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Imagine a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the theory goes, vandals will soon break a few more; eventually they may break into the building, and if it is unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. One un-repaired window is a signal that no one cares, and that signal invites escalation. This vivid image gave its name to one of the most influential — and most contested — ideas in modern criminology: Broken Windows theory. This is the fifth topic of the criminal option and the first from the social area, which explains behaviour through the situation and environment rather than the person. In Background we examine how features of neighbourhoods relate to crime and how the physical and social environment can be managed to prevent it, including the zero-tolerance policing that Broken Windows inspired. In Key research we study Wilson and Kelling's (1982) article "Broken Windows" in depth. In Application we design a crime-prevention strategy. The topic connects to environmental and social psychology and to the individual–situational debate that runs through the whole option.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 03, Section B (Criminal) topic | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| Neighbourhood features and their relationship to crime | Crime prevention — Background (Social) | AO1; AO3 evaluation |
| Zero-tolerance/order-maintenance policing and environmental design | Background — managing the environment to prevent crime | AO1; AO2 explanation |
| Key research: Wilson & Kelling (1982) Broken Windows | Crime prevention — Key research | AO1 argument/evidence; AO3 evaluation |
| A crime-prevention strategy | Crime prevention — Application | AO2 application; AO3 judgement |
The specification is referenced descriptively throughout; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for the exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (knowledge of neighbourhood and environmental approaches to crime and of Wilson and Kelling's thesis), AO2 (applying it to a prevention strategy) and AO3 (evaluating the theory and the policing it inspired).
The social area shifts the question. Instead of asking what is different about offenders, it asks what is different about the situations and places in which crime flourishes. This is a genuinely different lens: it treats crime less as the expression of criminal individuals and more as a product of environments that invite or discourage it. If that is right, then prevention need not target people at all — it can target places.
Several traditions inform this environmental approach.
Defensible space and environmental design. The architect Oscar Newman argued that the physical design of housing affects crime: spaces that residents can see, control and feel ownership over ("defensible space") deter offending, whereas anonymous, unsupervised spaces (blind stairwells, unclaimed communal areas) invite it. This grew into Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) — using layout, lighting, sightlines and territoriality to design crime out of the built environment.
Routine activity theory. This proposes that a crime requires three things to converge in time and space: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. Crucially, it does not require more offenders — the same level of motivation produces more crime where targets are exposed and guardianship is weak. Prevention therefore works by increasing guardianship and reducing target suitability, not only by reforming offenders.
Rational choice and situational crime prevention. If offenders make (bounded) rational choices, weighing effort, risk and reward, then crime can be prevented by increasing the effort (locks, barriers), increasing the risk (surveillance, lighting), and reducing the reward (marking property) of offending. This is situational crime prevention: manipulating the immediate environment of potential crimes rather than the disposition of potential criminals.
Broken Windows belongs to this family but adds a distinctive psychological and social mechanism. Its claim is that visible disorder — not only physical (broken windows, graffiti, litter, abandoned cars) but social (public drunkenness, aggressive begging, loitering) — communicates a message: that this is a place where norms are not enforced and no one is in control. That message emboldens both minor and, over time, serious offending, and it frightens law-abiding residents into withdrawing from public space, which removes exactly the informal guardianship that keeps a neighbourhood orderly. Disorder, on this view, is not merely unpleasant; it is the first link in a causal chain that can end in serious crime. It is this claim — that tolerating small disorder breeds large crime — that made Broken Windows so influential and so controversial.
Why this is a social topic. The mechanism is thoroughly situational: behaviour is shaped by the cues the environment provides about what is normal and permitted, not by the offender's biology or private cognition. This is the individual–situational debate in action — Broken Windows locates the cause of crime in the situation (a disordered environment) rather than the disposition (a criminal character), which is precisely why it sits in the social area.
It is worth drawing out the psychological principles that give the broken-windows metaphor its force, because naming them lifts an answer from description to explanation. The first is the power of social norms and the way people infer them from their surroundings. Much research in social psychology shows that people take their cues about acceptable behaviour from what others appear to be doing and from the state of the environment: a littered, graffiti-covered space communicates a descriptive norm ("people here break the rules"), which loosens the individual's own restraint. A clean, orderly, evidently-maintained space communicates the opposite. Disorder, on this reading, is not just an eyesore but a message about the local norm, and the message is contagious — one visible violation makes the next more likely, a process sometimes called norm erosion. The second principle is anonymity and reduced accountability. In a neighbourhood where residents have withdrawn and no one appears to be watching, would-be offenders feel unobserved and unaccountable, lowering the perceived risk of offending — a theme that connects directly to deindividuation and to routine activity theory's "absence of a capable guardian". The third is fear as an active ingredient, not merely a by-product: fear changes behaviour, emptying streets of the very people whose ordinary presence provides informal surveillance, so fear is part of the causal machinery rather than a side-effect. Understanding disorder as norm signal, accountability cue and fear generator explains why the physical state of a place should influence behaviour at all, which is exactly the depth an examiner rewards.
A distinction that repays attention is between formal and informal social control. Formal control is the machinery of the state: police, courts, prisons, laws. Informal control is the everyday regulation exercised by ordinary people — a neighbour's disapproving look, a parent's rule, a shopkeeper who knows the local youngsters, the sense that someone is watching and would say something. Criminologists have long argued that informal control does far more to keep most communities orderly than formal control ever could, because the police cannot be everywhere and most conformity is voluntary and habitual. The deep claim of Broken Windows is that visible disorder destroys informal control by frightening residents into retreat, and that once informal control has collapsed, formal control (the police) cannot fill the gap. This is why the theory's recommended remedy is not simply "more arrests" but order maintenance in partnership with the community — an attempt to shore up informal control before it fails. The related concept of collective efficacy — a neighbourhood's shared willingness and capacity to intervene for the common good — has become central to modern research, and studies suggest that it is low collective efficacy, as much as visible disorder itself, that predicts crime. This matters for evaluation: it suggests that the broken window may be a symptom of weakened community capacity rather than the cause of crime, subtly relocating the mechanism and complicating the simple "fix the window, stop the crime" reading.
Full citation: Wilson, J. Q. & Kelling, G. L. (1982) Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29–38.
This key research is an influential theoretical article (an essay in a magazine, The Atlantic Monthly), not an empirical experiment. Wilson and Kelling drew on existing research and observation to advance an argument about the relationship between disorder, fear and crime, and about what the police should therefore do. OCR includes it because it is a landmark statement of the situational, order-maintenance approach to crime prevention, and because evaluating an argument and its evidence — as opposed to a controlled study — is itself an important skill.
Wilson and Kelling opened by discussing a real initiative: a New Jersey programme (the "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program") that put police officers back on foot patrol in Newark. Evaluations had found that foot patrol did not reduce the recorded crime rate — which might suggest it was pointless. But Wilson and Kelling drew attention to a striking additional finding: residents in foot-patrol areas felt safer, were less afraid, and had a more positive view of the police, even though crime figures had not fallen. Why would people feel safer when they were not, on the figures, any safer?
Their answer was that foot-patrol officers were doing something the crime statistics did not capture: they were maintaining order. The officers came to know the neighbourhood, and enforced its informal rules — moving on rowdy drunks, keeping the peace, curbing low-level disorder and intimidation. This did not show up as "crime prevented" in the statistics, but it preserved the sense of order that makes residents feel safe and willing to use public space. From this observation Wilson and Kelling built their general thesis.
The core of the article is a proposed causal sequence:
The policy implication is that the police should not focus only on serious crime after it happens, but should maintain order and tackle minor disorder early — repairing the "broken windows" — to interrupt the sequence before it reaches serious crime. Order maintenance, they argued, is not a distraction from crime-fighting but a form of it.
Although Wilson and Kelling's own emphasis was on order maintenance in partnership with communities, their ideas were later associated with, and used to justify, "zero-tolerance" policing — aggressively enforcing laws against minor offences (fare-dodging, graffiti, public drinking, "squeegee" windscreen-washing). The most famous application was in New York City in the 1990s, where the police leadership credited an order-maintenance/zero-tolerance approach with a dramatic fall in crime. This apparent success made Broken Windows enormously influential worldwide — and also drew the criticisms discussed below, because it is genuinely uncertain how much of New York's crime drop was caused by the policing, given that crime fell across the whole United States in the same period for many possible reasons.
Wilson and Kelling concluded that disorder and crime are causally linked through fear and the breakdown of informal social control, and that police can prevent serious crime by maintaining order and tackling minor disorder in cooperation with residents. Order maintenance, on their account, is a legitimate and important police function, not a soft alternative to real policing. They were, however, alert to risks — including the danger that order maintenance could shade into unfair or discriminatory harassment of unpopular groups — a concern that later criticism would amplify.
| Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|
| Intuitive, influential and generative — reshaped policing worldwide and inspired much research | It is a theoretical argument, not a controlled study, so it does not itself establish causation |
| Grounded in a real programme (Newark foot patrol) and a genuine, replicated finding (order maintenance reduces fear) | The disorder→serious-crime causal chain is hard to prove; disorder and crime may both stem from a third factor (e.g. concentrated poverty) |
| Shifts prevention toward modifiable environments rather than fixed dispositions | New York's crime fall coincided with a nationwide fall, so the policy's causal role is disputed |
| Highlights the neglected role of fear and informal social control | Zero-tolerance applications risk discriminatory over-policing, criminalising poverty and damaging police–community relations |
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