Broken Windows in Indianapolis

by Matt Kelley · 2009-06-22 16:38:00 UTC
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By cracking down on small crimes, the Indianapolis Police Department in making a big mistake.

In an effort to clean up the city's most crime-ridden neighborhoods, Indianapolis police are looking to the "broken windows theory" - hoping that by strictly enforcing laws against minor crimes like jaywalking, littering and not wearing a seat belt, they can create an environment that is less friendly to more serious infractions and violence.

There are serious problems with this approach. First, it accentuates the double-standard for the (often poor) residents living in high-crime neighborhoods. Jaywalking is illegal for them but overlooked elsewhere in the city. This effort doesn't build trust between a community and its police officers, either. Rather than feeling protected by police, residents begin to look over their shoulder to make sure they aren't "trespassing" in a friend's housing project or driving without their seat belt.

Most importantly, the statistics are unclear on whether Broken Windows works. I've written previously about the confusion between correlation and causation when it comes to police experiments like this one.

It's encouraging that Indianapolis Star reporter Francesca Jarosz sought out the other side of the story, and from a good source. She asked Fortune Society President JoAnne Page whether Broken Windows might work in Indianapolis:

"You're building a reservoir of distrust and ill will, and you're teaching young people that they are suspects," said Page, president and CEO of the Fortune Society, an agency that seeks alternatives to incarceration for offenders. "You're going to escalate tensions in the poorest communities, and those communities are also hardest hit by crime."

I'm convinced that a method to reduce crime is through old-fashioned policing: officers walking beats, building relationships with community stakeholders, occasionally even overlooking a littering or jaywalking violation in order to focus on more important crime.

Police departments might not rack up arrest numbers so quickly this way, but they might begin to build trust and take a leadership role on the path to a safe community.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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