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Comment by cobbzilla | Hacker News Reader

It’s unfortunate that “broken window theory” has become synonymous with the awful and racist police tactics introduced in NYC.

Broken window theory is real: imagine a random person in spotlessly clean city versus a city where there is trash everywhere. More people would litter in the latter city, I don’t think that is too controversial. Thus a run-down neighborhood with lots of broken windows will normalize behaviors that would be stigmatized elsewhere.

The unfortunate part was when NY adopted “broken windows policing”, which is to go into those neighborhoods and make lots of arrests for petty crimes, as if replacing all the broken windows might somehow reduce crime. Of course this is pretty dumb, since entrenched normalization of deviance (decades of bad/discriminatory policy) can’t simply be fixed by zealous application of punitive measures.

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> Broken window theory is real: imagine a random person in spotlessly clean city versus a city where there is trash everywhere. More people would litter in the latter city, I don’t think that is too controversial. Thus a run-down neighborhood with lots of broken windows will normalize behaviors that would be stigmatized elsewhere.

Citation needed. There are plenty of counterintuitive things in sociology; the broken window theory sounds plausible but that in no way implies that it's true.

Not citations but some empirical anecdata: visit SF, then visit Singapore. Or, notice how a relatively clean room in the house stays clean versus a somewhat messy room that degenerates into chaos.

I think few people would dispute that places with more litter have more littering!

But surely that's because littering causes litter?

>a run-down neighborhood with lots of broken windows will normalize behaviors that would be stigmatized elsewhere.

Of course, but...

>... as if replacing all the broken windows might somehow reduce crime. Of course this is pretty dumb

Calling it dumb seems to contradict the first quote above... If broken windows normalize bad behaviors, less broken windows would seem to prevent normalizing those behaviors.

>entrenched normalization of deviance (decades of bad/discriminatory policy) can’t simply be fixed by zealous application of punitive measures.

Why not? Punishing deviance prevents the normalization of deviance.

Curious, what would you think of broken windows policing as applied to high-crime white neighborhoods?

Did you read TFA? Do we ensure airplane safety through aggressive punishment of all minor offenses? Why not? Perhaps any real solution involves something more thoughtful than attacking obviously visible symptoms of the problem.

No contradiction. You can have one system, one small part of that system being no broken windows, where windows are commonly broken. You can have another system with unbroken windows. Repairing the windows and punishing people for breaking them won't magically transform the first system into the second. In fact, it might actually make things worse, depending on how it is implemented. For example, if it's already common to break windows in an area for a wide range of reasons and you start fining broke people money they can't pay and throwing them in jail... you haven't saved the windows, just caused a lot of damage.

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