The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

"The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it." This, the ninth of Sir Robert Peel's Principles, is as true today as it was 170 years ago. But order must already be in place, or will have to be "restored," before there is an "absence of disorder." I'm reminded of a teacher who leaves her class for several minutes, telling her students to sit quietly and read. How soon before one student, then another, then another and so on start to engage in "disorder," maybe shooting spitballs, throwing papers, writing "inappropriate" messages on the board, or whatever. The classroom will undoubtedly show some evidence of that "disorder" when the teacher returns -- and you better believe that she will find out who is responsible and make them clean up before they return to the business at hand. If she were to ignore it, what would happen next time?

I have always thought of the "broken windows" analogy as a message to all of us, be it the person who is holding the rock about to break the window, the owner of the broken window who allows it to remain broken, the "witness" to the breaking who looks the other way, or the police officer responding to the incident who thinks it to be too minor to warrant his attention: we all have a responsibility to each other as members of a community and we need to fulfill that responsibility to the best of our ability. When any one of us begins to stray, by letting the rock fly or by thinking it too trivial to get involved, it makes it that much easier for the rest of us to do the same.

Will fixing these "broken windows" end all crime, let alone stop the serial rapist, the child abuser, or the bank robber? Of course not. But once all of us begin taking steps to "restore order" within our own families, homes, neighborhoods, and communities, a movement which is going on in a great number of the places that are seeing drastic reductions in crime, progress toward that end will surely continue.

"Fixing broken windows" is not just the job of the police officer. It's a job for all of us as parents, teachers, judges, prosecutors, ministers, neighbors and citizens. So, too, is keeping them from being broken in the first place.

: -- Cliff Keenan, counsel for community prosecution, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice (posted 2/8, 10:00 a.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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