Charles Murray is the F.A. Hayek chair emeritus in cultural studies at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was adapted from his AEI working paper “The Collapse of Broken-Windows Policing in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, 2013-22.”
George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020, was followed in many places across the country by protest marches and riots. The Black Lives Matter movement mushroomed in size, funding and influence. Mayors of some major cities pilloried police and urged slashing their budgets.
In the ensuing months, especially as pandemic lockdowns eased, urban crime became more intrusive. Rampant shoplifting forced the closure of many stores, large and small. In a group of 34 of the largest U.S. cities, homicides surged 30 percent in 2020. Daily life in some cities evoked the menace and decay of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.
The timing of this crime rise led to a widespread impression that Floyd’s murder and its immediate aftermath had marked a break point in urban crime. I shared that impression and set out to test it by looking closely at crime data for three major cities: New York, Washington and Los Angeles.
What I found was more complicated than a change from before Floyd’s murder to after it: The time after May 2020 did see crime increases, but the preceding years — roughly a decade — paved the way.
The national crime story over the past 70 years tells of a disastrous rise in crime in the 1960s and 1970s, followed in the 1990s and 2000s by one of the great successes of social policy, a steep decline in crime. Policy analysts still argue about the reasons for that decline. I will not try to adjudicate the competing claims made for changes in policing, increased incarceration, or economic and cultural factors. But it is a fact that the progress occurred after many large cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, had adopted a new public safety philosophy: broken-windows policing.
“Broken windows” refers to the argument that making arrests for minor offenses heads off a sense of lawlessness that invites serious crime. These offenses are ones for which police could make an arrest but ones they can instead choose to ignore depending on the circumstances — offenses that don’t physically harm anyone or steal property but are insults to public order.
New York, Los Angeles and Washington have posted online databases containing raw data for each arrest made in those cities from 2013 through 2022. I used that information to count arrests for eight categories of offenses that are especially targeted by broken-windows policing: vandalism, theft of services (such as turnstile-jumping), vagrancy, public drunkenness, lewd behavior, prostitution and solicitation thereof, loitering and disorderly conduct. To ensure that all these qualified as minor offenses, I included only arrests that were charged as misdemeanors, violations or infractions, excluding arrests charged as felonies.
The graph below shows the proportional change in the number of those arrests using 2013 as the baseline.
In New York and Los Angeles, the fall in arrests for broken-windows offenses was steep and steady from 2013 to 2020. Washington is different, with a sudden rise in broken-windows arrests in 2019. The anomaly was created entirely by a one-year spike in arrests for prostitution and solicitation, the result of a policy decision to clear the streets of sex workers near hotels. If arrests for prostitution and solicitation are deleted from the Washington data, the trendline of broken-windows offenses shows the same uninterrupted decline as the trendlines for New York and Los Angeles.
As of 2022, arrests for broken-windows offenses since 2013 had fallen by 74 percent in New York, 77 percent in Washington and 81 percent in Los Angeles. There was no apparent “Floyd effect” in New York or Los Angeles. A case for a small effect can be made for Washington. It should be noted that during the same period, reported major crimes known as FBI index crimes declined only slightly in New York and Washington, and rose in Los Angeles.
The collapse of broken-windows policing was accompanied by a broader retreat from law enforcement in all three cities for felonies as well as misdemeanors.
Consider how Los Angeles has applied California’s “flash incarceration” law, which allows probation or parole officers to impose a jail sentence of one to 10 days for probation or parole violations, thereby serving as an immediate, unappealable punishment. It is a direct expression of broken-windows theory. In 2013-2014, Los Angeles used flash incarceration 4,858 times; by 2021-2022, its use had dropped 99 percent. The city also virtually stopped arresting people for vagrancy (down 98 percent), failure to appear in court (down 98 percent) and contempt of court (down 91 percent).
Among the other crimes that had large reductions in arrests, theft stands out. It isn’t just that Los Angeles police stopped arresting shoplifters, signified by a 78 percent reduction in arrests for petty theft. Arrests for the FBI index crime of larceny dropped by two-thirds.
Arrest records in New York during that period also show dramatic declines. The top three categories, all with reductions in arrests above 90 percent, had broken-windows implications (disorderly conduct; prostitution and solicitation; theft of services), as did the fourth, trespassing (down 89 percent), as did drug-related offenses (down 86 percent) and traffic violations (down 76 percent).
The only FBI index crime that saw substantially reduced arrests in New York was rape (down 45 percent). Otherwise, New York arrest patterns for major crimes did not change appreciably even as its enforcement of minor offenses plunged.
That cannot be said for Washington, which saw large reductions of arrests for five of the seven serious FBI index crimes. Arrests for robbery and larceny were both down 67 percent. Arrests fell by 59 percent for aggravated assault, 49 percent for burglary and 40 percent for rape. Except for aggravated assault, these figures were mitigated by fewer reported offenses, but the net reductions in arrests for robbery (down 33 percent) and larceny (down 59 percent) suggest substantially reduced policing.
Not surprisingly, arrests in Washington for offenses with strong broken-windows implications during that period crashed as well. They occupied the top three slots for the largest declines in arrests: prostitution and solicitation (down 97 percent), vagrancy (down 93 percent) and public drinking (down 93 percent).
Many explanations can be offered for the collapse of broken-windows policing in these three major U.S. cities, but the effects are not complicated or subtle. The daily quality of life of Americans living in much of New York, Los Angeles and Washington has suffered. Boarded-up stores, vandalism and people sleeping on the streets have increased along with smaller indignities of life in these neighborhoods — public drinking and drug use, omnipresent graffiti, intimidation of passersby.
These costs of ending broken-windows policing are not borne by people in affluent suburbs or rich urban neighborhoods. They are disproportionately borne by urbanites who are minorities or have modest incomes, or both. If improving their lives is the goal, then restoring broken-windows policing should be part of the solution.
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