Every so often, New York City reminds Americans that even their most iconically liberal cities can be home to their most reactionary politics. In 2021, only a year after the city was rattled by some of the largest, most explosive, and longest-lasting street uprisings of the George Floyd rebellion, New Yorkers elected the former cop, Eric Adams, as their mayor. In this case, New Yorkers sent a message to themselves and the nation: law and order remains a popular style of politics in American cities. But what sort of politics is law and order, and what explains its broad appeal?
From the launch of his campaign, Adams articulated a prototypical tough-on-crime agenda centered on the restoration of the infamous “broken windows” style of policing popularly associated with the racially discriminatory, quality-of-life policing tactics that conservative mayor Rudy Giuliani implemented in New York during the so-called Great Crime Decline of the 1990s. Because of his aggressive expansion of policing in the city and simultaneous across-the-board cuts to the rest of city government, we might characterize Adams as adhering to a quintessentially neoliberal playbook in which social welfare spending is slashed and poverty is criminalized to gratify the upper- and middle-class elites whose interests require an “orderly city” (Chronopoulos Reference Chronopoulos2020; N. Smith Reference Smith1998). And yet, a typical neoliberal framing cannot explain why Adams draws his base of support from the multiracial working class in the outer boroughs and not the financial and real-estate elites concentrated in Manhattan (Fortner Reference Fortner2023; Phillips-Fein Reference Phillips-Fein2022). Nor do I believe neoliberalism offers the best account for Adams’s arguments for reintroducing broken windows policing.
In the fall of 2022, despite boasting about the city’s low crime numbers, Adams and New York governor Kathy Hochul unveiled a massive broken windows policing initiative, “Cops, Camera, Care,” intended to “surge” police presence in the subways (Adams and Hochul Reference Adams and Hochul2022). At the launch, Adams explained that their reason for such a dramatic display of force was that “we can tell New Yorkers all the time that we have decreased crime … but if New Yorkers don’t feel safe, we are failing. … And that’s why the omnipresence of police officers … is crucial. … People have stated over and over again they feel better and safer when that uniformed officer is there. And we’re zeroing [in] … on that focus” (Adams and Hochul Reference Adams and Hochul2022; The Bad Side 2023). But why orchestrate a costly policing operation that was explicitly not intended to impact anything more tangible than vague public anxieties, especially one that coincided with a purported city fiscal crisis requiring cuts to other municipal services like schools and libraries (Phillips-Fein Reference Phillips-Fein2022)? In this article, I argue that behind broken windows policing is not a neoliberal theory of crime control but a neoconservative theory of democracy.
The many styles of contemporary American policing have no single source, but the theory behind Adams’s call for an “omnipresence” of the police has an obvious one. In 1982, James Q. Wilson, neoconservative intellectual and arguably the most influential political scientist of the second half of the twentieth century, and his coauthor, criminologist George L. Kelling, published their notorious article “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” in The Atlantic Monthly, in which they made the case for why the police should prioritize easing public anxieties instead of fighting crime (Wilson and Kelling Reference Wilson and Kelling1982). Written to publicize the conclusions of The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment (Kelling, Pate, and Ferrara Reference Kelling, Pate and Ferrara1981), this experiment showed that when police were embedded in neighborhoods where they could assist communities in addressing their informal problems (instead of trying to fight crime directly), crime did not decrease but fear of crime markedly did. Although definitively not a crime-control success, Wilson and Kelling celebrated the reduction of fear in Newark as a political one.
Diminished public anxiety proved to Wilson and Kelling that the diagnosis of the cause of the urban crisis that neoconservatives had been making since the early 1960s was correct. Urban centers were not undergoing a crisis of material deprivation but a crisis of moral (and political) authority (Dorrien Reference Dorrien1993; Steinfels Reference Steinfels1980). Most importantly, it was a crisis that neoconservatives blamed on welfare liberalism, which they believed had undermined the capacity for self-rule in urban communities by trying to solve their problems for them. According to the neoconservatives, the Great Society had not only created a culture of economic dependency but also a climate of escalating political anarchy. Accordingly, “Broken Windows” argued that the fear of crime gripping cities was less a reflection of increasing crime rates than the anxiety that came with the breakdown of community authority. The problem, then, that Wilson and Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling1991, 134) sought to resolve was, “[H]ow [could] the police strengthen the informal social control mechanisms of natural communities in order to minimize fear in public places?”Footnote 1 Their answer was to embed police within the community—not to stop crime but, through their (omni)presence, to ease the anxieties of informal neighborhood authorities.
In this article, I draw on evidence from Wilson’s papers at the RAND Corporation Archives to elucidate the role of neoconservatives in shaping the punitive turn in urban governance and transforming modern conservatism to have greater popular appeal in American cities. I contend that neoconservatives believed that by cultivating relationships between informal and formal authorities, they could woo the informal leaders—the parents, the teachers, the business owners, and renters and landlords alike—of diverse urban communities better than liberals had with social welfare. Albeit a crude mechanism divorced from any clear policy agenda, I believe that by flooding neighborhoods ravaged by the plight of deindustrialization with police, neoconservatives used the politics of law and order to foster right-wing political sensibilities in postindustrial cities.
While my analysis centers on the neoconservative political motivations underlying broken windows policing, it makes sense that for many scholars “broken windows policing has become the political expression of neoliberalism at the urban scale” (Camp and Heatherton Reference Camp2016, 2). Indeed, the neoliberal transformation of American cities was only possible because of the shift inaugurated by broken windows policing from fighting serious crime toward the regulation of social order (Chronopoulos Reference Chronopoulos2020). By criminalizing poverty and branding certain social statuses as inherently disorderly (Harcourt Reference Harcourt2005; Kohler-Hausmann Reference Kohler-Hausmann2018), broken windows policing managed the social chaos unleashed by massive divestment in public services in poverty-stricken postindustrial cities so that they could be made secure enough for redevelopment by private capital (Beckett and Herbert Reference Beckett and Herbert2011; Chronopoulos Reference Chronopoulos2011; M. Davis Reference Davis1992; Vitale and Jefferson Reference Vitale, Jefferson, Camp and Heatherton2016). Moreover, broken windows policing is not just the most militant example of how neoliberalism prosecuted its war on the poor (Camp Reference Camp2016; Schrader Reference Schrader2019), but the particular brutality of policing in certain cities and toward certain populations is inconceivable without accounting for the way “racial discourse heavily shaped the discourse of urban dysfunction” and crime (Beckett Reference Beckett1999; Hinton Reference Hinton2016; Kelley Reference Kelley, Camp and Heatherton2016; J. Miller Reference Miller2011; Spence Reference Spence, Dilworth and Timothy2020, 89).
While the proponents of broken windows policing tend to advocate for it as a strategy intended to enhance police-community relations, its critics (Harcourt Reference Harcourt2005; Lerman and Weaver Reference Lerman and Weaver2014; Lyons Reference Lyons1999; Soss and Weaver Reference Soss and Weaver2017), argue that on the contrary broken windows policing diminishes community participation in democratic processes. Yet, while agreeing with the assessment that broken windows policing diminishes the kind of democratic practices I would like to see nourished in urban communities, here I argue for not writing off the political theory underlying broken windows policing as simply ideological cover for an antidemocratic, racist, and neoliberal agenda. I believe doing so, even for good reasons, has inhibited more serious attention to the enduring popular appeal of this style of politics. Broken windows policing not only degrades urban democracy but actively supports the authoritarian practices and sensibilities of community self-rule that I see as crucial for reproducing the social base for law-and-order politics. In emphasizing what I see as the profound effects of neoconservative ideas in shaping the popular politics of law and order, I follow Timothy Weaver’s (Reference Weaver2022) analytically useful and historically compelling analysis of urban political development as the interplay of multiple overlapping and competing political orders. For this reason, even while my analysis bends the stick toward neoconservatism in its portrait of urban politics, it is only because I view the political repercussions of the neoconservative theory of law and order that I am elucidating to be underappreciated within the recent scholarly focus on the antidemocratic and repressive effects of neoliberal models of crime control. At the heart of this approach is an insistence that struggles over the intellectual paradigms that provide “the overarching purposes (or ideas) that capture control of governing institutions” are worth taking seriously (Weaver Reference Weaver2022, 322; see also Dilworth and Weaver Reference Dilworth and Timothy2020; R. Smith Reference Smith, Shapiro, Skowronek and Galvin2006). In this case, taking neoconservative political theory seriously requires complicating some of the ways we understand both the rise of the carceral state and modern conservatism.
On one register, I see the absence of engagement with the popular and democratic elements of the politics of law and order as partly a byproduct of the focus in recent critical carceral scholarship on illuminating how the “long War on Crime” was internal to the War on Poverty and how it laid the foundations for criminalizing poverty and racializing crime (Hinton Reference Hinton2016, 4; Murakawa Reference Murakawa2014, 22; V. Weaver Reference Weaver2007, 247). This scholarship dispels the notion that state repression, particularly its racialized dimensions, has been principally an effect of the conservative backlash to the progressive trajectory of liberal democratic state making. Instead, it argues that racialized class repression is essential to the liberal democratic state. But this literature obfuscates two things. First, it tends to downplay or disregard altogether what David Garland (Reference Garland2002, 3, 15) describes as the emergence in the 1970s of a new “criminological episteme” or the “accelerating movement away from the assumptions that shaped crime control and criminal justice for most of the twentieth century.”Footnote 2 By failing to incorporate an analysis of how different political regimes have led to meaningful changes in policing practices, contemporary critical theorists of the police mistakenly construe the discourse animating policing in our time as essentially liberal (Neocleous Reference Neocleous2021; Seigel Reference Seigel2018; Vitale Reference Vitale2018).
Second, when focusing on the disparate levels of violence policing and incarceration impose upon racialized communities, scholars often frame the carceral state as an apparatus of top-down racial domination, exclusion, and displacement (Alexander Reference Alexander2012; Camp Reference Camp2016; Hinton Reference Hinton2016; Muhammad Reference Muhammad2011). But I believe it is also necessary to supplement this view of racialization as a process of exclusion and domination with one that recognizes the importance of what the political theorist Gabriel Salgado (Reference Salgado2024) describes as the vital processes of “unequal and predatory inclusion.”Footnote 3 In developing the ways that a neoconservative approach to law and order sought to empower traditional authority figures in marginalized communities by supporting their capacity to exercise dominance over threats to their informal authority from within their communities, my account contributes to a growing literature on multiracial and cross-class coalitions that support punitive politics (Forman Reference Forman2017; Fortner Reference Fortner2015; Osman Reference Osman2011; Reed Reference Reed1999; Williams Reference Williams2021).Footnote 4
On another register, I share with Wendy Brown (Reference Brown2006) the sense that in order to understand the contradictory and discontinuous ways that the many movements and disparate elements of modern conservatism find points of unity,Footnote 5 it is necessary to think about its most divergent elements, like neoconservatism and neoliberalism, together. Brown (Reference Brown2006, 691) interprets these two tendencies as both logics of “de-democratization.” While neoliberals actively hollow out democratic values and replace them with market prerogatives, Brown portrays neoconservatives as content to see liberal democracy wither away as long as moral authority is restored to American society. Brown’s interpretation of neoconservatism as driven by a quintessentially moral rationality introduces an important dynamic into an analysis of the contemporary Right that can often be overly fixated on the economic dynamics of neoliberalism. This distinction has been generative of terrific insights like, for example, Melinda Cooper’s (Reference Cooper2017) important work on how the neoliberal desiccation of the liberal welfare state was only made possible because of the neoconservative moral campaign to restore the nuclear family as the primary site of American social reproduction. Likewise, this article aims to contribute to this kind of analysis of the complexity of modern conservatism by showing how, like Cooper’s insights about the economic effects of the valorization of the nuclear family, there are also important political effects to consider in the championing of the police.
However, the neoconservatives were not just motivated by moral concerns but rather understood morality within a classically political framework. Unlike Brown (Reference Brown2006, 701), who asserts that neoconservatism merely “wraps itself in the mantle of … ‘democracy’” to pursue a decidedly undemocratic moral vision, I think neoconservatism ought to be viewed as a political project. As a political project, it was aimed at radically transforming the traditional conservatism of the Republican Party from, in the opinion of Irving Kristol (Reference Kristol1995, xi), its previous existence as an “alien political entity,” which represented “the business community” and “smaller-town America,” was openly anti-intellectual, was entirely fixated on instituting a “balanced-budget,” was isolationist in foreign policy, and was opposed to civil rights. I argue that neoconservatism was an intellectual movement, largely led by political scientists and political sociologists (Joseph Reference Joseph1982), whose ambition was to reconcile a commitment to preserving a “traditional” social order with the need to make modern conservatism appealing within an increasingly diverse democracy. Rather than considering the neoconservatives as the moralist counterpart to the amoral economism of neoliberalism, I read them as some of the modern Right’s most influential thinkers of democratic politics.
In what follows, first, I identify the intellectual maneuver neoconservatives used to challenge liberal expertise on a range of social policies. In the next two sections, I show how, despite being commonly associated with crime reduction strategies, broken windows policing was explicitly intended to empower community authority, not reduce crime. In the final two sections, I address how cultivating relationships between public and private authorities in urban communities reflected a neoconservative theory of democratic self-rule, which I consider authoritarian.
The Ignorance of Expertise
In the introduction to a 1973 collection of essays peering back on the great social policy defeats of the 1960s, including his own, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Reference Moynihan1973, 24) mused:
Indeed, an increasingly common source of failure in social policy derives not from ignorance as such, but from the failure to recognize and acknowledge it. I have suggested that in this respect it is crucial to distinguish between political problems and knowledge problems in the initial process of definition. … Often political problems are mistaken for knowledge problems, as in the familiar formulation of the 1960s that if “we can develop the know-how to get to the moon, we can develop the know-how to save our cities.”
I read Moynihan’s distinction between knowledge problems and political problems as an intellectual marker dividing two eras: the postwar liberal consensus and the neoconservative realignment of American politics. The postwar era was an exceptionally ambitious time in American governance, when “the central psychological proposition of liberalism, which is that for every problem there is a solution,” was tested against the nation’s most formidable social contradictions: the persistence of poverty and racism in an age of unprecedented affluence (Moynihan Reference Moynihan1973, 18). Having already discovered that scholars could be of use in orchestrating wars, after World War II, Washington put academics in charge of its new campaigns against societal disorders (Dahl Reference Dahl1961, 764). And yet, at the height of welfare liberalism’s powers in the 1960s, the hundreds of urban riots that raged throughout the decade viscerally demonstrated that neither the Great Society programs nor the major legislative and legal victories of the civil rights era had resolved America’s most acute social antagonisms.
By the mid-1970s, their incapacity to subdue the urban crisis left many of the leading intellectuals of the liberal welfare state, including Moynihan, feeling less sanguine about the capacity of government to solve America’s big problems. For Moynihan, the trouble with the liberal approach to these problems was that while all policy issues are, at a certain level, both problems of knowledge and politics, he saw the liberal reflex to resolve the latter through the former as fundamentally misguided. Accordingly, by arguing that rescuing the city was primarily a political problem, whereas going to the moon was mainly a problem of knowledge, Moynihan sought to clarify a distinction between technical problems and political problems that he thought had been lost. However, in doing so, he created too neat a divide between the two dimensions. Differing claims to politics are also necessarily differing claims to knowledge. Consequently, the challenge to the liberal consensus that neoconservatives mounted was not just prosecuted along political lines but along epistemological ones as well. While confidence in the capacity of experts to solve problems defined the liberal era, the opposite became true during the neoconservative counterrevolution. As Moynihan (Reference Moynihan1973, 25) understood it, the difference between his time and the “ignorance in action” that defined politics in all other periods was that “increasingly it is possible to know what you don’t know.”
Decades later, the US invasion of Iraq on account of “unknown unknowns” exemplified how, far from inhibiting politics, this early example of a quintessential neoconservative style of reasoning was intended to liberate politics from the dictates of a liberal monopoly on knowledge. Long before the neoconservatives were positioned to direct foreign policy, they challenged the fundamental presuppositions of liberal social policy—the belief that experts knew how to solve the root problems of American societies—by using their knowledge of the ignorance of expertise to crack open new possibilities for political action and experimentation. Unsettling the epistemological foundations for liberal social policy presented neoconservatives with the opportunity to offer alternative explanations for society’s problems and, in the process of doing so, to reconceive fields like politics, economics, sociology, psychology, biology, culture, and morality on their terms. Sidney Blumenthal (Reference Blumenthal1986, 125) described them as an “ideological ‘light brigade,’” thinkers who were not so much experts in one area as generalists “able to move fluidly from field to field, generality to generality.” The Socratic-like aptitude neoconservatives had for introducing doubt in the governing assumption of liberal social science tapped into the widespread frustration with welfare liberalism’s top-down administrative approach, enabling neoconservatives to argue that political problems were best answered within communities and not in Washington or city hall.
For the historian Alice O’Connor, the “extended ‘urban crisis’ of the 1960s and 1970s … became a kind of crucible for galvanizing [the] new right intellectual activism” (O’Connor Reference O’Connor2008, 334) that laid the foundations for an overtly conservative urban policy agenda. Today, the Manhattan Institute continues to promote the neoconservative vision for “a self-consciously urban policy agenda, based on zero-tolerance law enforcement, school ‘choice,’ hard-nosed implementation of welfare reform, and the large-scale privatization of municipal and social services” (334). O’Connor identifies the intellectual locus for this “counternarrative” as the “two erstwhile centers of, respectively, liberal urbanology and left-liberal social criticism: the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies and the so-called New York intellectuals” (337), whose leading thinkers were brought under one masthead in the mid-1960s in Irving Kristol’s journal, The Public Interest. The journal’s early contributors were a diverse group of thinkers united by a shared interest in thinking through the difficulties of managing the urban crisis. Of the many areas of liberal social policy that neoconservatives successfully routed, their reconceptualization of how to approach crime control was the earliest and possibly most comprehensive of their urban policy triumphs.
From the late 1960s until the 1990s, James Q. Wilson was the intellectual most responsible for overturning the postwar liberal paradigms of crime control in public discourse and for authoring the theories of incarceration and policing that are dominant today. He accomplished this by undermining confidence in the liberal approach to the crime problem, which in the 1960s consisted of three elements: eliminating its root causes through antipoverty programs and antidiscrimination reforms, deterring it by making the police more efficient crime fighters, and rehabilitating criminals by transforming prisons into institutions for social improvement. However, joining critics on both the Left and the Right who believed that none of the liberal rehabilitative remedies seemed to work (Martinson Reference Martinson1974), Wilson proclaimed that having surveyed the existing programs and scholarly literature, he had found that there was no obvious administrative solution to the crime problem (Wilson Reference Wilson1975a). Rather than trying to solve the great problems of the city for its residents, Wilson argued that government should instead respond to what city residents truly wanted from institutions like prisons and police: for prisons to punish—not rehabilitate—offenders, and for the police to intervene in familial disputes, quiet noisy neighbors, and mediate disagreements on the block, not stop crimes. While liberal planners tinkered with plans to solve once and for all what he viewed as unsolvable problems (like crime), Wilson gestured toward the routine anxieties and hostilities of daily life that have no ultimate solution, but are grounds for potentially unlimited government intervention. Thus by reframing policing and prisons as serving political ends in communities, Wilson helped to transform crime control from a technical preoccupation of professional administration into one of the more compelling discourses in popular politics: the politics of law and order. In the next section, I reflect on why it is a mistake to interpret “Broken Windows” as a blueprint for decreasing crime, instead of thinking through the implications of its stated intent of undermining the assumption that the police could directly reduce crime at all.
Broken Windows and the Crime Problem
Broken windows policing is not interpreted by its critics as aimed at reviving community authority. Instead, it tends to be read as premised upon a myth: the illusion that the police can reduce crime. In part, this is a result of the central focus of contemporary critical theories of the police that argue that at the core of the liberal state is police power—an antidemocratic and illiberal form of coercive rule that dominant groups use to maintain their interests (Dubber Reference Dubber2005; Neocleous Reference Neocleous2021; Seigel Reference Seigel2018; Vitale Reference Vitale2018). In this sense, critical theories of the police are aimed foremost at exposing the real function of police in modern society, which law-and-order discourse obscures. As Mark Neocleous (Reference Neocleous2021, 3, 18) explains, to maintain the “beautiful fiction” that liberal and democratic norms circumscribe the police, a vast array of “rhetorical legitimations” must be deployed to misrepresent the police as, for example, separate from the military, neutral enforcers of laws, or capable of preventing crime.
Within critical theories of the police, mainstream criminology (which Wilson and Kelling are associated with) functions as the primary mechanism by which the commonsense myths that legitimate the police are perpetuated. Criminology is understood as performing this role by projecting the illusion that the police can be made to conform to liberal democratic norms through reforms that do not substantially alter the existing organization of society. For example, Micol Seigel (Reference Seigel2018, 5) describes how “pro-police narrators” are responsible for promoting “a tale of noble origins and ever-improving professionalization” that taps into one of liberalism’s most quintessential just-so stories: that the development of the state represents the inexorable movement of bureaucratic rationalization. This “simplistic narrative” of progressive reform, she writes, “leaves us with few analytic tools to challenge the idea of the police,” for it “misses the potential violence that is the essence of [police] power” (9).
In presuming the police perform an unchanging, essential function, critical theory presents professionalization discourse as the operative logic of policing within liberal democracies in general, rather than as a historically distinct movement within police management and reform (Fogelson Reference Fogelson1977; Monkkonen [Reference Monkkonen1981] 2004; Walker Reference Walker1977). But doing so misrepresents professionalization as the dominant tendency in police science and management today, despite its having been outmoded over 60 years ago. When the first generation of anglophone police science appeared in the 1960s and the 1970s (i.e., Banton Reference Banton1965; Skolnick Reference Skolnick1966; Wilson Reference Wilson1968), its conclusions put it at odds with the dominant institutional practices and discourse of the police professionalization movement, which “stressed efficiency, hierarchy, and bureaucratic regularity as the key to police reform” (Sherman Reference Sherman1974). From the 1930s until the 1960s, the primary objective of the police professionalization movement was to reduce the discretionary authority of police officers—seen as the source of police corruption, discrimination, inefficiency, and violence—but by the 1970s the community policing model had begun to rebrand decentralization and police discretion as the key to bringing order to the streets of urban America (Newburn Reference Newburn2022; Reiner Reference Reiner2007; Reference Reiner2015; Scheingold Reference Scheingold1984; Sklansky Reference Sklansky2007). No one was more influential in this regard than Wilson (Reference Wilson1968).
In the last decade, however, certain elements of the police professionalization movement’s logic of reform have been revived. In particular, the Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing reproduced a number of the key police reform proposals of the Johnson administration’s Kerner Commission on riots, including recommendations such as improving police training and hiring standards, providing antidiscrimination training, diversifying police forces, and relying on increased oversight over the enforcement of these standards by the Department of Justice (R. Davis Reference Davis2015). The failure of Obama-era police reforms to reduce police violence during a period of growing popular uprisings against the police can in part explain why much of the critical scholarship on policing has identified liberal reformism and police professionalization as the primary obstacle to meaningful change. For example, the cover of Alex Vitale’s (Reference Vitale2018) highly influential book, The End of Policing, reads, “The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is policing itself.” In this sense, contemporary critiques of policing are the clear product of an Obama-era shift in carceral studies away from thinking about law and order as a politics of the reactionary Right, and instead in identifying liberal police reform as the primary impediment to any effort to end policing as it currently exists. At the heart of this critique is the insistence that “it is largely a liberal fantasy that police exist to protect” the public from crime and that it is this fantasy that fuels the popular belief in the “police as the legitimate mechanism for using force in the interests of the whole society” (2018, 32).Footnote 6
However, while raising doubts about the link between policing and crime rates might have struck at the heart of the police professionalization model—an approach that was principally aimed at making the police more efficient crime fighters—and might be usefully applied to its neoliberal reboot, this is not an effective way of challenging the neoconservative logic of broken windows policing that is premised upon the idea that the police can do little to directly reduce crime. In other words, the neoconservative framework of broken windows policing and critics of liberal police professionalization share the same assumption about the relationship between policing and crime. The major difference, however, is that while critics believe that in “reality … the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by … tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people” (Vitale Reference Vitale2018, 34), broken windows policing operates under the claim advanced by neoconservative social scientists that it is those communities in particular that demand police intervention in their personal affairs. Therefore, while the issue of crime is inextricable from the politics of law and order, the exponents of broken windows policing hold far more complicated views on the meaning of crime and the limits of crime control than are typically reflected in contemporary critical scholarship on policing. And even as liberal reformism remains a key part of the ideological and political support structure for American policing, I believe it has been a critical mistake to identify it as the primary one. For that reason, it is important to consider how the neoconservative interpretation of the relationship between policing and crime differs from liberal conceptions.
In “Broken Windows,” Wilson and Kelling meant for the “broken windows” metaphor to “explain how neighborhoods might decay into disorder and even crime if no one attends faithfully to their maintenance” (Wilson Reference Wilson, Kelling and Coles1997, xv). Their sense that signs of disorder invite more disarray led them to speculate that by attending to low-level disorder in neighborhoods, like broken windows, the police might have better luck at helping to maintain the kind of community cohesion that organically deters crime than they ever had at trying to stop criminal activity head-on. For Wilson and Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling1991), this reorientation away from fighting crime to enforcing community authority was a return to the traditional role of the police. In the past, they explained that urban communities maintained their internal cohesion through “a kind of built-in self-correcting mechanism: the determination of a neighborhood or community to reassert control over its turf.” An essential resource that enabled communities to “reclaim … their authority over the streets” was that “the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community” (Reference Wilson and Kelling1991, 129). Wilson and Kelling claimed that by making community authorities feel confident that it has the support it needs to enforce its informal rules, the police could perform a more valuable service than they had in trying to directly fight crime.
Ironically, even though both the theory and practice of broken windows policing explicitly sought to disassociate the police from crime fighting and expert management (Chronopoulos Reference Chronopoulos2020), chance led to the opposite reception. Like with mass incarceration more generally, much of the perceived success of broken windows policing can be attributed to the happenstance that its implementation coincided with the Great Crime Decline that began in the late 1980s and continued into the 2000s (Zimring Reference Zimring2006). The fact that crime rates plummeted for over a decade allowed for the widespread sense that, in Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (Reference Gilmore2007, 17, 20) pithy formulation, “crime went up; we cracked down; crime went down,” when the actual sequence was that “crime went up; crime went down; we cracked down.” Regardless, plummeting crime rates delivered the political and intellectual leaders of the law-and-order movement a victory that was difficult to contest.
Twenty years after its implementation, broken windows policing remains the central plank of the conservative approach to urban policy in America, especially in New York City, where it was first implemented by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police chief Bill Bratton. One sign of the extraordinary success of broken windows policing was its rapid conceptual dilution as it quickly became synonymous with a variety of styles of policing that had nothing to do with its underlying theory (Kohler-Hausmann Reference Kohler-Hausmann2018, 2). This paradoxically included a neoliberal interpretation of broken windows policing, which exerted its influence on the crime rate through Bratton’s CompStat program of data-driven policing that emphasized top-down management of hot-spot patrolling, rather than the community-oriented beat patrol that “Broken Windows” had recommended (Vitale and Jefferson Reference Vitale, Jefferson, Camp and Heatherton2016). Thus broken windows policing became associated with both a (neoconservative) decentralized, highly personalistic, and discretionary style of neighborhood policing and a (neoliberal) technocratic management style of crime control—a combination instigating “hundreds of thousands of additional contacts between the police” and resulting in skyrocketing “number[s] of people churned through the criminal justice system” (2016, 160).Footnote 7
Claiming that order-maintenance policing had indirectly reduced serious crime created political opportunities but also presented a potential empirical weakness. As a result, attempts to prove that policing disorder is linked to crime reduction (Skogan Reference Skogan1990; Reference Skogan2006) or to provide evidence to the contrary (Harcourt Reference Harcourt2005; Harcourt and Ludwig Reference Harcourt and Ludwig2006) have colored much of the scholarly debates over policing in the years since the Great Crime Decline. However, the results of these efforts have been consistently mixed,Footnote 8 with the empirical evidence of the harms that police either cause or prevent providing support for both positions that favor increasing the level of policing in the US and those that would have the police abolished altogether (Levitz Reference Levitz2023; Lewis and Usmani Reference Lewis and Usmani2022; Vitale and Karakatsanis Reference Vitale and Karakatsanis2022).
The benefits of better empirical data on policing notwithstanding, the prioritization of disproving that broken windows policing reduces crime is indicative of an overestimation of the importance of crime reduction to the theory, which has contributed to a general misperception of how broken windows policing understands crime.Footnote 9 Wilson and Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling2006) argued this point in response to Bernard Harcourt’s (Reference Harcourt2005) Illusion of Order, in which Harcourt attempted to both empirically disprove that enforcing order could reduce crime and illuminate how Wilson and Kelling’s theory failed to consider the social harms that might follow from empowering the police to determine what and how community norms should be enforced. In their rebuttal, Wilson and Kelling “happily acknowledge” that their “speculation” that greater order leads to declines in crime is “not settled.” But they simultaneously asserted that increased public order is “self-evidently good,” even if it has no effect on crime rates. For them, crime reduction was neither the first nor ultimate goal of broken windows policing, which is why they endorsed “order-maintenance policing.”
Wilson and Kelling’s manner of dismissing Harcourt’s suggestions regarding harm reduction is also illustrative of the approach to crime that broken windows policing pioneered, which I argue takes crime to reflect a quintessentially political problem lacking a technical solution. Whereas Harcourt argued that the police ought to focus on serious crimes so that public order could be maintained through more impersonal measures like legalizing prostitution and installing fare-evasion-proof turnstiles, Wilson and Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling2006) avoided a substantive debate over crime reduction strategies by simply retorting that Harcourt ought to “direct his arguments to the ‘community members’ about whom he so vaguely writes who prefer a very different world than the one he endorses. They have already voted against the world he prefers, many times over.” Here Wilson and Kelling redefined what Harcourt framed as an administrative problem of knowledge—the question of what is the least harmful way to enforce order—as a problem of politics, or as a question of what kind of order the community demands the police enforce. I turn now to the implications of Wilson’s attempt to redirect the police from performing an administrative role to becoming adjuncts of community politics.
What Kind of Problem Is Crime? What Kind of Solution Are the Police?
From the outset, “Broken Windows” was an argument for abandoning the administrative and political morass that the “war on crime” had become for urban governments, by instead rooting policing in local concerns. In a 1991 grant proposal for a study on how the highly discretionary policing Wilson and Kelling advocated for could be legally accommodated, Kelling (Reference Kelling1991, 3) explained that while police managers and politicians were fixated on bringing down index crimes, regular patrol officers often told him “stories in which they would go to meet with citizen groups only to discover that many citizens, after politely nodding in agreement about the ‘crime problem’ in their neighborhoods as represented in official crime statistics, then switched the conversation to issues that were of more concern: youths around, etc.” In this sense, Kelling explained that the “Broken Windows” essay “gave voice to an inchoate and rough-hewn belief that neighborhood groups had been unsuccessfully trying to express for some time … while crime was a problem, neighborhood groups were more concerned with disorderly, uncivil, and bothersome behavior” (3). More simply, “Broken Windows” was premised upon the idea that fear of crime was mostly anxiety about more quotidian problems.
This was a theory that Wilson had been developing for decades before the publication of “Broken Windows.” In 1967, in an early engagement with the crime problem at a conference at the Urban Institute in Boston, Wilson (Reference Wilson1967, 9) explained to his audience of city planners and urbanists that although a recent study he had conducted of Boston-area voters concluded that “crime in the streets is the chief issue,” this did not mean that police needed to crack down on crime. On the contrary, as legitimate as fears of crime may be, he explained that they are never about crime in isolation but rather connected to many other anxieties. Inviting his audience to complicate their understanding of these surveys, Wilson continued that when ordinary people are pressed to establish the nature of the connection they see “between lawlessness and rioting … and public obscenity, unconventional morality, social and political heresy, and the alleged dependence created by the welfare state,” these types of correlations are things people “find very hard to articulate” (9–10). But Wilson believed the reason people cared about serious crimes was not that they were experiencing these crimes themselves, but that violence, disorder, impertinence, and incivility were all linked in a great chain of authority. And therefore, he explained the growing anxiety about crime in the US was the result of what the neoconservatives believed to be a generalized crisis of authority (Nisbet Reference Nisbet1975) with which, during a period of postindustrial racial, class, gender, sexual, and generational conflict and upheaval, all Americans had some level of experience (Katz Reference Katz1989).
By 1975, Wilson had synthesized his disappointing experience chairing President Johnson’s 1966 White House Task Force on Crime into the bestseller Thinking about Crime (Reference Wilson1967; Reference Wilson1975a), in which he challenged the dominant penal theory of the first half of the twentieth century: the idea that prisons were intended to rehabilitate criminals (Allen Reference Allen1981; Garland Reference Garland2002). In it, Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, 43) blasted liberal sociologists for collectively mischaracterizing their own findings to “assert that crime is the result of poverty, racial discrimination, and other privations, and that the only morally defensible and substantively efficacious strategy for reducing crime is to attack its ‘root causes’ with programs that end poverty, reduce discrimination, and meliorate privation.” The disjuncture between the liberal policy recommendations of sociologists and what their research actually found (that criminal propensities were linked to “the subjective states that preceded or accompanied criminal behavior,” or conditions “that cannot be easily and deliberately altered” [48–49]), explained to Wilson why he had “yet to see a ‘root cause’ or to encounter a government program that successfully attacked” the crime rate (xv). Instead of trying to eliminate the root causes of crime, Wilson proposed that criminologists focus on traditional responses to crime, like policing and prisons, “not necessarily because of a belief that the ‘causes of crime’ are thereby being eradicated, but because behavior is easier changed than attitudes” (56). Liberals might not want to accept reality, Wilson wrote, but “wicked people exist” (209), and with little evidence of any reliable way to reform character, it is best to “lock ’em up” (Wilson Reference Wilson1975b).
This is how Wilson popularized what has become the dominant penal theory in the US: the theory of incapacitation, which Gilmore (Reference Gilmore2007, 14) describes as the “least ambitious of all” penal theories because it “simply calculates that those locked up cannot make trouble outside of prison.” Yet this characterization is only descriptively true. The real ambition of the theory lies in what it rejected: the belief that it was possible to identify what causes crime (poverty) and what can stop it (redistribution). Without a clear sense of what causes crime, ambitious plans for a society without crime are precluded. Thus, the genius of Wilson’s intellectual maneuver was to first undermine the epistemological assumptions of the prevailing order, and then, having established that scholarly knowledge and expertise provide no certainties as to how to rid society of its problems, reestablish the realm of action as governed by an entirely different calculus: politics.
However, Thinking about Crime also performed a second, subtle theoretical twist. Often read by scholars as having helped to introduce a strictly behavioral or methodological individualist approach to crime deterrence (Garland Reference Garland2002, 59–60; Loss Reference Loss2022, 275–76; Schrader Reference Schrader2019, 236), Thinking about Crime did indeed shift attention from addressing root causes of crime to disincentivizing undesirable behavior. But overemphasizing what Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, 50) saw as the always limited policy mechanisms governments have at their disposal to reduce crime risks losing sight of the significance of his other major intervention, which was the reinterpretation of class as a product of “values rather than … income.” This redefinition implies that whereas society can easily redistribute income, the family, which “inculcate[s] habits of virtue, law-abidingness, and decorum,” does not do so “as the agent of society or its government” (49). Therefore, while the roots of social disorder become diverse and less directly accessible through government interventions in Wilson’s analysis, the primary fortification against it is known. Thus, even as he seemingly limits the ambit of state action to influencing behavior, he subtly reassigns the place where crime can be combated best from one domain (poverty) to another (the family).
Even as he seemed to limit the state to the unambitious role of moderating behavior, Wilson framed this intervention as a kind of act of last resort. Crime was not simply a threat to communities for Wilson but a symptom of their collapse. He explained that “[b]y disrupting the delicate nexus of ties, formal and informal, by which we are linked with our neighbors, crime atomizes society and makes its members mere individual calculators estimating their own advantage, especially their own chances for survival amidst their fellows” (Wilson Reference Wilson1975a, 21). It is only when the bonds of community are broken that people even act in ways that seem to prioritize maximizing their individual interests, and therefore, the real burden of crime is not the harm it inflicts but the social anomie it unleashes. In other words, for Wilson, we only become individuals whose behavior responds to vulgar material incentives and disincentives once we are alone, cut off from a higher system of values that structure our actions. Thus, as Wilson’s former student and scholar of public management, Mark H. Moore (Reference Moore and Wilburn2023, 108), observes, in a challenge to the prevailing behavioral theories of his time, such as those derived from “[Mancur] Olson’s model of homo economicus, Jim [Wilson] created a more enriched model of what could be described as homo civicus or homo politicus.”
Accordingly, the problem with crime was for Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, 21, 25) not just that it can “victimize individuals,” but that on a political register, crime contributes to the “breakdown of neighborhood controls (neighborhood self-government, if you will).” The real thrust of Wilson’s analysis centered on the kinds of community relationships that are the best buttress against criminality, whereas he only championed lengthy prison sentences as a behavioral remediation for individuals who are already cut off from organic links with communities. Simply, punitive interventions are not framed as capable of meaningfully reversing the underlying conditions of the urban crisis, which Wilson argued could only be reversed through greater community cohesion.
Crucially, for Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, 36), community disorganization was not the outcome of declining economic fortunes in the cities, which he believed were improving, but had two other primary drivers. First, he believed that the centralization and nationalization of political parties had led to the collapse of urban political machines, resulting in city governments becoming “increasingly remote from neighborhood concerns.” Second, he thought the easing of racial restrictions on housing had allowed the middle class and particularly the “number of blacks who have been able to move out of inner-city or slum areas” to deplete the “human infrastructure” (38), so much so that “the central city is coming to be made up of persons who have no interest, or who face special disabilities, in creating and maintaining a sense of community” (30). In other words, Wilson claimed that reforming corrupt local political parties and integrating middle-class suburban neighborhoods had destroyed the system of patronage that had incorporated poor urban neighborhoods into formal political structures while also draining these increasingly Black communities of the middle-class organic leaders that he believed had provided for their informal political organization in the past. In this light, we can see how, for Wilson, the problem of the urban crisis was a problem of restoring urban community leadership needed for establishing “communal social controls” (35).
However, the dilemma this problem posed for policy intellectuals to Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, 35) was that “there [was] relatively little that government can do directly to maintain a neighborhood community.” The only immediate action that Wilson suggested that governments might take was to “assign more police officers to it” (35). While he did not think the police could lower crime rates, he speculated that the community authority the police supported could. The role of the police here would be to reduce the anxiety of the informal authorities by using their discretion, not the law, to support informal community codes. But if Wilson wanted to strengthen community authority, he was dubious of the campaign for “community control” over the police led by New Left groups, Black radical organizations, and other community politics movements. As struggles over community control objectives—like the creation of community police boards—were escalating, Wilson argued that greater direct control over the police was as impossible for communities as it was for administrators and the courts (Sherman Reference Sherman1974, 289).
Unlike these other approaches, the potential of broken windows policing derived from the way it appealed to the rank-and-file police officers whose personal, discretionary authority it gave priority to while simultaneously speaking a language of decentralization, community preservation, and neighborhood authority that gelled with the “new spirit of localism” of the “neighborhood movement” that by the mid-1970s was sweeping urban America and transforming city governance (Osman Reference Osman, Schulman and Zelizer2008, 110, 120). By rebranding policing as local and decentralized as opposed to an expertly managed bureaucracy, and police officers as maintaining community order through personal discretion rather than indiscriminately enforcing laws, Wilson and Kelling tapped into the energies of the “neighborhood revolt” of the 1970s, whose “paradoxical coalitions” of “returning suburbanites, African American activists, white ethnic revivalists, historic preservationists, and new urban white-collar professionals” were “introducing a postindustrial reimagining of the declining industrial city” (113, 110–11). Thus, not only did broken windows policing represent an epistemological shift from interpreting the urban crisis as an administrative issue to identifying it as a political one, but it also participated in a reconceiving of the neighborhood and the family as the primary site of urban politics rather than city hall. “In the long run,” Wilson ([1985] Reference Wilson1991, 23) wrote, “the public interest requires private virtue.”
The Neoconservative Theory of Democracy
One of the key critiques of postwar liberalism advanced by neoconservatives was that liberals had a poor conception of politics: it was not only that liberals were looking at the wrong problems—poverty instead of authority—but also that they treated political problems as administrative ones. Liberals held that the problems of cities could be resolved by expert planners and that the limits of political representation could be overcome by making political organizations more procedurally democratic. But for Wilson and his peers, problems in cities resulted from the diverging interests of their residents, not from poor planning. Likewise, Wilson did not think that making urban political organizations more procedurally democratic would lead to the interests of poor urban communities being better represented, because these communities had conflicting interests, not singular ones. By articulating their own theory of politics, neoconservatives were able to connect the diverse views of their inchoate political coalition under a theory of democracy in which, as Moynihan (Reference Moynihan1973, 59) asserted, “politics is a neighborhood business.” The task the neoconservatives set themselves to was redirecting the study and practice of politics to the community level, a domain that they believed under liberalism had become an object and not the subject of politics.
Speaking at New York University in 1970, the intellectual leader of the neoconservatives, Irving Kristol (Reference Kristol1983, 59), announced that “[o]ur most obvious difficulty is that we have so many big cities and seem so persistently inept in devising a satisfactory machinery of self-government in them—swinging wildly from the corrupt rule of political machines to abortive experiments in decentralized, direct democracy, with a slovenly bureaucracy providing the barest minimum of stability in between.” Like Wilson, Kristol believed the urban crisis was best understood as a crisis of urban democracy, which he thought liberals were both responsible for and mystified by. The dilemma for conservatives, however, was for Kristol that under the banner of the Republican Party, conservatives could only hold power for a “temporary interregna.” For so long as the Right remained uninterested in claims to “ideological authority,” Kristol believed it could only hold power because of the weakness of the Democratic Party, because, he explained, “in the modern world, a non-ideological politics is a politics disarmed” (59).
In Kristol’s (Reference Kristol1995, 353) view, both the Nixon and Ford administrations had “lived off Democratic errors but had no governing philosophy of [their] own—at least none that could strike a popular nerve among the electorate”—and therefore the challenge he saw neoconservatives responding to was to make conservatism “more politically sensible as well as politically appealing.” In 1976, Kristol wrote that “[t]here is a possible conservative majority out there, but it has to be welded together out of disparate parts; it has to be created, not just assumed. And it can only be created through the unifying power of political ideas” (1995, 353). Twenty-six years later, Kristol (Reference Kristol2002) wrote to Wilson that
[p]olitical science, having been from its beginnings a liberal-oriented discipline, became in your hands a neoconservative one. And you had better hands! American conservatism would never have gained its current legitimacy had its arguments on public policy been demonstrated to be not merely ideological (rephrasings of Hayek) but firmly founded on scholarly grounds. Congressional hearings have never been the same since you provided conservatives with scientists to testify and scientific studies to cite. The liberal-left among political (and social) scientists are now desperately playing catch-up.
How did Wilson accomplish all this? By first undermining the epistemological foundations of liberal social science, which aimed to identify the root causes of social disorders, and then by critiquing the dominant assumption of welfare liberalism that the messiness of politics could be replaced with the reasonableness of administration, Wilson created openings in which neoconservatives could establish their own grounds for both knowledge and politics. Furthermore, by shifting the focus of politics away from rational planning and to problems of authority in the home, the school, and the streets, neoconservatives advanced a theory of democracy capable of producing a diverse and contradictory coalition. Here, too, Wilson’s intellectual contributions helped to illuminate how the prioritization of cultural issues by neoconservatives was not simply a reflection of their particular moral fixations but rather were unified within an intellectual framework that held the informal formation of virtues in the family and the community as the true center of political life.
As early as graduate school, Wilson was deeply concerned by what he perceived as a kind of diminishment in the conceptualization of politics that came as a byproduct of the postwar pluralist system of governance. The pluralist schema was, in Wilson’s (Reference Wilson1958, 1) early view, “an essentially economic view of the political process … whereby scarce or valued resources are allocated to achieve the maximum attainment of given ends.” Challenging the leading authority on pluralism, Robert Dahl, Wilson explained that while pluralists define the “essence of politics” as the “attainment of goals,” politics ought to be seen as the struggle over the “formulation of goals” (3–4). As another former student of Wilson’s, the political scientist R. Shep Melnick (Reference Melnick and Wilburn2023, 125), recently commented in an essay reflecting on Wilson’s contribution to a (conservative) “reorientation of our approach to political science,” “Wilson’s work shows us what it means for man to be a political animal, not solely an economic creature maximizing its individual utility.”
Economic redistribution, rational administration of social services, experiments in democratic proceduralism, participatory forms of democracy—none of these had sufficiently overcome the urban crisis, and according to Wilson, they all failed because of their fundamental misunderstanding of politics and democracy. Moreover, he believed that the real center of political life—where everyday sensibilities of what is just, virtuous, and moral are cultivated—was not to be found in formal political venues but in the daily life of the citizenry. To that end, Wilson (Reference Wilson and Buehrig1966, 142) wrote that “the city is the best place to explore the kinds of attachments citizens have to the polity” because “it is the very ordinariness of local concerns—garbage collection, police protection, street repair, school programs—that make them valuable as tools to explore the nature of citizenship and civility.” Insomuch as democracy was about self-rule for Wilson, a democratic society is one where people feel they have a degree of authority over the problems that personally matter to them.
A frustration Wilson (Reference Wilson1967, 15–16) had with how scholars approached urban issues was that no matter the problem, urbanists, as a rule, preferred to introduce some new “pilot project or a new demonstration program” and generally wanted nothing to do with “anything ‘traditional’” or any “traditional agency.” He, on the contrary, believed the task of urbanists ought to be “to make a much more serious effort to strengthen these traditional agencies” (16), of which he had two in particular in mind: schools and police.Footnote 10 And the most important questions regarding these two institutions were, “Do they have the support of society? Are people ready to back them, and to back the traditional sources of authority that stand behind them?” (15). The reason he saw these two as so vital was that “the tradition of civility, the commitment to authority … has always been their court of last resort” (16). In a sly reversal, Wilson suggested that the best way for the police to serve the community was for the community to support the police.
Here, Wilson’s conception of politics was consciously Aristotelian. Praising Aristotle for establishing “that government exists to perfect the character of the householders,” Wilson (Reference Wilson2010, 167) asserted that rediscovering this sensibility was the key to tackling the urban crisis. Consequently, his Aristotelian conception of politics became the basis for how he saw the police contributing to the rebirth of political society. He made this debt explicit in his notes for a lecture he gave at a Los Angeles Police Department staff retreat in the summer of 1987, which opens with the following theses:
CONCEPT IS ANCIENT
Aristotle: Man is a social animal
Human life only possible in communities
Decent communities are those that support human virtue
Aristotle thought that virtue only possible in small communities where all could know all
Where all know all, informal social control is easier
Challenge: can decent life occur in big cities?
Can if big city is a collection of viable communities
PROBLEM IS MODERN: “BROKEN WINDOWS.” (Wilson Reference Wilson1987)
Wilson considered political life to be primarily conducted through informal processes. For most, self-rule can only ever mean informal authority; thus, democratic society is not only contingent on private authority, it is, for Wilson, almost entirely an affair of private authorities. Accordingly, his theory of democracy gives a special place to the police. Since he began to study the police in the early sixties, Wilson (Reference Wilson1965) knew that the real challenge of policing was to find “[n]ew ways … to bring police officers and neighborhood groups together for non-bureaucratic meaningful communication. … The alternative may be a police force which, however competent, functions as an army of occupation.” Twenty years later, his answer was “Broken Windows,” and a fantastical vision of a return to nineteenth-century policing, when police “were thought to be servants of well-established, well-understood community norms” (Wilson Reference Wilson and Woodson1977, 39).
A Democracy of Authorities
The 1970s and 1980s were an inflection point in American politics where the preeminent disposition in social policy transitioned from solving problems to managing anxieties. I have argued that the neoconservative intellectual maneuver that propelled this shift in rule had two dimensions. First, the neoconservatives unsettled the epistemological foundations of liberal welfarism, which held that the root problems of social antagonisms could be identified and directly addressed. Second, in undermining faith in governing through expertise, neoconservatives designated new zones of possibility for political (and intellectual) activity. As neoconservatives unleashed this intellectual assault at practically every level of social policy, the unifying thread across their efforts was an attempt to relocate the locus for policy development from administrative agencies to community politics. Thus, speaking at the 1968 commencement for The New School, Moynihan (Reference Moynihan1973, 201), quoting Kristol, announced, “We are all decentralists now.” In this sense, the decentralization often associated with the neoliberal rollback of the state must also be seen as a neoconservative relocation of the center of political life from the halls of government to the relations of authority within local communities.
The prioritization of localism and traditional institutions like the family, school, and neighborhood by neoconservatives was structured by a neo-Aristotelian, democratic theory of politics whereby these stations of social organization were articulated together as collectively imperiled by welfare liberalism and their empowerment as the route out of the crisis of technocratic liberalism. Of all the ways neoconservatives tried to revive urban politics, the intervention that successfully anchored their influence in city politics was the politics of law and order. Broken windows policing exemplified the neoconservative theory of democracy, articulating this approach insofar as it aimed to shift the role of the police from responding to the administrative problem of crime rates to supporting traditional community authorities. Consequently, the police became the vehicle through which neoconservatives believed the personal relations of authority necessary for democratic politics could be reinforced in urban ghettos—or what I name as the neoconservative political theory of law and order that has permeated urban governance since the 1970s.
It is important to elucidate the neoconservative theory of democracy because, without it, the politics of law and order appear as only a vehicle for repression. This is not to say the police are not repressive. On the contrary, we have only begun to develop the means to account for the extent of violence that policing inflicts in America. We do know, however, that in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, the Department of Justice has discovered that the Municipal Court and Police Department generate close to a quarter of the city’s revenue through the racially discriminatory enforcement of minor municipal violations, like jaywalking, and a policy of issuing arrest warrants for failures to appear in court or to pay fines (R. Davis Reference Davis2015). This is to say, it was less than a decade ago that it became widely accepted that local policing represented a blind spot in American public consciousness (and the field of political science) where the authority of the state was left almost entirely unchecked (Soss and Weaver Reference Soss and Weaver2017). But part of understanding how the police have come to have such an outsized role in local governance means also grappling with the paradox that the politics of law and order also often finds support within overpoliced communities.
Here, we must think beyond the ways the police repress to try to understand what elements in civil society they also uplift. Wilson saw the family as the most important site for the development of the habits and sensibilities necessary for political society, and believed that supporting the family ought to be made the central objective of politics. However, while the police are one of the most violent institutions in American society, so too is the family (Snyder Reference Snyder2019). And far more than with the police, authority in the family is unchecked. But if the family is political, what is the political significance of its violence? Everything in Wilson’s work suggests that it would be decisive in the formation of political character. Yet in The Marriage Problem (2002), a book where Wilson extols the virtues of the family and warns of the chaos its decline would unleash in society, violence in the family never makes an appearance. Never does Wilson suggest that a society in danger of coming apart because of the political consequences of family disorganization might have anything to fear from the politics engendered by the family. This silence, I believe, is suggestive of the type of constitutive violence neoconservatives believed to be necessary for a stable society.
Robyn Marasco (Reference Marasco2023, 1070) recently argued that amending Carl Schmitt’s exclusion of personal violence in his existential definition of the political as “the real possibility of physical killing” helpfully “clarifies … that the family is a political institution, that the intimate relations between men and women (and the bonds between adults and children) are properly political, and that the patterns of violence that many women and children suffer in their private lives are—in no small part—how the exception becomes the rule.” Marasco’s example is instructive for how we might read Wilson’s great concern for the political dangers of violence between strangers against his striking lack of concern for violence in the family. In Thinking about Crime, Wilson (Reference Wilson1975a, xix) commented that the reason he focused almost exclusively on “predatory street crime” was because of his “conviction” that compared to all others, this form of crime is “a far more serious matter … because predatory crime … makes difficult or impossible the maintenance of meaningful human communities.” But if street violence was atomizing for Wilson, was there a kind of violence that he saw as community enhancing?
Here, we might consider Wilson’s extraordinary silence on violence in the family as suggestive of an alternative way to interpret his blithe attitude toward the dangers posed by discriminatory discretionary policing beyond representing his personal indifference toward the suffering of the racialized poor. In “Broken Windows,” Wilson and Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling1991, 133) acknowledged that they had “no wholly satisfactory answer” to the problems of discriminatory policing “except that [they] … hope … the police will be inculcated with a clear sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority.” They suggested that this might be accomplished by their “selection, training, and supervision” (133), but curiously, this contradicts Wilson’s long-standing conclusions about the limits of police management to limit the use of discretion by the police on the street. More clarifying is recalling that the primary question “Broken Windows” asked was, “Should police activity on the street be shaped in important ways by the standards of the neighborhood rather than by the rules of the state?” (131). Wilson and Kelling’s answer was yes, the police ought to be made to enforce the informal rules of the community and broken windows policing was the way this could be accomplished.
In this context, their nonchalance toward police violence is entirely consistent with their argument that to restore community “authority,” the police have traditionally “acted, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community” (Wilson and Kelling Reference Wilson and Kelling1991, 129). Their hope then was that by embedding the police in communities, the police would not enact their personal bigotry but the prejudice of the community. For Wilson and Kelling, extralegal, norm-enforcing violence is not just permissible but constitutive of community authority, particularly when the most important institution in the community is experiencing a crisis of authority. However, the neoconservatives did not see the urban crisis as just a crisis of urban authority in general but as a crisis of authority in Black families in particular. Even in The Marriage Problem, Wilson (Reference Wilson2002, 107–60) still clung to Moynihan’s (Reference Moynihan1965) infamous hypothesis that one of the main drivers of the persistent social disparities between Black Americans and other groups was a result of the high rates of “mother-only” families in Black communities. Wilson’s fixation on the need for two-parent families and his insistence that police violence could help to restore relations of authority in urban communities suffering from acute family disorganization suggests that the type of authority he saw the police as supplying was the violent male authority missing from the matriarchal household. With this in mind, we might consider the extralegal, discretionary violence disproportionately meted out by the police upon young Black men to have been, for Wilson and Kelling, an understandable and even acceptable, if not sufficient, substitute for the kinds of patriarchal and misogynistic violence they implicitly saw as vital to social cohesion and absent in the Black family.
But the police also offer more to the family than an alternative to the absent father. If we interpret the supplementary violence police provide to urban communities as indicative of Wilson’s implicit recognition of a necessary, constitutive violence of authority in the home, then part of the danger to families during the urban crisis was that American society was becoming increasingly hostile to men abusing their partners and children. As the agency responsible for prosecuting those who perpetrate interpersonal violence, it is no coincidence that it is precisely the kind of violence that is most common in the home—intimate partner violence and child abuse—that the police have a long history of tolerating. Not only do the police persistently fail to prosecute alleged abusers and collect evidence of abuse, and not only do they regularly treat victims of abuse in ways that discourage them from calling the police in the future (Scaia and Martinson Reference Scaia and Martinson2023), but police officers are themselves responsible for some of the highest rates of domestic abuse of any profession (Mennicke and Ropes Reference Mennicke and Ropes2016). What kind of relationships of authority does this suggest that the police use their discretion to support within communities? There is good reason to name this as “patriarchal authority” (Dubber Reference Dubber2005). Or if we were to identify it through its dominant style of gendered violence, we might more rightly call it “misogynist authority.” But because we are also specifically attempting to think about the ways informal and formal authority are interdependent here, we might also follow the Frankfurt School’s lead in considering the kinds of relations of authority that develop in the home as connected to the types of authority that become supported elsewhere (Adorno et al. [1950] Reference Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford2019; Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer and O’Connell1975). Accordingly, it is best to name the kind of authority the police support in the community as “authoritarian.”
Interpreting broken windows policing as engaged in a material process of developing authoritarian social relations and political sensibilities helps to disabuse us of the view of the state and society as opposing forces, wherein prisons and police are viewed mechanically as mere instruments of state repression. On the contrary, forms of state and societal authority are constitutive of each other and enter into crises together. Neoconservatives were cognizant of the political relationships interweaving state and society. Accordingly, they did not see the police as merely a tool to impose their vision of order but instead saw them as offering a means to overcome the social divisions of party, race, ethnicity, class, age, sex, and gender to form exciting new political coalitions and political sensibilities, composed through processes of “unequal and predatory inclusion” that begin, as Aristotle noted, with the unequal relations of authority in the home (Salgado Reference Salgado2024). The police may have the unique capacity to impose their will on the public arbitrarily, but the neoconservatives recognized that what makes the police special is that community members regularly call upon them to come into their homes and intervene in their personal affairs.
Despite the sobering reality that the “American federal system imposes systematic obstacles to the efficacy of [local] political mobilization around persistent racial and economic hierarchies” (L. Miller Reference Miller, Bridges and Fortner2016, 194), community organizing remains vital to fighting back against neoliberal austerity and authoritarian reaction in the city. Indeed, it is for this reason that it matters so much that the neoconservatives sought to cultivate conservative sensibilities around, and popular support for, law and order within urban communities. Recognizing the ties between formal and informal authorities means that critics of policing, particularly abolitionist ones, must be careful not to adopt an uncritical, idealized portrait of overpoliced communities as inherently sympathetic to efforts to oppose the police and the state (Chua Reference Chua2020; Maher Reference Maher2021; Vitale Reference Vitale2018). The task of politically empowering urban communities requires that communities not only mobilize against forces threatening them from without, but also against the forces that already structure them from within.
Acknowledgments
It was only through the guidance and insights of Robyn Marasco, Michael Fortner, Leonard Feldman, Danielle Hanley, Oliver Silverman, and Gabriel Salgado that this project was made possible. I would also like to thank Zachary Conn, Ferris Lupino, M. Edith Sklaroff, Kamran Moshref, Spencer Piston, the participants of the “Police Abolition” panel at the Association for Political Theory’s 2023 annual conference, the members of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Political Theory Workshop, the editors of Perspectives on Politics, and my four anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback at various stages of this project. Finally, I am indebted to Cara McCormick and Eric Newman at the RAND Archives for their hospitality and generous assistance.
