New York City – 1980 – I had moved back from a rural area in upstate New York to subway cars covered with graffiti, moving through a graffiti covered trash filled junk pile of a city. (To this day, a wild flower on the side of a country road often appears to me like a piece of paper.) The beautiful red sun sets were caused by all the particles in the air and then there was that signature smell of pollution – you didn’t need to smoke to get lung cancer with that air. Squeejee men at the corners of busy streets washed car windows with filthy rags and threatened drivers to pay for their work. You couldn’t leave your car on the street, even with the hood chained down to protect your battery, without fear of returning to a missing tire or two – I lost one from my old beloved red four-door Dodge Dart with the slant six engine. Luckily I had a spare to put on and was able to drive away – otherwise leaving the car there with my right front tire missing would have meant they’d taken them all. And I remember putting a sign in the car’s front window - “radio already stolen.” Walking meant looking over your shoulder for the next mugger or worse. Middle of the night gun shots were followed the next morning by a chalk outline of a body in the street. I remember three tough looking guys approaching me, a clearly not-tough college professor, while I waited on a lower Manhattan subway station. They hesitated only when they noticed I was with a friend, Mike Owen, a carpenter from upstate New York, whose visible strength and timely visit to the city saved me. This was only five years after the city had gone bankrupt and the famous headline of October 30, 1975 in the New York Daily News “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The president of the United States had refused to bail the city out of its financial crisis. Holding a New York City bond meant it likely you would lose your money.
Airplanes can go into a spiral, known among pilots as a “death spiral.” Once it begins, the spiral reinforces itself and only ends when reaching the ground. John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and her sister lost their lives in a Piper Saratoga 32 in such a spiral. All spirals are self reinforcing and many saw New York City in a downward spiral with disorder reinforcing disorder – anarchy, the likely outcome unless the military came in. And would Gerald Ford pay for that?
Maybe there was a cheaper way to get out of New York City’s spiral. In 1982, an article was published in the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine dedicated from its 1857 onset as focused on “ideas.” The authors had an idea entitled, “Broken Windows.” They proposed that signs of disorder, abundant in New York City in 1980 induced more disorder and crime. The idea took hold with people in charge of the transit authority and the police department in New York City, leading to a zero tolerance quality of life policy. The police stopped responding only into serious crime and began to focus on the disorder of New York City: public urinators and drinkers, subway toll jumpers, squeejee men, and graffiti “artists,” – all behavior interfering with public order, even if not apparently dangerous, became important enough for the police to pay attention to.
New York’s disorder and crime dropped year after year, a change ascribed to following the “Broken Windows,” idea. Many others in law-enforcement followed suit, a trend thought to have contributed to the reduction in petty and even serious crime in North American cities. But there have been many who felt that the idea has been given too much credit – much of the decrease in crime could be ascribed to economic factors, reduction in drug addiction and other changes as the 80s moved into the decades to follow. There has never been any direct evidence for the “Broken Windows” idea, until now. This uncertainty, led three Dutch social scientists from Groningen to conduct a series of experiments that many believe settled the controversy. They published it in the December 12, 2008 issue of “Science.”
When junk advertisements were put on bicycles that had been left in a place with a sign saying graffiti not allowed but with walls covered with graffiti, these people littered the area with the junk advertisements to a far greater extent than in the identical space with clean walls. In another experiment, a sign informed bicycle riders not to chain their bicycles to a fence with another sign nearby not to trespass in a certain area. When bicycles were chained to the fence, far more people disobeyed the trespass sign than when the same number of bicycles were left at the fence but not chained. When shopping carts were left around in a parking lot with a sign to return shopping carts, almost twice as many people littered the parking lot with junk advertisements left on their windshields than compared to when no shopping carts were left around. And another experiment – fire crackers are prohibited in Groningen. When people heard fire crackers going off where they were retrieving their bicycles, they littered again nearly twice as much as when this noise was absent.
And one last test: an envelope with an exposed five euro note was easily seen and accessible in a mail box. You guessed it. Nearly twice as many people stole the five euros when the mailbox was covered with graffiti.
This Dutch study, highly regarded for the statistical rigor used in the interpretation of the results and the design of the experiments, has added to the increasing evidence that one approach to reducing vandalism and petty crime, and serious crime as well, is to follow the “Broken Windows” idea.
Have you seen the increase in graffiti in the subways recently?