America has been suffering a crime wave induced by radical progressive criminal justice ideology (i.e. soft on crime and criminals) since the summer of 2020. Politicians and DAs put into office using donations from radical progressive billionaire George Soros have been allowing small-time criminals to avoid justice. At City Journal, Rafael A. Mangual asks, “Can we get back to tougher policing?” He writes:
More than 40 years have passed since the publication of one of the most important public-policy essays ever written. Its title, “Broken Windows,” captured the essence of a simple but deeply insightful idea: public order matters. “[I]f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” wrote the late authors, political scientist James Q. Wilson and longtime Manhattan Institute senior fellow George L. Kelling, in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic. Visible signs of chaos were like warnings: you’re not safe here. If left unaddressed, the chaos made those areas more vulnerable to further disorder, including serious crime. “ ‘[U]ntended’ behavior,” the authors maintained, “leads to the breakdown of community controls” and causes residents to “think that crime, especially violent crime, is on the rise, and . . . modify their behavior accordingly.” The areas where disorder festers become more “vulnerable to criminal invasion” than “places where people are confident they can regulate public behavior by informal controls.”
The theory—expanded on by Kelling and his wife, Catherine Coles, in their 1996 book, Fixing Broken Windows—sparked a revolution in American policing. At the direction of innovative officials like NYPD commissioner and later LAPD chief William “Bill” Bratton, and with crucial support from political leaders like New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, police departments across the country would, in the 1990s and 2000s, adopt tactics and strategies that reflected these vital insights. Proactive policing not only drove street crime down but also yielded unexpected benefits—like the illegal firearms discovered during pat-downs of turnstile jumpers in the subways and the outstanding arrest warrants discovered on the street through the enforcement of open-container violations. The historic, generation-long crime decline that resulted as Broken Windows policing took hold widely solidified legendary status for Kelling and Wilson.
Yet this law-enforcement revolution sparked acrimonious pushback from antipolice academics and activists—aided, in no small part, by how often the concept of Broken Windows policing was misinterpreted and distorted, much to the frustration of its originators. These distortions became more influential as crime continued its downward trajectory nationwide during the first decade of the twenty-first century, as large urban police departments focused on developing counterterrorism capabilities in a post-9/11 world and as a new generation of urban residents came of age with little or no awareness of recent history. Progressive critics argued for rolling back proactive policing measures and for lessening criminal-justice penalties; and a series of viral police use-of-force incidents, beginning in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, built momentum for these efforts, while intensifying hostility toward law enforcement. The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 served as the movement’s apex, triggering the deadliest urban riots in the United States since the 1960s amid widespread condemnation of police.
Perhaps not coincidentally, 2020 marked the largest one-year homicide spike in at least 100 years. Four years later, with crime—particularly gun violence—still well above pre-2020 levels in many U.S. cities, calls for American police to return to their mid-1990s crime-fighting approach have gotten louder. Unfortunately, this appeal, while entirely justified, cannot be practically pursued in the current environment. Two massive obstacles block the return of Broken Windows–style policing: the police workforce crisis; and the demonization of cops, and of policing itself, as racist. The kind of policing that led to one of the safest generations on record for American cities cannot be revived until these obstacles are surmounted.
Action Line: America’s Main Streets need order and justice. Without that, they won’t survive, and America’s number one job creator, its small businesses, will fade and die. That can’t be allowed to happen. Americans won’t tolerate it. That’s why they’re fleeing the “Escape States” and moving to Your Survival Guy’s 2024 Super States, where politicians treat residents with respect, like valued customers. Not like piggy banks to be smashed and emptied. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
