Broken Windows and Community Social Control: Evidence from a Study of Street Segments

Abstract

Objectives Broken windows theory identifies community social control as a central mechanism for controlling crime. In turn, controlling disorder is seen as the primary method that police or other government agents can use to strengthen community social controls. Our study examined the antecedents of informal community social control, measured as collective efficacy, at street segments. Methods This article leverages multi-wave primary data collection at 447 street segments in Baltimore, MD including official crime statistics, survey responses, physical observations, and systematic social observations. We used mixed-effects OLS regression models to examine antecedents of collective efficacy at the street-level. Results We find that social disorder and crime, rather than physical disorder, are the primary antecedents of collective efficacy at the street-level. We also find that fear of crime does not have a direct impact on collective efficacy. Conclusions Our study suggests that police and city government more generally should not look to controlling physical disorder as a means of increasing community controls. At the same time addressing social disorder is an important mechanism to bolster collective efficacy, though care is needed to avoid bias or backfire effects from aggressive order-maintenance policing.

Building “A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth” through problem‐oriented community organizing: A quasi‐experimental evaluation

“…This observation is important because it shows that community engagement exists and can be cultivated even in high-crime communities, which contrasts with traditional ideas about social disorganization (e.g., Skogan, 1989) but aligns with more recent research showing that although hot spots of crime do have lower levels of collective efficacy than non-hot spots, levels are higher than we might assume (Kuen et al, 2022;Weisburd et al, 2023;Weisburd, White, et al, 2021). The creation of ABSPY's Community Task Force demonstrated that within a handful of microplaces, there may be literally hundreds of people with interest, good ideas, and willingness to participate, if the right steps are taken to conduct outreach and mobilize them.…”