The police and neighborhood safety BROKEN WINDOWS by JAMES Q. WILSON AND GEORGE L. KELLING
James Q. Wilson is Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard and author of Thinking About Crime. George L. Kelling, formerly director of the evaluation field staff of the Police foundation, is currently a research fellow at the John F Kennedy School of Government Harvard.

In the mid-1970s, the state of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol Officers. Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a “good pinch.” In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along. Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D. C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlle d experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot