The Racialization of Broken Windows

• In Event: 033 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Inequality and Crime 1

Abstract

For more than a decade, policing in New York City has been, at least in part, based on the Broken Windows theory, penned by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an article in The Atlantic in 1982 (Kelling and Wilson 1982). The theory is built on the idea that disorder begets more disorder and, left unpoliced, leads to crime. In practice, it has been used to justify a broad range of policing practices, for example, quality-of-life policing as practiced in New York City (Bratton 2015). Police Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio continue to defend their commitment to Broken Windows theory (Auletta 2015; Paybarah 2015) despite criticism, based in empirical evidence, that the practices it has been used to justify are implemented in ways that have racially disproportionate outcomes (Fagan 2012; Golub, Johnson, and Dunlap 2007; Spitzer 1999). While it is difficult to determine the reasons behind the disproportionality, the purpose of this paper is to describe a theoretical mechanism through which broken windows policing, as motivated by the Broken Windows theory, can lead to racial discrimination. The paper will map a path from social disorganization theory and Broken Windows, through conceptions of disorder as ‘matter out of place’ as described by Mary Douglas, to racialized conceptions of disorder and the racial implications of Broken windows theory as written, and, finally, to the racial implications of those police practices that claim their basis in Broken Windows theory but do not conform to it in their realization.

Author

• Jessica Rose Kalbfeld, New York University