From the NEW YORK TIMES:
… James Q. Wilson, who taught government at Harvard for more than two decades, was the author of disquisitions on politics, the family, the nature of bureaucracies, virtue and vice that both countered and steered intellectual trends.
But he was best known for his research on the behavior of police officers and lawbreakers. Probably his most influential theory holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down…
But Mr. Wilson’s theory and its application have had their critics. Some accused Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bratton of waging an overly aggressive campaign against panhandlers and the so-called squeegee men, who confronted motorists. And some researchers have questioned the efficacy of the program, saying that other factors, including the waning of the crack epidemic, were more responsible for the declining crime rate than the “broken windows” approach. The theory was first espoused by Mr. Wilson and George L. Kelling, a criminologist who had studied foot patrols in Newark, in 1982 in an article in the magazine The Atlantic…
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EDITOR: Although not the only answer, there was much value in what Wilson taught. Pick up litter in an area and before long people stop throwing things on the street. Doubt it? Try it. We tend to act the way we are expected to act.
