Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2006 Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five- City Social Experiment Bernard Harcourt Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Jens Ludwig Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Criminal Law Commons Recommended Citation Bernard Harcourt & Jens Ludwig, Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment, 73 U. CHI. L. REV. 271 (2006). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/637 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 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 targetingminor 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 supportfor 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.