The end of 2001 is a particularly good time to evaluate "Zero Tolerance," as it marks the departure from the political scene - for now - of the man most famously associated with this idea, namely Rudolf Giuliani, mayor of New York City. His departure is forced, since New York’s "term limit" law prohibits him from serving any more than the two consecutive terms he has had from 1994. He clearly would prefer to stay on as mayor a little while longer, and opinion polls showed him to be more popular than any of the candidates who ran to replace him. That popularity was mainly due to his heroic performance under the pressure of the September attacks. Before September 11, one of the main things Giuliani was known for was "Zero Tolerance," and many New Yorkers loved him for that, too - while many others hated him.
"Zero Tolerance" was derived from the "Broken Windows" theory, first put forward in 1982 in The Atlantic Monthly, a prestigious American literary and commentary magazine. In their article "The Police and Neighborhood Safety," James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, two academics, claimed that, when it came to maintaining public order in a community, even leaving a broken window in a public building unrepaired was a bad idea: passers-by will see it and conclude that no one cares, i.e. that there is no one in charge and that any behavior is acceptable. Soon, all the rest of the windows in that building will be broken; petty crime in the area - public drunkenness, graffiti, litter - will get out of control. As law-abiding citizens abandon streets which have become more menacing and unpleasant, the basis will be laid for an explosion of serious crime.
Serious crime was a constant part of life in New York City from roughly the early 1970s up through the 1993 mayoral election. Then, after running on a "law and order" platform, promising to "Reclaim the Streets," Giuliani unveiled his "Zero Tolerance" policy. The city police were instructed actively to prosecute those committing relatively minor crimes - the beggars, graffiti-sprayers, subway turnstile-jumpers, the infamous "squeegee men" (= gummizwabber) - i.e. derelicts who came up to clean the windshields of cars stopped in traffic in the hope of getting money through begging and/or intimidation. Significantly, he also greatly increased the number of New York City police available to carry out this mission. As their chief he appointed William J. Bratton, who as head of the Transit Police had already started to institute a similar policy in the city’s transportation network under Giuliani’s predecessor as mayor (and electoral opponent), the Democrat David Dinkins.
With that, Giuliani set off an impressive, radical downward trend in the city’s crime statistics that lasted throughout his two terms as mayor. Reported crimes fell from 430,460 to 184,111 in the year 2000; during that same period murders decreased from 1,927 to 671 per year. "Zero Tolerance" - already a concept with great political appeal because of its "get-tough" approach - seemed to be a great success. In particular, many serious criminals - murderers, rapists - were eventually caught by the police when they were arrested for committing more minor offenses. This policing approach was analyzed and copied throughout the rest of the United States and overseas as well; most notably, local Italian authorities (especially the mayor of Milan, Gabriele Albertini) and the new Labour government of Tony Blair expressed an interest in learning more about "Zero Tolerance."
So, had the puzzle of crime in the post-modern society been solved? Not necessarily. There soon appeared a dark side to "Zero Tolerance," namely police harassment and brutality. Just as incidents of reported crime plunged, complaints and claims against the police for mistreatment of citizens skyrocketed - up by 41%. Seventy-five percent of these were filed by citizens of either black or brown skin, against a police force which itself remained 75% white. The Giuliani mayoral record became stained with brutal incidents perpetrated by police against members of minorities: Abner Louima, an immigrant from Haiti, arrested in 1997 and beaten and sodomized in a Brooklyn police station; Amadou Diallo, another immigrant, from Africa, unarmed but nonetheless shot dead in 1999 by police officers in a hail of bullets after they mistook his wallet for a gun; Patrick Dorismond, a black American security guard, also unarmed at the time but nonetheless shot dead in 2000 by an undercover police officer after a misunderstanding about a drugs transaction.
We don’t live in New York, of course; we live in the Netherlands. That means that the key question for us to consider concerning "Zero Tolerance" is "What can we learn from that experience to help us do something, as a society, against crime in the big Dutch cities?" In light of the above well-publicized NYPD atrocities, the answer to that question, easily arrived at by many Dutch commentators, was "Nothing. It can’t work here."
That is taking a too-superficial view. A good case can be made that, in fact, with "Zero Tolerance" Mayor Giuliani took the original "Broken Windows" idea and corrupted it into something much more confrontational and racially-divisive than it was ever intended to be. (This argument is presented in a New Republic article by Jeffrey Rosen, "Excessive Force," written just after the Dorismond incident, and viewable on-line here. According to Rosen, things started to go wrong precisely when the rigorous enforcement of laws against petty crimes became viewed as a good way to catch more serious criminals. Remember, the purpose had originally rather been to deter such minor crime in the first place and so never let local society deteriorate to rampant serious crime. Seeing a potential murderer-on-the-loose in every citizen who, say, merely crossed the street at a red light, police behavior became much too aggressive. "Zero Tolerance" policing soon became for many identical to a regular army of occupation, completely out-of-control in its behavior This view was not helped by Mayor Giuliani’s own confrontation approach towards his critics and towards minorities, and his readiness to take the police’s side after every brutal incident against an innocent citizen.
Of course this debased form of the original "Broken Windows" policing idea can never - and should never be allowed to - happen in the Netherlands. Indeed, the conditions for it here are even worse; one lesson from the New York experience is that, for tougher law-enforcement to be successful, citizens must feel solidarity with the police. But in the Dutch cities it is too easy to imagine instead an "us-versus-them" confrontation, with the non-white, immigrant, allochtonen population on the other side - easily identifiable, and for the police easy to hate, by the color of their skin, and with little political influence to peacefully counteract increased police pressure on their everyday lives.
But rejecting "Zero Tolerance" because of the abuses it engendered does not mean that the original "Broken Windows" approach does not represent a valuable approach to urban crime. That drastic fall in crime in New York City (and other American cities) was for real. The insight that focusing on small crime can do much to eliminate much more serious crime still holds true, especially when that focus is accompanies by community outreach programs to help citizens understand what the police are trying to accomplish. That this is the right way to enforce "Zero Tolerance" has been demonstrated in other cities, such as Boston; it has even been demonstrated in New York itself, namely by an experiment conducted in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where "Zero Tolerance" was introduced together with close communication with the community involved (as told in the Rosen article).
The outreach and communication needed to make a "Broken Windows" approach work without alienating the populace are definitely imaginable for the Netherlands. In other words, there is plenty to be learned and applied here from that American crime-fighting experience, if we can only look beyond the ugly racist incidents which have sullied its name - without justification - to outside observers. Indeed, the more serious obstacle to such an approach in the Netherlands has to do with the increased commitment of resources to the police that this policy also necessarily involves. The unionized Dutch police are expensive, spend too much time filling out forms, and are all-too-rarely seen where they are needed. Is there the political willingness to spend more on them?
In the meantime, commercial establishments (e.g. Albert Heijn) want to leave neighborhoods such as the Bijlmer because they can no longer put up with the security problems that the taxes they pay are supposed to keep away from them; metro cars and even NS trains are covered with graffiti to an extent you won’t find anymore even in New York; and, in his 2002 New Year’s message, Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen has to declare "If one in four Amsterdammers is the victim of crime every year . . . then it is obvious that something has to change" (HFD English Edition, 3 January 2002). Maybe what needs to change are the popular prejudices against "Zero Tolerance."