The police and neighborhood safety

5 important questions on The police and neighborhood safety

What frightens people the most in public places?

  • Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger.

  • The fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.


The foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighbourhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime.


But how can a neighbourhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down—in fact, may have gone up?

  • What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods.





A determined sceptic might acknowledge that a skilled foot-patrol officer can maintain order but still insist that this sort of "order" has little to do with the real sources of community fear that is, with violent crime. To a degree, that is true. But two things must be borne in mind. Define those two things:

  • Outside observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of real crime.

  • 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.

    • One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
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Because of the nature of community life in the Bronx—its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"—vandalism begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behaviour is costly.

But how come that vandalism still occurs, even in Palo Alto?

  • Vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."

A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle.

Describe the chronological order of a neighborhood which is falling into disrepair:

  • A piece of property is abandoned,
  • Weeds grow up,
  • Awindow is smashed.
  • Adults stop scolding rowdy (ruw/ruig) children;
  • The children, emboldened, become rowdier.
  • Families move out,
  • Unattached adults move in.
  • Teenagers gather in front of the corner store.
  • The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur.
  • Litter accumulates.
  • People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slump (een dronkenlap) to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off.
  • Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.

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