ribit...
...yeah, who passed a silly law like that anyway!
After his election as Mayor of New York City in 1993,
Republican Rudy Giuliani hired Bratton as his police commissioner to implement the strategy more widely across the city, under the rubrics of "quality of life" and "zero tolerance".
Influenced heavily by Kelling and Wilson's article, Giuliani was determined to put the theory into action. He set out to prove that despite New York's infamous image of being "too big, too unruly, too diverse, too broke to manage", the city was, in fact, manageable.[16]
Giuliani's "zero-tolerance" program was part of an interlocking set of wider reforms, crucial parts of which had been underway since 1985.
Bratton had the police more strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion, public drinking, public urination, graffiti vandals, and the "squeegee men" (who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and aggressively demanding payment). Initially, Bratton received criticism for his work for going after these "petty" crimes. The general complaint about this policy was "Why care about panhandlers, hookers, or graffiti artists when there are more serious crimes to be dealt with in the city?"
The main notion of the broken window theory is that small crimes can make way for larger crimes. If the "petty" criminals are often overlooked and given tacit permission to do what they want, then their level of criminality might escalate from petty crimes to more serious offenses. Bratton's goal was to attack while the offenders are still "green", as it would prevent an escalation to more serious criminal acts in the future.[16] According to the 2001 study of crime trends in New York by George Kelling and William Sousa,[17] rates of both petty and serious crime fell suddenly and significantly, and continued to drop for the following ten years.
However, some later research strongly suggested that there was no benefit from the targeting of petty crime.[18] The crime reduction may have been a result of the decrease of crime across America and other factors like the 39% drop in NYC's unemployment rate.[19]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
DO SOMETHING!
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