Thin Blue Facade: The Broken Windows Disaster & Policing the Postmodern City

As a wave of violent crime hit American cities in the 90s, municipal governments began to turn to a novel and untested policing strategy: rather than targeting serious crime directly, police would tackle signs of social "disorder" like graffiti and drug use to prevent more serious criminal activity from settling in. The strategy, commonly known as "broken windows policing", soon became wildly popular, even as scientific research and practical experience proved that it had almost no impact on serious offences. Yet broken windows remains the dominant policing paradigm in the US and increasingly abroad, intended not to fight crime but to form a facade of order and prosperity to obscure a society increasingly plagued by soaring inequality and intractable social problems. In this video, we will discuss the origins and consequences of broken windows policing.

Archive of the original Broken Windows essay: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/

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Many thanks to tessa from the Armchair Urbanist Discord for the title suggestion.

Some stock footage is from levinkoshy: https://www.videvo.net/video/roads-and-cars-aerial/4778/

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A lot of research for this video came from Dr. Bernard Harcourt's book "The Illusion of Order". If you see a fact or statistic in this video not directly taken from one of the papers below, it came from that book.

Other research used in this video:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362480607085792
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4495553
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cl_pubs/124/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306396817717149
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/cdozo37&div=31&id=&page=
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10439463.2018.1448396
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26677656
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1095796015579993?journalCode=nlfa

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Music links (first appearance):

(0:00) Kai Engel: Evermore
(1:14) Kai Engel: Meekness
(4:49) Kai Engel: Interception
(7:02) Kai Engel: Downpour (Pon X)
(10:09) Chad Crouch: Just a Memory Now
(12:51) Kai Engel: Blur
(15:37) Chad Crouch: Lonely Warbler (Instrumental)
(19:23) Lex Villena: Mandy 12

Full music information is available at the below links:
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kai_Engel
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chad_Crouch
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/lex-villena

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This video is published under a Creative Commons license. You are free to copy, reproduce, and alter its contents as long as you cite me in your work.

Видео Thin Blue Facade: The Broken Windows Disaster & Policing the Postmodern City канала Eco Gecko