QPP 36: George Kelling and Broken Windows
George Kelling passed away on May 15, 2019. Kelling is best known as the (co-)author of Broken Windows, but his legacy is much greater than that. I met George Kelling in 1997 when I took a class from him while I was in the PhD program at Harvard University. In the early 1990s, Kelling described the importance of policing urban disorder, and how doing so could prevent crime. This ran counter to the entire criminal justice field, which accepted as a truism that police could not affect crime (See Bailey, Manning, Tonry, and others). They were wrong; Kelling was right. According to the experts, the crime drop of the middle 1990s wasn’t supposed to happen because none of the so-called “root causes” were addressed. But crime and violence and disorder did decrease. And dramatically so. If everybody in the academy was wrong about such a basic and fundamental point about society and crime, I thought, this might be a good field to get into.
Episode:
https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18082045
I spoke to George for the last time when I interviewed him over the phone for my next book, and oral history of the crime drop. The interview took place on August 4, 2018. (And it may be George Kelling’s last recorded interview.)
Along with Broken Windows, Kelling is the author of the Kansas City Patrol Experiment, the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, the Evolving Strategy of Policing and many other articles worth reading. It’s particularly interesting to read Kellings pre-crime drop articles describing the problem and what needed to be done. In hindsight, it seems common sense, almost per-ordained. But at the time, it was radical counter-orthodox thinking. And again, it just happened to be right.
Transcript:
[00:00:03] Hello and welcome to Quality Policing, I am Peter Moskos. On May 15th, George Kelling passed away at the age of 83. Before I was a police officer, I was a and after I was a police officer, I was a graduate student in sociology at Harvard University. I took a class from George Kelling around 1997 or so, and I was one of the classes that got me into policing as a field. At the time I had read Broken Windows and I knew the crime had gone down in New York City and I knew that broken windows was part of the reason, or at least what they said was the reason. George Kelling, as I assume most listeners to this podcast would know, is the cocreator of the Broken Windows theory. It was originally an article in the Atlantic magazine in nineteen eighty two. But I also urge people to read other articles that Kelling has written, including the 1988 piece coauthored with Marc Moorthy, The Evolving Strategy of Police, and also the 1991 article in City Journal called Crime and Metaphore toward a New Concept of Policing. George Kelling was one of the greatest police minds and perhaps the greatest police researcher of the 20th century, along with broken windows. His name is part of the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment and the Newark Foot Patrol Experiment. It’s really hard to talk about policing in an academic context without constantly referring to the work of George Kelling. And for my next book, which will not be out for a while, but for my next book, I interview George Kelling last August and it occurred to me that this is probably one of the last interviews that George Kelling ever did. George Kelling has always been generous to me and to others with his time and knowledge. And so it was clear on the course of the interview that his health wasn’t great, which makes it all the more impressive that he was willing to do this interview for me. This interview has been lightly edited for style, not really for substance. My first question was how he got into policing in the first place.
[00:02:25] I had some contact with the police when I was in graduate school. That was during the 1960s. I was fairly active in civil rights stuff and I got to know the police union fairly well. I was both in contact with the civil libertarians and the union, and this is where this was in Milwaukee when I went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to get my Ph.D., I took a course from Hermann Goldstein. And while I was taking that course, worried about the Police Foundation, a newly formed foundation created by the Ford Foundation with 30 million dollars, was looking for people, for academics who had some experience in policing. And there were virtually none then have to understand what a decent it was in terms of anything about police at that particular time. And so Herman and a few other people at Madison encouraged me to go and visit the police foundation. They decided to hire me. And so I had access to the police foundation and I got involved at first of all, as a consultant working in Dallas. That didn’t go terribly well. But Bob Wasserman started a project in Kansas City and in the South District. They challenged the idea that preventive patrol made a difference. And Bob said said, you know, that’s an empirical issue. Let’s get Kelling in and he’ll help you work this. So I got involved in the preliminary work of the Kansas City study and then with a series of colleagues, Tony paid, Charlie Brown, et cetera. I did the Kansas City Preventive Patrol experiment. That didn’t endear me to policing. You know, of course, the findings were that riding around in cars didn’t produce anything and it didn’t. Many cops sort of know that. Well, it comes on the line. A lot of them did. But of course, that was a vigorous argument with the cops from Kansas City. One group said riding around doesn’t make any difference. Another group said it does, especially when combined with rapid response to calls for service, because that was just really coming in at that powerfully at that time. We’re talking 19, basically seven, 72, 73. Mm hmm. And so I got involved that way through the research side at the time. Pat Murphy was president of the Police Foundation. And as you know, he did everything to challenge police chiefs, the IACP, et cetera. And so he used the Kansas City as a bit of a bludgeoning stick to say how foolish most chiefs were and the IACP, et cetera, which he ran against. And so so the Kansas City study not only was published, it was marketed by Pat Murphy and gained considerable both notoriety and fame. I was struck as I was working with police on the ground. I was struck by the fact that police, police, especially, especially executives, thought foot patrol was always the time to me. It seemed to make some kind of a difference. And ultimately, I did the Newark foot patrol study, which ultimately, as you know, the final chapter led to broken windows. That was kind of those things, in summary, that got me into ultimately into New York City. Imagine an organization that had 30 million dollars of 1970 money and turn Kelling loose within that money. Did O.W. Wilson play? Was he on one side of this or the other? Was who was? Well, he wasn’t a player at all. I think O.W., in fact, was dead by the time I was seriously involved, because I do see his police administration book of someone as the epitome of what’s wrong in policing the.
[00:06:30] Yeah, I think that’s right. But it was gospel at the time. Yeah. Everyone had to read it to pass civil service exams, but it was a classic reform model of policing. So then when did you read Jane Jacobs first? Do you remember. Oh, yeah, I can almost see that 1978 and that that was a contributing. Oh, yes, it really it really inspired me. And when Jim Wilson proposed that we do a paper together in the back of my mind was the Jane Jacobs. I thought her chapter two, which was required reading for all of my students, is that the chapter on the street Yallock Safety? Yeah, and it seemed exactly right to me. My observation was and this is in the last chapter of the new patrol study I talked about, the police has regulating behavior because what I saw and I spent a lot of time on the ground walking with foot patrol officers, observing them, talking with them, talking with citizens, talking with merchants in small stores, you know, 7-Eleven and stuff like that.
[00:07:43] And the support for foot patrol was very strong, but mainly what the police did was to maintain order. And Jim Wilson called me, congratulated me on the new foot patrol study and then said that the final chapter was really dynamite. As far as he was concerned.
[00:08:02] I am not sure that was the language, but he was very impressed by it and asked me if I wanted to do a paper with him. I told him that as far as I was concerned, he was free to just cite me. There was no need for us to write it together. But Jim insisted, and it was typical of Jim’s generosity throughout our relationship. And so we did the broken windows thing. That’s very kind of him. Yeah, he was he he was always very generous. And he was he was both a delight and an insult to work for. He was a delight in that. He wrote so beautifully. But he also it seems so easy for him. And I would struggle to spend a long time just doing a page, which seemed to me he would just whisk through something. But it turned out that I was pleased with how he’d edit and rewrite and things I insisted stay the way where they were. And so I was able to write. So but again, just think if you had told either one of us that the article was going to have the legs that it had, we would have found that funny to say yes, 36 years later. Yeah. And my entrance into New York was a Bob Kerrey was chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York State. I had known Bob from and he had worked for the foundation for a short time. First of all, he asked Wasserman and me to take a look, take a look at whether the transit police should be merged with the NYPD. We did that report recommended against it, but that was kind of it. This was before Bratton was took over. Transit Giuliani Bratton Bratton. I know Bratton a little bit at this time. He he’s out of Boston. He’s into the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. And then ultimately, Take-Over takes over a 400 person equivalent of Park Place. Bob Crowley. He asked me to do something about what was called the problem of homelessness. You might know that I’ve always objected to the term homeless. I view that as a political phrase, not a description of what the nature of the problem was. But The New York Times believe it was homeless.
[00:10:26] Bob believed it was homeless, and he asked me to do something about it. Bob Kiley, there’s a story that’s a good story.
[00:10:34] It’s true because I’ve checked out with the chief of staff. This is the problem of disorder in the subway was gross at that time. I think you’re you’re too young to understand how bad it was in 1988.
[00:10:47] That’s when I first visited New York. Yeah. So and, you know, Chicago was going through some similar things, so. Yeah, no, I arrived by train in Grand Central Station and saw that, you know.
[00:10:57] Yeah. And you were lucky to be able to hang onto your bag because guys would grab it and carry it for you and expect money to get it back. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, at one point after we were done with this study, Bob called the three chiefs of Transit Police, Long Island Railroad and Metro North Police Department. And he said, what are you going to do about the problem of homelessness and what they said? Well, we tried this and it didn’t work. We tried that and it didn’t work. This has been tried in Chicago and it didn’t work. And finally, Bob Kiley blew up and said, damn it, oh, you can do is tell me what you can’t to get him out of there. His chief of staff, Trashmore, contacted me because she knew that Bob was tough to deal with. And told me about that, and of course, I knew what the police were going to do and it wasn’t going to be good. I went in to see Bob and said, I understand that you said, get him out of there and they’re going to and then what are you going to do, Bob? And he knew enough about policing because he had been deputy mayor of Boston earlier. Bob said, yeah, I know they’re meeting today about the plans to deal with the problem. And at the time, David Gunn was what was president the subway. And he didn’t like soft consultants. He liked consultants about hardware, but didn’t like soft consultants and was kind of bothered by the fact that I crashed the meeting under Bob Kelly’s direction. And the the the police had their plan. The plan was that they would get high powered hoses and clean the subway with these high powered hoses and the aim of supporting the cleaning. The police would eject the homeless from the subway and they were already ordering the high pressure stuff and going to ask me what I thought about it. And I said, well, I really don’t know what to say, except that I know that on the day you start doing that, it’s going to be a zoo in the subway. They’re going to be people with umbrellas being cops. They’re going to be demonstrations. The New York Civil Liberties Union is going to be all over you. And David finally said, what should I do? And I said, I don’t know. But give me a task force of about four or five patrol officers, a sergeant or two and a lieutenant and one at least a deputy chief who can make final decisions. And so I started then in early 1989 with this task force and we worked out a plan in terms of dealing. We trained officers and had special training for all the officers in terms of how to deal with people who were disorderly in the subway. But I couldn’t get any leadership. I couldn’t get any white shirts down in the subway. And although we got off to a good start, there are a lot of good victories. We got the high moral ground because demonstrators were talking people out of busses into the subway and the subway was supposedly in their mind, was a surrogate shelter. And because there wasn’t getting any leadership, it was falling apart. Consultants are good with ideas, but can’t provide leadership. I finally asked, I told Kelly we have to get new leaders. We didn’t know who to get washerman. Kiley and I met and Wasserman’s suggested Go Bratton and Kelly was a little bit skeptical. A chief of full department of Four Hundred is supposed to take over the transit police in New York City, but he was finally convinced. And although there was resistance in the subway from the president because there had been a sequence at that time, I’ll year pointed Bratton and we know what happened in a matter of months. A Bratton took over like McCarthy on the streets of Tokyo, immediately provided leadership. He promoted people, people who had supported me. He promoted it. He jumped ranks. Richard Collinge was jumped, I think, two or three ranks to become a deputy chief. And that was that was the beginning of what happened in New York City.
[00:15:28] That’s sort of one of Bratton signature moves to promote someone many ranks and one.
[00:15:33] Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Bob then ultimately left over and returned to Boston as chief. And it’s never been clear to me why. But anyway, he did. And I should say during this time I gave a lecture at which Giuliani I heard it, he asked me to come in and meet with his staff. It was quite clear this was his second run and it was quite clear that crime and disorder were going to be his issues. And he strongly endorsed broken windows. When the time came to select the chief, I was asked once by one of his staff members, I can’t remember who. I said, if you’re happy with the direction of the department, keep the current chief. If you’re not happy, get an outsider. And they proceeded to hire Bratton. And of course, we all know what that led to.
[00:16:27] Do you think Giuliani ever really understood broken windows?
[00:16:31] I think he did at the beginning, but I think he’s quite sort of opportunistic later on. And that is, you know, you can only push a tactic so far. And I think he started pushing it too far. Not work, not while Bratton was there, Bratton it really tussle for control, but Bratton won out. And now we get to the part that I think is most important about my conversation with you, because I can’t answer the question of why did crime drop in New York City? I have my own theory. The combination of Compstat and broken windows and Bratton is a very wise use of well-trained, disciplined special units to get guns. And so guns stop being carried. And we got the results that we did in New York. But all the time going on now within within the policing profession, we’re going through a paradigm change. We have identified we really identified with the future paradigm is and that community policing. But nobody knows how to relate to the community, don’t know what tactics sit in that. And it has little to do with crime. What Bratton did was to in my mind, the first true iteration of community policing was what Bratton did in New York City. If, for example, you look at the paper that I did with Mark more and identify the characteristics of community policing, the elements, what the tactics are but the outcomes are, etc., each one, if you go down the list and look at what Bratton did, he did all those things. They weren’t clearly understood. It was during the time of very high crime. It wasn’t dealing with the community in times of high crime is very different than dealing with the community in in low crime times. But he had all the elements there. But again, we didn’t we didn’t have a variety of tactics. We had broken windows and not much else. We had Compstat, which decentralized authority. He had special training about community. So but what he did was to for the first time, I think, community policing and crime prevention. And up until then we were reading, you know, David Daley wrote that big secret is that the police can’t do anything about crime. Well, it seems to me Bratton demonstrated that community policing structured to the events at the time and the circumstances at the time can have an impact on crime. Now, since then, I think we forgot about the after that was a series of chiefs. We kind of forgot community policing. We return to a more aggressive policing model. But yet within the profession, the idea of community policing was the dominant paradigm already. And how do you define community policing and will be for the next 20, 30 years until you’re my age and the young people are saying, but what you had wrong was and this is a big paradigm shift that I see what he did in New York City as the first true community policing strategy. But again, it looks very different because of the circumstances at the time.
[00:20:03] Yeah, I think that’s the most important thing I have to say, and that is that if one examines Bratton’s strategy at the time and looks at what are the elements of community policing, can you see the difference between tactics and strategy? Strategy is a big idea. Strategy is what is the business of the organization? How much money do you need? What are the resources you need? What are the tactics you use? What is the administrative structure?
[00:20:34] What are the personnel policies? It’s all of the functioning at and this is Mark Moore’s idea. All of the elements that go into organizational functioning, whether positive or not, tactics are the methods used to carry out the strategy of the organization.
[00:20:56] Well, I would strongly suggest that you take another look at the energy paper that I did on the the evolution of policing or something like that evolving strategy with Evolving Strategies paper.
[00:21:09] There was a reform strategy. And when no one can identify what was the business of the organization, well, it was law enforcement rather than prevention of crime. It was centralized authority, not decentralized authority. It was training was the model that we have, and that is that you could identify all the elements of the reform strategy in parallel with the elements of community policing, because I think one can go back. When I first wrote the paper, I had a chart and there was the what was the strategy of.
[00:21:46] Political error. What was the strategy of the reform era and what is the current strategy? And it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily adhered to, but it’s the dominant ideology and philosophy at the time. And the more and the movement towards it is a sign of how important it is in terms of decentralization, the things that I’ve talked about.
[00:22:08] Could I ask you to talk about the link between Compstat, which is and it’s that some I mean, and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s a measure. It’s a way to get accountability. It’s a way to get information. But at some point it is about quantitative data. How do you how does that mesh then with broken windows, which is much more of a. Well, police don’t call it qualitative, but, you know, hard to measure concept.
[00:22:31] Well, it seems to me that if you said Anemone Compstat. Yeah, I think the hard data, the statistics etc are important, but I think there are qualitative issues that have to be dealt with as well. And I think once you look and this is why getting people on the ground, getting researchers, getting cops on the ground, listening to what’s going on in communities, because if you would look at some of the areas of New York City and say, what is the problem?
[00:23:04] Well, the problem here is, let’s say armed robbery, but yet you go and ask the citizens of that neighborhood what the problems are and they’ll tell you as drunks on the stoop in the morning to tell you it’s drug good, drug use down and needles available and that the statistics often do not represent. What are the problems from the point of view of citizens. And so that’s why the qualitative insights are every bit as important. You only get that from getting on the ground. It seems to me that Compstat helps identify what some of the crime problems are and some are some of the disorder problems given the statistics of the department. But there are other problems that the statistics don’t gather to this day. They don’t gather. And so it takes insight about what bothers citizens and what they’re what the demands are independent of the crime stats that say armed robbery is the most serious crime problem in a neighborhood. That can be true, but it doesn’t bother citizens as much as, again, what I describe drunks down, etc..
[00:24:12] And then so how do you get the right cops to deal with quality of life issues? And that’s one thing that, you know, who’s against training. Right. But how did you talk to cops and say, you know, let’s do this the right way, let’s do it the legal way, the ethical.
[00:24:26] Well, cops from the beginning understood broken windows. And I can recall some of the first training sessions and being in broken windows would be brought up. Cops would say, I know, I know, but I don’t have time given the calls I have. I don’t have problems. I don’t have time to deal with drunk, stoned. I don’t have time to deal with therapy. So it was. Yes, but you’re right. But it seems to me that one has to help officers to understand. I think you’ve got to give officers a vision more than anything else. What we’ve lacked is the transmission of a vision to policing that police by Bratton was able to inspire, given his his his toughness on serious crime. He was able to inspire a lot of cooperation when it came to disorder as well. And then that finding in the subway that in some neighborhoods one out of 10 first year was either a serious criminal or carrying illegal weapon. And that that opened Pandora’s box about the I think the overuse of broken windows as a way to identify targets as in a casting a wide net. Get them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Seems to me that it was it was done right. Bratton gave the officers the vision and the training that we provide doesn’t give cops a vision.
[00:25:56] I I’ve always wondered why people like Bratton and Flynn, et cetera, haven’t taken on the police academy, because I think, as you know, there are very uninspiring and to say the least, wouldn’t thing I find frustrating about what the legacy thing we’ve talked about this before when we were dealing with the Atlantic, but with the legacy of broken windows, is somehow the left turned against or part of the left, I should say, turned against it. Why? And could that have been gone differently?
[00:26:24] Well, that’s a that’s an interesting question, because it seems to me that we started to look at broken windows of the 1990s through not through 1990s eyes. That’s one part of it. And that is people don’t understand. People don’t know how bad it was in New York City, the crime and harassment were.
[00:26:45] Civil rights and human rights issues. Do you remember because I looked at a lot of the old newspapers and magazines before right on the cusp of the crime drop. And one thing that struck me is the only answer coming from the left at the time. So I’m talking, you know, late 80s, 1990. Yeah. Drug treatment. That was a drug treatment. Drug treatment. Drug treatment never happened, by the way. It was kind of an empty, I don’t know, empty bag of policy tricks or nothing else there. Nothing else, really. None of the root causes improved at the time in New York. Crime went down. A level of young men in poverty went up. Did were you active? I know in the I mean, in the subways you were how active did you stay in the department or was your job done and Bratton and implemented things?
[00:27:27] Oh, started starting even in the subway. It was clear I was detested in the street by the transit police leadership that that was there. And Bratton from the standpoint of New Yorkers was a nobody. Nobody knew of him. He had a history in Boston, but that was limited to that. We had to make sure that Bratton wasn’t associated with me. And so as soon as Bratton started, I backed away from the transit police stayed in the background.
[00:27:57] Bill and I have always had a lot of contact, but I see it in the background. For three weeks. I wouldn’t even come to New York City because it would appear that Bratton was my boy and going to implement what I wanted to Bratton very quickly put his own stamp on what he was doing. And there’s no doubt that I was not a player any longer, which was true and good.
[00:28:24] I’m proud, actually, I have a copy in my office of the full version of the white paper Back Stick, a Kansas City Patrol.
[00:28:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know when I die, I don’t know what Catherine’s going to do when I go to some library somewhere, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think it’s interesting.
[00:28:43] I’ve, I, ah, when I, when I left workers I opened up to my office door and I had already sorted my books and said help yourself to all these papers and books. And so students would come in and take them and they were there. And I’m now and I took other books to the library and finally the librarian said we can’t take any more of these books. And I said, why? And she said, well, some of them are 50 years old. They don’t take books at all. Yeah.
[00:29:20] Anyway, good luck with your stuff, Peter.
[00:29:25] Thanks for listening, this has been quality policing. This episode was recorded and edited and copyrighted by Peter Moskos.
