Excerpts from Police Commissioner William Bratton’s introduction to a new NYPD report, “Broken Windows and Quality-of-Life Policing in New York City.”
In 1990, the city accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s population and 9.6 percent of the nation’s homicides and this at a time when the whole nation was more violent.
By 2013, those figures were 2.7 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively. The city, once the site of a tenth of the country’s murders, now literally has less than its share.
More than any other factor, what caused this amazing change was Broken Windows, or quality-of-life policing.
The term Broken Windows comes from an eponymous 1982 article in the Atlantic, written by George Kelling and the late James Q. Wilson.
In brief, Kelling and Wilson asserted that unaddressed disorder encourages more disorder. From that follows crime, then increasingly serious crime, and finally violence.
Beginning in 1990, I applied these ideas to crime in the New York City transit system. We wouldn’t ignore the little things. Fare evasion and graffiti would no longer be considered too petty to address.
In fact, we’d focus on them as vigorously as on serious crimes like robberies, if not more so. Why? Because serious crime was more likely to occur in a lawless environment.
Quality-of-life policing in the transit system worked. From 1990 through 1993, crime rates underground fell by 35.9 percent. In the city above, where quality-of-life enforcement was less rigorous, it fell only 17.9 percent.
The advent of quality-of-life policing for the cops and management accountability for the commanders amounted to a public safety revolution that was about more than fighting crime — it was about preventing crime.
A primary means of doing so was stopping low-level disorder and petty crime before they flourished and invited more serious crime.
But it wasn’t until 1994, when I assumed leadership of the NYPD and brought quality-of-life policing to the city as a whole, that we saw New York City’s crime rate fall below the average of the state’s next five largest cities.
More misdemeanor arrests ultimately led to fewer felony arrests because the NYPD was preventing crime more effectively.
By applying summonses to violations and arrests to misdemeanor crimes, rather than looking the other way because these offenses are “too insignificant,” officers were correcting conditions early.
Arresting someone for a misdemeanor frequently prevents him from graduating to committing felonies, for which severe sanctions like prison may result.
That’s why index-crime arrests are down 36 percent from 1994 (in 2014, there were 60,000 fewer felony arrests than there were 20 years ago). That’s why the city jail population on Rikers Island was nearly halved between 1993 and 2013.
None of this means we can’t explore alternatives to misdemeanor arrest. We can and we are doing so. We can be more considered and more considerate. We can be more respectful and more respected — and we will be.
The fact is that quality-of-life policing is not about the blind pursuit of arrests; it’s about what it says it’s about: the quality of life in this city.
In my view, Broken Windows should be synonymous with discretion, not zero tolerance.
Cops know that when someone’s actions diminish other people’s quality of life, arrests and summonses aren’t the only answer. At the same time, we also should never and must never retreat from enforcing the law. Discretion has limits.
We know that not all neighborhoods enjoy the same quality of life. So with regard to Broken Windows, we go where we are called and where disorder and crime occur.
The NYPD’s policing is responsive, not capricious. Some critics allege that we “target” communities. We do not. Nor, in general, do we “target” individuals — we address behavior.
Our policing is also based on conduct, not demographics. In New York City there are intractable racial disparities in who commits — and, more importantly, who suffers from — crime and disorder.
Among the myriad of factors the NYPD uses when we deploy officers and allocate resources — 911 calls, 311 calls, complaint reports, domestic-incident reports, traffic patterns and accident rates, the presence of infrastructure or cultural monuments deemed high-value in a counterterrorism sense, residential headcounts — not one is based on income or on race.
The vast majority of citizens obey the law, whether from goodness or in acquiescence to the social contract. But others do not. Their actions run a gamut, from petty violations to serious crime. There are those who live their days preying on others.
Police prevent the crime and disorder these people cause. They must do so vigorously, but they must do so fairly and respectfully. In striving for security, the community’s dignity is not secondary to its well-being.
Because policing isn’t just about crime, it’s about people — the crime fighting is one facet of the real mission, which is serving the public.