Humankind

by Rutger Bregman

  4

  Almost forty years have passed since the broken windows article first ran in The Atlantic. During that time, Wilson and Kelling’s philosophy has percolated into the farthest reaches of the United States, and well beyond, from Europe to Australia. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell calls the theory a great success, and in my first book I was enthusiastic about it, too.32

  What I failed to realise was that by then few criminologists believed in it any longer. Actually, alarm bells should have started ringing as soon as I read in The Atlantic that Wilson and Kelling’s theory was based on one dubious experiment.

  In this experiment, a researcher left a car parked in a respectable neighbourhood for a week. He waited. Nothing happened. Then he returned with a hammer. No sooner had the researcher himself smashed one car window than the floodgates opened. Within a matter of hours, ordinary passers-by had demolished the car.

  The researcher’s name? Philip Zimbardo!

  Zimbardo’s car experiment, never published in any scientific journal, was the inspiration for the broken windows theory. And just like his Stanford Prison Experiment, this theory has since been thoroughly debunked. We know, for instance, that the ‘innovative’ policing of William Bratton and his Brattonistas was not responsible for the drop in New York City’s crime rates at all. The decline set in earlier, and in other cities, too. Cities like San Diego, where the police left minor troublemakers alone.

  In 2015, a meta-analysis of thirty studies on broken windows theory revealed that there’s no evidence Bratton’s aggressive policing strategies did anything to reduce crime.33 Zip, zero, zilch. Neighbourhoods aren’t made safer by issuing parking tickets, just as you couldn’t have saved the Titanic by scrubbing the deck.

  My initial reaction was: okay, so arresting bums and drunks doesn’t reduce serious crime. But it’s still good to enforce public order, right?

  This throws up a fundamental question. Whose ‘order’ are we talking about? Because as arrests in the Big Apple skyrocketed, so did the reports of police misconduct. By 2014, thousands of demonstrators were taking to the streets of New York and other US cities, including Boston, Chicago and Washington. Their slogan: ‘Broken windows, broken lives.’

  This was no exaggeration. In the words of two criminologists, aggressive policing was leading to citations for:

  … women eating doughnuts in a Brooklyn park; chess players in an Inwood park; subway riders for placing their feet on seats at 4am and an elderly Queens couple cited for no seatbelts on a freezing cold night while driving to purchase needed prescription drugs. Allegedly, the man was instructed to walk home to secure identification–a few blocks from the pharmacy. When he returned to the pharmacy, the officers already wrote the ticket using a prescription bottle as identification. The elderly man’s subsequent heart attack led to his death.34

  What had sounded so good in theory boiled down to more and more frivolous arrests. Commissioner Bratton became obsessed with statistics, and so did his officers. Those who could present the best figures were promoted, while those who lagged behind were called to task. The result was a quota system in which officers felt pressured to issue as many fines and rack up as many citations as possible. They even began fabricating violations. People talking in the street? Arrest ’em for blocking a public road. Kids dancing in the subway? Book ’em for disturbing the peace.

  Serious crimes were an entirely different story, investigative journalists later discovered. Officers were pressured to tone down their reports or skip them altogether, to avoid making departmental figures look bad. There are even cases of rape victims who were subjected to endless questioning in an attempt to trip them up on tiny inconsistencies. Then the incident wouldn’t be included in the data.35

  On paper, it all looked fantastic. Crime had taken a nosedive, the number of arrests were sky high and Commissioner Bratton was the hero of New York. In reality, criminals walked free while thousands of innocent people became suspects. To this day, police departments across the country still swear by Bratton’s philosophy–which is why scientists continue to consider US police statistics unreliable.36

  There’s more. The broken windows strategy has also proven synonymous with racism. Data show that a mere 10 per cent of people picked up for misdemeanours are white.37 Meanwhile, there are black teenagers who get stopped and frisked on a monthly basis–as they have been for years–despite never having committed an offence.38 Broken windows has poisoned relations between law enforcement and minorities, saddled untold poor with fines they can’t pay and also had fatal consequences, as in the case of Eric Garner, who died in 2014 while being arrested for allegedly selling loose cigarettes. ‘Every time you see me, you want to mess with me,’ Garner protested. ‘I’m tired of it… Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone.’

  Instead, the officer wrestled him to the ground and put him in a chokehold. Garner’s last words were ‘I can’t breathe.’

  Only now, years after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, have I come to realise the broken windows theory is underpinned by a totally unrealistic view of human nature. It’s yet another variant on veneer theory. It made police in New York treat ordinary people like potential criminals: the smallest misstep could supposedly be the first on a path to far worse. After all, our layer of civilisation is tenuously thin.

  Officers, meanwhile, were being managed as though they possessed no judgement of their own. No intrinsic motivation. They were drilled by their superiors to make their departments look as good as possible on paper.

  Does this mean we should forget about fixing actual broken windows? Of course not. It’s an excellent idea to repair windows, spruce up houses and listen to local people’s concerns. Just as an orderly prison radiates trust, a tidy neighbourhood feels much safer.39 And after you fix the windows, you can throw them wide open.

  But Wilson and Kelling’s argument wasn’t primarily about broken windows or poorly lit streets. The ‘broken window’ was a misleading metaphor. In practice, it was ordinary people who were being registered, restrained and regulated.

  Professor Wilson was steadfast to the end, maintaining right up to his death in 2012 that the Brattonista approach was a huge success. Meanwhile, his co-author was plagued by mounting doubts. George Kelling felt the broken windows theory had been too often misapplied. His own concern had always been about the broken windows themselves, not the arrest and incarceration of as many black and brown people as possible.

  ‘There’s been a lot of things done in the name of Broken Windows that I regret,’ Kelling admitted in 2016. When he began hearing police chiefs all over the country invoke his theory, two words flashed across his mind: ‘Oh s––t.’40

  What would happen if we turned the broken windows theory around? If we can redesign prisons, could we do the same with police departments?

  I think we can. In Norway–where else–there’s already a long tradition of community policing, a strategy that assumes most folks are decent, law-abiding citizens. Officers work to win community trust, informed by the idea that if people know you, they’ll be more likely to help out. Neighbours will give more tips, and parents will be quicker to call if their child seems to be heading down the wrong path.

  Back in the 1970s, Elinor Ostrom–the economist who researched the commons (see Chapter 15)–conducted the largest study ever into police departments in the United States. She and her team discovered that smaller forces invariably outperform bigger ones. They’re faster on the scene, solve more crimes, have better ties with the neighbourhood, and all at a lower cost. Better, more humane, less expensive.41

  In Europe, the philosophy of community policing has been around a while. Officers are used to coordinating with social services and even consider what they do a kind of social work.42 They’re also well trained. In the US, the average police training programme lasts just nineteen weeks, which is unthinkable in most of Europe. In countries like Norway and Germany, law enforcement traini
ng takes more than two years.43

  But some American cities are changing their approach. The people of Newark, New Jersey, elected a new, black mayor in 2014, and he had a clear vision of what modern policing in the city should look like. It requires officers, he said, ‘who know people’s grandmothers, who know the institutions of the community, who look at people as human beings […] that’s the beginning of it. If you don’t look at the people you’re policing as human, then you begin to treat them inhumanely.’44

  Could we take the principle of turning the other cheek even further? Absurd as the question may sound, I couldn’t help wondering: Could a non-complementary strategy also work in the war on terror?

  In my search for an answer I discovered that this strategy has been tried already–in fact, in my own country. Among experts, it’s even called the Dutch Approach. It began back in the seventies, when the Netherlands was confronted with a violent wave of leftist terrorism. The government didn’t enact new security laws, however, and the media did as law enforcement asked and limited coverage. While West Germany, Italy and the United States brought out the big guns–helicopters, road blocks, troops–the Netherlands refused to give terrorists the platform they wanted.

  In fact, the police refused to even use the word ‘terrorism’. They preferred ‘violent political activism’ or plain old ‘criminals’. Meanwhile, Dutch intelligence was busy behind the scenes, infiltrating extremist groups. They set their sights specifically on terrorists–sorry, criminals–without turning whole segments of the population into suspects.45

  This led to some comical situations, like a tiny Red Youth cell in which three of the four members were undercover agents. Carrying out attacks turned out to be pretty difficult when there was always someone off taking a bathroom break or holding the map upside down.

  ‘A behind-the-scenes, timely, cautious counterterrorism policy,’ concludes a Dutch historian, ‘brought the spiralling violence to a standstill.’46 When some of the Red Youth visited a terrorist training camp in Yemen, the Dutch terrorists were shocked by the intensity of the German and Palestinian fighters. It was downright scary. As one Dutch member later put it, ‘They took all the fun out of it.’47

  A more recent example of a turn-the-other-cheek approach comes from the Danish city of Aarhus. In late 2013, the police decided not to arrest or jail young Muslims who wanted to go and fight in Syria but to offer them a cup of tea instead. And a mentor. Family and friends were mobilised to make sure these teenagers knew there were people who loved them. At the same time, police strengthened ties with the local mosque.

  More than a few critics called the Aarhus approach weak or naive. But in truth, the police chose a bold and difficult strategy. ‘What’s easy,’ scoffed the police superintendent, ‘is to pass tough new laws. Harder is to go through a real process with individuals: a panel of experts, counselling, healthcare, assistance getting back into education, with employment, maybe accommodation […] We don’t do this out of political conviction; we do it because we think it works.’48

  And work it did. While in other European cities the exodus continued unabated, the number of jihadists travelling to Syria from Aarhus declined from thirty in 2013 to one in 2014 and two in 2015. ‘Aarhus is the first, to my knowledge, to grapple with [extremism] based on sound social psychology evidence and principles,’ notes a University of Maryland psychologist.49

  And then there’s Norway. People there managed to keep a cool head even after the most horrific attack in the country’s history. After the 2011 bloodbath perpetrated by right-wing extremist Anders Breivik, the country’s prime minister declared, ‘Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity.’50

  This kind of response often gets you accused of looking the other way, of choosing the easy path. But more democracy, more openness and more humanity are precisely what’s not easy. On the contrary, tough talk, retaliation, shutting down borders, dropping bombs, dividing up the world into the good guys and the bad–that’s easy. That’s looking the other way.

  5

  There are some moments when it becomes impossible to look away. When the truth refuses to be ignored. In October 2015, a delegation of North Dakota’s top prison officials experienced just such a moment.

  It happened during a work visit to Norway. For those who don’t know, North Dakota is a sparsely populated, conservative state. The incarceration rate is eight times as high as in Norway.51 And the prisons? They’re old-fashioned holding pens; all long corridors, bars and stern guards. The American officials didn’t expect to learn much from their trip. ‘I was arrogant,’ one said later. ‘What was I really going to see other than what I call the IKEA prison?’52

  But then they saw the prisons. Halden. Bastøy. The tranquillity. The trust. The way inmates and guards interact.

  Seated at the bar of the Radisson Hotel in Oslo one evening was the director of the North Dakota Department of Corrections. Leann Bertsch–known among her colleagues as tough and unbending–began to cry. ‘How did we think it was okay to put human beings in cagelike settings?’53

  Between 1972 and 2007, the number of people incarcerated in the United States, corrected for population growth, grew by more than 500 per cent.54 And those inmates are locked up for an average of sixty-three months–seven times longer than in Norway. Today, almost a quarter of the world’s prison population is behind American bars.

  This mass incarceration is the result of intentional policy. The more people you lock up, Professor James Wilson and his followers believed, the lower the crime rate. But the truth is that many American prisons have devolved into training grounds for criminals–costly boarding schools that produce more accomplished crooks.55 A few years ago, it came out that a mega-facility in Miami was cramming as many as twenty-four inmates into a single cell, from which they were let out for one hour twice a week. The result was a ‘brutal gladiatorial code of fighting’ among inmates.56

  Individuals released from these kinds of institutions are a genuine danger to society. ‘The vast majority of us become exactly who we are told we are,’ says one former California prison inmate: ‘violent, irrational, and incapable of conducting ourselves like conscious adults.’57

  When Leanne Bertsch returned from Norway, she realised things had to change in North Dakota prisons. She and her team formulated a new mission: ‘To implement our humanity.’58

  Step one? Shelve the broken windows strategy. Where before there had been regulations covering over three hundred violations–not tucking in your shirt, for instance, which could land you in solitary confinement–now all those nitpicky rules were scrapped.

  Next, a new protocol was drawn up for guards. Among other things, they had to have at least two conversations a day with inmates. This was a major transition and met with considerable resistance. ‘I was scared to death,’ one of the guards recalled. ‘I was scared for staff. I was scared for the facility. I was scared when we talked about specific guys leaving, and I was wrong.’59

  As the months passed, the guards began to take more pleasure in their work. They started a choir and painting classes. Staff and inmates began playing basketball together. And there was a notable reduction in the number of incidents. Before, there had been incidents ‘at least three or four times a week’, according to one guard. ‘Someone trying to commit suicide, or someone trying to flood their cell, or being completely disorderly. We haven’t hardly had any of that this year.’60

  Top officials from six other US states and counting have since taken trips to Norway. Director Bertsch in North Dakota continues to stress that reform is a matter of common sense. Locking away whole swaths of the population is just a bad idea. And the Norwegian model is demonstrably better. Less expensive. More realistic.

  ‘I’m not a liberal,’ swears Bertsch. ‘I’m just practical.’61

  17

  The Best Remedy for Hate, Injustice and Prejudice

  1

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea behind the No
rwegian prisons. If we can turn the other cheek with criminals and would-be terrorists, then maybe we can apply the same strategy on a larger scale. Maybe we can bring together sworn enemies and even stamp out racism and hatred.

  I was reminded of a story I’d come across in a footnote somewhere, but hadn’t pursued. A tale of two brothers who for decades stood on opposing sides, yet in the end managed to prevent a full-blown civil war. Sounds like a good story, doesn’t it? In a pile of old notes, I found the brothers’ names, and after that, I wanted to know everything about them.

  2

  The story of the brothers is inextricably bound up with one of the most renowned figures of the twentieth century. On 11 February 1990, millions of people sat glued to their televisions to see him. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for twenty-seven years, became a free man on that day. Finally, there was hope for peace and reconciliation between black and white South Africans. ‘Take your guns, your knives and your pangas,’ shouted Mandela shortly after his release, ‘and throw them into the sea!’1

  Four years later, on 26 April 1994, the first elections were held for all South Africans. Again the images were enthralling: endless lines at the polling stations, twenty-three million voters in all. Black men and women old enough to remember the start of apartheid casting ballots for the first time in their lives. Helicopters that once brought death and destruction, now dropping pencils and paper ballots.

  A racist regime had fallen and a democracy was born. Two weeks later, on 10 May, Mandela was sworn in as the country’s first black president. During his inauguration, fighter jets flashed across the sky tracing vapour trails in the colours of the Rainbow Nation. Combining green, red, blue, black, white and gold, the new South African flag was the most colourful on earth.