Does New York City’s ‘broken windows’ policing work? New report says no.
/For more than 30 years, activists, experts and police chiefs have been divided over the New York City Police Department’s “broken windows” method of policing. The idea — championed by Bill Bratton during his first and current tenures as New York’s police commissioner — is that cracking down on petty crimes like vandalism and public urination generates an atmosphere of lawfulness that then prevents more serious crime.
Now that debate is playing out within Bratton’s own NYPD with warring reports. The latest, released Wednesday by NYPD’s watchdog inspector general, finds no evidence that huge crack-downs on low-level “quality-of-life” incidents decrease felony crimes.
That study directly contradicts a report by Bratton’s NYPD last year that claims the exact opposite — that quality-of-life policing was responsible for fewer felony crimes in New York.
Wednesday’s report — by DOI Commissioner Mark Peters and NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure — takes direct aim at the “broken windows” policy that Bratton famously began pushing in the 1990s. Their report notes the cost of that policy “in police time, in an increase of the number of people brought into the criminal justice system and, at times, in a fraying of the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.” [MORE]
