Quality of Life Enforcement

[sheclown]

Here is an article from Giuliani illustrating the origins of "Quality of Life" and broken window theory.  This is the foundation on which the "Quality of Life" policing is based here in Jacksonville.  I think this approach is problematic, but I wanted to post it as a beginning to this discussion.

Archives of Rudolph W. Giuliani

The Next Phase of Quality of Life:
Creating a More Civil City
Wednesday, February 24, 1998


We've come this far because we have focused on people respecting the rights of others. We have made the "Broken Windows" theory an integral part of our law enforcement strategy. This theory says that the little things matter. As James Q. Wilson describes it, "If a factory or office window is broken, passersby observing it will conclude that no one cares or no one is in charge. In time, a few will begin throwing rocks to break more windows. Soon all the windows will be broken, and now passersby will think that, not only is no one in charge of the building, no one is in charge of the street on which it faces.. so more and more citizens will abandon the street to those they assume prowl it. Small disorders lead to larger ones, and perhaps even to crime."

In other words, if a climate of disorder and lack of mutual respect is allowed to take root, incidence of other, more serious antisocial behavior will increase. There's a continuum of disorder. Obviously, murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other. A city in which an increasing number of people respect and are willing to accommodate the rights of others is a city that's moving in a progressive direction.

The broken windows theory works. Just last week police officers noticed a man who was acting suspiciously. After keeping a close watch on the man for a time, the officers caught the man recklessly jaywalking. He was served a summons, and when they took him to the precinct they discovered that he was wanted in connection with a number of robberies. We might not have gotten this dangerous man off the streets if we hadn't caught him committing a lesser offense.

And in fact, last Wednesday when the Police Department conducted a comprehensive quality of life sweep North of 57th Street in Manhattan involving both transit and precinct units, they uncovered a variety of serious offenses. In this sweep, police made four felony arrests: for grand larceny, drug possession, assault, and promoting gambling. [There were 66 misdemeanor arrests, four violations, 244 A-Summonses, 44 B-Summonses, 166 C-Summonses, 36 E-C-D Summonses. They conducted 16 Bus Checks, and 70 subway vertical patrol checks.] They found violations and crimes including disorderly conduct, open container possession, littering, trespassing, loitering for prostitution, public urination, possession of a controlled substance, loitering for drugs, unlicensed possession of a knife, obstructing sidewalk, gambling, and a wide range of traffic, parking, and environmental control violations.

The fact is if you concentrate on the little things, and send the clear message that this City cares about maintaining a sense of law and order, which is another way of saying people respecting the rights of other people, then the City as a whole will begin to become safer. The very reason laws exist in the first place is so that people's rights can be protected, and that includes the right not to be disturbed, agitated, and abused by others.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/rwg/html/98a/quality.html

[sheclown]

Under Giuliani, Broken Windows started out as a good faith effort to reduce serious crime by going after petty crime. But over time it evolved into a branding mechanism, a means for relentlessly associating New York City's renaissance with Mayor Giuliani's face. Today, Broken Windows is among the most universally discredited theories in the social sciences. Study after study has concluded there is no causal link between the reduction in nuisance crimes, like turnstile jumping or aggressive panhandling, and the reduction in serious crimes, like robbery and murder. And this was easily inferable at the time. The reduction in New York City's crime rate was echoed nationally, in many cities that did not employ Quality of Life policing. In retrospect, the principal causes behind New York City's crime drop had nothing to do with Giuliani. They included: a receding of the '80s crack epidemic, a growth in the prison population thanks to the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, an increase in the numbers of police initiated by Giuliani's predecessor, and possibly, as the Freakonomics authors famously argued, the legalization of abortion a generation earlier. But, as the journalist Wayne Barrett says in Giuliani Time, "this mythology that Rudy Giuliani single-handedly supercopped, and conquered, crime in New York City" is now in the "bloodstream" of Americans.

to read the rest of the article

http://www.slate.com/id/2141424/

[sheclown]

Under the guise of academic dispassion, then, Broken Windows became a vehicle for exciting the well-developed antipathies of Giuliani's core constituency. That constituency was made up of working-class whites, the (largely white) middle and upper classes, commuters, tourists, and large corporations. There's nothing wrong with that coalition, and kowtowing to wealthy stakeholders can make for a healthier city. But as the city's misery index fell, and then fell precipitously, Giuliani struggled nonsensically to keep alive old habits of urban demonology while maintaining his stature as the lonely defender of civic virtue. "I believe it's the way to create a civilized society," Giuliani had said in term one, referring to respect for the city's cops. Fair enough, and coming out of the '80s, no doubt the Big Apple deserved a series of stern lectures on public decorum. But by his second term, Giuliani had evolved from a reasoned municipal savior into a demented scold. It wasn't in spite of, but because of Broken Windows, whichâ€"once the squeegee men had all been retiredâ€"required ever more outlandish "causes" to feed a waning public spite. "Streets do not exist in civilized cities for the purpose of people sleeping there," Giuliani says in term two, as he attempts to bulldoze Manhattan clear of the homeless, adding: "Bedrooms are for sleeping." (Yes, but … one still sputters in disbelief at this logic.) In his losing battle with the Brooklyn Museum, in which he tried to de-fund the institution for displaying art he found distasteful, he announced, "Civilization has been about trying to find the right place to put excrement, and it is not on the walls of museums."

http://www.slate.com/id/2141424/

[sheclown]

"Motives" describe individual actions by emphasizing the individual actor's free will. "Causes" describe individual actions by de-emphasizing the individual actor's free will, in favor of impersonal forces like the weather or poverty. Broken Windows was crucial to Giuliani's image because it allowed him to keep alive both the vocabulary of motives and causes. On the one hand he could spin out an entirely plausible and, on its face, statistically sophisticated argument, complete with charts and graphs, about the causes of crime. On the other hand, his conclusions about those causes allowed him to deploy the conservative shibboleth about crime: that its principal engine wasn't impersonal forces, like unemployment or poverty, but the deterioration of personal responsibility, especially at the hands of liberal do-gooders. As the University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt puts it in the film, "What the theory was able to do really was transform something that was viewed as a public nuisance into something viewed as a positive harm. So all of a sudden this panhandler on the street is not just a pain in the neckâ€"it turns out that actually it's because of the panhandler that we have such high rates of crime."

http://www.slate.com/id/2141424/

Broken Window theory is able to scapegoat the poorest among us so no longer do we, as a society, feel the need to take care of the helpless, we now make them the cause of all crime and feel the need and/or responsibility to punish them for it.

[fsu813]

I think people expounded on BW theory further than orginally intended.

"Study after study has concluded there is no causal link between the reduction in nuisance crimes, like turnstile jumping or aggressive panhandling, and the reduction in serious crimes, like robbery and murder."

From my reading, it was originally meant to address neighborhood crimes......not commerical/business crimes of turnstile jumping & bank robbery.

From my own observations, a crime is more likely to be committed where house/area seems unkept, unattended, and not cared about much more than a "nice" house/area where it's obvious that people pay attention to things. I think this is common sense, personally.....and is in essence BW theory.

Every theory has it's limits, and I think that once you try and expand it to cover all sorts of other things it won't quite fit correctly. Perhaps some types of non-environmental issues are effected by BW theory as well, but I think it's a mistake to try and include all crimes into the fold under all cirumstances, in all environments.

[buckethead]

These articles sound a bit vitriolic.

[UpOn2Wheels]

Whether you admire Rudy or think he's a jackbooted thug with a Napoleon complex, there's no denying that his tactics made NYC a safer place to be.

NYC under Ed Koch and David Dinkins was a festering shithole filled with crime.  Getting mugged was just part of the New York experience.  I can't count the number of close calls I had getting to Port Authority late at night.

Under Giuliani, NYC at night was about as dangerous as Des Moines.

[thelakelander]

From my own observations, a crime is more likely to be committed where house/area seems unkept, unattended, and not cared about much more than a "nice" house/area where it's obvious that people pay attention to things. I think this is common sense, personally.....and is in essence BW theory.

Every theory has it's limits, and I think that once you try and expand it to cover all sorts of other things it won't quite fit correctly. Perhaps some types of non-environmental issues are effected by BW theory as well, but I think it's a mistake to try and include all crimes into the fold under all cirumstances, in all environments.

Ramping up enforcement in high crime areas over safer ones makes sense and is a good use of limited resources and manpower.  The injustice comes if the policing method includes penalizing people for minor infractions in one neighborhood and letting those violating the same laws in another go untouched/unstopped.  That's poor social policy.

[Springfielder]

I understand what you're saying, but it's clearly a useful tool when it comes to not only showing police presence, but it often leads to an arrest for a more serious offense. To me, that's well worth the effort. It takes more guns, drugs and thugs off the streets.

So yeah, we can demand that the same practices be strictly enforced in the lower crime impacted areas, but that would result in a waste of good policing efforts. If this is what's demanded, then I would venture to say that crime rates will increase.

[thelakelander]

Then, it may just be as simple as this.  A portion of society is fine with policies that continue to breed separatism and division, as opposed to exploring other policies that can be just as effective in reducing crime. While we've come a long way in the last 40 years, we have a long way to go.

[buckethead]

From my own observations, a crime is more likely to be committed where house/area seems unkept, unattended, and not cared about much more than a "nice" house/area where it's obvious that people pay attention to things. I think this is common sense, personally.....and is in essence BW theory.

Every theory has it's limits, and I think that once you try and expand it to cover all sorts of other things it won't quite fit correctly. Perhaps some types of non-environmental issues are effected by BW theory as well, but I think it's a mistake to try and include all crimes into the fold under all cirumstances, in all environments.

Ramping up enforcement in high crime areas over safer ones makes sense and is a good use of limited resources and manpower.  The injustice comes if the policing method includes penalizing people for minor infractions in one neighborhood and letting those violating the same laws in another go untouched/unstopped.  That's poor social policy.

I agree with the above. Taking it a step futher, one can see where such practices would actually prove counter productive by creating a sentiment of "us vs them" between petty offenders and law enforcement. It also creates division between segments of populace.

[Springfielder]

Then, it may just be as simple as this.  A portion of society is fine with policies that continue to breed separatism and division, as opposed to exploring other policies that can be just as effective in reducing crime. While we've come a long way in the last 40 years, we have a long way to go.

I didn't say that there should be anything to breed separatism and/or division, but come on, can you really say that crime isn't higher in certain areas, and that it's important to try and combat it isn't important? Do you really feel that using the same techniques in every area is what will stop people from feeling that they're being treated so unfairly, when arrests are made and criminals with guns and drugs are then taken off the streets?

I feel that if the neighborhood would step up to the plate, take ownership and fight to take back their neighborhood, then in turn, they'd see a change in police having to use such minor infractions for probable cause to stop someone. But it starts with the people in these neighborhoods to do something positive towards making it a more livable neighborhood. People need to stop blaming the police for doing their job, for making the efforts they do to get these thugs off the streets and using lawful means at their disposal to do so.

If the crime wasn't so prevalent in these areas, then there wouldn't be the need to stop someone for walking in the streets instead of the sidewalk, there wouldn't be the stopping people for minor offenses that all too often lead to the discovery of more serious issues. It's a matter of aligning the priorities, and understanding that the police are doing the best they can to keep people safe, to rid the neighborhood of those that don't have the best interest of a lawful, clean and decent neighborhood at heart.

[thelakelander]

This pretty much wraps up my position on this.

Ramping up enforcement in high crime areas over safer ones makes sense and is a good use of limited resources and manpower.  The injustice comes if the policing method includes penalizing people for minor infractions in one neighborhood and letting those violating the same laws in another go untouched/unstopped.  That's poor social policy.

Taking it a step futher, one can see where such practices would actually prove counter productive by creating a sentiment of "us vs them" between petty offenders and law enforcement. It also creates division between segments of populace.

[Springfielder]

Then as far as I see from the responses (including my own) that the division as you say, will continue. I personally am thrilled that there's a strong police presence in the higher crime areas, I'm thrilled each and every time a thug, a gun, or person who has committed crimes against society, etc has been stopped and taken off the streets. I am perfectly fine with stopping someone for a minor infraction when it usually leads to one of the listed above, is the end result.

I personally work within my community, because I give a damn about it. I expel my energy into keeping the neighborhood clean and crime free. It's the efforts such as this and the policing such as you dislike that have made my neighborhood a safer, cleaner and more people friendly place to live. I can (and do) feel comfortable with being outside at night, I feel confident that my neighbors are watching out for my safety, as I do theirs.

Springfield was not always a safe place, it was not always a clean place...but it sure is now that I and many like me have taken that step forward, who have not denounced the policing tactics used to help rid our neighborhood of those who wish us harm or those who want to steal what we have. Instead of whining about how the police are so unfair, we welcomed their efforts, in fact, we asked for it.

Perhaps this is what sets us aside, and what keeps us from feeling that we're being treated unfairly. We now reap the rewards of what the policing and team efforts have done.

[thelakelander]

Cool.  If anything, its good to have everyting out in the open.  It really makes it easier for people to process why things are the way they are.