Quality-of-Life Enforcement

Quality of life, quality-of-life offenses, and quality-of-life enforcement entered the criminal justice lexicon in a major way during the late 1970s. This was at a time when American policing was in a crisis. Crime was increasing, and research suggested that the dominant tactics of the time—preventive patrol and rapid response to calls for service—were of limited effectiveness. Starting during the 1920s and continuing through the 1970s, police saw their “business” as responding to serious “index” crimes: Murder, rape, assault, robbery, and burglary topped their priorities. The police put forward several values to justify their strategic emphasis: Index crimes were serious and demanded police attention; limited resources required that police establish priorities; and focusing on serious crime with reactive tactics—preventive patrol, rapid response to service, and criminal investigation—lim-ited how intrusive police were into community life.

This strategy was largely endorsed by President Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice—a point of view that shaped professional police and academic criminal justice thinking for decades. Minor offenses, ranging from drunkenness to prostitution, were either virtually or actually decriminalized and given scant attention by police, prosecutors, and the courts.

Nonetheless, disorderly conditions and behaviors bother citizens. Even surveys conducted for the President's Commission documented the close links between disorder and citizen fear of crime—a finding confirmed again and again in surveys and focus groups, and by community groups. Citizens also act on those fears: Many barricade their homes, abandon cities, and/or withdraw from public spaces as a result of disorder and minor crimes. Compounding the problem, the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill without adequate community services flooded public spaces, especially in inner cities, with an often obstreperous and unpredictable population, many of whom were soon considered to be the homeless.

“Broken Windows,” published in 1982 by James Q. Wilson and this author, is perhaps the most well-known articulation of the links between disorder and fear. A metaphor, broken windows argues that just as a broken window left untended shows that nobody cares and leads to more broken windows, disorder, left untended, indicates that nobody cares and leads to citizen fear of crime. “Broken Windows,” however, is controversial, especially in academia, for at least two reasons. First, it challenged reigning views of the time regarding decriminalization; deinstitutionalization; and the narrow focus of police, prosecutors, and courts on serious crime. Second, “Broken Windows” put forward a hypothesis: Not only does disorder create citizen fear, but it is also a [Page 392]precursor of serious crime. Both issues remain contentious, especially in academia.

Nonetheless, a broad consensus has developed that maintaining, developing, and restoring order is an end in itself. Neighborhood problems ranging from litter, graffiti, and abandoned cars to public drunkenness in parks, prostitution, and drug dealing severely diminish the quality of life in communities. Children cannot play in parks or on the sidewalk, the elderly cannot walk to neighborhood shopping centers, and families cannot sit on the stoops of their homes or apartments. Quality-of-life offenses, then, are minor crimes: aggressive panhandling, prostitution, drug dealing in public spaces, illegal vending, and other such crimes.

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