The Broken Windows Hypothesis: Structural Racism, Colorblindness, and the Institutional Production of White Supremacy

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 22: Criminalizing Race

Abstract

‘Broken Windows’ policing, also known as “order maintenance” and “quality-of-life” policing, has become the highest priority in the policing of urban neighborhoods. Today, the vast majority of policing in large urban areas is achieved through the ‘Broken Windows’ theory, a term that involves arrests and summonses for low-level offenses, such as disorderly conduct and panhandling. Emerging research has argued that policing in many urban cities reflects a “racial project” that subordinates and racializes black residents in the name of “quality-of-life” practices. The statistics on arrests for most low-level offenses show that policing in New York City, in particular, creates massive racial disparities in the arrest of people for everyday behaviors. This paper examines the role of the inventors of ‘Broken Windows’ policing, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, in fostering a racialization process. I analyze the racialized techniques and logics that drove the invention of the theory. This paper argues that the theory involves a colorblind frame of racialized hegemonic frameworks on the prevailing social order in the interest of favoring white supremacy. This colorblind ideology obscures and naturalizes how policing organizational practices and laws converge to systematically criminalize and punish blacks in the United States for minor behaviors. 

Author

• Edwin Grimsley, The Graduate Center, CUNY