The Broken Window Theory

26 min readOct 9, 2020

Is it an effective way to control crime and degradation in cities?

“People [respond] to an environment that consists of other people responding to their environment, which consists of people responding to an environment of people’s responses.” — Thomas Schelling

INTRO

What is the Broken Window Theory?

In 1969, Phillip Zimbardo, one of the most progressive and important social psychologists of the past century, conducted an experiment based out of Stanford University which has now inspired extensive debates amongst economists, psychologists, and sociologists since he first released his research results.

In wasn’t until many years later, however, that Zimbardo’s research proved to be the foundation for what is now known as “The Broken Window Theory”. In 1982, Criminologist, George Kelling, and Political Scientist, James Wilson, wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly, in which they built upon Zimbardo’s original insights from his research and applied them on a larger scale.

Criminologist, George Kelling, and Political Scientist, James Wilson

As a result, The Broken Window Theory (BWT) was born. Through their proposed theory, Kelling and Wilson stated:

“At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

In 1996, author Malcolm Gladwell recounted Zimbardo’s experiment in his New Yorker article, Tipping Point: “In a famous experiment conducted twenty-seven years ago by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo, a car was parked on a street in Palo Alto, where it sat untouched for a week. At the same time, Zimbardo had an identical car parked in a roughly comparable neighbourhood in the Bronx, only in this case the license plates were removed and the hood was propped open. Within a day, it was stripped. Then, in a final twist, Zimbardo smashed one of the Palo Alto car’s windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, that car, too, was destroyed. Zimbardo’s point was that disorder invites even more disorder — that a small deviation from the norm can set into motion a cascade of vandalism and criminality. The broken window was the tipping point.”

Although the premise of the BWT is an excellent assumption on a qualitative level, the theory is widely debated due to the limited quantitative research and empirical evidence that is required to support the theory holistically. Even Zimbardo is hesitant to fully support Kelling and Wilson in their theory. As stated on Zimbardo’s website, “A media account of our study in Time Magazine (Feb. 28, 1969, “Diary of a Vandalized Car”) was the only empirical research presented in support of this controversial theory by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling”.

Qualitatively, Zimbardo’s research clearly demonstrates how objects and communities that appear to be in disarray and disorder, or don’t appear to be maintained, can have higher rates of crime, vandalism, and destruction. Quantitatively, however, Zimbardo’s research is limited in its findings. Hence, the prescriptive model of Kelling and Wilson’s theory suggests that policing agents should try to eliminate menial levels of disorder in communities, such as broken windows, graffiti, and litter to lower the occurrences of crime within these communities.

Fundamentally, Kelling and Wilson are correct in his making these assumptions, but there are many skeptics of their theory who don’t believe this prescriptive model will have a high level of efficacy when implemented in communities. Essentially, many people don’t believe that the BWT will help to prevent crimes from being committed in communities over a long period of time.

However, it is safe to assume that the majority of the population generally agrees that clean and well-maintained environments make people feel happier, safer, and more trusting within their communities. Think about it: a person would rather live in a clean, well-organized, and well-respected environment than in a garbage dump. This fact is blatantly obvious, that is, unless the person being referred to is Oscar the Grouch.

The truth is that no one likes feeling anxious and scared as a result of living in an unstable environment. It is just plain uncomfortable and it goes against the basic human needs that we, as people, have. As Abraham Maslow suggests in his Hierarchy of Needs, people have an innate need to feel safe. This is why the need for “safety” is listed second on the pyramid of needs, right after “food”. People value safety as one of their most essential needs in life.

With this in mind, the insights drawn upon in Kelling and Wilson’s article truly demonstrate the ways in which positive visual cues, more specifically, Behavioural Economics, can potentially be used to change and influence people’s behaviour. Hence, the process of maintaining communities can inherently affect both urban development and real estate prices in positive way, over a long period of time. We must wonder, though: Is it actually possible to change both individual and community behaviour within a city, and if so, is the BWT an effective long term strategy to help reduce crime and degradation in a city?

SUPPORT FOR THE THEORY

Cases where the theory was implemented and proved to be effective.

After Kelling and Wilson proposed their theory, many policy makers and policing agents, mostly spread throughout cities in the US, began experimenting with the BWT to better understand how effective and beneficial it could be, if it is implemented in crime-ridden communities.

Although some people found that implementing the BWT in their communities proved to be beneficial, other people found that implementing the theory was not efficacious, since it did not necessarily help to reduce or minimize crime within their communities. What many people realized was that crime was inextricably linked to multiple macro-economic factors that could not simply be eliminated through the BWT. But, despite people’s skepticism, the BWT has had a great deal of influence within some communities.

More specifically, the BWT has been extremely efficacious in communities that have had William Bratton as a police commissioner. Although there isn’t a great deal of empirical evidence to support the BWT, as stated previously, Bratton could very well be evidence himself that the BWT is efficacious when implemented effectively. Bratton was one of the first police commissioners in a major city to adopt and implement the principles of the BWT.

The first city that Bratton led and served was Boston. Between 1970 and 1993, Bratton operated in many different roles within the Boston Police Department until he was eventually appointed as commissioner of the city’s police force. During his tenure, Bratton took the BWT very seriously and began to adopt and apply the principles outlined by the theory. Subsequently, the city of Boston realized a significant reduction in overall crime. An article written in The Boston Globe, in 2006, cited Bratton’s accomplishments regarding the BWT:

“The real-world influence of the theory can be traced, in large part, to one man: William J. Bratton. Currently the police chief of Los Angeles, he was running the Boston transit police in the early 1980s. Bratton had had contact with Kelling, with whom he now has a close relationship, but just as important was his belief in the then-unfashionable idea that a patrolman’s primary responsibility was to keep order in a community rather than just respond to serious crimes after the fact. Bratton employed the broken windows theory as part of what he calls a comprehensive policing strategy, and on his watch, crime on the T dropped by 27 percent. ‘It was one of the elements,’ Bratton says of broken windows. ‘What the officers were attempting to do was deal with those quality of life offenses.’”

After achieving a significant level of success with his policing strategy in Boston, Bratton was eventually recruited by the NYPD, in 1990. Four years later, Bratton was promoted to lead the NYPD as police commissioner. In this position, Bratton was mandated by Rudolph Giuliani, mayor of New York City at the time, to implement all aspects of the BWT to help reduce crime throughout the city. During this time, Bratton’s aggressive policing strategy to minimize minor “quality of life” offences proved, once again, to be extremely effective. As stated in a Yale School of Management case on Bratton’s success in NYC:

“The response to Bratton’s changes [were] immediate. Crime rates plummeted, and morale skyrocketed. Bratton [transformed] the structure and culture of the NYPD in a way that had never been done before. In addition, he was praised by many in the press for proving that crime was not an intractable fact of modern life but rather a problem that could be solved….By 1996, Bratton was at the height of his achievement. In just two years, every one of the 76 police precincts in New York City had seen a double-digit decline in crime. Serious crime overall had fallen by 32 percent, [the] city’s murder rate [had fallen] by 47 percent and car theft [had fallen] by 40 percent….[Additionally], Bratton [had] a 71 percent approval rating among the general public, and…internal surveys of the police department showed job satisfaction at an all-time high…[The] majority of the city’s thirty-one thousand police officers [had] nothing but good things to say about him — an unprecedented phenomenon in the modern history of [the NYPD]”.

By the end of Bratton’s tenure with the NYPD in 2001, the city’s murder rate had fallen by 70 percent. Bratton’s successes with implementing stringent “quality of life” and community-based policing initiatives, once again, silenced skeptics of the BWT.

In 2002, Bratton was recruited by the Los Angeles Police Department, and was appointed as the force’s Chief of Police. His mandate was to implement his same BWT strategies across the city to reduce crime rates and gang violence. Not surprisingly, Bratton was extremely successful. As discussed in two recent Los Angeles Times articles, Bratton’s efforts with the LAPD helped to reduce crime rates for six straight years, and in 2007, he was reappointed to a second, five-year term as police commissioner. Additionally, the reappointment was notable since it had been nearly twenty years since anyone had been reappointed as police commissioner for the LAPD.

In August of 2011, Bratton began advising David Cameron, the UK’s Prime Minister, on ways in which the City of London could implement the BWT. Although Bratton is currently leading the LAPD’s force, David Cameron attempted to recruit Bratton in the fall of this year. Cameron offered Bratton a position to become the police commissioner for the City of London, but Cameron was overruled by congress. We can say that Bratton’s successful track record, as well as the current demands placed upon him, are compelling sources of evidence that the BWT is effective. Either Bratton is an extremely good leader and police commissioner, or the BWT is quite effective when people implement it properly.

With this in mind, we must wonder how efficacious the BWT could be if it were implemented by a task force or policing agency that is not led by William Bratton. The evidence to answer this question lies in a case study which was conducted in 2005 by researchers at Suffolk University and Harvard. The researchers believed that the BWT could be effective in reducing crime in any community, if it is implemented properly. As a review of the case on the Suffolk University website states:

“[The] researchers worked with local police to identify 34 ‘crime hot spots’ in Lowell, Massachusetts. In half of the spots, authorities cleared trash, fixed streetlights, enforced building codes, discouraged loiterers, made more misdemeanour arrests, and expanded mental health services and aid for the homeless. In the other half, there was no change to routine police service. The areas that received additional attention experienced a 20% reduction in calls to the police. The study concluded that cleaning up the physical environment is more effective than misdemeanour arrests, and that increasing social services had no effect.”

Once again, this provides a strong foundation to support the BWT’s effectiveness in helping to reduce crime in communities.

CRITICISM AGAINST THE THEORY

Reasons to question the effectiveness of the theory.

When Kelling and Wilson first published their insights into the BWT, many academics and skeptics began to work promptly on finding empirical evidence that disproved Kelling and Wilson’s qualitative theory. As a result, a heated debate ensued within the world of academia. Many researchers have not only written articles stating their disapproval of the BWT, but have also written books to state their position. However, many skeptics have questioned the effectiveness of the theory and many critics have questioned Bratton’s implementation of the theory. Overall, many academics and skeptics have widely agreed that there are three significant factors which call the BWT into question: The reduction of crack-cocaine use within society, the legalization of abortion within the United States, and people’s perception of racial integration within neighbourhoods.

Firstly, as vocal skeptics of the theory, University of Chicago law professor, Bernard Harcourt and Georgetown University policy professor, Jens Ludwig believe that the reduction in crime over the past thirty years can be largely attributed to the micro-economic factors of the crack industry. Harcourt and Ludwig have stated that factors such as the increase in the supply of crack, the decrease in the demand for crack, and the decrease in the importance of “prime real estate” required to sell crack throughout the 1980’s have caused the price of crack to fall which, in turn, has helped to reduce crime rates overall; having fewer drug addicts has resulted in fewer crimes being committed. As stated in The Boston Globe article, Cracks in Broken Windows:

“Harcourt and Ludwig draw on the work of criminologists who have seen the rise and fall of crime rates in the ’80s and ’90s as a result not of a new type of policing, but of the crack epidemic. When crack first hit the market in the 1980s, it was a lucrative business to be in (and worth the fight for turf), but as it became more available, the price dropped dramatically, making dealers think twice about risking their lives to make ever-lower profits, [thus] reducing the incidence of violent crime.”

Additionally, Harcourt has elaborated on his theories in his book, Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing, which was released in 2005. In the book, he strengthens and supports his position towards the BWT by discussing the detailed statistical analyses he and Jens Ludwig conducted to examine the correlation between crime rates and disorder within neighbourhoods. The Boston Globe article also stated further research that Harcourt and Ludwig conducted to support their objections to the BWT:

“Harcourt and Ludwig also use the results of a Department of Housing and Urban Development program to suggest that neighborhood disorder has no effect on criminality. In the HUD program, public housing tenants from cities including New York and Boston were moved from inner-city projects to safer, more orderly neighborhoods. Contrary to what broken windows would suggest, there was no decrease in criminality among the relocated public-housing tenants: They continued to offend at the same rates in their new, more orderly neighborhoods as they did in their disorderly ones.”

Through their extensive research, Harcourt and Ludwig stated that they could not confirm any empirical evidence which suggested that crime rates were inextricably linked with the appearance, lack of maintenance, and disorderly behaviour conducted within neighbourhoods.

Secondly, another notable University of Chicago professor, economist Steve Levitt, along with former Yale law professor, John Donohue (now at Stanford), have questioned the correlation between the decrease in crime rates and the implementation of the BWT. Levitt and Donohue are best known for their controversial theory about the legalization of abortions in the 1970’s, and how this factor is the most significant reason why crime rates began to fall throughout the 1980’s and 90’s. The Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis, as it’s referred to, was first published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, in 2001. Four years later, Levitt, along with journalist Stephen Dubner, successfully commercialized the theory in the renowned book Freakonomics. As cited in Donohue and Levitt’s initial paper, The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime,

“Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime….The simplest way in which legalized abortion reduces crime is through smaller cohort sizes. When those smaller cohorts reach the high-crime late adolescent years, there are simply fewer people to commit crime.”

Additionally, to build upon the Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis, we must identify the causal links that could correlate the legalization of abortion with the reduction in crime rates. Firstly, once abortion was legalized in many states across the US, in the 1970’s, many women in lower-class parts of society had the option to abort their babies if they didn’t believe they could properly care for, or afford to care for their children once they were born. In many cases, the women who sought abortions were poor, drug-addicted, unstable, and unfit mothers to-be, who did not have committed partners to help raise their children, regardless of their socio-economic status. As a result, fewer children were born into broken families which, in turn, helped to decrease the rates of crimes being committed by adolescents and young adults. Statistically speaking, the majority of crimes are often committed by males between the ages of 16 and 24, so when this cohort of the population decreased throughout the 80’s and 90’s, crime rates also decreased overall throughout the U.S.

One must wonder, though: Is this theory only applicable within the United States? According to Levitt’s Freakonomics blog, the answer is “No”. Levitt has performed an empirical analysis of his theory in other countries, like Canada, Australia, and Romania, and has found that the legalization of abortions has helped to reduce crime rates in these countries over a long period of time. Additionally, Levitt has supported his theory by stating that crime rates actually decreased around the 1990’s in cities and countries where there were not any changes to the cities’ and countries’ policing strategies. This argument definitely supports Levitt and Donohue’s theory that crime rates are not necessarily linked to “Order Maintenance Policing” initiatives and the Broken Window Theory. As Levitt and Dubner state in their book, “There is frighteningly little evidence that [Bratton’s] strategy was the crime panacea that he and the media deemed it [to be].”

Racism is a factor in the Broken Window Theory

Thirdly, Harvard sociologist, Robert Sampson, and University of Michigan education professor Stephen Raudenbush, have found compelling empirical evidence which also calls the BWT into question. Through their research, Sampson and Raudenbush have stated that maintaining communities does not have an effect on the overall perception of neighbourhoods, which leads to disorder and crime. Rather, the two men have stated that the racial penetration within neighbourhoods greatly determines how people perceive the levels of safety and disorder within their communities.

To conduct their research, Sampson and Raudenbush ventured into a group of run-down neighbourhoods in Chicago and recorded the exact number of signs of degradation. These signals included broken windows, boarded up buildings, graffiti, and litter, all of which would could, according to the BWT, lead to disorder within a community. The researchers then interviewed 3,585 residents within these communities to see how they perceived their neighbourhoods. Ironically, the respondents did not perceive their neighbourhoods to be unsafe based on the physical appearance of the environment around them. Rather, the respondents consistently stated that they perceived their neighbourhoods to be less safe, based on the racial integration within their neighbourhoods. The results of Sampson and Raudenbush’s research are discussed in the following Washington Post article, from 2005:

“White residents were far more likely to report disorder than Black or Latino residents living in the same neighborhood….As the proportion of black residents in a neighborhood increased, white residents’ perception of disorder also soared…Much to the researchers’ surprise, they saw the same patterns when they looked at the perceptions of black residents. As the percentage of African Americans in the neighborhood increased, the percentage of black residents who judged their neighborhood to be in disarray also rose…In fact, the perceptions of blacks were no less likely than those of whites to be negatively affected by an increasing number of black residents. Among Latinos, the pattern was even starker. They were far more likely than either blacks or whites to be negatively affected by the increased presence of black residents…[Overall, it] seems to be that blacks [have] bought into the same negative stereotypes as whites, and have come to associate black neighborhoods — any black neighborhood — with decay and dysfunction, regardless of the objective condition of the area.”

As unfortunate as it is, Sampson and Raudenbush have cited a very compelling argument that shows how racism is a key factor in determining how people perceive disorder within their communities. As discussed in an article in The Boston Globe,

“Sampson and Raudenbush attribute these responses to what some social theorists have called ‘implicit bias’: a tendency of both whites and minorities to subconsciously associate minorities with undesirable traits like criminality. If race, rather than the reality of a neighborhood’s condition, is what really shapes perceptions of disorder, it may not make any difference whether someone addresses the so-called broken windows [theory].”

Lastly, as this section discusses, there are many skeptics of the BWT. However, there are also many critics of William Bratton. Specifically, Bratton’s critics believe that he has only been effective with his policing efforts because of the forceful techniques he has employed to implement the BWT. His critics state that Bratton has encouraged his police forces to partake in social and racial profiling, whereby more arrests are made in neighbourhoods that are predominantly occupied by poor, African-American and Latino people, regardless of the behaviours these people conduct within their neighbourhoods. If this profiling has occurred through such “Order Maintenance Policing” efforts, as academics have suggested, then it is doubtless that crime rates would decrease within these communities.

Due to such profiling, many people would be intimidated to commit misdemeanours of any sort, regardless of the severity, because they would be scared that they would likely be punished for their mischievousness. Hence, if social and racial profiling had occurred under Bratton’s rule, it is inevitable that crime rates would have decreased amongst the lower-class, racially profiled segments of society.

A BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS PERSPECTIVE

The effects of social norms, social signals, and social conformity on people’s behaviour.

Social norms and signals often dictate the ways in which people will react within their environment. Irrationally, people tend to conform to social norms, based on their representative environment, even when they are aware that their behaviour is unacceptable, illegal, and unethical. As a result, people constantly monitor the behaviour of others within their shared environment and act upon the social cues and stimuli they receive about what is and is not acceptable behaviour to partake in. Hence, people will not always behave rationally in their surrounding environment, based on the set of stimuli they receive and process.

Furthermore, when there are not any people within a shared environment, and a person cannot analyze the behaviours of others, then he will begin to analyze his surrounding environment to understand the social cues that lead him to act in specific ways. These signals, such as broken windows, litter, and graffiti, or “derelict environments,” can cause a person to participate in criminal and destructive behaviour. These signals of degradation can also be signs of potentially under-valued parcels of land for real-estate investors. As a result, gentrification of neighbourhoods can occur on occasion, which leads to increases in real-estate prices and, thus, forces the residents of the parcel of land to relocate. So how does behavioural economics play a key role in the BWT? Can disorder within environments change our economic interests?

In 2008, a study was conducted at the University of Groningen, Netherlands, led by social psychologist Kees Keizer. In the study, Keizer analyzed the effects that degradation in environments had on people’s willingness to steal and commit acts of misdemeanour. For his study, he conducted six experiments to see how people would behave in an environment that was maintained, versus an environment that was not maintained.

As expected, the results of his experiments revealed that derelict environments breed disorderly conduct. In one experiment, Keizer and his colleagues left flyers attached to the handlebars of bikes under two controlled conditions: one where bikes were locked up in alleys with graffiti and litter, and one where bikes were locked up in the same alley without any graffiti or litter. This simple change in environment had significant repercussions. The results showed that 69% of cyclists littered their flyers in the unmaintained environment, compared to only 33% of cyclists who littered in the maintained environment. In another experiment, Keizer took an envelope with a €5 bill in it and placed it in a mailbox within two controlled environments similar to those in the previous experiment mentioned above.

To ensure that the €5 bill inside the envelope was clearly visible to pedestrians, Keizer used envelopes with clear address windows. Not surprisingly, the two environments had very different effects on people’s behaviour and their willingness to steal. In the clean environment, 13% of pedestrians took the envelope from the mailbox, whereas in the degraded environment, 27% of pedestrians engaged in the act of stealing. The results of this study were discussed in a 2008 article in The Economist, titled Can-the-Can.

“The researchers’ conclusion [for this study] is that one example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing….The message for policymakers and police officers is that clearing up graffiti or littering promptly could help fight the spread of crime.”

RUN A REGRESSION AND YOU’LL FIND…

Other theories that show differing results.

There are many hypotheses which question the efficacy of the BWT, and it is doubtless that there are also many other factors which contribute to the occurrences of crime, vandalism, and misdemeanours in a community. However, we cannot forget about the importance of analyzing both micro and macro-economic trends and behaviours on all levels to effectively conclude whether or not the BWT is effective when implemented within an environment. What we can say, though, is that it is inevitable that people will find some relationship between two or more variables if they run enough regressions. When they conduct regressions, many researchers will identify correlations between different variables, then hypothesize that there is a causal relationship between those variables. One such study shows the irony of running such regressions.

The study, labelled the Broken Yankees Hypothesis (BYH), was conducted firstly, to question the significance of the BWT, and secondly, to show that running regressions on unrelated and random variables can cause people to identify unusual causal relationships between the variables. As Bernard Harcourt discusses in his 2005 article, titled Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and A Five-City Social Experiment,

“When the New York Yankees do well, violence should decline through the strengthened social ties that develop by the bonding that occurs among the city’s residents at local bars and restaurants, with much of the city’s attention focused on a single, shared goal. When the Yankees do poorly, residents may be less likely to aggregate together for a common purpose in communal settings, and the team’s poor performance may even spur dissension among New Yorkers…The strong performance of Billy Martin’s Yankees teams during the late 1970’s coincides with a drop in homicides, but even more striking is the massive decline in homicides that accompanies the consistent excellence of Joe Torre’s squads beginning in the late 1990’s.”

Additionally, another study referred to as the Nature Effect has also shown that increases in the number of trees, amount of grass, and amount of other natural elements in an environment can decrease rates of crime and violence within a community. Once again, if a regression is run on two variables, it is likely that a person will find some type of correlation. In 2001, researchers Frances Kuo and William Sullivan of the University of Illinois conducted a study on the relationship between nature within Chicago’s public housing communities and its effect on disorderly conduct. The researchers found that,

“[People] who lived in housing units with no immediate view of or access to nature reported a greater number of aggressive, including violent, conflicts with partners or children than their peers who lived near trees and grass…. [Therefore], humans suffer a variety of negative social effects when living in barren landscapes…These effects include decreased civility, less supervision of children outdoors, more illegal activity, more aggression, more property crime, more loitering, more graffiti, and more litter”.

CONCLUSION

What can actually be said about the Broken Window Theory?

As discussed throughout this paper, many significant factors can affect the rates of crime, violence, and vandalism within a community. Through the proposed evidence, it is quite apparent multiple factors must be analyzed to fully understand how fluctuations in crime rates and disorderly conduct can potentially have an effect on the value of real estate within a community. We cannot simply conclude that the Broken Window Theory is the sole factor which causes changes in these elements of urban and real-estate economics. Hence, we believe that the following factors, based on empirical research, must be considered when hypothesizing about fluctuations in crime rates and real-estate prices within a community:

1) William Bratton’s Consistent Implementation of the BWT and successful results in differing regions is reason to believe that the theory can be effective in helping to reduce crime when it is executed properly.

2) The Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis provides evidence which shows a correlation between an increase in the number of legalized abortions (from the 1970s onwards) and a decrease in the rates of crime in society.

3) The Harcourt-Ludwig Hypothesis provides evidence which shows a correlation between a decrease in the demand for crack-cocaine (from the 1980s onwards) and a decrease in the rates of crime in society.

4) The Sampson-Raudenbush Hypothesis shows how people, even of their own race, have a predisposition to be racist towards one another. Sampson and Raudenbush have provided evidence which shows how the racial integration of neighbourhoods affects people’s perceptions of their area. Therefore, the racial integration of a neighbourhood may be more significant in determining the level of disorderly conduct within it, than the overall condition of the environment.

5) The Kuo-Sullivan Hypothesis shows how the natural environment can help to change people’s perception about the communities they live in. More trees, grass, and greenery can lead to lower rates of disorderly conduct within a community.

6) Micro and Macro-Economic Factors can drastically affect the levels of disorderly conduct within a community. Factors such as the level of education people receive, the number of schools within their communities, the friends and colleagues with whom people surround themselves, the health of the economy (which affects people’s mental states), and the unemployment rate (which affects the number of people there are to commit crimes — the more people that work, the fewer people there are on the streets).

Overall, we can conclude by stating that we believe it is always beneficial to maintain a community’s appearance, as the BWT suggests. Ensuring that a community is free of litter, graffiti, and broken windows will doubtlessly make residents in a community feel better about the neighbourhood in which they live. We cannot say for sure, though, that the BWT is an initiative that will be 100% effective in lowering the rates of drug use, violence, prostitution, vandalism, and overall disorderly conduct within a community.

There are simply too many confounding factors, which preclude us from stating that the BWT is the most effective measure in helping to reduce crime and increase real-estate values within a community. It is, therefore, inevitable that a person who runs a regression and extrapolates multiple differing variables will always find a correlation between two variables, even if causation is not implied. The lack of empirical research on the BWT prevents us from performing a hedonic pricing analysis to determine exactly how much an “intact window” versus a “broken window,” a “clean alley” versus a “derelict alley,” or a “pristine park” versus a “litter-laden park” represents in monetary terms.

However, it is doubtless that a well maintained house or building will always be more valuable in a real estate market, as compared to its potential value if it were not maintained and had broken windows.

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