BROKEN WINDOWS: WHY—AND HOW—WE SHOULD TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY

What is disorder? Wilson and Kelling’s seminal 1982 “broken windows” article introduced the concept, at least in spirit. Although they did not give it that name, they focused on what we now call social disorder. Their original list included public gambling, public drinking and urination, street prostitution, congregations of idle men and bands of youths dressed in apparently gang-related apparel, and activities such as panhandling, disturbing the peace, loitering, and vagrancy. Since then, the list has grown to include truant high-schoolers, squeegee men looking for tips, dumpster divers in search of dinner, street preachers armed with bullhorns, “urban campers” in parks under cardboard tents, people with a “street lifestyle,” the presence of sexually oriented establishments, street harassment of women, open gambling, threatening phone calls, recreational violence in pubs and clubs, and—in the article by Gau and Pratt (2008, this issue)— “noise” and “dogs running at large.” The title of Wilson and Kelling’s article implied that the signs of physical decay needed to be addressed as well. In various studies, physical disorders have included dilapidation, abandoned buildings, stripped and burned-out cars, collapsing garages, broken streetlights, junk-filled and unmowed vacant lots, litter, garbagestrewn alleys, alcohol and tobacco advertising, graffiti, and the visible consequences of vandalism. Taken as a whole, these items constitute an untidy list. In contrast, criminal codes seem to encompass a more bounded and orderly set of prohibitions. What the common crimes listed above have in common, however, is only that legislators do not like them. Otherwise, they also encompass a potpourri of behaviors, motives, and modalities. The length of the disorders list is not a problem. The disorder indicators used in any particular research or evaluation project should be selected judiciously for their relevance to the setting, just as no study includes “all” crimes. Disorders were overlooked for a long time by criminologists because many have only a tenuous link to the criminal law or are clearly civil law matters. Many evade attention from the police because they lie on the fringes of being “serious enough” to warrant attention; Albert Reiss (1985) dubbed these disorders “soft crimes.” Others items from the list hover in the vicinity of protected rights to speech and assembly; street