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October 23, 2022

Years ago, I was writing about Blacks and Democrats and looked at the impact Rudy Giuliani made in New York City. Over the course of his tenure from 1994-2002, there were 3,440 fewer Black murder victims in the city than there might have been had New York simply experienced the average nationwide crime decline during that same period. “That’s 3,440 families that did not lose a son, a father, a breadwinner, or a role model. 3,440 Black men still alive to take care of and support their families…”

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Saving 3,400 Black lives and keeping 3,400 families intact didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those lives were saved by better policing or, more accurately, actual policing, via a program  known as “Broken Windows.” The Broken Windows policing approach was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982. “Broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

And in the early ’90s, the visible signs of crime in New York City were everywhere. Subways were covered with graffiti; Times Square was nothing but peep shows, liquor stores, and vacant storefronts. But New York wasn’t just experiencing signs of crime; there was actual crime, and a lot of it, with violent crime and murder rampant.

In 1993, there were 2,420 murders in NYC, for a rate of 13.3 per 100,000, almost 50% above the national average of 9.51. With the advent of Broken Windows, the city started cleaning up graffiti, arresting the squeegee thugs who intimidated drivers stopped at red lights, and targeting petty criminals.

Image made using Broken windows by Tomas Castelazo (CC BY-SA 3.0) and “End broken windows policing” by Alec Perkins (CC BY 2.0).

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Giuliani knew what he was doing. Before his election, he said that “he cared about statistics, but the real measure would be whether people actually felt safer. That, he said, was the ultimate test of policing and political leadership.” By the time he left office in 2002 he had delivered both the statistics and a feeling of safety—at 960, the murder rate had plummeted by 64% or 4.75 per 100,000, 15% below the national average.

As the crime rate plummeted, the city and its citizens thrived. Times Square transformed from a seedy denizen of hookers, pickpockets, and drug dealers into a shining tourist Mecca filled with glistening theaters, hotels, and restaurants. SoHo, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village transformed into vibrant, inviting places. New Yorkers and tourists alike felt like New York was once again a place they could enjoy without feeling as if they were in a war zone.

The point of all of this is small things matter. Subways covered in graffiti, people urinating in the streets, homeless camping out on sidewalks, and kids stealing beers and Nyquil from CVS…none of these things by themselves send society into the abyss. But when they’re tolerated, they tell the perpetrators that laws don’t matter and, soon, shoplifting turns to burglary turns to robbery which turns to assault and, sometimes, murder. And as criminals and crime proliferate and violence becomes more common, those law-abiding citizens who can flee for safer pastures, and all that remain in cities are criminals and their next victims, the ones who don’t have the resources to escape or who can afford their own personal protection militia. That’s when dystopia goes from being the fiction of Hollywood blockbusters to reality.

None of this is particularly insightful stuff that requires an above-average IQ to understand. But just because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s common.

The idiocy of the anti-Broken Windows theory, if one might call it that, was demonstrated by the clearly low-IQ mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, in 2015 after Freddy Gray’s death in police custody. The mayor stated that “while we try to make sure that they (protestors) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.”

So, the chief law enforcement officer of a major American city decided to give “protesters” space to destroy said city. The right of private property owners to retain their property, the desires of citizens to be safe in their communities, and the expectations of taxpayers that their leaders would enforce the law were not important. What mattered were the wishes of those intent on destruction.