No abstract

Something dramatic happened in New York City in 1994: a lot of people stopped committing crimes, especially violent ones. The reduction in the number of persons committing murders, for example, while not unprecedented,' was extraordinary. Since 1994, a debate has raged about why this happened. Putting our position up front, we believe the police played an important, even central, role in getting people to stop committing crime in New York City. Despite arguments to the contrary,' no evidence exists that the substantial drops in crime in New York City, especially the initial ones when one of the authors of this paper, William Bratton, was commissioner, were the result of economic change, changes in drug use patterns, or demographic changes. Arguably, New York City's economy, drug use patterns, and demography might be different now in 1998. Unemployment was at 10% the month Bratton took over the New York City Police Department (NYPD) (January 1994) and at 8.7% when he resigned (April 1996)-hardly a booming economy.' And remember as well, the initial reductions in crime were so steep that by August of 1995-three years ago, but only twenty months after Bratton took office-New York maga

No abstract

Police order maintenance activities are important but controversial. They are controversial because there is no clear and consistent definition of what constitutes disorder and because the justification for police intervention in disorderly situations in uncertain. Some behavior that creates disorder is illegal and the basis for intervention is clear: the law. Other behavior that creates disorder is not illegal; instead, it violates community or neighborhood expectations of what constitutes appropriate civil behavior. Under such circumstances a primary basis for police intervention is the political will of the community.

In our 1982 essay, ''The Police and Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows,'' James Q. Wilson and I contended that disorderly conditions and behavior like public urination, graffiti, aggressive panhandling, and public drunkenness seriously disrupted urban life (Wilson and Kelling 1982). Further, we speculated that disorderly conditions and behavior could be sequentially linked to serious crime, as citizens become fearful and retreat from public spaces predatory behavior increases. We illustrated the argument with a metaphor: Just as a broken window left untended is a sign that nobody cares and leads to more broken windows, so disorderly behavior and conditions left untended are signs that nobody cares and lead to increased disorder, citizen fear of crime, serious crime, and urban decay. Moreover, we contended that even though maintaining order had traditionally been a core police function, for a variety of reasons police had withdrawn from most order maintenance activities during the mid-twentieth century. Although we believed that police should do something about disorder, at that time we were not sure what-concerned as we were about issues of justice, equity, and racism and limited by the state of police thinking of the time. Contemporary readers should understand: ''Broken Windows'' was written in 1982 when community policing and problem solving were