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George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles
From Fixing Broken Windows
(The Free Press, 1996)
From Chapter Three:
The Importance of Connecting
Things happen when police officers get out of their cars and systematically
interact with citizens, through foot patrol or some other tactic. Let us
provide an example observed by Kelling in walking foot patrol on the streets of
Newark, New Jersey, during the mid-1970s. This was a time when most of the
citizens in the area were black and the officers were white, when memories of
the 1960s riots in American cities were still fresh. As two officers patrolled
a Newark street, they came upon a pregnant African-American woman
with a young child at a bus stop being harangued by a drunk African-American
man. Both the woman and child were obviously terrified. The officers knew
the man and addressed him by name: "Joe, you must leave this woman alone." When
Joe protested, one of the officers took him firmly by the shoulders, turned him
around, and began walking him away from the woman. Joe continued to protest:
"I'm not doing anything wrong." His street companions, who were standing
alongside nearby buildings and watching, began to comment: "Oh, oh, Joe wants
to get arrested." The officer walked Joe about ten yards away from the woman
and instructed him: "I'm going to let you go, but keep walking. I don't want
you to bother this woman anymore." Joe continued to protest, and when the
officer let him go, he took a couple of steps forward, then tried to run around
the officers and back to the woman and child. The officers immediately grabbed
Joe, wrestled him to the ground, handcuffed him, and called for a car to take
him to the station for booking. During the twenty-minute wait for the car, Joe
continued to protest, ranting and raving in a drunken fashion. One officer
held Joe down, while the other exchanged comments with citizens, including the
woman and child who had been harassed. Joe's street colleagues never came to
his aid, but ridiculed him for behaving as he had. Finally, a police car came,
the officers put Joe in the backseat, the car pulled away, and citizens
dispersed.
How different this event might have been if the officers and citizens had
been unfamiliar with each other. For many white officers, making such an
arrest on a Newark street, when the vast majority of passersby were African
Americans, would have been a nightmare scenario. As it was, however, the scene
was relatively relaxed. Indeed, throughout their foot patrols white officers in
Newark moved easily along city streets, chatted with citizens, explained to
miscreants why they had to behave, ordered people to "move on," and
occasionally, made arrests. In effect, these officers were exercising the very
authority ideally accorded to police that we described in Chapter 1, an
authority negotiated as citizens and police came to know and trust each other
and to recognize their mutual interest in maintaining order on the streets.
Return to The Promise of Public Order: An Interview with
George Kelling and Catherine Coles.
Copyright © 1996 Fixing Broken Windows, by George L. Kelling and
Catherine M. Coles. Reprinted by arrangement with The Free Press, a division of
Simon and Schuster.
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