Minor Disorders and Serious Crimes Essay

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Baseline Information

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 established that efforts targeted at controlling minor disorders could help reduce more serious crime. White James Emery (2001) established in their research over the past decades three key areas in the US which are Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles have embraced at least some tenet of the suppositions and theoretical positions of the research that established that the tolerance of minor disorders leads to the proliferation of more serious crimes and disorders.

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The broken windows theory addresses the first puzzle of the neighborhood-effects literature in a straightforward and provocative way: it is the variation in disorder in neighborhoods that explains the variation in crime, holding structural disadvantage constant. The real trigger is disorderliness itself. The theory was familiar to psychologists and sociologists because of its proximity to theories of urban decay and social contagion. Urban sociologists interpreted the broken windows hypothesis through the lens of urban decline: disorderliness, dilapidation, abandonment, and social disorder, such as prostitution, public intoxication, and drug use, reflected and reinforced, in a cyclical manner, declining property values, residential instability, and the gradual decay of the urban neighborhood.

A closely related interpretation is suggested by Philip Cook and Kristin Goss’s review of the standard model of ‘social contagion’. Bratton started initiated a program of zero-tolerance in which the NYPD From this contagion perspective, the broken windows phenomenon reflects an information cascade: people with imperfect information about the risks and rewards of criminal activity may infer the net returns to crime from the social environment. Information limitations are at the heart of the information cascade model. Here, the potential criminals do not know the probability of being detected in a neighborhood, but the lack of enforcement of minor crime and disorder fills this void and signals low enforcement. The characteristics of the local physical environment, which are themselves the product of the accumulated series of behaviors of local residents, thus communicate the statistical likelihood of being apprehended. They are a signaling mechanism that feeds into the calculus of whether to commit a crime. “This “contagion” interpretation offers a straightforward explanation of broken windows familiar to most sociologists and economists” (Hier, 2007).

As to the second puzzle concerning the public policy prescriptions. Wilson and Kelling’s original Broken Windows essay itself did not compel a particular policy outcome. From a policy perspective, the broken windows hypothesis is, in principle, consistent with a variety of potential policy levers, ranging from changes in policing to community organizing. Nevertheless, most policymakers seem to have understood the theory as implying what has come to be known as “broken windows policing” also known as “order-maintenance,” “zero-tolerance,” or “quality-of-life” policing. So for instance, in their 2001 study, George Kelling and William Sousa suggest that the most effective way to address disorder and reduce crime is to increase the number of misdemeanor arrests (Feldman, 2006).

“When Wilson and Kelling proposed the theory of broken windows in the early 1980s many academic researchers were skeptical about the ability of police activities to reduce crime” (White, 2005). Since that time, a new body of empirical literature has, in my view convincingly, demonstrated that increased police spending does indeed reduce crime and that targeting police resources against the highest-crime “hot spots” can also help prevent criminal activity. The key scientific and policy question behind the Kelling analysis is thus whether asking police to focus on minor disorder crimes, as in broken windows policing, yields more pronounced reductions in violent crime than does having police focus on violent crimes directly. The analysis provides no empirical evidence to support the view that shifting police towards minor disorder offenses would improve the efficiency of police spending and reduce violent crime.

Theory Statement of relationship or cause and effect

The underlying theory is that the small bad habit tolerated can lead to the proliferation of more serious crime. The theory focuses on human psychology particularly the way individuals are likely to behave in particular settings characterized by the presence of some disorderliness. By extension, the theoretical assumptions are therefore that an elimination of small disorders like littering, leaving dirty cutlery on in sinks, etc can help in eth elimination of more serious disorders or crimes.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis in the Kelling research is that eradicating minor disorders can help to get rid of or reduce serious disorders or serious crimes. Disorders in the premise of Kelling’s research denote any anti-social conduct or behavior such as the throwing of litter, urinating in public and any other forms of conduct which are normality neither unacceptable nor expected.

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Procedure or Methodology Describe the steps taken to sample behavior

The classical application of the broken windows theory was done in New York City, and the outcomes were evaluated against the goals and objectives of the application, the implementation was a resounding success in preventing crime, an irrelevant policy, or an invasion of individuals rights. In 1993, Rudy Giuliani was elected and installed as mayor of New York City-based on his “get tough on crime” platform. The mayor hired William Bratton as the police chief. Bratton, who was heavily influenced by George Kelling, applied the principles of broken windows theory” (Murray, 2002). The application of the principles entailed cracking down on minor crimes and disorderliness in a bid to create a feasible template for the eradication of bigger crimes.

“A friend of mine who lived in New York City at that time even saw police telling people they could not sit on milk crates on the sidewalk apparently that was against the law as well” (Short, 2006).

Results

After the implementation of the principles almost immediately rates of both petty and grave crimes dived significantly. In the first year alone, “murders were down 19% and car thefts fell by 15%, and crime continued to drop every year for the following ten years” (Short, 2006). Can it then be advanced the implementation of the broken windows theory an unqualified success? Over the same course, o time crime stats showed a significant decrease in major cities which had not embraced the broken window theory. Crime levels went down the country over and much of the progress in the fight against crime has been attributed to window policy.

The crack eon of the early 1980s was diminishing as there were also fewer people in the youth’s age range which accounted for much crime. Similarly, the outcomes experienced in New York City did not come from novel policing approaches. “Other critics argue that regardless of the effectiveness of broken windows, it was too costly in terms of individual rights” (Levine, 2005).

Discussion

The implementation of broken windows theoretical thrust; with its enthusiasm for fighting crime generated unacceptable police conduct. Nevertheless, the outcomes in New York City were satisfactorily interesting as various police divisions around the country have embraced the principles of broken windows theory. Researcher Kelling’s theory has its name derived from the observation that a few broken windows in an empty building quickly may influence human behavior to lead to more broken window panes, more vandalism, and in the long run; break-ins. The propensity for persons to act in certain ways can be reinforced or waned based on what they observe others be doing. This is not an implication that the persons will ape bad behavior exactly; for instance, reaching for a spray can when they see graffiti. “Rather, says Dr. Keizer, it can foster the “violation” of other norms of behavior.

Behavior Change

State the Problem

The statement of the problem entails that humans find it easy to litter or exude uncleanliness habits when the environment they are in is not clean itself. The core of the problem focus is on that person are will most likely litter a shelter if they find it littered.

Research hypotheses

The core hypothesis of the behavioral change thrust is to test the application of the implications of the outcomes of the testing of the broken windows theory as seen in the foregoing study. From the conceptual corpus of the foregoing components that have outlined the merits and demerits as well as other attributes and dynamics of the Broken Window Theory, the Broken Window Theory will be used to observe human behavior. The aim is to establish how humans behave within a set of certain variables. The Sub-hypothesis leveraged on the core supposition is that the appropriated application theory in societal crime-fighting stratagems will contribute significantly to the creation of more peaceful societies. These variables will be tested in an experimentation simulation which will entail the test methodologies, outcomes, and the discussion of outcomes and their implications.

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Methodology

The testing design is tailored to establish how many times a bus stop shelter will be littered out of the presence of 100 subjects. What is being tested here is the supposition that the number of people who will litter the shelter will be more when the subjects find the shelter already littered than when subjects find the shelter without any litter. The testing for the shelter condition variable will entail the cleaning up of the shelter every time gets littered so that the conduct of subjects can be differentiated and evaluated.

The quantitative research thrust will make use of randomly selected subjects (males and females) to carry the research aimed at establishing whether the curtailing and curbing of curtailing of small crimes do have an impact on the eradication of more serious crimes forms. It is also important to mention that subjects were of different age ranges from teenage to adult. The manipulated variable was the condition of the shelter which was subject to subjects as either lean or littered to establish if the condition of the shelter had any direct and established impact on the conduct of the subjects.

Results

Results indicated that the frequency of littering is remarkably high in cases where subjects found the shelter littered while also showing the frequency of littering is significantly low when subjects find the shelter clear. The rationale of the testing design was to attest to the notion that minute negative forms of conduct have a ramifying impact. This has substantiated the core tenet of the broken window theory which holds that if uncontrolled; small crimes are likely to lead to more serious forms of crime.

The results have shown that when the bus stop shelter was littered 76% of the subjects dropped some litter around the shelter. The figure is against the comparatively low mark of 37% littering instances when the subjects found the shelter clean.

It is notable that when the shelter was littered 24 subjects did drop any litter, also when the shelter was clean 63% of the subject did not drop any litter.

Discussion

It is apparent from the results of the experimentations that the broken window theory holds water. James Q Wilson and George Kelling probably did not expect to trigger a massive policy shift of colossal socio-political consequences when they wrote an article for Atlantic Monthly in 1982 entitled ‘Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety’. When asked in January 2004 whether the broken windows theory had ever been empirically verified, James Q. Wilson reportedly told the New York Times: “People have not understood that this was a speculation” (Greenberg, 2007). The theory was not based on empirical data, Wilson emphasized. “We made an assumption that a deteriorating quality of life caused the crime rate to go up” (Gladwell, 2002). As to whether that assumption is right, Wilson stated: “I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime” (Greenberg, 2007). As Wilson noted in a different interview, “God knows what the truth is. ” Yet understanding the ability of a broken windows policy to affect disorder and crime is important for both legal and scientific purposes. The notion that broken windows policing might reduce crime is plausible because many of the behavioral mechanisms underlying this policing strategy are at least in principle consistent with existing models of social contagion.

The results of the study are in tandem with a long tradition within socio-legal research of studying visual cues of neighborhood disorder and exploring the relationship between those neighborhood characteristics and deviance. Prompted by a recurring observation of dramatic variations in crime rates across neighborhoods, the tradition grew over decades of research taking seriously the idea that there may be “neighborhood effects” on the production of crime. That is, arrangements in social space may significantly affect human behavior. This research tradition traced importantly to the early Chicago School of sociology – the monographs on neighborhoods and spatial settings, the Jewish ghetto, the Italian “slum,” the Near Northside of Chicago, taxi-dance halls, and brothels and to the later social inter-actionist research of Erving Goff man, especially his study Behavior in Public Places, and others such as Albert Cohen and Jane Jacobs.

One of the most striking findings from the neighborhood effects research comes from the dramatic differences across neighborhoods in rates of crime and delinquency even across neighborhoods with similar concentrations of social disadvantage as measured by average rates of poverty, unemployment, familial and residential instability, and dependence on government benefit programs. Robert Sampson and Stephen R trace the rich intellectual history and the variations over time in neighborhood-effects research in their thorough paper, Systematic Social Observation of Public Spaces” (Greenberg, 2007).

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References

Leonard C. “Citizens Without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, And Political Exclusion”, Cornell University Press (2006), ISBN: 100801472903.

Gladwell, Malcolm “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”, Back Bay Books (2002). ISBN: 100316346624

Hier, Sean and Greenberg, Joshua “The Surveillance Studies Reader”, Open University Press (2007), ISBN: 100335220266

Legates, R. “The City Reader”, Routledge (2003), ISBN: 139780415271721

Levine, Michael “Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards”, Business Plus (2005), ISBN: 100446576786

Murray, James T. and Marla “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC”, Gingko Press (2002), ISBN: 101584230789

Short, John Rennie “Urban Theory: A Critical Assessment”, Palgrave Macmillan (2006), ISBN: 101403906599

White, James Emery “Serious Times: Making Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day”, InterVarsity Press (2005), ISBN: 100830833803

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IvyPanda. 2022. "Minor Disorders and Serious Crimes." May 13, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/human-observation-project/.

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