With crime and urban disorder at the “top of mind” these days, we should recall that we once knew what worked: “broken windows” policing. And since the left attacked broken windows policing by distorting it, it is worth recalling a key portion of the James Q. Wilson/George Kelling argument:
And an important virtue of enforcing the rules against “minor” offenses like jumping the turnstile, peeing on the street, or carrying an open container of alcohol is that it’s easy to visually verify who is and isn’t following the rules. If someone isn’t following the rules, police officers can stop them and search them, and if they’re carrying an illegal gun, they can arrest them. Without this kind of low-level stop, the only way to get illegal guns off the street is by stopping people at random—which realistically means racial profiling. That is bad. People have a very legitimate interest in not being stopped and frisked merely for belonging to a particular demographic group. Where progressives have gone too far is in extending this consideration to people who are in fact committing crimes, when those are exactly the people you want to stop.
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