Response Paper
One Spark Starts (and Stops) the Flame
One of the greatest problems for politicians in the United States of America during the last decade of the twentieth century was crime. They were constantly fighting against it, with success in most areas, yet which did not expand to one of the greatest cities in this country. There was a diminution of criminal activity in the decade of the 1990s throughout the United States of America (Davies). This was caused by the economy getting better, people looking for employment, drug use going down and the average age going up. Nevertheless, this was not happening in New York City, which actually saw the crime rate going up. This meant that some other intervention was needed in order to produce a diminishment of criminal activity. In his article “Broken Windows Theory: How The NYPD Reduced Criminal Behaviour (and What We Can Learn From It)”, the author Sam Thomas Davies describes how this city used the Broken Windows Theory in order to significantly lower the crime rate in this city.
Basically, this theory postulates that if there are elements in the environment that evidence that there is wrongdoing that goes unpunished, this will attract even more criminal activity. Their main intervention was cleaning up the subway, both in terms of graffiti and of fare beaters, in a plan that cost several billion dollars (Davies). This was so effective that it made the crime rate plummet from near fourteen shootings per day in 1994, to no violent crimes at all in a day of 2012 (Davies).
Even though this is an interesting theory, it is in no way new. In fact, one could liken it to the original sin that Catholics have believed in for many centuries. The main difference could be that here, the stimuli are taken to be external, while original sin is internal. The theory that one element leads to the rest is frequently very useful, and one can use it throughout one’s life in order to avoid actions that one believes to be harmful.
Works Cited
Davies, Sam Thomas. “Broken Windows Theory: How The NYPD Reduced Criminal Behaviour (and What We Can Learn From It).” Samuel Thomas Davis. Web. 29 Mar 2016. <http://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/broken-windows/>.
