Whose broken window?
Brendan Cheney
Bill de Blasio has promised to decrease arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana, which have disproportionately affected young men of color.
But he has also pledged to implement Broken Windows policing, which when it was used in New York City in the late 1990s relied on high levels of marijuana arrests.
Whether those two promises can be reconciled depends, in part, on whether de Blasio executes Broken Windows as its authors originally conceived of it, or as it came to be practiced by the New York Police Department.
The concept of “Broken Windows” policing was first proposed in an article in The Atlantic by George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in 1982. They argued that leaving lower-level crime unaddressed demoralizes the community and leads to more high-level crime, and that law enforcement should crack down broadly on visible quality-of-life crimes. It also recommended that police could make a great impact on marginal neighborhoods, creating a ripple effect, rather than focusing on high-crime neighborhoods.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/magazine/2014/05/8544640/whose-broken-window
