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Monday, March 14, 2016

Broken Windows and Eric Garner

If you look at "broken windows" conceptualization, you will see that a good part of it is focused on the "maintenance of order" mission that James Q. Wilson discusses.  "Public order" questions always have the potential for causing friction between police and the community, and between members of the community itself (which I'll return to).

Garner died as a direct result of this friction, but there are additional factors that contributed to his death.
1.  Sin taxes - the reason tht Garner had been confronted by police before in this area is that he was selling cigarettes without paying the taxes on them; the merchants in the area with shops have to sell their cigarettes with taxes, making them more expensive.  Consumers could buy Garner's cigarettes cheaper, and thus not buy them from the shopkeepers,  It was the shopkeepers that kept calling police to remove Garner from the area.
2.  Culture conflict - The culture of the shopkeepers differed from Garner's.  Garner felt he had a right to freely sell cigarettes whereas the shopkeepers felt that Garner wasn't playing by the rules.  This is an example of intercommunity culture conflict that has nothing to do with police EXCEPT that they have to intervene on the side that controls the jurisdiction politically.  This is true whether a community policing model is being used or not.
The most hypocritical example to me of this kind of culture conflict is the Michael Vick case.  Upper class liberals go on and on about systematic oppression of black people, and yet led the mob attack to put Vick in jail for his dogfghting activities.  Yet in some black, Hispanic, and white cultures, dogfighting and cockfighting are parts of life.  Another example of intercommunity culture conflict specific to New York would be the Big Gulp law.  You didn't see the upper class of the city making their Grande cappuccinos illegal, just the Big Gulps that the unwashed peasants drank ;)

Every time you make a law, you make confrontation between police and PARTS of the community more likely.  The more insane the law is (sin taxes for example, or banning substance use like Big Gulps), the more confrontation you can expect.  And statistically speaking, the more confrontation, the more likelihood someone gets hurt, be they cop or civilian.  A civilians odds of being hurt skyrockets when they resist arrest in the presence of multiple officers.

Broken windows worked in New York.  The crime rate dropped while it was in use (although there is the argument that that was due to the nationwide drop in crime, the New York rates dropped considerably more than the national average).  I told a class in this school that the crime rate in New York would rise again once Diblasio ended broken windows policing, and time has borne me out.

Bowling, B. (1999, Autumn). The rise and fall of New York murder: Zero Tolerance or crack’s decline? British Journal of Criminology: VOL. 39 NO. 4. Retrieved April 15, 2014 from www.umass.edu/legal/Benavides/Fall2004/397G/.../7%20Bowling.pdf

Celona, L. (2015, May 26). You’re 45% more likely to be murdered in de Blasio’s Manhattan.  T
he New York Post. Retrieved May 27, 2015 from http://nypost.com/2015/05/26/youre-45-more-likely-to-be-murdered-in-de-blasios-manhattan/

Greene, J. (1999, April). Zero Tolerance: A case study of police policies and practices in New York City.
Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 45 Issue 2. Retrieved April 17, 2014 from http://crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/ZeroNYC.htm

Kelling, G. and Wilson, J. (1982, March 1).Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety.
The Atlantic.Retrieved August 28, 2014, from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/

Orlando, J. (1997). Fighting crime from the ground up: The "Zero Tolerance" approach.
GW Policy Perspectives. Retrieved April 15, 2014 from ww.policy-perspectives.org/article/download/4187/2937
if Americans are too lazy to work, shouldn't we stop their welfare payments?

Illegal aliens are cheaper to hire because employers do not have to pay into Social Security, Medicare, or health insurance.
The side effect of this is that it drives wages downward for those citizens that do get jobs.

Illegal aliens remit (send their money home, as opposed to spending it here) from 50-75% of their wages out of the country, this is money that is not spent in our economy, which is more money that business loses, and thus has no need for employees to transact. When businesses don't need to hire, they won't.

By cutting off welfare support, it would force those Americans you call lazy to compete for jobs with illegals.  Now, that is a little tongue in cheek, but overall it makes little sense to me to pay citizens not to work while importing workers that do not contribute to major portions of the economy.

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