Broken Windows Politics

If the 2024 elections were a referendum on urban liberalism, then the referendum went poorly. Bright-blue cities swung toward Trump. In California, Colorado and Arizona, voters passed referenda meant to tighten criminal laws. And across the country, progressive prosecutors went down in defeat. 

These results fit a long-term trend of voters turning tough. The defeat of progressive prosecutors like LA’s George Gascón or Oakland’s Pamela Price was presaged by the recall of San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin two years prior. The loss of drug legalization efforts like Massachusetts’ psychedelics ballot initiative followed Oregon’s recent decision to undo its drug decriminalization initiative, Measure 110.

One paradox emerges from these results: Why has the public gotten tougher as serious crimes like murder have started falling? Some Trump allies claim the crime stats are fabricated, a claim we should reject out of hand. The answer some liberal commentators have begun to coalesce around is that voters were motivated by a surge in visible public disorder — drug use, prostitution, unsheltered homelessness and a general increase in antisocial behavior.

There’s much merit to this view. Surges in shoplifting, public homelessness, public drug use and even irresponsible dog ownership are reflected in the data in at least some places. Antisocial conduct seems pervasive, from dangerous driving to the use of phone speakers on planes. Individual cities have seen bursts of new problems, like the wave of prostitution on Roosevelt Avenue. Disorderly behavior — what I’ve defined as “domination of public space for private purposes” — really does seem to be more common than it was before the COVID pandemic and the “defund the police” movement.

That voters apparently care about it even as violent crime is mostly declining raises uncomfortable questions for urban progressives. If they don’t want to take further losses on this issue, they will need to accept that disorder is a problem not merely instrumentally but intrinsically, and one that government has a legitimate role in abating.

This will be a challenge, because the past decade of criminal justice reform has focused in no small part on censuring disorder control as ineffective, illegitimate and frequently racist. That position is itself a response to the rise of broken windows policing. In an influential 1982 article, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling argued that urban disorder — then at an all-time peak — was not merely incidental to, but was one cause of, the 20th century urban crime wave. Inspired by Kelling and Wilson — and by the pioneering work of Bill Bratton’s NYPD — many big-city police departments embraced public order enforcement as one means to bring crime under control.

But as crime fell, broken windows attracted many critics. Some challenged the idea that disorder caused crime. Others said that broken windows enforcement was inequitable in its application. Still others argued that what officials and politicians and many community members call “disorder” is often just a product of preconceived assumptions about race and class.

As the years passed and cities got safer, and broken windows’ apparent ratio of cost to benefit rose, these critiques gained in political power. Blue areas moved to curtail stop-and-frisk, remove police from traffic stops and abolish loitering laws.

Intellectual criticisms of broken windows policing did not cause the recent rise in public disorder. But the criticism has left many on the left unable to now argue that something should be done about rising disorder. Indeed, many are doubling down on the idea that more reform, rather than more policing, will solve the issue.

What is needed is a reframing of the argument — on both sides. The relationship between petty disorder and major crime remains contested, according to recent criminology literature. The most up-to-date meta-analysis of 56 studies concludes that enforcement against disorder can reduce crime, but much depends on the form that enforcement takes. And since the advent of the broken windows theory, police and others have evolved strategies for reducing serious crime without addressing disorder, raising questions of whether the strategy remains the most effective way to reduce crimes like murder.

But arguing about whether or not disorder causes major crime sidesteps and sometimes obscures a more important fact: Voters intrinsically care about disorder. Experiencing graffiti or public drug use or loud music on the subway is not as bad as being murdered. But it is unpleasant. And it is a denial of everyone’s right to enjoy public spaces equally — a foundational principle of modern urban life.

Without policy to preserve quality of life, cities struggle. They become less friendly, less innovative and less desirable places to be. With the rise of remote work, it’s easier than ever for residents to leave disorderly cities. Indeed, they appear to be doing so, with major cities seeing double-digit declines in the number of young children — an index of a mass exodus of families.

On the far left, such concerns are met with a certain kind of sneer, one which tells people to suck it up, suggesting that disorder is just part of inevitably messy life in urban areas. What voters have said repeatedly over the past two years is that they find this argument unpersuasive. They want their cities neat and clean, and they won’t be told otherwise.

That does not mean the left or the right should give up on smart, sane and cautious criminal justice reform. Zero-tolerance policing as it was practiced, for example, at the height of the Bloomberg years — one very aggressive and particular way of addressing quality of life offenses — seems to have done significantly more harm than good. And voters have demonstrated they will tolerate reform so long as it doesn’t raise rates of crime or disorder.

But any big-city leader who wants to be successful needs a strategy for dealing with disorder, not just major crime. Such a strategy might look, in fact, a lot like broken windows as Kelling, Wilson and Bratton originally articulated it. For these three, broken windows policing was about using cops to help communities govern themselves. By targeting bursts of policing to sources of disorder, a smart disorder-reduction strategy can get problems under control such that less policing is needed in the long run.

Such views once were within the reformist Overton window, and could be again. But they only will be once everyone agrees with what voters have been screaming for two years: Disorder matters.