Making Order of Disorder: a Call for Conceptual Clarity*

Over the past several years, social science has not been kind to broken windows theory. Various critiques have led some scholars to conclude that the “theoretical arc of the broken windows or incivilities thesis has at the least flattened out and may be in decline” (Taylor, 2006:1625). Criticisms surface on several dimensions. Among the most scathing, Harcourt (2001) takes issue with the concept of “disorder,” claiming it is socially constructed, variable, and biased against lower class culture. He also challenges the notion that disorder and crime are related. In his reanalysis of Skogan’s (1990) data, Harcourt documents no support for a disorder-crime relationship, finding “no statistically significant relationships between disorder and purse snatching, physical assault, burglary, or rape when other explanatory variables are held constant” (p. 78). Other studies grant that although disorder and crime may be related, the nature and strength of the relationship are questionable. Sampson and Raudenbush (2001:4) find it is the structural characteristics of neighborhoods, as well as neighborhood cohesion and informal social control (i.e., collective efficacy)—not levels of disorder—that most affect crime. And other studies similarly document that disorder takes a back seat to more powerfully predictive aspects of neighborhood fabric such as status and stability (Taylor, 2008; see also Taylor, 2001). Social science also has not been kind to the most common policy response based on the broken windows perspective: order maintenance policing.1 Although many public officials and analysts have credited this form of policing with drastically reducing crime and improving the quality of life in New York City and in other major cities in the United States, some scholars question how much, if any, of the decline in crime can be attributed to order maintenance policing (Bowling, 1999; Conklin, 2003; Harcourt, 2001; Kamen, 2000). Bowling (1999), for example, argues that