15. Broken panes bring bad luck:
the broken window theory
In the eighties and nineties the New York City police were confronted with increasing rates of
theft, violent crime and drug sales in the city. In order to combat this, the police launched the
‘Quality of life’ campaign. The idea behind this was that a littered environment was a feeding
ground for criminality. An environment with social disorder (such as loitering youths, public
drunkenness and prostitution) and physical disorder (such as grafiti, abandoned buildings and
trash in the street) increased the chance of both petty and serious crime. For this reason
grafiti and traces of vandalism were removed and, mindful of the message of the previous
chapter, the litter in the streets was cleaned up. To the delight of the police, crime igures in
the city dropped signiicantly.
The explanation was termed the ‘broken window theory’. James Wilson and George Kwelling
propose that when a window in a building is broken and goes unrepaired, the chance of
another window breaking increases. The more broken windows, the greater the chance of
more windows being smashed to smithereens. A building with broken windows subsequently
attracts other forms of criminality, such as breaking in, squatting and stripping the building.This
in turn will cause criminality around the building to increase; it attracts criminals, while law-
abiding citizens avoid the area. According to the broken window theory, people see physical
and social disorder as a sign that everything is permissible and that authority is absent. Such
an environment puts ideas into people’s heads, and lowers the threshold to overstepping their
boundaries. The underlying idea is that a single transgression encourages people to commit
further transgressions or expands to become one big transgression, and that one transgressor
grows into many.
Empirical evidence for this theory was supplied years later by Kees Keizer and colleagues. In
one experiment the main entrance to a parking lot was temporarily closed by the researchers.
However, they had left a gap of 50 centimeters. On the fence the researchers had hung up
a sign with the text ‘No entry, go around to the other entrance’. The side entrance was 200
meters further on. What would people do when they wanted to get to their cars, walk around,
or slip through the opening? The researchers were curious in particular as to whether the
15. Broken panes bring bad luck: the broken window theory
