[Peace-discuss] NG invokes discredited "Broken Windows" theory

[David Green]

Credible social scientists no longer put stock in "broken windows." James Q. Wilson's 1982 theory has proved to be a political/historical artificat of the era of Zero Tolerance, and all of the mischief that resulted from that, from inner cities to  schools to prisons. Wilson also, with John DiIulio, propagated the notion of "super predators" in the 1990s, which was of course directed at young black males. The political context of all of this was the War on Drugs, Giuliani, the Central Park jogger, etc. The intellectual context was The Bell Curve, wefare queens, etc. But NG editorialists still think that they can sound social scientific by invoking this discredited view. James Q. Wilson is a racist social scientist, and broken windows is a racist social theory.
 
NG editorial:
 
"Aggressive panhandling establishes a tone that tells its perpetrators that 
infringing on other people's space and rights is OK. It sets the stage for 
escalation.
It's analogous to the "broken windows" theory of urban policing, where city 
officials quickly repair a broken window to prevent the spread of the idea that 
more broken windows are acceptable. It's why New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani 
cracked down on minor misconduct as part of his successful campaign to improve 
the city's quality of life."
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows#Criticism_of_the_theory
 
According to most criminologists who speak of a broader "backlash",[9] the broken windows theory is not theoretically sound.[10] They claim that the "broken windows theory" closely relates correlation with causality, a reasoning which is prone to fallacy. David Thacher, assistant professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of Michigan, stated in a 2004 paper that:[10]
[S]ocial science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it.... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces.
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