn into murders and robberies and assaults and rapes, right? - And so by the point, by the late '90s, early 2000s as you document in your book, you say the media was now referring to the quote, now famous broken windows essay as the Bible of Policing, the blueprint for community policing. And it was stated as a fact, just as Pamela Paul stated it, that broken windows has helped reduce crime in cities around the nation, has had undeniable successes. The American Bar Association Joe was saying there's little dispute that the theory works, that it has sparked, as the Christian Science Monitor put it, a revolution in American policing. I mean, you just quote headline after headline about how this was undeniably had changed American policing and we'd figured out how to stop crime. - Right, and you have to understand, of course, at the time, right, we had mass incarceration, which had started in this country about 1973, right? I mean, people need to understand that we were in a context here where a lot of people were trying to figure out how to fight crime. And one of the major ways in which most states were addressing crime was through massive arrests and incarceration programs, which resulted in extraordinary numbers of persons going to prison and jails. So in ordinary terms, you know, we used to have about 150,000 persons in jails and prisons, constant from like 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, et cetera. Starting in 1973, we get mass incarceration, you get passed 2 million, 2 million three. By 2008, we've got 2 million three hundred people behind bars, predominantly African-American young men. And you've got a rate of incarceration in this country that reaches in 2008, 1% of the adult population. So you had a very draconian policy of imprisonment starting in the late 1960s, when crime became a big issue. And, you know, with Richard Nixon, et cetera, that reaches this crescendo of incarceration. And so everybody's on the progressive side is trying to find a different answer, right? And so this is at the time in which kind of conservatives are pushing for imprisonment and for broken windows policing, but progressives are looking for something, kind of, you know, folks like Bill Clinton, and they glob onto broken windows policing as well, because it's viewed on the progressive side as an alternative to mass incarceration. So basically, everybody's coming together. It's like a kumbaya. You've got the conservatives who are, you know, because James Q was pretty conservative. You've got the progressives who love this idea because it means like, well, wait a minute, we're not gonna have to imprison everybody. And everybody's coming together. And it's like, this is the manner from heaven. This thing drops from nowhere. And it's like, and you've got Giuliani who's touting it like a mad man because, of course, you know, reducing crime is the big way to get elected. And everybody's on board. - Well, yeah, so it is quite extraordinary that because it appeals to conservative desire to eliminate disorder and troublesome people and liberals desire, as you say, to, well, maybe we could just go after the squeegee man and graffiti. And if we could keep the windows from getting broken, then we can have an alternative to mass incarceration. You say that so much so, it serves both their interests. So well, nobody bothers to go back, check the article for whether there was any actual evidence in it. And as you say, I mean, I went back and read this article recently, he read this thing. I remember being as highlighted in college and I hadn't noticed the first time I read it, just like the gaping hole where the evidence should be. And, you know, they tell us you say this story where, you know, a piece of property is abandoned and then litter accumulates and then people start drinking and then people start getting into fights. And then eventually someone's murdered. This is a story about a hypothetical fictitious city. But when they, if you look for, okay, well, what is the proof that the piece of property being abandoned actually in the real world initiates a sequence, a causal sequence with a murder at the end of it, they cite this one experiment by Philip Zimbardo. I think they completely misstate the facts of that experiment. - Right, yeah, they had no evidence. It was really just this idea, right? And actually what's even remarkable is in the article, James Q. said, this is just a hypothesis. This is just an idea, actually. We don't have the proof for it, but that was kind of buried in the article. And they, you know, the one thing they talked about, yes, was that Zimbardo experiment, which, in fact, was kind of like they had left a car in an area, in an abandoned area. And after a few days, they kind of broke a window, broke a window of the car. And then after that, supposedly on the experiment, people kind of went in and started to steal things from the car and rip it apart and whatnot. But actually the delay in the study itself and it didn't really confirm kind of major crimes like homicides or rapes or assaults, you know? It was kind of minor disorder might trigger minor disorder or something like that, you know? It wasn't a theory that, you know, this forms of disorderliness, which heaven knows what are they exactly. That became, for me, that became a big issue because it was kind of this assumption that we all know what is disorder, which is not the case that we can talk about, but that it would cause. And of course, you know, if you have to just use common sense, you would start to think, well, wait a minute, maybe it's not disorder, even if we knew it, maybe it's not disorder that causes homicides and rapes. Maybe both have similar antecedent conditions or so maybe a neighborhood that has a lot of disorder defined by James Q here. A lot of disorder might also have a lot of violent crime in it. Maybe these things came together. Maybe there was one common cause that caused them both, you know, but the idea that one caused the other, there really was no evidence for that. Nor was there any evidence that police reducing the disorder would actually reduce serious crime as well. - Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you do in your book is you go through some studies purported to confirm the broken winter's theory. You pointed out that there was a kind of methodological mistake in just like finding correlations without considering whether something could have caused both. But I just wanted to dwell on that Zabato experiment because the way you stated it there was, is the way that they portray it. But there's an article going back and looking at the original Zabato experiment. And in fact, they misrepresented it. So the way they portray it is that Zabato left a car in the Bronx and in the Bronx, people smashed up the car very quickly. But then, which is poor neighborhood. Then he went to a rich neighborhood in Palo Alto. Nothing happened to the car until he smashed a window at which point people descended on the car and started breaking it, right? That's how they portray the experiment. And they use that to say, well, if you smash just one window, you initiate a cycle that will turn rich Palo Alto, rich bourgeois Palo Alto, everyone will become barbarians. The thin veneer of civilization will crack and things will go to hell in a handbag. But in fact, Zimbardo and his students, he says he left the car, he broke the window. Nothing happened in Palo Alto. He then took the car to the Stanford campus and he and his students began smashing the car and other students joined in with their professor and smashing the car. And what Zimbardo proved from the study, what he says he proves is just that the, you know, violence against is kind of contagious and enjoyable. Nothing to do with a community descending because of a broken window. And so the thin piece of empirical evidence that they had is in fact just as fraudulent I think and should have fallen foul of the Atlantic's fact checkers in the same way that Pamela Paul's claim should have fallen foul of the New York Times' fact checkers. But it didn't. They never checked the original study. - Right. And for some reason, the theory that replicates over time, that replicates over time. So not only was there the problem with the Zimbardo study, but the next study that in a way tries to prove broken windows is a statistical analysis of about 40 neighborhoods done by a sociologist, Wesley Skogan, where he shows that neighborhoods with high disorder are neighborhoods with high crime. That's all he shows in his, in his study. And it's touted as being the proof. So when Giuliani picks it up from James Q. Wilson, James Q. Wilson was using the Zimbardo, when Giuliani picks it up in '93, '94, he then relies on the Wesley Skogan study, which is a little piece of Wesley Skogan's book. Turns out that that study also didn't pass the fact checkers. So I actually got my hands on the data in that study, and it was the messiest data I'd ever had. But in the study, there were actually five crimes that they had tried to identify and see if it was linked to major crimes. One of them was burglary. One of them was small robberies. One of them was prostitution, assault, et cetera. Of those five, there was only one of the five that went in the right direction for the study, and it turned out that was the only one that they used. So they had actually discarded four other small-time crimes because, well, because they didn't come to the right result. One of them, actually, which is really interesting in this context was prostitution, which actually areas where their red-light districts tend to be more orderly, in fact, in part because commercial sex operators want to have a neighborhood that feels sufficiently safe, that people are going to go there and drop their pants. So there's actually an interesting way in which that form of "disorder," which is commercial sex, is actually tied to more institutionalized orderliness. But in any event, that data was simply eliminated from the study because it didn't go with the right result. And there were just all kinds of problems with that study, which had been touted as being the study that proved the Broken Windows Theory. In fact, it didn't, and I spent a good chapter of the book going through that study carefully and picking it apart. - It's extraordinary. I mean, you quote at the beginning that Giuliani and Bratton saying in, I think, a policy paper, Wesley Skogan has found that disorder is the first step in the downward spiral of urban decay. And then you go through and you realize, he hasn't found that at all. In fact, it's kind of academic dishonesty. I mean, it's bad. It's really kind of intellectual malpractice to discard the pieces of your data that contradict the theory. - Not only that, I mean, there were so many problems with the study, but maybe just take a step back and a quantitative study that has going to tell you a static, in other words, it's a one time shot. It's one moment about neighborhoods that have a lot of disorder and that have a lot of crime or neighborhoods that have little disorder, little crime or neighborhoods with some disorder and whatever. A one static snapshot of neighborhoods is never going to be able to validate a causal theory that operates over time. In other words, even if, and it doesn't, but even if the study showed that those lined up perfectly so that, you know, only minor disorder neighborhoods had no major crime and major disorder neighborhoods had major crime, even if it had lined up perfectly across, you know, different crime variables and all that. I mean, even assuming it had been perfect, it doesn't prove anything. It still doesn't prove anything because it doesn't show that one causes the other or that the other causes the other. It's static, it's static, it's not telling you what the causal mechanism is. - You're listening to Current Affairs. Current Affairs is a non-profit left media organization supported entirely by its readers and listeners with no corporate backers or advertising. We depend on your subscriptions and donations. If you're enjoying this program and you're not a monthly subscriber already, please consider becoming one at patreon.com/currentaffairs. And if you are a podcast subscriber, check out everything else Current Affairs offers, including our flagship print magazine, which comes out six times a year and is loaded with beautiful art and insightful essays. We also offer a twice weekly news briefing service that will keep you up to date on everything happening in the world and the stories you won't find in your morning newspaper. You can sign up for those at currentaffairs.org/subscribe. And if you just want to help us keep building independent progressive media because you understand how vital that project is, go to currentaffairs.org/donate where you can read more about our work and make a monthly or one-off contribution. Current Affairs is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and donations are tax deductible to the extent allowable by law. Now back to the program. (upbeat music) Their whole thing was a story about something that occurs over time. You start with the broken window, you end up with a murder in a... - Right, you can't prove it by simply saying, oh, well, this is a high crime neighborhood and it's also got a lot of disorder. So one caused the, I mean, it's not how you go about explaining a theory that has temporal causation in it. The study itself, even if it hadn't had all those defects, couldn't prove it in any way or couldn't, you know, non-fossify the theory. - So the correlations didn't consistently match up, but even if the correlations had consistently matched up, they're also consistent with a theory that, I don't know, poverty causes both disorder and crime rather than the broken windows. And the whole, and the reason this is important is because broken windows is a theory that unless you crack down on very small things, small disorder, and within that they include things, and this is another remarkable thing when you go back to that original article, they include things that are not illegal. So disorder, this category of disorder includes squeegee men. Julianna really didn't like the squeegee men in New York. It includes Julianna revived, I think the anti-umlicensed dancing ordinance from the prohibition era. It includes, you know, drug use, but it also includes loitering, just standing around in the wrong place. So let's get into a little bit of this idea of disorder, this thing that they said you had to eliminate if you didn't want rape and murder and robbery. - Right, yeah. I would say that kind of from a kind of theoretical perspective or, you know, from, that's the most interesting question is what is order actually, and what is disorder, right? Now they had identified certain things, right? As it was very interesting to see their little list. So for instance, one of the things that they identified as being disorderly was hanging out on the stoops. Okay, something you do in certain neighborhoods in New York City, probably in New Orleans as well. People hanging out on the stoops was considered a form of disorder. Now it's interesting, it's like, who does hang out? What neighborhoods are people hanging out on the steps? It turns out that it's a very cultural and racially identified practice, okay? A certain neighborhood, it's very common in what we used to call Hispanic neighborhoods in America, Latinx, you know, a Dominican neighborhood or Mexican-American or Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York where, you know, the people would hang out during the day and hang out on the steps and kind of stand there and watch the neighborhood. Now it turns out that that actually is a form of social control. It's actually people in the neighborhood taking control of the neighborhood and knowing who's in the neighborhood and who's not and identifying people who don't belong and identifying, you know, the regulars. And it's a form of social control in the sense that actually it's a way in which in some neighborhoods, people are trying to create order, okay? But it didn't fit, it didn't fit with the, kind of the more the cultural norms of those who, you know, the James Q. Wilson cultural norms, right? And so all of a sudden this form of behavior that which was a form of orderliness was being described as disorderly, but in a way it was identifying a minority community more than identifying disorder, right? And a lot of these forms of disorder actually when you start to kind of scratch at the surface, start to have racial correlations or ethnic correlations. And what we're talking about all of a sudden are, you know, Latino or black neighborhoods rather than quote unquote, disorderly neighborhoods. And one of the most fascinating is some scientists, some social scientists, Daniel Wallace and others, Rauch, Roddenbush, Rob Sampson and others, did some studies of how people identified disorder and they were comparing this one in Chicago, they did this incredible, they videotaped neighborhoods and they had people code and they had people identify disorder. And it turned out that with the same amount of disorder in a neighborhood, people saw more disorder in black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods. So with the identical, you know, with the identical factual disorderliness as defined by these metrics of disorder, they would identify more disorder in minority communities than in white communities, which goes a little bit with the way in which, you know, disorder is, there's an ideological dimension to disorder, right? There's an ideological dimension to disorder. It's simply not the case that all of these forms of disorder are what everybody would call disorder. Because what's critically important is that they're talking about disorder as distinct from crime and harm, because things that even are crimes or harms don't necessarily fall in the Wilson-Kallen category of disorder. In fact, they even say that, well, the police might need to do some things that aren't strictly legal in order to eliminate disorder, which is antisocial behavior. And, you know, you point out that, you know, corporate crime isn't considered, you know, wage theft. That wouldn't fall into the category of disorder, even though that's crime and harm. But Wilson would cite things like, you know, eccentric clothes and unusual hair. I think he says at one point might be some signs that things are starting. - Yeah, I mean, like, in fact, the word he used, the word he used was conch rags. - Oh, yeah. - Okay, which was, I mean, that's what James Q Wilson referred to as being kind of an indicator that things were spiraling, right? Which was a racially identified way of referring to a particular way of wearing your hair. You put your finger on probably the most interesting and tricky thing about disorder, is that in the Broken Windows essay, they talk about the fact that cops might have to use a little disorder themselves, in other words, right? - You know, and that's what's, that's what's so fascinating because, so what happens in New York City is that, you know, they start their Broken Windows policing in 1994. And, you know, two years later, '96, '98, four years later, crime has gone down, crime has gone down in New York City. It's gone down even more in a place like Los Angeles, which didn't even have Broken Windows policing. And in other cities throughout the country, but it's gone down, but what's gone up in New York, 60% are complaints of police misconduct. And so, you've got a situation in New York where crime's going down, but complaints of police misconduct are going up. And the question is, well, is that order, or is that disorder, right? And right there, you've got the whole problem. You've got the whole kind of made-up-ness of the theory because like, well, wait a minute, if complaints of police brutality are going up, 60% in New York City, maybe disorder has gone up, right? And there's the trick, right? How do you define disorder? Well, of course, you know, Giuliani and Bratton were not defining it by complaints of police brutality, right? They were identifying certain other things. And of course, maybe we would say, well, wait a minute, no, disorderliness has actually gone up. So what you end up realizing is that disorder and order are two of the most malleable terms we have in society. One person's order is another person's disorder. Exactly, right? Hence the title of the book, The Illusion of Order. You're creating something, a situation that we call order because you harassed and arrested a bunch of squeegee men. In doing so, you may have used illegal and unconstitutional violence, but we're going to put that in the bucket of order. And the thing is, it becomes clear in other points in their essay, you know, they talk about this police officer in New York and how he used to do community policing and what it entailed. And often, it entailed basically taking the side of the respectable citizens against those who were kind of mentally put in the bucket of the disorderly people. That's drunk people, but it's also, they say that he would always take the side of the business owner in a dispute with the customer, right? So it's clear that it's certain order means whether a certain segment of the population is happy with the way things are. Exactly, yeah, and not surprisingly, it usually lines up with race and class and ethnicity, right? I mean, that's one of the things about this that is so disturbing in a way. I mean, it created in our minds this idea of the disorderly, often minorities in New York City. And you know, you got to understand another reason that it became so popular was that for a lot of liberal New Yorkers at the time, you know, the guy, the panhandler, the guy on the corner asking for money, the guy, the homeless person on the street, you know, it was disturbing, it was very disturbing. It's not what you want to see when you're walking home from the office, you know, and you might be, you know, you might be liberal, but you know, still you feel bad, you don't know what to do. Well, all of a sudden that person has become the problem, the problem that you have to get rid of, right? And so you can kind of try to sweep those people away with police sweeps and you're no longer gonna have that nuisance, that moral nuisance, you're not gonna have to, you know, you're not gonna have to feel bad about the panhand or the homeless person or about not giving them money or about walking by and not doing anything because all of a sudden they've become the problem. So, you know, the police has to take them away, right? And I think in New York, that played a big role as well in making it so popular. It's kind of like turned a nuisance into something that the police had to get rid of. And so, you know, a lot was swept under the rug that way. Now, what's also particularly interesting about this theory is that it was, it came at a particular time, right? The mid-1990s, when New York was going through forms of gentrification and real estate development that in part were transforming New York, but that needed some justifications. And the broken windows theory was the perfect justification. So, Times Square was completely redesigned at this time. Now, it's important to understand, of course, those plans for Times Square had started in the 1970s. Those were plans that had been laid for, laid down in the 1970s, 1974 under Lindsay and other mayors for a radical redevelopment of Times Square, which used to be the red light district in New York and would become kind of, you know, the Disneyland that it is today with, you know, Nike Shops and pedestrians and whatnot walking. But it was a time when that kind of real estate redevelopment and redistribution needed to be justified, not just simply as, well, we're just going to make a lot of money, we're going to build new buildings and a lot of real estate developers are going to make a lot of money, but it also needed to be justified politically. And the broken windows theory served that role perfectly by saying, look, we're getting rid of the triple X adult stores down here in Times Square and we're going to reduce crime as a result. So it also served as this mask for real estate redevelopment and, you know, redistribution, large scale, wealth redistribution. Because you could say, well, we have to do it. You know, there's no argument because unless you deal with disorder, you are going to have terrible violence. And so we have no alternative. They're not really a debate about whether the squeegees should be legal. Yes, it's annoying to come and have someone spray your car when you didn't want them to and they leave a mess and then they want money from you. But not only is it annoying, but we need to arrest the squeegee man because if we don't, we are on, and it's essentially a slippery slope down towards complete chaos and dysfunction, which, you know, the more I think about it, is like a theory that I would want to see extraordinary empirical support for, because I know the story sounds compelling in one way, but also it sounds really counterintuitive in another way. That is to say, well, really, if we don't arrest like illegal, if we don't crack down on illegal dancing, that's what police should be spending their time on rather than actual murder of violence. Right. Exactly. What kind of resources are we putting into this? Right? Where are we putting our resources? Now, those would have been all the questions that should have been asked. But none were, really, in part because of the real grip that Giuliani had on the media. You have to understand this '94, '95, '96, and all the weight of 2001, when Giuliani becomes, you know, America's mayor, right? He really is at his height, tragically, following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. And in fact, it's really at that time that he, again, is touting broken windows. He's actually running for election at that time, just at the time of 9/11. He's trying to extend his mayoral mandate, actually, is what he's trying to do on the basis of the great job that he's done as mayor of New York and seeing us through the Twin Towers. There's an element, also, of people like a counterintuitive idea. I mean, you said it appears in the Malcolm Gladwell book, you know, when they pitched this to the Atlantic, you know, "What if?" It's one of those, like, "Everything you know about policing is wrong." And there's an incentive that publishers have, also, because we need to have original ideas. The old idea that police should just do the, you know, the boring work of going out and investigating murder. So, you know, "Well, what if, actually, the broken window?" And it's an easy, quick fix, too, it's like-- Right, right. It had everything going for it, except the facts. Except any empirical support whatsoever. Except any empirical support. And so the social science studies that come in to try and corroborate it are just fraught and just-- So, George Kelly does a few later on, but they just don't hold water. And then, of course, just the crime statistics don't hold water either, because although it's true that crime came down sharply in New York during the time, '94, '98, and '98, it's also true that it fell sharply in other cities. It fell dramatically across the United States. There was just a remarkable crime drop during that period. Starting in '91, actually, in New York, it starts in '91 under Dinkins. It wasn't, as a result of the broken windows policing, it kind of already started to go down, because the crack epidemic had reached its peak in 1991. So you see it across the country, but you also see it in towns and in cities and municipalities that do the exact opposite of broken windows policing, that have a kind of like, let's reduce arrests. You see this in San Diego, for instance, that had a very different policy. Of course, Los Angeles at this time had no functional policing. This was between Rodney King at the beginning of the '90s, and the Rampart scandal at the end of the '90s. And the LAPD was completely dysfunctional during this time, was not engaging broken windows policing. And they saw, you know, equivalent drops, and sometimes greater drops in like robberies and whatnot. So when you just compare like what's going on with overall crime as well, there was no real indication that it was working. But, you know, but Giuliani had the pulpit and the media at his fingers, and he was able to say, you know, the drop in crime here is broken windows. Well, that raises the question, what do we know about effective ways to reduce violence in society? If broken windows is a discredited theory on it. - Yeah, right. So this is, you know, this is a big source of debate. And, you know, I think we tested a lot of different approaches, different approaches, different policing approaches. We've tested different interventions, particularly, you know, drug treatment interventions, trying to reduce dependency on drugs, trying to deal with different drug trade activities. Legalizing licensing have been ways of addressing some of these things. So for instance, you know, the broken windows goes against prostitution, right? Well, there are certain places that have been working on having licensing of commercial sex. It's the case in some counties in Nevada. And so there have been a lot of other efforts that we've seen that have been able to address, you know, things that we would like to see addressed, like addiction behaviors. And they've proven to be much more successful in addressing those than kind of cracking down on them. The other thing is that the crackdowns have been very, you know, often caused unnecessary violence and harm. And I think we're experiencing that right now in New York. There were just reports of, there's been a recent police killing in New York involving someone who ran a turnstile and who was chased down and shot fatally. So there are lots of other ways, but you know, even like a turnstile jumping, right? You know, if turnstile jumping is a problem, well, you can have turnstiles that you can't jump, right? You can construct turnstiles that you can't jump, right? So there are just so many other ways to deal with this then through police action. And that was the point in part. Another big question is even if you believe in the broken windows theory, that doesn't mean that the answer is police aggressive arrests for misdemeanors. In other words, if graffiti is the problem, you can have, you know, the sanitation department deal with it. If turnstile jumping is the problem, you can have the MTA deal with it. You don't have to throw the cops at every problem. And that was another big source. - That's right. It actually stands separately as a causational theory of how violence occurs from the answer of what you do about it. There's this kind of assumption, this kind of leap to, "Oh, well, then you definitely have to arrest the panhandlers." You need, you know, you need the agents of the state to go drag these people off the street, but you could do a million things. - Right. You've basically got two theories in one, two explanations in one, right? You've got the explanation that disorder causes crime. But then you also have this separate explanation or theory that, well, you throw the police at the disorder and you arrest people and that's gonna reduce crime, right? That's another whole piece of it that, you know, we haven't even talked that much about, but it's like a whole other piece of this theory that there isn't good evidence for that. - And that piece of the theory, you know, to just go back to your saying and to kind of close out here, has done a lot of harm. The theory that you have to stop the disorder, which is minor things that may not even be illegal that are often proxies for poor people, essentially. And when you go back to this guy, Banfield's writings and it's pretty even more explicit in there that like the things poor people do are the problem with the city adopting that. I mean, has caused so many young black men to be stopped at frisk in New York and not just men. And, you know, people have their constitutional rights violated, so many violent police encounters. I mean, the harms of this one theory, I see we're a big part of why you were motivated enough by it to write the entire book on why it was wrong. - Yeah, you know, there was a lot going on in New York at the time. There was the Diallo assault, terrible stuff going on. You know, it was assaulted and well, it was just the broom handles and whatnot. I mean, so it just had a way of feeding a kind of aggressiveness in policing that obviously can often, you know, it can often go off the rails, right? And I think we saw it then. And I think we just saw it in New York again a couple of days ago. I think that this book might be due for a 20th anniversary edition. I was very depressed reading it. - An updated preface or something. - To look at how long ago, because at the time you wrote this, there hadn't been much criticism. This was kind of the first, I think this was the first book. - There was practically no criticism. And there's been very, very little criticism. Yeah, I mean, this was the first criticism of the theory and for many years, the only. - 'Cause it's been a lot of understanding now that mass incarceration is kind of a horror. But as you point out, there's this temptation to see this, whether rebranded a little bit as community policing for the good liberals who don't like the idea of being associated with, you know, disorder or no less community policing. But as you say, we really need to avoid the temptation to revive this theory. 'Cause you go through the evidence and you're like, there's just nothing for it. And I assume nothing has come out since that has changed your mind. - No, well, you know, since then I've done a number of other empirical studies testing, none of them panned out. I'd say that the social science consensus is pretty much that it's not a disorder causes crime phenomenon that that just isn't right. Now, you know, having a lot of police, which is the other aspect of it, you know, that can have some deterrent effects and costs, as we talked about, but in terms of, you know, is it broken windows policing? Nah, that doesn't pass us. - I think people owe it to themselves to pick up your book Illusion of Order, the False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, which hasn't aged a day in the last 20 years. Professor Bernard Harcourt, thank you so much for joining us on "Curd Affairs" today. - Thank you, Mr. Robinson. I enjoyed it greatly. Take care. (upbeat music) - The "Curd Affairs" podcast is a product of "Curt Affairs" magazine. If you are not subscribed to "Curt Affairs" magazine, visit currentaffairs.org/subscribe today and get our glorious print edition. The "Curt Affairs" podcast is released regularly, every week on patreon.com/currentaffairs. 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