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73 U. Chi. L. Rev. 271 (2006)
Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment

handle is hein.journals/uclr73 and id is 281 raw text is: ARTICLE Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment Bernard E. Harcourtt & Jens Ludwigtt In 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling suggested in an influential article in the Atlan- tic Monthly that targeting minor disorder could help reduce more serious crime. More than twenty years later, the three most populous cities in the United States-New York, Chicago, and, most recently, Los Angeles-have all adopted at least some aspect of Wilson and Kelling's theory, pri- marily through more aggressive enforcement of minor misdemeanor laws. Remarkably little, though, is currently known about the effect of broken windows policing on crime. According to a recent National Research Council report, existing research does not provide strong support for the broken windows hypothesis-with the possible exception of a 2001 study of crime trends in New York City by George Kelling and William Sousa. In this Article, we reexamine the 2001 Kelling and Sousa study and independently analyze the crime data from New York City for the 1989-1998 period. In addition, we present results from an important social experiment known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO) underway in five cities, including New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, as well as Baltimore and Boston, that provides a unique opportunity to overcome some of the problems with previous empirical tests of the broken windows hypothesis. Under this program, approximately 4,600 low-income families living in high- crime public housing communities characterized by high rates of social disorder were randomly assigned housing vouchers to move to less disadvantaged and disorderly communities. Taken together, the evidence from New York City and from the five-city social experiment provides no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling, nor for the proposition that broken windows policing is the optimal use of scarce law enforcement resources. t Professor of Law,The University of Chicago Law School. tt Associate Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University. Special thanks to Jeffrey Fagan, Hal Holzman, Tracey Meares, Steven Messner, Robert Mor- rissey, Robert Sampson, Mark Shroder and Todd Richardson for comments on earlier drafts; to Ella Delaney and Tim Ross at the Vera Institute for their assistance in assembling the data for New York City; to Stephen Schacht at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) for comments and guidance regarding the data collection and analysis; as well as to Sarah Rose and Zac Callen for excellent research assistance. The MTO survey and administrative data results summarized here and first published in Kling, Ludwig, and Katz (2005) and Ludwig and Kling (2005) were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) (Grant Nos 9876337 and 0091854) and the National Consortium on Violence Research (Grant No 9513040), as well as by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant Nos R01-HD40404 and R01-HD40444), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. 271

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