Oh I understand that. The sad part is that the evidence is extremely limited and careful experiments done to empirically validate it have failed with other more plausible alternatives provided (see the criticism section).
The most compelling one to me is that the cities that applied this theory and the ones that didn’t saw similar decrease in crime suggesting an overall downward trend that couldn’t be attributed to this theory. That’s basically an A/B test at scale that fails to find anything.
Also:
> Baltimore criminologist Ralph B. Taylor argues in his book that fixing windows is only a partial and short-term solution. His data supports a materialist view: changes in levels of physical decay, superficial social disorder, and racial composition do not lead to higher crime, but economic decline does. He contends that the example shows that real, long-term reductions in crime require that urban politicians, businesses, and community leaders work together to improve the economic fortunes of residents in high-crime areas.
That sounds like the theory has cause and effect reversed and treating the effect does not actually address the underlying cause. If your wood beam is rotting, a fresh coat of paint can help but at some point it will collapse.
> In the winter 2006 edition of the University of Chicago Law Review, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig looked at the later Department of Housing and Urban Development program that rehoused inner-city project tenants in New York into more-orderly neighborhoods.[25] The broken windows theory would suggest that these tenants would commit less crime once moved because of the more stable conditions on the streets. However, Harcourt and Ludwig found that the tenants continued to commit crime at the same rate.
Oh look, another controlled A/B experiment that fails to validate anything.
> In his 2012 book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, Jim Manzi writes that of the randomized field trials conducted in criminology, only nuisance abatement per broken windows theory has been successfully replicated
So the only thing we can link it to is nuisance calls. All that work and hassling for a super minor win.
It’s impossible to scientifically prove something but there’s enough holes to indicate that this theory provides an exceedingly poor model for crime. It’s also easy to consider a hypothetical scenario where one person or a small group of people steals all the money in the neighborhood such that everyone is poor and can barely feed themselves, if that. The poor now need to steal and commit crimes to feed themselves and their families and cause disorder by using drugs too try to escape their situation / self-medicate. Would broken windows policing actually accomplish anything when the root cause is that the money was stolen from the area?