“Broken Windows” or Incivilities Thesis

Origins and Development

The seed sprouted in the mid-1970s. Urban civil disorders of the 1960s had raised concerns about citizens' safety and law enforcement in major cities, concerns reflected in the Kerner Commission report (1968), and giving rise to the Crime Control Act and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, a precursor of the current National Institute of Justice. Results were coming in from the first series of national victimization surveys. These interviews also asked about fear of crime.

The surveys showed that the number of those fearful of crime far outstripped the number of crime victims. Those reporting higher fear levels lived in [Page 31]cities. When broken down demographically by gender and some simple age categories, researchers learned that those most fearful (elderly women) were least likely to be victimized, whereas those least fearful (young males) were most likely to be victimized.

James Q. Wilson, a political scientist and policy scholar, suggested in 1975 that people were afraid of disorder, not just crime. He argued that disorders, which were much more ubiquitous than crime, were what caused high fear levels. Thus, the kernel of the thesis emerged.

Other researchers over the next 5 years elaborated the idea. “Fear of crime” was more than “fear” of “crime” (Garofalo & Laub, 1978). It was not just that urban residents in some areas were surrounded with disorder; such conditions implied that public officials or agencies could not or would not bother to fix things (Hunter, 1978).

Initial discussions of disorder included both physical features of the neighborhood and features of street life. The list of relevant features is potentially quite lengthy and, as will be noted later, dependent upon who is making the list. Nonetheless, relevant physical features typically included abandoned houses; vacant lots, especially if they were weedy and/or trash-filled; abandoned, burned-out, or stripped cars; shuttered stores; properties or yards inadequately maintained; houses in poor structural condition; litter; graffiti; and streets, sidewalks, or streetlights in need of repair. Later, following the “crack invasion” of the mid to late 1980s, discarded crack vials or syringes were added to the list. Also added after the crack invasion were relevant behaviors by groups of rowdy and lewd unsupervised teens, “hey honey” hassles, public drinking or drunkenness, public drug sales or drug use, and neighbors fighting or arguing on the streets. With increased homelessness in the 1980s, problems such as public urination, panhandling, or just the presence of the homeless appeared on the list.

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