Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving beyond Strong Causal Reasoning
![handle is hein.journals/jclc94 and id is 391 raw text is: 0091-4169/04/9402-0381
TRE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 94, No. 2
Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University, School of Law Printed in U.S.A.
ORDER MAINTENANCE RECONSIDERED:
MOVING BEYOND STRONG CAUSAL
REASONING
DAVID THACHER*
A backlash has set in against order maintenance policing strategies, if
not among policymakers and the public, then at least among criminologists.
This backlash has several components, but the most prominent rests on
empirical studies that have claimed to cast doubt on James Q. Wilson and
George L. Kelling's broken windows theory-the theory that disorder, left
unchecked, leads to crime by driving residents indoors and sending a
message to would-be offenders that a neighborhood is out of control.' In
this paper I argue that this backlash focuses too narrowly on the broken
windows theory in its assessments of order maintenance policing, and I
develop and apply alternative methods of analysis that focus more directly
on the intrinsic merits of efforts to reduce disorder by using ethnographic
research and normative analysis. In the process, I analyze the few grounded
descriptions of order maintenance practice that have been presented in the
literature to argue that at least some kinds of order maintenance policing are
intrinsically valuable-regardless of the impact they have on serious
crime-because they address important instances of accumulative harms
and offenses.2 Policing inappropriately ignores these problems when it only
focuses on serious crime.
In making this argument, I draw on and extend recent ideas in policy
analysis about the way scholarship can best inform public policy. In current
debates, both opponents and proponents of order maintenance often
presume that its benefits are best judged by its contribution to crime
reduction-by its indirect effects on serious crime, rather than its direct
* Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning, University of Michigan. I
would like to thank Ryan Allen, George Kelling, and Martin Rein for helpful comments on
an earlier draft.
I James Q. Wilson & George L. Kelling, Broken Windows: The Police and
Neighborhood Safety, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Mar. 1982, at 29-38.
2 JOEL FEINBERG, HARM TO OTHERS (1984) [hereinafter FEINBERG, HARM TO OTHERS];
JOEL FEINBERG, OFFENSE TO OTHERS (1985) [hereinafter FEINBERG, OFFENSE TO OTHERS].](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jclc94&div=19&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving beyond Strong Causal Reasoning
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