by Chris Hayes
The jungle. The primordial land of disorder and unruly natives, the precincts outside civilization’s control. And this disorder, they suggested, could also eventually lead to crime in a self-fulfilling vicious circle.
At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. 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. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)
Kelling spent time with a white Newark foot patrolman he called Kelly and watched as he enforced order in a run-down but bustling transit hub in the city: telling teenagers to quiet down, instructing drunks to keep their bottles in paper bags and drink only on side streets rather than the major thoroughfares: “Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as ‘enforcing the law,’ ” Kelling and Wilson noted, “but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.”
Here we see one of the earliest articulations of the theoretical distinction between the Colony and the Nation. Newark circa 1982 was a city in the midst of massive white flight in the wake of pitched battles over school busing and housing integration. It was poor and mostly black. Kelling and Wilson were arguing, unapologetically, that in these precincts of the Colony, order should matter more than law.
Hundreds of years of historical weight rode on such a pronouncement, and yet the authors repeatedly referenced race only to quickly wave it away. At a few moments they seemed painfully unaware of their own racial blind spots. “Our experience,” they wrote, “is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer.”
Really?
“Broken windows” was an impulse before it was a theory. Kelling and Wilson were up front about the fact they were offering nothing new but rather a return to the “folk wisdom” of those residents who believed that disorder was contagious. They fondly recalled the good old days, when cops could just do whatever they felt necessary to keep the toughs in line.
The police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were roughed up, people were arrested “on suspicion” or for vagrancy, and prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. “Rights” were something enjoyed by decent folk.
This last line about rights is important. Kelling and Wilson seem implicitly to have been hostile to the kind of rights-based proceduralism that flowed from the Warren Court. They were urging the return to a bygone era when cops were local authorities who enforced community norms of order, rather than enforcers of the law within the confines of explicit constitutional rights. They suggested that police could help a community maintain order, but that the standards for order must come from the community itself.
In this sense, the “broken windows” approach began as a call for what liberals today approvingly call “community policing”—the “community” and the police collaborating to identify problems and protect citizens. The article is predicated on a study that required cops to get out of their cars and actually walk their beats, a key pillar of today’s “community policing.” Yet in the modern vocabulary of policing theory, “broken windows” has become shorthand for the polar opposite: aggressive, community-antagonistic, clean-’em-up vigilantism.
The problem with “community policing,” then and now, is that so often the cops being called to enforce community norms are not part of the community. And Kelling and Wilson’s celebrated “earlier period” of lone wolf policing looks pretty different to black residents of major cities. In the study that inspired the article, the cops were almost all white and the citizens of the Newark neighborhoods almost all black. Just how likely was it that hundreds of young white men in inner-city Newark were going to be the vessels through which that predominantly African American community enforced its own norms and order? Kelling and Wilson recognized this problem but ultimately shrugged their shoulders.
How do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?
We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question.
And yet Kelling and Wilson offered a comforting vision, at least for some: police as neighborhood watchmen, telling the unruly boys to knock it off and helping the old ladies cross the street. Assessing the city after desegregation and the great crime wave, they gave expression to and quasi-social-scientific justification for a generalized feeling, a hunch, lying in the white American subconscious: that all this disorder, this dirtiness, this filth and graffiti and brokenness must be cleaned. It must be washed. It must be ordered. This was the cri de coeur of the (oddly sympathetic) sociopathic Travis Bickle, who surveyed the New York of 1976 in Taxi Driver and said,
All the animals come out at night.
Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.
Sick, venal.
Someday a real rain will come and wash this scum off the streets.
As a theory, “broken windows” played a perfect explanatory role for politicians and policy makers. If disorder leads to crime, well then, we need to crack down on disorder. And cracking down on disorder was something the police could do. The liberal theory of the causes of crime—that it was born of racism, segregation, oppression, poverty, and disinvestment—painted a picture of the problem that required a set of solutions far above what the local beat cops could provide. The federal and state governments would have to not just cooperate with such an agenda but prioritize it, mobilize for the domestic policy equivalent of war. Wealth would have to be redistributed, students would have to be bused, housing laws would have to be enforced, and on and on. Getting rid of the “ghetto” as an institution would require a full, multigenerational commitment to making racial equality a genuine, lived economic reality in America. That was a social project for which, frankly, white voters had (and continue to have) little appetite.
“Broken windows,” on the other hand, offered an elegantly simple and eminently implementable program. No need for messy discussions about integration, equality, racial justice, and capital flows. No need to face the wrath of angry parents at town halls furious that their kids were being sent to a “bad school” thirty minutes away. Just start enforcing order, and the signal would be sent to criminals to behave.
Back in 1982, when Kelling and Wilson wrote their famous article, they didn’t even pretend to claim that enforcing order would lead to reductions in crime. Their argument was about the sentiment of the community (making residents “feel” safer). And they threw up their hands at the intractability of crime in the most desolately disinvested neighborhoods: “Some neighborhoods are so demoralized and crime-ridden as to make foot patrol useless.”
Despite these caveats, “broken windows” soon became an article of faith among the nation’s law enforcement leaders, chief among them Bill Bratton, who had been hired in 1990 to run the police department of New York’s transit authority. Kelling had been hired in 1985 as a consultant. Bratton embraced the man as his intellectual mentor and set about putting his theory into practice, ramping up enforcement of fare jumping, graffiti, and open containers. The highly publicized results were striking to even casual commuters: the subways became cleaner, less graffiti-riddled, and more pleasant to occupy. The year after Bratton assumed office, the total number of violent crimes in the subways declined 15 percent.
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Three years later, when Rudy Giuliani was elected on a “quality of life” platform that promised, in its own way, to wash the city clean with a “real rain,” Bratton was promoted to take over the entire NYPD. He set about ridding the city of the scourge of the squeegee men, who for Giuliani had become a kind of iconic symbol of the city’s disorder.
At this very moment crime in America reached a national tipping point. In 1993 crime started dropping in pretty much all categories nationwide, and then it just kept dropping. Nowhere in the country did it drop as swiftly or as dramatically as New York City. “While there is some variance by type of crime, the best rule of thumb for comparing the magnitude of New York City’s crime decline to that of the rest of the United States is that any crime drop for the rest of the United States is doubled in New York City,” criminologist Franklin Zimring observes. “In the same spirit that media were prone to choose a city as the ‘murder capital’ of the United States when crime statistics were issued, New York City was beyond dispute the Crime Decline Capital of the United States in the 1990s.”
Bratton became the face of this crime decline, featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1996 with the triumphant headline “Finally We’re Winning the War Against Crime. Here’s Why.” In large part because New York was the star city of the crime drop, the “broken windows” approach was adopted in city after city. Bratton subsequently left New York to head up the LAPD, where he also put his methods to work. He published a best-selling memoir with the immodest title Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.
While the actual role that “broken windows” policing played in the dramatic drop in crime is still hard to disentangle (about which more in a moment), one thing is certain: its implementation fundamentally and permanently altered the city in two distinct, indelible ways. First, it completely changed the mise-en-scène of city life, erasing the seediness that colored my youth. As the Giuliani era hit full bloom, you would hear cheery pronouncements from out-of-town visitors about how transformed Manhattan was: So clean! So accessible! So much more inviting!
Second, “broken windows” as a philosophy of urban governance altered the administration of justice in New York City. Issa Kohler-Hausmann, who’s done some of the most thorough empirical work on New York City’s “quality of life” arrests, notes that while arrests for low-level offenses skyrocketed, the actual rate of criminal convictions dropped. She argues that “broken windows” actually created a parallel court system, with an altogether different set of goals.
Misdemeanor justice in New York City has largely abandoned what I call the adjudicative model of criminal law administration—concerned with adjudicating guilt and punishment in specific cases—and instead operates under what I call the managerial model—concerned with managing people over time through engagement with the criminal justice system over time.
In other words, New York constructed an entire new judicial system around low-level offenses. The goal of this system is not to figure out if the person in question committed a crime but to sort city residents according to their obedience and orderliness. So expansive is this system of misdemeanor sorting that in a city that’s 80 percent less violent than it was two decades ago, the NYPD makes thousands of arrests a year of people who are doing things like selling M&Ms on the subway. Similar explosions of small-infraction misdemeanor citations, and summons happened across the country, from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to Ferguson.
This system of order maintenance, in which unruly citizens are marked and sorted, in which seediness is kept at bay, so that the Nation can stay pristine and inviting, confers tremendous benefits, wealth, and comfort on some and widespread harassment and misery on others.
New York went from rundown and dangerous to glossy and glamorous, and the transformation unleashed a geyser of cash. Between 1991 and 2015 the number of visitors to the city more than doubled, from 29 million to 58 million. The amount those visitors spent annually quadrupled from $10 billion to $40 billion.
Colleges and universities across the city saw an application boom, just one small indication of how the city’s ebbing “seediness” conferred tangible, material economic benefits on its institutions and businesses. But more than anything, the drop in crime and the palpable decline in disorder produced one of the greatest increases in real estate value in American history.
I SAW IT HAPPEN firsthand.
Every day from seventh grade until I graduated high school, I rode an express bus from the Bronx down to my school on the Upper East Side. The route passed through Harlem, one of New York’s most legendary neighborhoods. Once upon a time Harlem was affluent, an uptown proto-suburb, away from the crowds, noise, and stench of nineteenth-century downtown Manhattan. Its opulence in certain quarters persisted into the twentieth century as it became the intellectual and artistic capital of black life in America.
By 1991, when I started passing through Harlem, decades of government policy had crowded it with housing projects, while starving it of capital through redlining. But the beauty of Harlem was always there even amid the physical disintegration that comes with poverty.
At 125th Street, Fifth Avenue dead-ends at Marcus Garvey Park, a lovely eight-square-block patch of green with a swimming pool and recreation center, ringed on all sides by stately brownstones built just after 1900. In my youth, the buildings were derelict and almost all abandoned, and the park was, well, seedy. A halfway house stood on an adjacent block. But I was taken with what a staggeringly lovely spot it was. I used to dream of that park and those stately buildings peering out over it.
Fast-forward to 2016, and one of the brownstones on the western border of the park is listed for $5 million. “Mount Morris Park West is one of the most sought after blocks if not the most sought after block in prime Harlem!!!,” exclaims the listing, describing it as
situated on a quiet residential area, but it is also surrounded by various shopping, great restaurants, and transportation. Soon to be finished Whole Foods around the corner on 125th and Lenox; furthermore local restaurants include celeb chef Marcus Samuelson’s Red Rooster, as well as Corner Social, Cheri, Maison Harlem, Chez Lucienne, and many more.
Just around the block from that house, on the south side of Marcus Garvey Park, stands a luxury high-rise, Fifth on the Park, built in 2007. A three-bedroom apartment goes for about $2.4 million. You can’t help but notice that the official real estate listing calls Marcus Garvey Park by its original, decidedly less black-separatist name, Mount Morris Park.
For so long change had gone in one direction: toward flight, ruin, and entropy. Then the great crime wave subsided, and the tide reversed. In many of the places where real estate prices have skyrocketed, from Harlem to Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, little has changed in the neighborhood’s actual fundamentals. Like those buildings along the park, these places always featured proximity to subways, beautiful architecture, and tree-lined streets, and they have been, for decades, predominantly black and brown neighborhoods. The only thing that made them cheap was the self-fulfilling financial logic of the ghetto: no money was to be made in improving the place because only poor people were going to live there.
It wasn’t the race of the residents of these neighborhoods that changed first but the levels of crime and danger and (perhaps even more importantly) the perception of same. And with that change in perception, access to capital opened dramatically. Getting a loan for a brownstone in, say, Bed-Stuy in the mid-1960s had been difficult if not impossible. In the Bronx, capital was so scarce that an entire system of government programs and nonprofits was created to funnel money into building renovations and improvements. (I worked summer jobs at one of these organizations, the University Neighborhood Housing Program.)
That chapter of urban history now feels very remote. Today interest rates are low, cash is cheap, prices are going up, and the holders of great wealth—banks, hedge funds, individual rich people—are looking to invest in New York real estate. The sheer amount o
f real estate wealth created in the city in the last twenty years is staggering to contemplate. At the beginning of 1998, according to data from Zillow, the total value of all New York City residential real estate was about $283 billion (adjusted for inflation). By April 2014, that value had more than tripled to $935 billion. That’s $650 billion in just residential real estate value created in less than two decades.
New York is the place where crime dropped the most, and where the cumulative value of real estate almost certainly exploded with the biggest boom. But city after city has experienced versions of the same thing: drops in crime, spikes in real estate prices, and a process of gentrification that has pushed up rents for poor and working-class people, creating a nationwide affordability crisis. In 1984 poor Americans spent 35 percent of their income on rent. By 2014 that was 41 percent, with fully half of renters below the poverty line spending most of their total income to keep a roof over their head.
In Evicted, Matthew Desmond shows a snapshot of how this played out in one American city, Milwaukee. Due to rising rents, the poor are constantly behind on their bills, their homes are contingent on the generosity of their landlords, and they move from apartment to apartment in a state of constant desperate disruption.
From Milwaukee to New York, the process of real estate wealth creation has often come at the direct expense of the city’s poor. “Whatever positive effects the demographic shifts in Brooklyn are creating,” Raphael Ruttenberg, who works as a tenants’ lawyer in the borough, tells me, “the devastation has been profound. The poor of the city are being crushed under the wheel of progress. Entire neighborhoods are being effectively cleansed of the working poor who have been there for decades.”
Ruttenberg gave me an example of how this works in practice, in a building in the far eastern reaches of Brooklyn, a bleeding-edge frontier in the city’s gentrification map. The neighborhood is firmly in the Colony now, but not for long if its new owners have their way. In one building he represents, the landlords who bought the place in 2014 offered the tenants, all black and Hispanic, $10,000 to leave. When most balked ($10,000 sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t go far in the Brooklyn rental market), the landlords lowered the buyout fee to $4,000. Then as Ruttenberg described it to me: