A recent article by Anthony A. Braga, Jerry Lee Professor of Criminology and Director, Crime and Justice Policy Lab, at the University of Pennsylvania revisits the 1982 landmark article in Atlantic, written by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling introducing the Broken Windows thesis.
Policing as Public Health
Why Broken Windows still applies
Twenty-first-century policymakers profess a deep commitment to “public health,” and they now apply the concept to the problem of violent crime in cities. When Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, for example, he promoted the adoption of public-health interventions to address an uptick of murders; last June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public-health crisis.
These initiatives may be well-intentioned, but they ignore a hard truth. Police departments play a critical role in controlling violent crime and should be part of the public-health approach. Advocates of such an approach to crime tend to be reluctant to engage the police, worried about racially disparate policing and incarceration statistics. Yet the wholesale avoidance of the police works against their goals.
Public-health advocates regularly suggest preventing violence by, for instance, securing abandoned properties, cleaning up blighted lots, and fixing street lighting. But improving the physical environment is an old and well-established idea in policing.
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