5. Wilson and Kelling (1982)

Question 1

Background

Answer 1

• Previous research has shown how features of a community can influence crime rates. Newman (1972) compared the rate of crime in two New York housing projects. Brownsville was designed in small blocks around a courtyard and housed five or six families whilst Van Dyke consisted of high-rise buildings set a distance apart with parkland between. Although the same number of residents lived in both housing complexes, the crime rate was 50% higher in Van Dyke. Newman suggested that four factors were important in explaining the different crime rate: zone of territorial influence, opportunities for surveillance, image, and milieu.
• The debate over the value of police foot patrol as a way to reduce crime rates has raged, virtually unabated, since the 1960s, not only in Britain but throughout much of the developed world.
• In the new millennium, foot patrol has been elevated to the fore of British policing policy, driven by governmental and police concerns
  about the “reassurance gap” associated with public demand for “more visible, accessible and responsive policing”. Five thousand civilian “police community support officers” (PCSOs) have been employed across the police forces of England and Wales, carrying out their foot patrol duties alongside a growing number of police officers and civilian support staff. The Home Office announced plans to provide every area of the country with multi-agency “neighbourhood policing teams” by 2008, designed to be “citizen-focused” and promote local “reassurance”. (Wakefield 2006).
• Previous research has shown how features of a community can influence crime rates. Newman (1972) compared the rate of crime in two New York housing projects. Brownsville was designed in small blocks around a courtyard and housed five or six families whilst Van Dyke consisted of high-rise buildings set a distance apart with parkland between. Although the same number of residents lived in both housing complexes, the crime rate was 50% higher in Van Dyke. Newman suggested that four factors were important in explaining the different crime rate: zone of territorial influence, opportunities for surveillance, image, and milieu.
• The debate over the value of police foot patrol as a way to reduce crime rates has raged, virtually unabated, since the 1960s, not only in Britain but throughout much of the developed world.
• In the new millennium, foot patrol has been elevated to the fore of British policing policy, driven by governmental and police concerns about the “reassurance gap” associated with public demand for “more visible, accessible and responsive policing”. Five thousand civilian “police community support officers” (PCSOs) have been employed across the police forces of England and Wales, carrying out their foot patrol duties alongside a growing number of police officers and civilian support staff. The Home Office announced plans to provide every area of the country with multi-agency “neighbourhood policing teams” by 2008, designed to be “citizen-focused” and promote local “reassurance”. (Wakefield 2006).
• In 1973, the New Jersey state legislature passed the ‘Safe and Clean Neighbourhoods Act’. This legislation sought to create safe, clean
  neighbourhoods and foot patrol was specifically mandated as part of an effort to expand the presence and visibility of police protection.
• So, in the mid-l970s, the State of New Jersey announced the “Safe and Clean Neighbourhoods Program”, designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. The state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. Although the governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, many police chiefs were sceptical. They believed foot patrols reduced police mobility and made it difficult for them to respond to citizen calls for service. It also weakened headquarters control over patrol officers. Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a “good pinch.” In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. In addition, academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates with most feeling it was little more than a sop to public opinion. However, as the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along.
• Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark (eight foot-patrol beats in Newark were matched demographically, with foot patrol continued in four randomly selected beats and discontinued in four others. Foot patrol was also initiated in four beats where it had previously not been used), the foundation concluded, unsurprisingly, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. However residents of the foot patrolled neighbourhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and
  seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (e.g. staying at home with the doors locked). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favourable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favourable attitude toward citizens in their neighbourhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.
• This study describes how features of neighbourhoods can influence crime rates, the changing role of the police in the USA, and strategies for maintaining order.

Question 2

Method (2 points to make)

Answer 2

• This was an article published in The Atlantic Online in March 1982. It describes features of neighbourhoods that can be linked to high
  incidences of crime, and developments in policing strategies and changes in the concept of policing initiated in an attempt to reduce crime rates, focusing initially on the usefulness of foot patrols. The article also considers a variety of explanations for the fear of crime and victimisation, and how communities can help maintain order and make their neighbourhoods safe.
• The article can be seen to be composed of three main sections: safe neighbourhoods, the changing role of the police and maintaining order

Question 3

Part One - safe neighbourhoods (13 parts)

Answer 3

• To find the answer to the question, how can a neighbourhood be “safer” when the crime rate has not gone down–in fact, may have gone up? requires an understanding of what often frightens people in public places. Many individuals are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. However there is another source of fear - the fear of being bothered by disorderly people who are not violent, or, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers (individuals who ask strangers for money in a public place), drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, and the mentally disturbed. What foot-patrol officers did in the “Safe and Clean Neighbourhoods Program” was to elevate the level of public order in the neighbourhoods of Newark they patrolled. Though the neighbourhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen
  were mostly white, this “order-maintenance” function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both parties.
• Kelling, himself, spent many hours walking with Newark foot-patrol officers to see how they defined “order” and what they did to maintain it. The population of one typical beat area included both “regulars” and “strangers”. The officer on that beat knew who the regulars were and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules e.g. people could drink on side streets but not at the main intersection; bottles had to be in paper bags; talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was forbidden. Individuals who broke the informal rules were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet. These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the “regulars” on the street. Another neighbourhood might have different rules, but these were the one for this particular neighbourhood. What the officer did could be described as “enforcing the law” though some of the things he did probably would not have withstood a legal challenge. It appeared that judging from the behaviour and remarks made to interviewers, the people of Newark, assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order
• At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a
  window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken – the broken-window theory. This is true in both nice neighbourhoods and in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.) Zimbardo (1969) reported on some experiments to test the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by “vandals” within ten minutes of its “abandonment.” The first to arrive were a family—father, mother, and young son—who removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been removed. Then random destruction began—windows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult “vandals” were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passers-by were joining in. Within
  a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the “vandals” appeared to be primarily respectable whites.
• Untended property therefore becomes fair game for people for fun or plunder, even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things. The nature of a community makes vandalism more likely in some areas than others but vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers – the sense of mutual respect and the obligations of civility – are lowered by actions that seem to signal that “no one cares”.
• “Untended” behaviour also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable, law-abiding community can easily change to an
  inhospitable and frightening jungle. If a property is abandoned, it will become derelict and windows get smashed. The behaviour of some ofthe inhabitants deteriorates, so ‘nice’ families move out and unattached adults move in. Teenagers start to gather in front of the corner store, the shopkeeper asks them to move; they refuse, fights occur, litter accumulates and the community continues its downward spiral. Although serious crime and violence is not inevitable, residents believe that crime, especially violent crime, is on the increase and so modify their behaviour by using the streets less often, and when on the streets will stay apart from others, moving with averted eyes, silent lips and hurried steps so they “don’t get involved”. Such areas then become increasingly vulnerable to criminal invasion - drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, cars will be stripped and muggings will occur.
• It is however not easy to move away from such areas. The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a drunk can be as fear-inducing for defenceless persons such as the elderly as the prospect of meeting an actual robber; indeed, to a defenceless person, the two kinds of confrontation are often indistinguishable. Moreover, the lower rate at which the elderly are victimised is a measure of the steps they have already taken—chiefly, staying behind locked doors—to minimize the risks they face. Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more.
• It is not only the elderly that fear disorderly behaviour. Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, gathered together a number of surveys on the sources of public fear. One, done in Portland, Oregon, indicated that 75% of the adults interviewed cross to the other side of a street when they see a gang of teenagers; another survey, in Baltimore, discovered that nearly 50% would cross the street to avoid even a single strange youth. When an interviewer asked people in a housing project where the most dangerous spot was, they mentioned a place where young people gathered to drink and play music, despite the fact that not a single crime had occurred there. In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest. Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti (Nathan Glazer suggested that the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the individual with the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure whilst on the subway train is uncontrolled and uncontrollable so anyone can invade it and do whatever damage they want).
• In response to fear people avoid one another, weakening controls. Sometimes they call the police. Patrol cars arrive, an occasional arrest occurs but crime continues and disorder is not abated. Citizens complain to the police chief, but he explains that his department is low on personnel and that the courts do not punish petty or first-time offenders. To the residents, the police who arrive in squad cars are either ineffective or uncaring; to the police, the residents are animals who deserve each other. The citizens may soon stop calling the police, because “they can’t do
  anything.”
• The process we call urban decay has occurred for centuries in every city. However what is happening today is different in at least two
  important respects: (i) mobility has become easy for all but the very poor or those who are blocked from moving because of racial prejudice; (ii) the police no longer help to reassert law and order by acting on behalf of the community. This is probably because the role of the police has slowly changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes. In the 1960s, when urban riots were a major problem, social scientists began to explore carefully the order maintenance function of the police, and to suggest ways of improving it—not to make streets safer (its original function) but to reduce the incidence of mass violence. As the crime wave that began in the early l960s continued into the 1970s, attention shifted to the role of the police as crime-fighters.
• Although a great deal was accomplished during this transition, as both police chiefs and outside experts emphasised the crime fighting
  function in their plans, in the allocation of resources, and in deployment of personnel, which may have made the police better crime-fighters, the link between order-maintenance and crime-prevention, was forgotten. This link is similar to the process whereby one broken window becomes many. The citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behaviour; he is also showing that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window.
• Some police administrators concede that this process occurs, but argue that motorized-patrol officers can deal with it as effectively as foot patrol officers. Others, including Wilson and Kelling, are not so sure. In theory, an officer in a squad car can observe as much as an officer on foot; in theory, the former can talk to as many people as the latter. But the reality of police-citizen encounters is powerfully altered by the automobile. An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the street people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can help him manage whatever is about to happen. And he can never be certain what that will be—a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation, a teasing remark, a confused babble, a threatening gesture. In a car, an officer is more likely to deal with street people by rolling down the window and looking at them. The door and the window exclude the approaching citizen; they are a barrier. Some officers take advantage of this barrier, perhaps unconsciously, by acting differently if in the car than they would on foot.
• Most citizens like to talk to a police officer. Such exchanges give them a sense of importance, provide them with the basis for gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them (whereby they gain a sense of having “done something” about the problem). An individual can approach a person on foot more easily, and talk to him more readily, than a person in a car. Moreover, anonymity can be retained more easily by drawing the officer aside for a private chat.
• The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must accommodate them which is expensive in terms of both time and personnel

Question 4

Part two – the changing role of the police (9 parts)

Answer 4

• Over the past two decades, the shift of police from order-maintenance to law enforcement has brought them increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions, provoked by media complaints and enforced by court decisions and departmental orders. As a consequence, the order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals.
• The role of the police as watchmen whose main objective was to maintain order has changed to one of detecting and apprehending criminals with the judicial determination of guilt or innocence determined by universal standards under special procedures as the main objective.
• Ordinarily, no judge or jury ever sees the persons caught up in a dispute over the appropriate level of neighbourhood order because most cases are handled informally on the street and no universal standards are available to settle arguments over disorder. Until recently, in many states, the police made arrests on such charges as “suspicious person” or “vagrancy” or “public drunkenness”—charges with scarcely any legal meaning. These charges exist not because society wants judges to punish vagrants or drunks but because it wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a neighbourhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.
• Once one starts to think of all aspects of police work as involving the application of universal rules under special procedures, one must inevitably ask what constitutes an “undesirable person” and why should vagrancy or drunkenness be “criminalised”? The commendable desire to see that people are treated fairly makes people worry about allowing the police to rout persons who are undesirable by some vague or parochial standard. A growing and not-so-commendable utilitarianism leads citizens to doubt that any behaviour that does not “hurt” another person should be made illegal. And thus people are reluctant to allow the police to perform, in the only way they can, a function that every neighbourhood desperately wants them to perform.
• Wilson and Kelling think that it is a mistake to “decriminalize” disreputable behaviour that “harms no one” as it removes the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighbourhood order. Although arresting a single drunk or vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, failing to arrest a group of drunks or a group of vagrants may destroy an entire community. This suggests that a particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.
• The concern about equity is also serious. How can one ensure that age, skin colour, national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also
  become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable i.e. how can one ensure that the police do not become the mere agents of neighbourhood bigotry? There seems to be no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question
• The Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago is one of the largest public-housing projects in the USA, housing nearly 20,000 black citizens. Not long after it opened, in 1962, relations between project residents and the police deteriorated badly. The citizens felt that the police were insensitive or brutal; the police, in turn, complained of unprovoked attacks on them. Crime rates soared. Today, although the atmosphere has changed and police-citizen relations have improved, problems persist, primarily the presence of youth gangs that terrorise the residents. The people expect the police to “do something” about this but what can they do? Although they can obviously make an arrest when a gang member breaks the law, a gang can form and congregate without breaking the law. If an arrest is the only recourse for the police the residents’ fears go unassuaged. This leaves the police feeling helpless and the residents again thinking threat the police “do nothing”. What the police actually do in this housing area is chase known gang members out of the area, a strategy the residents know about and approve of. However the substantive problem remains the same: how can the police strengthen the informal social-control mechanisms of natural communities in order to minimize fear in public places? Law enforcement, per se, is no answer: a gang can weaken or destroy a community by standing about in a menacing fashion and speaking rudely to passers-by without breaking the law.
• It may be their greater sensitivity to communal as opposed to individual needs that helps explain why the residents of small communities are more satisfied with their police than are the residents of similar neighbourhoods in big cities. Elinor Ostrom et al. at Indiana University compared the perception of police services in two poor, all-black Illinois towns— Phoenix and East Chicago Heights with those of three comparable all-black neighbourhoods in Chicago. The level of criminal victimisation and the quality of police-community relations appeared to be about the same in the towns and the Chicago neighbourhoods. But the citizens living in their own villages were much more likely than those living in the Chicago neighbourhoods to say that they do not stay at home for fear of crime, to agree that the local police have “the right to take any action necessary” to deal with problems, and to agree that the police “look out for the needs of the average citizen.” It is possible that the residents and the police of the small towns saw themselves as engaged in a collaborative effort to maintain a certain standard of communal life, whereas those of the big city felt themselves to be simply requesting and supplying particular services on an individual basis.
• This raises the problem of how should a police chief deploy his meagre forces? Wilson and Kelling offer the following possibilities:
• Try further variations of the Newark Experiment
• Have minimal police involvement and use informal methods of social control such as community rules and agreements
• Employ citizen patrols e.g. the Guardian Angels who patrol the New York City streets.

Question 5

Part three – maintaining order: the way forward (6 parts)

Answer 5

• Though citizens can do a great deal, the police are plainly the key to order maintenance. However, they cannot do this job by themselves; they need the public’s support.
• Psychologists have done many studies on why people fail to go to the aid of persons being attacked or seeking help, and they have
  learned that the cause is not “apathy” or “selfishness” but the absence of some plausible grounds for feeling that one must personally accept responsibility. Ironically, avoiding responsibility is easier when a lot of people are standing about (diffusion of responsibility).
• Police forces in America are losing, not gaining members with some cities suffering substantial cuts in the number of officers available for
  duty. Some neighbourhoods are now so demoralised and crime-ridden that foot patrols are useless and the best the police can do with limited resources is respond to the enormous number of calls for service. On the other hand some neighbourhoods are so stable and serene foot patrols are unnecessary. The key objective must therefore be to identify neighbourhoods at the tipping point—where the public order is deteriorating but not unreclaimable, where the streets are used frequently but by apprehensive people, where a window is likely to be broken at any time, and must quickly be fixed if all are not to be shattered.
• Unfortunately few police departments have ways of systematically identifying such areas and assigning officers to them. Officers are assigned on the basis of crime rates (meaning that marginally threatened areas are often stripped so that police can investigate crimes in areas where the situation is hopeless) or on the basis of calls for service (despite the fact that most citizens do not call the police when they are merely frightened or annoyed). To allocate patrol wisely, the department must look at the neighbourhoods and decide, from first-hand evidence, where an additional officer will make the greatest difference in promoting a sense of safety.

Wilson and Kelling suggest the flowing strategies could help communities instil a sense of security and maintain order:
- Employ private watchmen/security guards
- Tenant organisations can hire off-duty police officers for patrol work in their buildings – such arrangements are probably more successful that hiring private watchmen and the Newark experiment helps to explain why.
- Encourage patrol officers to go to and from duty stations on public transportation and, while on the bus or subway car, enforce rules about smoking, drinking, disorderly conduct, and the like. The enforcement need involve nothing more than ejecting the offender.

• It is time to return to the long-abandoned view that the police should protect communities as well as individuals. Just as physicians
  now recognise the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police ought to recognize the importance of
  maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows

Question 6

Conclusions (4)

Answer 6

• Features of neighbourhoods influence crime rates.
• The role of the police has changed over recent years.
• Policing strategies are continually changing.
• Foot patrols enhance community feelings of safety