Broken windows syndrome

In his book 'Tipping Point', Malcolm Gladwell has devoted a chapter to the rise and fall of crime in New York City. Crime in the Big Apple started growing in the 1970s and 1980s and peaked in 1990.

In 1994, New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani appointed William Bratton as chief of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the turnaround started. While previously, the NYPD has been focusing on serious crimes, like homicide, rape and armed robbery, Bratton introduced a zero tolerance policy for any crime. He started with the seemingly victim-less crime of turnstile hopping on the New York Subway.

Turnstile hopping was not quite victim-less. Unemployed youth jumped the turnstile and then proceeded to harass travelers on the subway. Graffiti was an enormous problem and muggings and murders on the subway were so bad that the Lexington Avenue train earned the nickname, 'The Mugger's Express'.

The broken windows theory suggests that smaller crimes are the gateway to more serious and violent crimes. A kid who gets away with throwing a stone through a glass window is emboldened to do it again and soon learns to brag about it. Pretty soon, breaking a window is no longer brag-worthy, and he moves to bigger accomplishments.

Bratton cracked down on turnstile hopping by bringing the courts in a bus to the subway stations where the perpetrators could be tried quickly and without an undue burden on police time. A lot of the kids who would have then gone on to mugging were put into juvenile detention camps or in prison. At the same time, the City of New York invested money in cleaning up the graffiti on the trains and all new trains were made of stainless steel; paint doesn't bond to stainless steel.

We might need to take a good hard look at the broken windows theory here in India too. Perhaps the key to a law abiding society starts with stopping small crime.