Visible disorder invites more disorder; institutions signal norms.
Policing applications rest on weak and contested evidence. The Lowell experiment supports the disorder-reduction mechanism; the New York crime decline has too many confounds to attribute.
In practice
- An estate that clears graffiti and repairs lighting within a week of any report sees less dumping, and the residents' group did the work.
- A city that adopted aggressive stop-and-search while crime was already falling cannot separate the policy from the six other things that changed.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is signalling: visible disorder tells people that nobody is watching, so norms weaken. Another is opportunity, since neglected places offer the unobserved space that some activity needs.
- In its favour
- Field experiments find that visible disorder increases minor rule-breaking, and place-based policing focused on disorder hot spots has reduced crime in several trials.
- Against it
- The link from disorder to serious crime is weak once neighbourhood conditions are controlled, New York's decline has too many confounds to attribute, and the aggressive order-maintenance policing justified by the theory carries documented costs of its own.
- Standing
- Policing applications rest on weak and contested evidence.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works