The link below will take you to the other ‘Broken Window’ theory. This is an essay, bound to become a classic, written by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1982. They basically argues that preventing public nuisance – aggressive panhandling, turnstile jumping at subway stations (jumping over the machine that collects your token to avoid paying the fare), squeegeemen (men who come and forcibly clean your windows while you are at a red light and demand payment for their ‘service’) and small crimes go a long way in preventing violent crimes. Put it another way, not preventing public nuisance and small crimes leads to higher levels of violent crimes. Disorder leads to fear among innocent and vulnerable citizen, it leads to crime and eventual urban decay. Now this may sound obvious when we put it this way, but it is not. I will let the essay and related books and articles explain why.

I don’t remember when exactly I first heard about this theory. I think it was sometime in the mid-90s. I was so fascinated by it, I even got Kelling’s book Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, which he coauthored with Catherine Coles.

This theory and its practice is credited with drastically reducing crime in many US cities, most prominently, in New York city. There are some interesting stories about how this theory was put into practice in the NY subway system when Mayor Dinkins was in office. Later, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, with the help of his police department, put this theory into much wider use, thereby reducing crime to historically low levels.

I put the links below. Otherwise you would go straight to the links and skip my pieces of wisdom and observations. So here we go.

1) Take the Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo’s interesting experiment. In my opinion, the experiment also explains why socialist countries fall apart. Socialist countries either do not recognise property rights or actively undermine them. When property rights are denied or underminded, property become ownerless – no one owns them. Which means, no one is there to take care of them. Damages, intentional human inflicted or natural wear and tear, goes unrepaired. This is a very tempting invitation to one and all to inflict further damage, loot and plunder.

Don’t buy my argument? Check out any government owned building in India. In Chennai there is a government railway’s ticket booking office near Chintamani. Stand in front of this building and you will see what neglect looks like. As you walk up the stairs, of this very public building, you would find that people-as in by the people, for the people-have spit tobacco and pan all over the walls. Now ask yourselves why the same people don’t spit inside a privately owned airline company’s office building.

Now magnify this problem a million times and you get a Soviet Union, a government housing project in the US, a government railway station in India, and so on.

Some of you may argue this is an issue of enforcement. That is, the authorities should prevent such uncivil activities like spitting in public and punish the ones that spit. You do have a point. People who do spit in public, say, in India, wouldn’t do the same in Singapore. So good policing does matter.

But that still does not answer ‘who will keep the building from falling apart?’ This is where private property rights matter. Hopefully, more about property rights, von Mises’ price information theory and why socialism does not work, etc. and how they are related to urban governance later.

2) The theory and its practise, as one might expect, is not without its critics and controversies. How does one define public nuisance? What prevents the police from becoming a moral police force? At what point does preventing public nuisance become an infringement on a person’s freedoms ? Good questions. Need to be answered with checks and balances, to prevent the society from Talibanisation. (Glib answers to complicated questions.)

3) Is there good chaos and if so, shouldn’t it be part of our urban life? On one hand I love the ‘Broken Window’ theory and understand its importance in reducing crime and ‘cleaning’ up cities. I hope more cities would adopt it. On the other hand, I lived in Berkeley, CA, USA and loved it precisely because of all the weirdos, clowns, protesters (with whom I disagreed most of the time), park bench speakers who rambled and raved nonsense, the noisy drumming, pot smokers (I didn’t inhale or exhale, if you are curious!), etc. etc.

Of-course, speakers and drummers are not the same as drunken public urinator, public on-your-door-step crappers, squeegee cum your neighbourhood’s unfriendly intimidator and so on. But if you visit Berkeley, you will realise that there is a fine line that separates the two sides. How do you police a city and keep it safe while keeping it fun ? This is a tough one I suppose. How do I ensure that while my right brain votes for Giuliani to make sure that my kids are safe on the street, my left brain can continue to dance to the rhythms of the pot smoking noisy drummer on the same street ?

Check out.

1. www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_atlantic_monthly-broken_windows.pdf
2. www.manhattan-institute.org/html/critical_acclaim-fixing_broken.htm
3. Giuliani’s autobiography.