The Neoconservative Roots of the Broken Windows Theory
Interesting piece from September related to Eric Garner's homicide.
http://www.gothamgazette.com/index.php/opinions/5199-neoconservative-roots-broken-windows-policing-theory-nypd-bratton-vitale
SNIP
...if cities want to establish or maintain crime-free neighborhoods they must take action to ensure that residents feel the pressure to conform to civilized norms of public behavior. The best way to accomplish this is through the use of police to remind people in subtle and not so subtle ways that disorderly, unruly, and anti-social behavior is unacceptable. When this doesn't happen, people's baser instincts will take hold and predatory behavior will reign in a return to a Hobbesian war of all against all.
The emergence of this theory in 1982 is tied to a larger arc of urban neoconservative thinking going back to the 1960s. Wilson's former mentor and collaborator, Edward Banfield, himself a close associate of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, parented many of the ideas that came to make up the new conservative consensus on cities. In his seminal work of 1970, The Unheavenly City, Banfield argues that the poor are trapped in a culture of poverty that makes them largely immune to government assistance...
SNIP
The Broken Windows theory magically reverses the well understood causal relationship between crime and poverty, arguing that poverty and social disorganization are the result of, not the cause of, crime and that the disorderly behavior of the growing "underclass" threatens to destroy the very fabric of cities.
SNIP
The result of this approach has been the mass criminalization of the poor, who in New York City are overwhelmingly people of color.
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