On a quiet afternoon, Mark Rowe reads the famed American magazine article from The Atlantic, about ‘broken windows’, and comes away feeling it’s not so much about windows, but people.
The title of the March 1982 article by George Kelling and James Wilson is indeed ‘Broken Windows’; only, the sub-title is ‘police and neighbourhood safety’. While she’s not mentioned, the American authoress Jane Jacobs and her book on urban planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, comes to mind, for the article is about what makes neighbourhoods work – as orderly places where people not only can go about business in safety, but feel safe – whether from criminals, or fast traffic.
The article does indeed give the theory that once a window in a building is broken, others will get broken, because people see the signal that the window-breaker can get away with it. From that comes the idea that those in authority enforce laws best by going after smaller, visible crimes such as graffiti and littering. Except that’s not necessarily the case, simply because of fashion. Consider how Banksy is revered; this summer he’s been at work in London – the authorities have removed at least one of his works, not for ‘broken windows’ reasons but because a piece by Banksy is valuable. Yesterday I walked (feeling perfectly safe) a former railway line from Cheltenham city centre to the railway station, that has street art (pictured). A pair of (female) PCSOs had a camera in hand in an underpass that was lined with such art. Were they about to take a picture of it, to pursue the artists? I wondered at first. No; instead, it seemed the camera belonged to a family that wanted their picture taken in front of the art, and the PCSOs were obliging.
Much of the Atlantic article is given over to the sub-title; how to keep order ‘in precarious situations’, not only in neighbourhoods in general but more particularly on buses and outside rail stations and shops – which, the authors point out, is not the same as arresting and prosecuting offenders for crimes. Patrollers on foot keep order better than if in cars. That’s not to say police should give up cars altogether; police numbers are, the authors acknowledge, ‘meagre’; if reports of crime are too high for police on foot to respond to, it’s best to have response cars; and low or no-crime neighbourhoods don’t need to see patrols, foot or car (although as a security wise owl put it to me the other week, if local councillors are persuasive enough, they may convince the authorities to pay for patrols in well-off, low-crime districts where they aren’t that needed). Where foot patrols are called for is where neighbourhoods are, to return to Keeling and Wilson, ‘in jeopardy from disorderly elements’, and might tip from safe to unsafe. Tellingly the authors state: ‘The unchecked panhandler is the first broken window.’ Yet for at least a dozen years, UK police have tended to ignore or at most move on beggars, by treating begging as de-criminalised.
The authors write that ‘the police are plainly the key to order maintenance’, and set out why ‘community watchmen’ or outright vigilantes aren’t as useful as agents of the community. The authors do mention private security guards, that can deter, and even give aid, but cannot intervene like a ‘real cop’. Since 1982, however, private security has come on. In the September edition of Professional Security Magazine, I suggest that the UK in the last couple of years has seen a watershed: uniformed private security on the street – that is, a high street or town or city centre, beyond a shopping mall – has become unremarkable, and accepted. Wardens, rangers, whatever they are called, often employed by business improvement districts; the officers do indeed report things in need of repair such as broken windows (and take a camera-phone snap to attach to their report); the officers also do community work – a check on the homeless asleep in shop doorways first thing in the morning, as mentioned in the Birmingham Colmore BID patrollers article in the July edition of Professional Security. Another Birmingham city centre BID, Westside, this month with security staff at the National Indoor Arena (NIA) looked after a confused elderly man who was a missing person and handed him over safely to the care of West Mercia Police. Neither central government nor PCCs (police and crime commissioners) are mandating that town and city centres should add foot-patrollers, to ‘recognise the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows’. As ‘broken windows’ is not only literal but a metaphor, it’s arguably for the best that each town and city is left to decide if it requires a BID, and hired patrols.
