Broken Windows Paraphrased excerpt from the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell Published by Little, Brown and Company, Hachette Book Group, USA. On a Saturday evening before Christmas, a man left his apartment in Manhattan and boarded a New York subway. There were about twenty people in the car, but most sat at one end because some teens were "acting rowdy." But the man seemed unconcerned until the teens walked up and acting as if one had a gun in his pocket asked for five dollars. "What do you want?" the man asked. "Give me five dollars!" the teen repeated. The man reached in his own pocket, pulled out his own gun, fired, and paralyzed one the teen for life. Later headlines referred to him as the "Subway Vigilante". The story became a symbol of the city’s epidemic” crime problem. Has anyone ever ridden a subway in New York? Before 1984 you would have waited on a dimly lit platform surrounded by graffiti and trash. Every one of the city’s 6,000 subway cars was covered with graffiti. In the winter the trains were cold and none were ever air-conditioned. Very likely your train would be late because there was a fire somewhere on the system. There were over 15,000 arrests a year on the subways and harassment by petty criminals was common. The drug trade and gang warfare in the neighborhoods that the subways serviced was so bad that most people stayed in their apartments day and night. The sidewalks were empty. Children wouldn’t ride their bicycles. Folks wouldn’t sit on their porches. But then something strange happened. The crime rate began to drop. Within five years total crimes had fallen by more than half. The sidewalks filled up again, the bicycles came back, and people appeared on their porches. Police pointed to crime-fighting strategies and the decline in the use of cocaine. Some said more jobs allowed would-be criminals to find an “honest living”. However, these things were happening in other cities and their crime rates were still high. An interesting reason for this reversal of New York’s crime epidemic is called the “Broken Windows Theory” which claims that crime is the result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by think that no one cares or no one is in charge. Soon, more windows get broken, and a sense of lawlessness spreads from the building to the street, to an entire neighborhood - sending a signal that “hey, anything goes”. So problems like graffiti and trash on the street are the equivalent of broken windows. They’re invitations to increasing disorder and more serious crimes. New York hired an advisor who urged the city to put the Broken Windows Theory into practice - but people told him that worrying about graffiti was pointless; like “scrubbing the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the iceberg”. Instead they felt the city should focus on arresting serious criminals. But the advisor insisted that the graffiti was symbolic of the city’s crime problem.

Cleaning the subways and fixing windows. The city was about to purchase new subway trains worth millions of dollars, and unless they did something to protect them they knew just what would happen: They’d last one day and then they’d be vandalized. City crews began to clean off the graffiti. When the trains stopped - before turning around and going back to Manhattan – the city set up a cleaning station. If a train came in with graffiti on it, the crews removed the graffiti before sending it on its way. Dirty subway cars, which had not yet been cleaned were never mixed with clean cars. The idea was to send a message to the vandals. The authorities knew how dedicated the graffiti artists were. Typically the kids took three nights to complete their art. First they’d spend a night painting the outline. The second and third nights would be spent filling in the different colors. So the authorities decided to leave the art alone for the three nights. But on the fourth day they would clean the graffiti off with solvents. In the end the artists figured out that all of their hard work had been wasted – eventually they quit painting on the subway cars. The city also decided to crack down on fare-beating. Every day an estimated 170,000 people were riding without paying. Some simply jumped over the turnstiles. And if two or three began cheating, others - who might never have considered it – would jump the turnstile, reasoning that if some weren’t paying, why should they. So the problem just snowballed. And the problem wasn’t easy to fight. The fare was only $1.25 and the police didn’t feel it was worth the time to pursue it, particularly when there were more serious crimes happening down on the platforms and trains. But the mayor wanted to send a message that the city was serious about cracking down on fare-beaters so he assigned teams of plain-clothes policemen at the turn-stiles where fare-beating was the biggest problem. The teams would nab fare-beaters, one by one, handcuff them, and keep them in custody until they had a "full catch." A check was run on all those arrested. Sure enough, one out of seven arrested had an outstanding warrant for a previous crime. And one out of twenty was carrying a weapon. Suddenly it wasn’t hard to convince the police that tackling fare-beating made sense. The number of arrests for misdemeanors - minor offenses that had gone unnoticed in the past – tripled in the first months. And after a while the bad guys wised up and began to leave their weapons at home and pay their fares.

Then police began to crack down on “quality-of-life” crimes - public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, littering, and damaging property. When crime began to fall in the city - as quickly and dramatically as it had in the subways - city authorities pointed to the same cause: Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were “tipping points” for more serious crimes. Broken Windows Theory is based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed. It can be “tipped” – by tinkering with the smallest of details. Question: How does “quality-of-life” affect person’s decision to use or not use drugs?