The broken windows theory, proposed by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, connects disorder in neighborhoods to increases in serious crime, suggesting that maintaining order can prevent further criminal activities. This theory significantly influenced policing strategies in the 1990s, particularly in New York City, where initiatives aimed at reducing low-level offenses reportedly contributed to declines in crime rates. However, the theory has faced criticism regarding its empirical validity and its implications for disadvantaged communities, with researchers suggesting a need for more nuanced models to understand the relationship between disorder and crime.

1. Broken windows theory, academic theory proposed by James Q.
Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows
as a metaphor for disorder within neighbourhoods. Their theory
links disorder and incivility within a community to subsequent
occurrences of serious crime.
Broken windows theory had an enormous impact on police
policy throughout the 1990s and remained influential into the
21st century. Perhaps the most notable application of the theory
was in New York City under the direction of Police
Commissioner William Bratton. He and others were convinced
that the aggressive order-maintenance practices of the New
York City Police Department were responsible for the dramatic
decrease in crime rates within the city during the 1990s. Bratton
began translating the theory into practice as the chief of New
York City’s transit police from 1990 to 1992. Squads of
plainclothes officers were assigned to catch turnstile jumpers,
and, as arrests for misdemeanours increased, subway crimes of
all kinds decreased dramatically. In 1994, when he became New
York City police commissioner, Bratton introduced his broken
windows-based “quality of life initiative.” This initiative
cracked down on panhandling, disorderly behaviour, public
drinking, street prostitution, and unsolicited windshield washing
or other such attempts to obtain cash from drivers stopped in
traffic. When Bratton resigned in 1996, felonies were down
almost 40 percent in New York, and the homicide rate had been
halved.
The theory
Prior to the development and implementation of various
incivility theories such as broken windows, law enforcement
scholars and police tended to focus on serious crime; that is, the
major concern was with crimes that were perceived to be the
most serious and consequential for the victim, such as rape,
robbery, and murder. Wilson and Kelling took a different view.
They saw serious crime as the final result of a lengthier chain of

2. events, theorizing that crime emanated from disorder and that if
disorder were eliminated, then serious crimes would not occur.
Their theory further posits that the prevalence of disorder
creates fear in the minds of citizens who are convinced that the
area is unsafe. This withdrawal from the community weakens
social controls that previously kept criminals in check. Once
this process begins, it feeds itself. Disorder causes crime, and
crime causes further disorder and crime.
Scholars generally define two different types of disorder. The
first is physical disorder, typified by vacant buildings, broken
windows, abandoned vehicles, and vacant lots filled with trash.
The second type is social disorder, which is typified by
aggressive panhandlers, noisy neighbours, and groups of youths
congregating on street corners. The line between crime and
disorder is often blurred, with some experts considering such
acts as prostitution and drug dealing as disorder while many
others classify them as crimes. While different, these two types
of disorder are both thought to increase fear among citizens.
The obvious advantage of this theory over many of its
criminological predecessors is that it enables initiatives within
the realm of criminal justice policy to effect change, rather than
relying on social policy. Earlier social disorganization theories
and economic theories offered solutions that were costly and
would take a long time to prove effective. Broken windows
theory is seen by many as a way to effect change quickly and
with minimal expense by merely altering the police crime-
control strategy. It is far simpler to attack disorder than it is to
attack such ominous social ills as poverty and inadequate
education.
The theory in practice
Although popular in both academic and law-enforcement
circles, broken windows theory is not without its critics. One
line of criticism is that there is little empirical evidence that
disorder, when left unchallenged, causes crime. To validate the
theory in its entirety, it must be shown that disorder causes fear,
that fear causes a breakdown of social controls (sometimes

3. referred to as community cohesion), and that this breakdown of
social controls in turn causes crime. Finally, crime must be
shown to increase levels of disorder.
The strongest empirical support for the broken windows theory
came from the work of political scientist Wesley Skogan, who
found that certain types of social and physical disorder were
related to certain kinds of serious crime. However, Skogan
prudently recommended caution in the interpretation of his
results as proof of the validity of the broken windows theory.
Even this qualified support has been questioned by some
researchers. In a reanalysis of Skogan’s data, political theorist
Bernard Harcourt found that the link between neighbourhood
disorder and purse snatching, assault, rape, and burglary
vanished when poverty, neighbourhood stability, and race were
statistically controlled. Only the link between disorder and
robbery remained. Harcourt also criticized the broken windows
theory for fostering “zero-tolerance” policies that are
prejudicial against the disadvantaged segments of society.
In his attempt to link serious crime with disorder, criminal
justice scholar Ralph Taylor found that no distinct pattern of
relationships between crime and disorder emerged. Rather, some
specific disorderly acts were linked to some specific crimes. He
concluded that attention to disorder in general might be an error
and that, while loosely connected, specific acts may not reflect
a general state of disorder. He suggested that specific problems
would require specific solutions. This seemed to provide more
support for problem-oriented policing strategies than it did for
the broken windows theory.
In short, the validity of the broken windows theory is not
known. It is safe to conclude that the theory does not explain
everything and that, even if the theory is valid, companion
theories are necessary to fully explain crime. Alternatively, a
more complex model is needed to consider many more cogent
factors. Almost every study of the topic has, however, validated
the link between disorder and fear. There is also strong support
for the belief that fear increases a person’s desire to abandon

4. disorderly communities and move to environments that are more
hospitable. This option is available to the middle class, who can
afford to move, but not to the poor, who have fewer choices. If
the middle class moves out and the poor stay, the
neighbourhood will inevitably become economically
disadvantaged. This suggests that the next wave of theorization
about neighbourhood dynamics and crime may take an economic
bent.
Inspiration
Posted: November 30, 2012 in Article Reactions, Article
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Inspiration can come from the strangest of places. I’ve been
struggling with a topic to write a paper on. The paper had very
broad instructions: a paper related to a theory of justice.
Sometimes those are the hardest papers to write. Most students
had emailed the professor (if you are ever stumped, do that), I
was too proud and just sat here and procrastinated. And then I
wrote this reading response and I was inspired.
Reading Response: Broken Windows by James Wilson and
George Kelling
On the surface, one may look at the Broken Window theory as a
simple causal relationship: broken window in a house leads to
vandalism and an increase in crime, but it’s just not that simple.
I think the deeper meaning of what a broken window represents
and what it really leads to is important and presents a more
cyclical relationship.
Let’s start with their example: Consider a building with a few
broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency
is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they
may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied,

5. perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a
sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter
accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash
from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.
The reason why broken windows and acts of vandalism are still
prevalent is because communities simply do not seem to care for
it. The window itself actually symbolizes that the community
does not care and will not address the problem. The negligence
of society towards any form of a “broken window” signifies the
lack of concern for the community.
What isn’t shown in a simple diagram is the deeper actions and
emotions that have to play into a simple broken window. For
one, there has to be a feeling of disjointedness in the
community, a sense of anonymity, in order for the window to be
broken. The window itself should become a signal crime to
community; however, when there is no repair, it instead signals
to others that antisocial behavior is acceptable. When the
window is not repaired, a further reinforcement of said behavior
exists and states that such behavior is tolerable and overlooked.
Soon, the behavior becomes a social norm in the community and
more people feel that they can engage in the act. The feeling of
conformity to the social norm (the act of vandalism) is further
enforced when there is such a lack of routine monitoring
(ignoring the increase in vandalism) that the further acts go
ignored.
I think what’s important here is that it’s not a simple causal
model: Instead of just leading to a simple increase in crime, this
act reinforces the previous acts and the increase become
cyclical, reinforcing itself, and adding to further increases in a
lack of community cohesion and a feeling of anonymity within
the community; the community continues to ignore the
individual and the crime. This basically shows the power of
reinforcement—by ignoring the crime, you are reinforcing that
crime is acceptable. At any point in this cycle, a simple increase
in patrol (be it community or police) or even a repair would
show some thought and that the community recognizes the

6. damage.
Edward Abbey once wrote: In my notion of an anarchist
community every citizen – man or woman – would be armed,
trained, capable when necessary of playing the part of
policeman or soldier. A healthy community polices itself; a
healthy society would do the same. Looters, thugs, criminals,
may appear anywhere, anytime, but in nature such types are
mutants, anomalies, a minority; the members of a truly
democratic, anarchistic community would not require outside
assistance in dealing with them. Some might call this vigilante
justice; I call it democratic justice. Better to have all citizens
participate in the suppression and punishment of crime—and
share the moral responsibility—than turn the nasty job over to
some quasi-criminal type (or hero) in a uniform with a tin badge
on his shirt. Yes, we need heroes. We need heroines. But they
should serve only as inspiration and examples, not as leaders.
As shown in the broken window theory and in things like the
murder Kitty Genovese, we are not able to police ourselves.
Some may argue that this is because we are not a healthy
society, but I would argue that it is the fundamental nature of
our society. Though our society has shifted from a communal
and collectivistic society to a more individualistic society, this
need for a sense of community is still important in order to
maintain a lawful and orderly way of living. The way this is
done is through policing.
The backlash against order maintenance policing is unfairly
narrow. Contrary to the popular “crime-control” role that police
take, order maintenance policing has officers maintaining the
social order of society. In fact, the notion that the function of
law (or in this case police) is to maintain social order is a very
common one. Bronislaw Malinowski’s Crime and Custom in a
Savage Society took this approach from an anthropological
standpoint. Further, Eugen Ehrich (1975), while working in the
hinterlands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, laid out the same
basic thesis. “Living law” was the label Ehrlich gave to this
action. Aristotle (1988) stated that “for law is order” and Vago

7. (2009, p. 10) openly stated that “The paramount function of law
is to regulate and constrain the behavior of individuals in their
relationship with one another.”
I liken the signal crime of a broken window to an open wound:
if you recognize that the wound is an issue, you can apply a
Band-Aid; if you ignore it, the wound could fester and infection
could spread. The way I see it? Order maintenance is not the
Band-Aid, it is ointment: The police presence can’t repair the
community, but it can speed along the process; it is up to the
body to eventually fix itself.
The Abbey quote has always been one of my favorite, but I
never thought it would inspire me. I want to argue that though
community policing, though it may not reduce crime, has
intrinsic value because it strengthens the community. Instead of
taking a conventional approach, I want to use this
anarchistic/utopian philosophy to argue the true merit of
community policing is within its community-empowerment
value: You can argue that (a) the police are public servants, (b)
should maintain social order and not focus on crime-control,
and (c) help the community return to a state where it can police
itself. After all, Abbey did argue that anarchy does not imply no
rules, it means no rulers.
Now I just have to start writing and stop procrastinating!
Moral of the story?
1. Inspiration can come from anywhere
2. When you are not able to pick a topic, ask for help (which I
didn’t do)
3. Never procrastinate (which I never do)
Reference: https://crimgal.wordpress.com/category/classes-
2/theories-of-justice/
By John Leo
Introduction

8. Question: Graffiti is a big issue in Los Angeles, litter is i1
major issue in downtown
Philadelphia, and panhandUng is emerging as a dominant issue
in a dozen cities.
Why should this be so? Aren't most of these cities swamped
with far more urgent
social problems?
Likelyanswer: The cities are displaying a significant shift in
public attitudes. This
shift is strongly in the direction of the "broken window" theory
of social decay.
The theory was outlined in a 1982 article in The Atlantic by
political scientist
James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling. It says this:
The key to social
decay is a rising level of disorder that residents fail to challenge
in time. When
broken windows are not fixed, when graffiti and uncollected
garbage become
regular features and winos begin to doze off on stoops and
sidewalks, a powerful
signal goes out that the residents of the area have ceased to care
about conditions.
This leads to a break in morale and a feeling that events are out
of control. Landlords
don't make repairs. Vandalism spreads. The stage is set for
prostitutes,
druggies and criminals to drift in, and the neighborhood goes
under.
Disorder and Decline
The broken-window theory is largely upheld by a
book Disorder and Decline, a study of 40 urban
neighborhoods by Wesly Skogan, professor of
pnlitical science at Northwestern. But mayors and
councilmen and city administrators haven't
needed to wait for academic proof. More and

9. more, they grasp the idea intuitively. That's why
Los Angeles is trying to keep up with the flood of
graffiti, why Philadelphia businessmen spent so
much money to get the litter out of an 80-block
downtown area, and why New York spent tens of
millions of dollars to wipe graffiti from its subway
system and keep it out.
Minor battles. The major lesson of the brokenwindow
theory is that the crucial battles to save a
neighborhood must be fought over apparently
minor social infractions, well below the threshold
of police response. By the time the offenses are
great enough to justify police time and effort, the
struggle is often lost.
101
This is the real reason - not "the new war on the
poor" or "compassion fatigue" - why panhandling
has mushroomed into a sizable political
issue. In many cities, the life of downtown areas
and the remaining stable residential neighborhoods
is dearly at stake. Shoppers are increasingly
afraid of going downtown, for fear of being
-
hassled. Polls in cities such as Nashville and San
Francisco show that large numbers of people are
beginning to feel intimidated and coerced by
panhandlers. Even in cities where almost nobody
walks, such as Miami, the drifters who clean
windshields at red lights have become a serious
issue .... There is the growing gut feeling, often
confused and inarticulated, that things have gone
too far and that the quarter given to a panhandler
is helping to finance the downward spiral of cities.
A study by social scientists at Columbia University
shows that 69 percent of Americans think the
homeless should not be allowed to panhandle.

10. This appears to be broken-window sentiment: The
study also shows that most people are willing to
pay more taxes to solve the problem.
The New York City Transit Authority banned
beggars from the subways, lost the right to do so in
district court, and then won back the right on
appeal. This was an important victory. It was not
a triumph of the well-to-do over the poor. A large
percentage of riders are blue-collar or poor themselves.
It was not a victory for compassion fatigue
- polls showed that sympathy for the plight of
beggars and the homeless actually increased
among the ridership after the court decision.
Felonies decreased 15 percent. ...
The Transit Authority acted on the proposition that
the majority is right in claiming that public spaces
must be kept open for orderly public use, free of
hassles or coercion. Ten years ago, the suit probably
could not have been filed in New York. It
would have been out of bounds politically as an
attack on social victims or individual freedoms.
But time marches on. I think we are coming to the
end of a 25-year experiment to see whether we
can tolerate the consequences of social policies
based entirely on individual rights and compassion.
In my opinion, the answer is in: We can't.
The disaster of deinstitutionalization is part of this.
So is the gradual surrender of parks, bus depots,
train stations and other public spaces. There is
now a drive to reclaim those spaces and to find a
better balance between the rights of the community
and the rights of the individual. No one
knows how this will develop, but the impatience
with the old pol icies is all around us and it is
starting to flow into the political mainstream.
THE BROKEN-WINDOW THEORY OF URBAN DECAY

11. By John Leo
Adapted from "The Broker.-Window Theory of Urban Decay"
Published in This World, March 15, 1992; first published in
U.s. News and World Report, 1992.
Broken panes bring bad luck:
the broken window theory
In the eighties and nineties the New York City police were
confronted with increasing rates of theft, violent crime and drug
sales in the city. In order to combat this, the police launched the
‘Quality of life’ campaign. The idea behind this was that a
littered environment was a feeding ground for criminality. An
environment with social disorder (such as loitering youths,
public drunkenness and prostitution) and physical disorder
(such as graffiti, abandoned buildings and trash in the street)
increased the chance of both petty and serious crime. For this
reason graffiti and traces of vandalism were removed and,
mindful of the message of the previous chapter, the litter in the
streets was cleaned up. To the delight of the police, crime
figures in the city dropped significantly.
The explanation was termed the ‘broken window theory’. James
Wilson and George Kwelling propose that when a window in a
building is broken and goes unrepaired, the chance of another
window breaking increases. The more broken windows, the
greater the chance of more windows being smashed to
smithereens. A building with broken windows subsequently
attracts other forms of criminality, such as breaking in,
squatting and stripping the building. This in turn will cause
criminality around the building to increase; it attracts criminals,
while law-abiding citizens avoid the area. According to the
broken window theory, people see physical and social disorder
as a sign that everything is permissible and that authority is
absent. Such an environment puts ideas into people’s heads, and
lowers the threshold to overstepping their boundaries. The
underlying idea is that a single transgression encourages people
to commit further transgressions or expands to become one big

12. transgression, and that one transgressor grows into many.
Empirical evidence for this theory was supplied years later by
Kees Keizer and colleagues. In one experiment the main
entrance to a parking lot was temporarily closed by the
researchers. However, they had left a gap of 50 centimeters. On
the fence the researchers had hung up a sign with the text ‘No
entry, go around to the other entrance’. The side entrance was
200 meters further on. What would people do when they wanted
to get to their cars, walk around, or slip through the opening?
The researchers were curious in particular as to whether the
behavior of the drivers would depend on the environment. For
that reason they had hung up another board on the fence with
the text, ‘No locking bicycles to the fence’. In one scenario
there were four bicycles one meter from the fence. In the other
there were four bicycles locked directly to the fence. In the
environment with the freestanding bicycles, 27 percent of the
people slipped through the fence; with the bicycles locked to
the fence the figure was 82 percent. The researchers had
expected this effect, but were surprised by the big difference.
In another experiment, Keizer and colleagues examined whether
the negative effect of such an environment could spur people on
to more serious misdemeanors. This time the researchers stuffed
an addressed envelope half way into a red letterbox. A five-euro
bill was clearly visible through the window of the envelope.
Would passers-by take the letter out and pocket the money? In a
clean environment 13 percent did this. When there was graffiti
around the letterbox, the figure doubled to 27 percent.
The explanation which Keizer and colleagues gave was the
following. They distinguished three goals for influencing
behavior: ‘normative goals’ (behaving as you should), ‘hedonic
goals’ (feeling good), and ‘gain goals’ (improving your material
situation). These three goals do not always weigh equally; their
relative weight is affected by the environment. The normative
goal, however, is a priori the weakest of the three and is under
pressure from the two other goals. Environmental factors, such
as disorder, push normative goals to the background, bringing

13. the other goals to the fore. If someone sees that others give the
normative goal less priority, that reduces their own attention for
the goal, and laziness and greed gain the upper hand. If you
notice that others violate the rules (for instance by locking their
bicycles to the fence when this is explicitly prohibited), then
you yourself will attach less importance to the normative goal
of behaving properly, increasing the chance that you will slip
through the fence. If you see an envelope containing five euros
hanging out of a letterbox, then the disordered environment
increases the weight you give to your own gain goal, so you are
more likely to take the envelope. Violation of norms spreads
because the normative goal (following the rules) is weakened,
opening up more space for self-interest.
The strength of this theory is that it shows that people not only
imitate the behavior of others (as shown in the previous chapter
in Cialdini’s research), but that when people observe others
violating the norms, this also leads them to violate other norms.
The normative goal
53
15. Broken panes bring bad luck: the broken window theory
is weakened in its entirety. This means that in order to prevent
an escalation of violations, minor misdemeanors and their
visible effects should be dealt with quickly, and that if you want
to improve the ethics and integrity of an organization, this must
be done in an integrated and coherent way. If an organization
wishes to combat internal fraud, then it must also prevent
antisocial behavior such as intimidation, aggression, and
hostility. If an organization wishes to deal carefully and
responsibly with clients, then it must deal carefully with other
stakeholders. Unethical behavior is very difficult to isolate: an
organization cannot be ethical in one relationship or situation,
and unethical in another. Unethical behavior, as shown in the
above experiments, is a wildfire that spreads easily.
Keizer’s theory also helps to explain why, if unethical behavior
has escalated and spread widely, this cannot be reversed simply
by cleaning up afterwards. The culture is then already so badly

14. infected that people no longer attach any significance to the
normative goal. Much energy must then be put into establishing
and communicating the importance of this. Companies which
have slipped off the rails and been discredited can therefore
make a good start towards recovery by re-evaluating their
business mission from a normative perspective, reformulating
business goals, rewriting the code of conduct, making intensive
efforts to communicate this, and providing extensive training to
employees. This is the only way to win back territory for the
normative goal, and it will improve behavior on countless fronts
in its wake.
If you want to prevent an organization being derailed and a
great deal of energy being required to get things back on track,
then the task is to repair “broken windows” in the organization
as quickly as possible.
54
15. Broken panes bring bad luck: the broken window theory
The CDA had dual purposes of creating measures to deal with
anti-social behaviour, and
changing the youth justice system. In placing these two issues
within the same framework
ASB and youth crime were situated within the same discourse.
The Act is heavily weighted
towards measures which target children and young people, and
as a result some have
suggested that the title is misleading. Piper (1999) writing soon
after the introduction of
the Act suggests that:
“…an Act entitled ‘Crime and Disorder’ which concentrates to
the extent
this Act does on children and young persons [sic] is clearly
endorsing
those political and social ideas which emphasise the ‘danger’ of
young
people’s behaviour – the perceived threat from children ‘out of
control’

15. and the potential threat to society if children are not guided into
responsible and law-abiding adulthood.” (Piper, 1999: 399)
A sentiment reiterated by Muncie:
“...many of [the CDA’s] provisions are explicitly directed not
only at
young offenders, but at young people in general.” (Muncie,
1999: 147)
Beginning with the CDA, the ASB Agenda has sought to control
the activities of young
people in general, not only those who have acted anti-socially
(if that can ever be clearly
defined). One of the central aims of the ASB agenda is “keeping
young people off the
streets” (DCSF Press Release, 6th January 2010). This is
fulfilled in one of two ways: either
through encouraging young people to join youth clubs and other
extra-curricular activities
(discussed in chapter 6.4.1), or through enforcement measures
such as child curfews or
dispersal powers. This reinforces the perception that the
presence of young people on the
[54]
streets is somehow dangerous; both for members of the
community who may be the target
of youth ASB as well as for the young people themselves who
may become criminal as a
result of their ASB. Youths hanging around on the streets “have
become the universal
symbol of disorder and, increasingly, menace” (Burney, 2002:
73). This problematisation of
youth on the streets is further explored in chapter 6.4. Much of
the discourse justifying
ASB measures targeted at young people and children is based on
the premise that ASB
leads to crime (usually based on ‘broken window’ theory, see:
Wilson and Kelling, 1982)

16. and that children and young people who undertake ASB even at
a low level are at risk of
becoming criminals (Home Office, 1997b, 1998). Thus, ASB
enforcement measures are restructured
as positive interventions to ‘nip it in the bud’ (Home Office,
1997b), and
members of the public are also encouraged to view all levels of
ASB as unacceptable and
report it to the authorities.
The political rhetoric and legislation of the ASB Agenda has
created a recognisable folk devil
in the anti-social youth. Pre-existing social types such as ‘yob’,
‘hooligan’ and ‘thug’ have
been absorbed into ASB discourse at the same time as newer
concepts of the ‘chav’
(discussed further in chapter 4.6.4) and ‘hoodie’. In particular
the ‘hoodie’, a young person
who wears hooded jumpers or jackets with the hood over their
heads seemingly for the
purpose of acting in a menacing way, has become shorthand for
anti-social young people.
Events widely reported in the media such as the banning of
‘hoodies’ from shopping
centres: “Torquay hoodie ban for Asbo teenagers” (The
Independent, 15th October 2008)
and “'Mall bans shoppers' hooded tops” (BBC News, 11th May
2005) serve to create an
association between the action (wearing a hoodie) and a whole
class of individuals
(teenagers). Attempts to challenge these stereotypes are further
hindered when politicians
join the debate to confirm the stereotypes: “Blair backs ban on
hooded sweatshirts” (The
Times, 12th May 2005). Thus the picture of the anti-social
youth is confirmed and through
this process the folk devil is created and maintained.

17. Community Policing NuggetBroken Windows and Community
Policing
The notion of broken windows has provided important insights
and innovation to the field of policing. At times, however, these
ideas have been misunderstood, misapplied, and often viewed
outside the context of community policing. Broken windows is
based on the notion that signs of incivility, like broken
windows, signify that nobody cares, which leads to greater fear
of crime and a reduction of community efficacy, which in turn
can lead to more serious crimes and greater signs of incivility,
repeating the cycle into a potential spiral of decay. For police,
the insight of broken windows is that they are called on to
address minor quality-of-life offenses and incidents of social
disorder to prevent more serious crime, and that they must take
specific steps to increase the capacity of communities to exert
informal social control. Just as many have inaccurately reduced
community policing to community relations, others have
incorrectly reduced broken windows to merely zero tolerance or
order enforcement policies, with little regard for community
concerns or outcomes. In fact, broken windows advocates for
the careful implementation of these specific police tactics so
that individual rights and community interests are respected. In
addition, broken windows stresses the importance of including
communities in the change process, with the primary goal being
the development of informal social control mechanisms within
the communities in question and not merely increased
enforcement of minor offenses.
Later articulations of broken windows place it squarely within
the context of community policing and attempt to address some
of the legal and moral implication of its adoption. As Sousa and
Kelling (2006:90) state, “we believe that order maintenance
should represent a policy option in support of police and
community efforts to be implemented as problem-analysis and
problem-solving dictates.” An application of a one- size-fits-all
order maintenance program is unlikely to have universally
positive effects on all of the various crimes and serious

18. problems confronted by police departments and is not advocated
for by broken-windows theory. Rather, from the perspective of
community policing, broken windows represents an important
potential response to crime and disorder problems that may or
may not be dictated through problem-solving processes and
broken-windows-style interventions should be conducted in
partnership with community stakeholders.
Broken windows is more narrow in scope than the overarching
community policing philosophy and fits well within the
community policing context. For example, unlike the
community policing philosophy, broken windows does not
attempt to identify specific organizational changes in law
enforcement agencies that are necessary to institutionalize these
types of police interventions. Situating broken windows within
the broader community policing philosophy can help to advance
the organizational changes necessary to make broken windows
interventions (when they are called for through careful analysis)
successful and sustainable. For example, broken windows can
benefit from community policing’s focus on hiring different
kinds of officers (who pay attention to disorder and have skills
in community capacity building), building stronger analytical
functions to support proper analysis, and making specific efforts
to engage communities and increase trust to facilitate order-
maintenance interventions.
When broken windows is correctly understood within a broader
community policing philosophy, improper implementation of its
central tenets through such things as ignoring community
concerns, applying a zero tolerance one-size-fits-all approach to
minor offenses, and conducting cursory or no analysis of
problems, are less likely to occur. Appreciating the true scope
of broken windows policing concepts within the context of
community policing will enable these innovations to flourish
and be most effective.
Sousa, W.H. & Kelling, G.L. (2006). Of “broken windows,”
criminology, and criminal justice. In D. Weisburd & A. A.
Braga (Eds.), Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives

19. (pp.77-97). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press./p>
· -Matthew C. Scheider, Ph.D.
Assistant Director,
The COPS Office
Breaking Down the Walls:
Examining Broken Windows Theory and Policing in Relation to
Graffiti Writing in Canterbury
Michael Mills
MA Methods of Social Research Dissertation 2012
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research
University of Kent
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I would like to thank Dr. Johnny Ilan for his
guidance, support and supervision throughout this project.

20. Without his help this thesis would have read quite differently,
and been much the worse for it.
My father’s constant encouragement in this undertaking, and
throughout the duration of my Master’s course, has as ever been
a great support. In addition, his dutiful and diligent proof-
reading of much of this thesis has surely spared me several
embarrassing cases of indecipherable sentences. Though
perhaps some such sentences remain, the blame for this can only
be attributed to me alone. Thanks, Dad.
Abstract
Despite being frequently and fervently promoted by local
authorities in the city of Canterbury, the value of using Broken
Windows logic to describe the impact of graffiti on criminality
in its immediate area is not self-evident. First articulated in J.Q.
Wilson and George Kelling’s seminal Broken Windows thesis,
the theory itself asserts ‘that serious street crime flourishes in
areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked’ (1982:
36). This thesis sought to test whether this related accurately to

21. Canterbury’s street settings, specifically by noting whether
crime rates were higher in locations that graffiti writing was
most prevalent. It also sought, through qualitative descriptive
and discussions, to observe first-hand whether graffiti has in
some part been responsible for spikes in criminality in areas of
the city. The findings of this mixed-methods study offered little
empirical support for this theory where no evidence, be it
qualitative or statistical, pointed towards graffiti acting as a
catalyst for the kind of sequential decline described by Wilson
and Kelling. ‘Broken Windows policing’ was similarly revealed
by this analysis to have little correspondence with street level
conditions in the city: where graffiti appeared to have little
effect in causing crime, such a programme, in which a reduction
in graffiti (and visible disorder more generally) is targeted as a
means of reducing further criminality, is suggested here to have
little effect in reducing wider crime rates. Thus, this thesis
sought to introduce a cultural criminological reasoning to better
explain what was found throughout the city; one that most,
importantly, provides a nuanced appreciation of the multiple
meanings graffiti can carry within the contemporary cultural
script. Through this theoretical lens, which recognises the
importance of context awareness (both cultural and geographic)
when the theorising the relationship between graffiti and its
immediate environment, it was judged that viable alternatives
exist that ought to usurp Broken Windows logic as the default
response the appearance of writing.

22. Contents
Chapter I
Introduction : Canterbury’s Broken Windows and Graffiti
‘Scourge’ 5
Chapter II
Literature Review 10
Chapter III
Methodology20
Chapter IV
City Wide Correlations: Quantitative Analysis 33
Chapter V
Breaking Down the Walls: the Street-Level Gaze
41
Chapter VI:
Conclusions
57
Bibliography
62
Chapter I
Introduction: Canterbury’s Broken Windows and Graffiti
‘Scourge’
Graffiti is regarded a problem in the city of Canterbury. This
small, largely wealthy and relatively serene Cathedral city in
the south-east of England, with a population of around 70,000
people and a local economy that largely runs on tourism, its
night-life and its student populace, seemingly considers itself to
be under threat from forms of street art that inhabit the city’s

23. walls (This is Kent, 22/1/2009). Though not intrusive, the sight
of graffiti is still part of the everyday experience for those who
walk the city, where most appears either in small clusters or
isolated tags and is noticed only by those who keep their eyes
open for it. Though its graffiti scene therefore bears little
resemblance to the street art meccas of New York, London,
Bristol, Berlin or Melbourne, the police and local council,
however, believe graffiti to be a serious local issue. In an effort
to alleviate the apparently ‘disgraceful state of this graffiti on
the walls of our city’ (Adam Parsons quoted in The Kentish
Gazette, 2/6/2011: 14), authorities have sought to remove
graffiti where possible and aggressively police and punish
writers in order to deter those responsible for this local concern.
This has included the swift removal of graffiti in the city with a
Graffiti Busters service (Canterbury City Council, 2012), a free
hotline for reporting writing, raids on suspected writers’ homes
(This is Kent, 8/4/2011), and the arrest and prosecution of
writers at every given opportunity (Claridge, A. and Alston, K.,
18/3/2010, This is Kent, 12/2/2010, 19/1/2012). This attempt to
send out a ‘firm message that we take this antisocial behaviour
seriously’ (This is Kent, 8/4/2011) has also seen a verbal
assault launched against graffiti whereby the acts of writers are
described as harbingers of social decline and urban decay.
Consider this statement on the city council’s website:
‘Graffiti undermines pride in the local community. Graffiti is
often the first element in a spiral of decline and creates a
negative impression of an area. It also contributes to the fear of
crime’ (Canterbury City Council, 2012: 1).
Such a disparaging attitude to graffiti is also shared by many
senior members of local communities, some of whom have
started their own anti-graffiti campaigns (see Napler, 19/5/2011
and The Kentish Gazette, 2/6/2011: 14), suggesting that the
‘scourge of graffiti’ (Herbert Pragnall quoted in The Kentish
Gazette, 25/3/2010: 9) is already damaging the local area:
‘This graffiti is detrimental…because it sends out the signal
that no one cares, and that it's okay to throw some more rubbish

24. down…It's not only rubbish which is increasing in the area but
dog fouling as well, because it makes the area look rundown’
(This is Kent, 11/3/2011).
Such descriptions of graffiti’s effect on its immediate
surroundings clearly echo the logic found in Broken Windows
theory, originally articulated in Kelling and Wilson’s (1982)
seminal article in Atlantic Monthly. Famously, or perhaps
‘infamously’ (Wasterfors, 2009: 92)), suggesting that crime is
likely to ‘occur anywhere once communal barriers—the sense of
mutual regard and the obligations of civility—are lowered by
actions that seem to signal that "no one cares"’ (Wilson and
Kelling, 1982: 33), Broken Windows rationale has seen graffiti
writing characterised as a sign of incivility that will attract
crime to locations in which it is prevalent (see Sloan-Hewitt and
Kelling, 1990). According to Wilson and Kelling, graffiti
effects its environment by making it appear ‘uncontrolled and
uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever
damage and mischief the mind suggests’ (1982: 34). Authorities
in Canterbury appear to take such ideas seriously and have
adopted elements of so-called ‘Broken Windows policing’
(Hinkle and Weisburd, 2008) in their local war on writing; an
approach to crime control born from the logic articulated
throughout this thesis. Such a policing programme, based on the
central tenets of Kelling and Wilson’s hypothesis, has generally
involved an increase in manpower and resources oriented
towards policing minor misdemeanours, under the guise that
this will herald a reduction in disorder and more serious crime
(McLaughlin, 2008): ‘where a window is likely to be broken at
any time, it must quickly be fixed if all are not to be shattered’
(Wilson and Kelling, 1982: 37). In Canterbury this has equated
to local authorities intervening at the ‘first element in a spiral
of decline’ (Canterbury City Council, 2012: 1) represented by
graffiti and other signs of low-level disorder in the city. This
resulted in a multi-agency approach between the local council
and police force, with even traffic wardens being invested with
the power to issue on the spot fines for writers or those who

25. litter in the city (Warren, 23/8/12).
After its perceived successes in New York City and across
America (Harcourt and Ludwig, 2006), Broken Windows theory
and policing appear to have garnered the approval of many
police practitioners the world over (Wacquant, 2003). However,
the premises of Kelling and Wilson’s argument continues to
inspire debate amongst criminologists, many of which remain
unresolved. Many scholars remain either sceptical towards or
vehemently critical of the theory’s assertions, with its claims
that acts of so-called ‘disorder’ both increase fear of crime and
criminality in their local context regularly being called into
question. Moreover, the effectiveness of Broken Windows
policing remains part of on-going debates, where it has been
suggested that stories of the policy’s success have been vastly
overstated (Harcourt, 1998, Harcourt and Ludwig, 2006).
Among many cultural criminologists there remains little doubt
that those in political power have utilised Broken Windows as a
‘convenient foundation’ (Ferrell, 2005: 148) for ‘assign[ing] the
blame for street crime not to poverty and marginalisation, but to
the poor and marginalised’ (Ferrell cited in Snyder, 2009: 6),
and implicitly linking disorderly behaviours to an ‘underclass’
way of life’ (Squires, 2008: 15), and in doing so propping up
their own popularity (Snyder, 2009: 24). Indeed, this has been
suggested to generally be the case with authorities’ approach to
graffiti writers, and perhaps more so than to any other deviant
group: Austin’s (2001) and Ferrell’s (1996) analysis across New
York and Denver respectively highlight the mobilisation of
Broken Windows against writers at a time when each city’s
mayor stood to acquire political capital by claiming writers to
be the source of several social problems. In light of such
scepticism, this popular policing approach has been suggested
to be based on ‘folk wisdom’ (Matthews, 1992: 20) and ‘the
political and economic goals of those who orchestrate’ such
approaches (Snyder, 2006: 95): representing ‘a taken for
granted assumption’ amongst policy practitioners (Crawford
cited in Beckett and Godoy, 2010: 279), rather than a police

26. derived from any robust reasoning or evidence.
The Research
It is therefore important to determine whether Broken
Windows does accurately describe graffiti’s impact on its urban
surroundings. The combination of the policy relevance of these
discussions and the relatively nebulous body of existing
evidence on this topic, makes these issues extremely pertinent
and relevant to intertwining discussions of theory and policing
practice in contemporary criminology. This research, then,
seeks to test whether Broken Windows theory provides the best
theoretical framework for understanding the relationship
between graffiti and wider crime in Canterbury. In doing so, it
will also reflect on whether the Broken Windows policing
model employed across the city offers the most effective way of
reducing the city’s crime rates. Pertaining to issues of graffiti
writing, this study is centred on an attempt to bring some clarity
to the aforementioned debates by answering two questions:
· To what extent does Broken Windows theory provide an
accurate understanding of graffiti writing’s effect on its
immediate environment in Canterbury?
· To what extent is a focus on graffiti as part of Broken
Windows policing in Canterbury likely to be effective in
reducing crime as a whole?
It is hoped that this thesis will make both a theoretical and
methodological contribution to the body of literature
surrounding Broken Windows theory. As well as shedding light
on the aforementioned discussions, this mixed-methods study
will utilise a mixed methods approach to the testing of Wilson
and Kelling’s hypothesis by combining the quantitative analysis
found in most of the literature with a more contextualised,
street-based approach (similar to that previously used by
Taylor, 1999, 2001). Alongside the use of crime maps and
photography of graffiti on the streets of the city to unearth
correlations between graffiti and crime across the city, a series

27. of smaller case studies will be analysed in order to develop a
richer sense of context around graffiti writing: whether (and
why) graffiti is largely visible or hidden, as well as the likely
consequences for this in terms of its impact on its immediate
environment. The combination of these approaches is intended
to provide a broad picture of graffiti and crime’s distribution
throughout the entire city, whilst also getting to the root of the
specific nature of the relationship between graffiti and crime
through these more detailed case studies.
As will be revealed in the upcoming chapters, the findings
of this research project give reason to be highly critical of
Broken Windows theory; as they demonstrate the theory’s
central premises to have little correspondence with the apparent
relationship between graffiti and crime throughout the city.
Both in the quantitative analysis, from which no meaningful
correlation between graffiti and other forms of crime is found,
and the analysis of case studies throughout the city, little
evidence was found to suggest that the ‘developmental
sequence’ towards urban decay described by Kelling and
Wilson, in which ‘disorder and crime are… inextricably linked’
(both quotes 1982: 32), had begun or was likely to begin.
Deriving from these findings it has also been suggested that
there is little empirical foundation for Broken Windows
policing in the city, with it being argued that attempts to reduce
crime through controlling graffiti are therefore likely to be
ineffectual. Alternatively, as the thesis progresses, a variety of
cultural criminological arguments, which sheds light on
graffiti’s location within mainstream culture, the unintended
effects of Broken Windows policing on practices of writing and
the pluralistic uses of particular urban spaces, emerge as a much
more serviceable theoretical framework for explaining these
findings. This prompts a reconfiguration of the way we
understand graffiti’s impact on its immediate environment and
the effectiveness of attempts to effectively police it through a
Broken Windows model, emphasising the need for us to move
beyond Wilson and Kelling’s ideas in order to understand, and

28. develop policies towards, graffiti writing and policing in the
city of Canterbury.
Chapter II:
Literature Review
Before delving into the findings of this research project, it is
important to outline what is currently known about Broken
Windows theory and policing, including: the arguments that put
forward this theory; tests of its accuracy and the effectiveness
of its associated policing practices and, then; some of its main
critiques in criminological literature. This literature review will
detail each of these bodies of work and will, throughout the
chapter, make clear how they relate to existing scholarly
knowledge on graffiti writing’s impact on its immediate
environment. It will also flag the contributions this study aims
to make to existing knowledge on Broken Windows theory and
graffiti writing. As this literature review will show, there is no
shortage on works commenting on, critiquing or testing the
Broken Windows thesis. What we must consider, however, is
what these works collectively tell us and whether there remain
unanswered questions and gaps in knowledge in this area of
study that this research can viably address.
The “Broken Windows” Thesis
Broken Windows theory’s brand of ‘environmental criminology’
(see Bottom and Wiles, 2002), as originally found in Wilson and
Kelling’s (1982) seminal article (‘arguably one of the most
influential and widely cited articles in North American
criminology’ (McLaughlin, 2008: 27)), constructs a model of

29. crime causation that identifies low-level disorder as a cause of
more serious offences. Providing what has been described as ‘an
alluring and elegant simplicity’ (Willis, 2002: 220) in their
portrayal of an area’s sequential descent into unmanageable
chaos, Wilson and Kelling’s thesis offers a description of how
‘serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly
behaviour goes unchecked’ (1982: 36). Characterising forms of
incivility as ‘symbolic invitations to more serious forms of
criminality’, this perspective itself suggests that initial
disruptions of social order may pave the way to ‘a downward
spiral of criminal disorder’ (both quotes Ferrell, 2005: 148) that
causes community members to withdraw from order
maintenance, as fear of crime increases, and leave the area
‘vulnerable to criminal invasion’ (Wilson and Kelling, 1982:
32). Claiming that such visible signs of disorder ‘create a
negative impression of an unmanaged and uncared for
environment’ (Department for Transport, 2010: 3), it is argued
that they therefore attract offenders from outside the area who
sense that it has become a vulnerable and less risky site for
crime. Wilson and Kelling continue:
‘it is more likely here, rather than in places where people are
confident they can regulate public behaviour by informal
controls, drugs will change hands, prostitutes will solicit, and
cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be robbed by boys
who do it as a lark, and that prostitute’s customers will be
robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently.
That muggings will occur’ (Kelling and Wilson, 1982: 33).
Hinkle and Weisburd’s (2008) representation of the sequential
decline described in Wilson and Kelling’s Broken Windows
thesis.

30. Amongst the acts of so-called ‘disorder’ that have been
characterised as catalysts for such sequential decay by Broken
Windows scholars and various public officials, graffiti appears
to have assumed a leading role. Examples of this in action have
ranged from the spectacular association of graffiti with the most
heinous of criminal acts, ‘obviously, murder and graffiti are two
vastly different crimes… But they are part of the same
continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to
tolerate the other’ (Giuliani, 1998: 1), to less a hyperbolic
belief that ‘graffiti not only damages property but actually
makes public space more dangerous by turning neutral space
into crime space’ (Snyder, 2009: 48). Regularly referred to as a
harbinger of bad news for urban locales, as a crime that ‘can
ruin lives and create an environment where more serious crime
can take hold’ (HM Government, 2010: 2, see also Sloan-Hewitt
and Kelling, 1990), graffiti is often characterised as the
quintessential threat to social order in the eyes of those who
subscribe to the Broken Windows account of social decline in
urban space. As one Swedish report argues:
‘Illegal graffiti is the visual impression of an uncaring and
indifferent society, where small crimes can lead to bigger
crimes. Without exception, failure to identify the whole
problem accurately and take a proactive approach in the early
stages encourages illegal graffiti to continue to escalate until
resources or the cost of effective control is beyond the means of
any administrations’ (quoted in Department for Transport, 2010:
5).
The latter stages of the above quote allude to the strategies that
have been employed by policing practitioners in an effort to
stave off the processes described in Wilson and Kelling’s
influential article. So-called ‘Broken Windows policing’
(Hinkle and Weisburd, 2008), also referred to elsewhere as both
‘zero-tolerance’ and ‘quality of life’ policing (McLaughlin,
2008a), extends from the theory’s logic by embracing ‘the order

31. maintenance function of the police’ (Wilson and Kelling, 1982:
35) and aggressively enforcing minor misdemeanour laws in an
effort to bring about a reduction in initial symptoms of disorder
and, thus, prevent a downward spiral of urban decline (Jang et
al, 2008). Simultaneously, the development of new technology
to aid the police, including developments such as COMPSTAT
and the use of digital technology for surveillance as well as
increased manpower, has generally been central to this approach
(McLaughlin, 2008a, Snyder, 2009). First applied in William
Bratton’s attempt to ‘reclaim the [New York City] subway
system’ (Bratton quoted in McLaughlin, 2008: 59) from
criminality, Broken Windows policing became ‘an integral part
of [the] law enforcement strategy’ (Giuliani, 1998: 1)
throughout the whole city in the 1990s once Randolph Giuliani
was elected Mayor and Bratton appointed police commissioner.
At present, the New York Broken Windows model has since
become the default method of policing across America more
generally, also being used Chicago and Los Angeles (Harcourt
and Ludwig, 2006), and, after perceived success of this
approach in reducing crime rates throughout the 1990s, the
dominant framework for reducing and preventing crime in urban
space across Europe and many places elsewhere (Wacquant,
2003)[footnoteRef:1]. Moreover, this has given the theoretical
ideas that underpin this approach legitimacy in the eyes of many
policing practitioners and public officials, with the original
articulation of Broken Windows theory now standing as one of
the most cited articles in policing literature (Manning, 2001).
[1: That the scholarship of J.Q. Wilson should have a
significant policy impact is of no surprise. Having served on
White House task Force on Crime in 1966 and the US
President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (1985-1991),
‘Wilson’s scholarship stood in stark contrast’ (Delis, 2010: 192)
critical criminologies that dominated the disciplines throughout
the 1960s and 70s. An opposition that Wilson himself was well
aware of (see Wilson, 1975).]

32. Testing the Broken Windows Thesis
Whilst Broken Windows ideas have received acclaim from
those working in policy circles (for example Giuliani, 1998,
Home Office, 2010), debates have rumbled on regarding the
accuracy of the theory’s account of crime causation in urban
spaces among criminologists and remain largely unresolved.
Indeed, in scholarly circles the theory has received a mixed
reaction and has been the subject of longstanding processes of
evaluation, often based around various forms of statistical
analysis, in an attempt to quantify the accuracy of Wilson and
Kelling’s claims. Such tests of Broken Windows theory have,
thus far, taken on one of two forms: either looking for
correlations after measuring neighbourhood disorder and crime,
or measuring of the impact of misdemeanour policing on crime
rates (Harcourt and Ludwig, 2006). What follows is a brief
account of this literature; the key studies and themes that have
emerged in the past 30 years from the testing of Wilson and
Kelling’s original claims. Moreover, it will summarise what
they ultimately tell us about the accuracy of the Broken
Windows thesis.
Alongside a body of literature that lends support to the claim
that signs of disorder impact upon residents’ fear of crime and
their involvement in the local community (see Pitner et al
(2012), Chappell et al (2011)), there are a number of studies
that concur with Wilson and Kelling’s claims regarding disorder
and more serious crime by and showing Broken Windows
policing to have a desirable impact on crime rates. For instance,
we may look to Sloan-Hewitt and Kelling’s (1990) claims of
success on the policing of the New York underground, as well
as Golub et al’s (2003) interviewing of arrestees in New York
found that almost half had reported stopping or cutting back on
disorderly behaviour because of Broken Windows policing
(though obviously not enough to avoid being arrested!). Kelling
and Sousa’s (2001) attempt to quantify the impact of Broken
Windows policing led them to look at the entire city’s crime
rates and, by estimating that for every 28 misdemeanour arrests

33. there was one violent crime prevented, claimed quality of life
policing to have prevented 60,000 violent crimes between 1989
and 1998. These studies, and also other works (such as Zimring,
2007, and Corman and Mocan, 2005), have attributed a large
share of the New York crime drop in the 1990s to this approach
of policing. Outside of New York, Wesley Skogan’s (1990)
widely-cited analysis across 6 American cities found similar a
chain of fear of crime being linked to disorder, and disorder
being a good predictor of robbery victimisation. Similarly,
Thomas et al’s (2011) analysis of arson in Michigan found ‘that
proxies of social disorder can be used to identify areas of high
arson risk, consistent with the Broken Window theory’ (2011:
271). Such studies, however, have often been criticised for the
quality and the nature of their analysis. Re-examining Skogan’s
data set, for example, Brian Harcourt (1998) found that the
conclusions originally offered by the author were skewed by the
influence of a few extreme cases and locations, finding instead
that there was an insignificant relationship between disorder
and serious crime in the vast majority of locations. In addition,
Harcourt and Ludwig’s (2006) analysis prompts caution towards
Kelling and Sousa’s (2001) findings by noting that their
analysis had been skewed by a failing to control for crime rates
prior to 1990[footnoteRef:2]. As these cases show, despite the
evidence pointing towards Wilson and Kelling’s thesis and its
cognate programme of Broken Windows policing being of some
value, there remains reason to remain wary of the these claims
and the evidence used to support them. [2: Citing mean
reversion, Harcourt and Ludwig note that the biggest drops in
the data set came from areas that experienced the largest rise in
crime in the 1980s. They observe that ‘jurisdictions with the
greatest increases in crime during the 1980s tend to experience
the largest subsequent declines as well’ (2006: 276) regardless
of whether Broken Windows policing was used in these areas or
not, and that the effect of such policing was vastly been over-
estimated by Kelling and Sousa (2001).]

34. In addition, other analyses have looked to a context wider than
New York City to suggest that the impact of Broken Windows
policing may have been overstated by the likes of Kelling and
Sousa, and Corman and Mocan (see Barker, 2010, Blumenstein
and Wallman, 2006). For example, Eck and Maguire (2006) note
that the crime rate fell similarly in San Diego, Seattle and
Dallas throughout the 1990s where Broken Windows policing
was not adopted. Furthermore, they show that the crime rate in
Seattle fell 18% with a 6% decrease in manpower, likewise in
Dallas where a 39% reduction in crime came with a 3% decrease
in policing numbers. Moreover, Yang’s (2007) discovery of a
negative correlation between incidents of violent crime and
disorder in Seattle, and Sampson and Raudenbush’s (1999, see
also 2001, 2004) finding that correlations between disorder and
crime were moderate at best, once more bring the theory’s
claims into question and suggest Broken Windows policing to
be ‘analytically weak strategy to reduce crime’ (Sampson and
Raudenbush cited in Harcourt and Ludwig, 2006: 284) (see also
Cerdia et al, 2009, Karmen, 2000).
Reflecting on this collection of work as a whole, including
those studies that support and cast doubt on the Broken
Windows thesis, it appears that the quantitative studies
conducted thus far tell us relatively little in terms of clarifying
the merits of this theory. Presenting an ambiguous picture,
where various statistics are pitted against one-another without
either perspective ultimately disproving the other, this body of
literature merely gives us reason to be sceptical of some of the
theory’s claims and the hyperbole surrounding claims of success
in New York City (where it is claimed that declining crime rates
were ‘proving the Broken Windows theory’ (William Bratton
quoted in Corman and Mocan, 2005: 239)). It is at this point,
then, that the chapter will progress from the detailing of these
tests of Broken Windows relevance to understanding urban
crime, and towards theoretical and contextually-driven
criticisms of Wilson and Kelling’s thesis based on qualitative
research. As will be revealed below, it is in this body of

35. literature that a great deal more is revealed about the problems
in the Broken Windows thesis.
Critiques of Broken Windows
Before we delve into criticisms of Broken Windows theory that
arise from street-level qualitative research, we can see how
Broken Windows’ separation of ‘disorder’ and ‘crime’ has been
criticised. Arguing that the theory fails to establish meaningful
and robust concepts of ‘crime’ and ‘disorder’ (Gau and Pratt,
2010) by re-defining forms of low-level crime (such as
prostitution, public drinking and vandalism) as ‘disorder’, a
term without any legal implications or inherent suggestion of
law-breaking, Gau and Pratt note that Wilson and Kelling’s
theory, in actuality, fails to make any meaningful statement
about how factors outside of criminal behaviour may encourage
criminality (as suggested by Gau and Pratt, 2010). In this sense
the theory provides an imagined sequence of progression from
‘disorder’ to crime, whereas in reality there was only ever
‘crime’ all along. This therefore means that the aforementioned
studies that have subsequently suggested disorder and crime to
be positively correlated often tell us very little; as such terms
often mean the same thing, thus undermining their usefulness
even further!
In addition, looking back on the body of empirical evidence
preceding their work, Gau and Pratt remark that ‘prior studies
have linked levels of structural and social disadvantage to
disorder and crime in a manner suggesting that disorder may
simply be one component of a larger condition of…
concentrated socio-structural disadvantage’ (2010: 763). That
is, social structure resembles a lingering factor that appears to
explain the emergence of both disorder and crime. As Sampson
and Raudenbush (1999) put it, disorder is of the same aetiology
as crime: ‘rather than conceive of disorder as a direct cause of
crime, we view many elements of disorder as part and parcel of
crime itself’ (quoted in Harcourt and Ludwig 2006: 285). In
light of these critiques, ‘disorder’, as found in Broken Windows

36. theory, is exposed as a red herring: a theoretical disguise for
both ‘the structural characteristics of the neighbourhoods, as
well as neighbourhood cohesion and informal social control –
not levels of disorder – that most affect crime’ (Sampson and
Raudenbush quoted in Department for transport, 2010: 6).
These valuable and telling critiques aside, a variety of street-
level studies have also been shown to undermine Wilson and
Kellings thesis with similar effectiveness. Emerging from
cultural criminological critiques of Wilson and Kelling’s
theory, and supported by the findings of Taylor (1999, 2001),
other scholars have called for a greater appreciation of the
multiple meanings that forms of so-called ‘disorder’ can carry
than Broken Windows theory offers. After all, if ‘disorder’ is
not interpreted as such by those who encounter it, then Wilson
and Kelling’s account of urban decline will surely fail to
materialise. Perhaps the greatest example of a crime that is
often ambiguous in its meaning is indeed graffiti writing, which
‘continues to spread like some mutating double-helix,
confounding art, crime and commodity’ (Ferrell et al, 2008:
151) in the late-modern age and actively demonstrates that acts
of criminality can be simultaneously be disdained by various
individuals, embraced by some and met with indifference by
others. While graffiti may indeed seen as a sign of undesirable
things to come (by some), for niche and edgy shopping districts
graffiti may serve to ‘tell shoppers that this is a cool space’
(Snyder, 2009: 53), and for others a sign of potential urban
regeneration:
‘A proliferation of hip-hop graffiti in place of gang graffiti (a
distinction ignored by Wilson and Kelling) may likewise
suggest a decline in criminal violence – that is, it may lead
some neighbourhood residents to understand that gang crime is
on the decline – and in fact it may harbinger a less violent
social order now negotiated through the very symbols that
Wilson and Kelling so tellingly misrepresent’ (Ferrell et al,
2008: 105).
It becomes apparent, then, that the ‘decontextualisation of

37. disorder’ (Gau and Pratt, 2010: 759) within a Broken Windows
model that ‘constructs a series of abstract, one-dimensional
meanings that it arbitrarily assigns to dislocated images’
(Ferrell et al, 2008: 104) of urban crime is not one that is
capable of grasping the complexities and contradictions in
graffiti’s, and perhaps other examples of so-called disorder’s,
meaning to urban audiences:
‘None [are] self-evident or assured; each is negotiated day-to-
day amidst the swirl of urban populations. Because of this,
accurately understanding public display as a key nexus between
crime and culture requires attentiveness and long-term emersion
in everyday situations – not [Broken Windows’] abstract
political posturing’ (Ferrell, 2005: 149).
Ferrell’s call for a contextualised analysis that can dig deeper
into the subtleties of crime has not only extended to a cultural
criminological appreciation of the meanings applied to graffiti
and other crimes; it also relates to different approaches to
ascertaining what environmental factors encourage particular
criminal behaviours. Departing from the detached position
adopted by ‘the milieu of social researchers who choose not to
look at the world’ Emmanuel David (2007: 251), Ralph Taylor’s
studies of Baltimore (1999, 2001) where a mixture of on-site
assessments, maps, census, crime figures and interviews with
residents and community leaders were used, provide a good
example of such an approach. Finding that while some types of
incivilities were related to serious crimes and many others were
not, Taylor identified a variety of separate problems of crime
without a common underlying cause or remedy. In short, the
idea of disorder underpinning the spread of urban crime has
been suggested by Taylor to be false. Elsewhere, Broken
Windows theory’s explanation of criminal behaviour itself,
where criminals are presented as rational actors in the process
of risk-avoidance whilst committing crime (therefore leading
them to low risk ‘disorderly’ areas), has similarly been shown
to be equally troublesome. The work of Peter St. Jean is useful
here for demonstrating how Broken Windows theory fails to

38. account for the driving forces behind the choice of location for
criminal acts. Pockets of Crime (St. Jean, 2007) shows how
decisions regarding where to commit crime are often based on
characteristics of the area that bear little relevance to disorder;
where the area’s impact on the deniability of the crime, footfall,
demand for drugs, or ready distractions are found to be more
integral to understanding where crime takes place than the
prevalence of disorder in an area. Thus while the perception of
a low-risk environment created by signs of disorder may attract
some crime, St. Jean’s street-based analysis demonstrates that
some strategic decisions made by criminals actually lead them
away from disorderly areas. Ethnographers of graffiti writing
subcultures have identified similar dynamics in the behaviour of
writers to those explained by St. Jean, with locations for writing
regularly being shown to be influenced less by perceived
disorder and more so by an intended target audience. Snyder’s
(2009) analysis of New York’s graffiti scene provides a nice
example of this and suggests that writers will often target more
affluent areas (such Manhattan) or rail-side locations in order to
be more widely seen by the people of their city and by other
writers. Thus, it appears that it is not only Wilson and Kelling’s
understanding of how these acts are seen by city dwellers and
the meanings that they carry: the same criticism applies to their
understanding of criminal acts themselves. Moreover, it seems
then that the kind of criticisms levelled at Broken Windows
theory by cultural criminologists (and also Ralph Taylor and
Peter St. Jean), by providing examples of how and why the
theory is limited in particular regards, tell us significantly more
about the accuracy of Wilson and Kelling’s thesis than the
aforementioned body of quantitative analysis. What is required
then, in order to move knowledge forward in this area, is
something that lies closer to a cultural criminological analysis
of urban space and crime: one that adopts an interpretive
epistemology that allows the scholar to understand the multiple
meanings that signs of criminal acts can carry, and is attentive
to the context of the criminal acts and the visible evidence it

39. leaves behind.
How This Study Builds on the Literature
It seems then that work in the vein of Snyder, Taylor, St. Jean
and also Mitchell Duneier (2000) provides the best means of
addressing gaps in knowledge surrounding Broken Windows
theory and policing; where the waters remain muddy regarding
each’s respective accuracy and effectiveness. As has been
outlined throughout this literature review, the current body of
knowledge on the accuracy of Broken Windows theory remains
relatively unclear: the existing battles between various
statistics, data-sets and formulae has failed to give a clear idea
of the theory’s strengths and the successes of Broken Windows
policing. This requires of criminologists that such tests should
be continued to establish greater clarity on the issue, however
greater awareness of the contexts in which crime and disorder
lie must be taken in order to provide useful answers to such
unresolved questions. This research intends to do just this, and
to add to an emerging body of literature that tests the claims of
Broken Windows theory by testing the links between ‘disorder’
(in this case pertaining exclusively to graffiti writing) and
crime. In doing so it also seeks to contribute to understandings
of the effectiveness of Broken Windows policing. With its remit
being strictly focused on graffiti writing, and the city of
Canterbury, it should perhaps be viewed as yet another piece in
a larger puzzle of discerning how accurate Broken Windows
theory can be considered to be. Given that the ideas expressed
in the Broken Windows thesis continue to exert a heavy
influence over contemporary criminal justice practice (Becket
and Godoy, 2010), it remains criminology’s task to continue to
test and critique this theory, as well as offer alternatives where
it is shown to be insufficient in explaining the reality of crime
and disorder in urban neighbourhoods.
As well as a body of literature that both tests and critiques
Wilson and Kelling’s highly influential claims, this study will
also add to knowledge related to understanding where graffiti

40. tends to be written, the impact it has on its surroundings and the
relationship between these dynamics. In particular it will also
contribute to a tentative body of literature that reflects on
changes in the behaviour of writers amidst aggressive policing
of their activities, the emergence of digital technology being
used to share images of writing (see Snyder, 2006, 2009), and
shifts in graffiti’s meaning in mainstream culture (Ferrell et al,
2008). Moreover, with this contextualised analysis it will re-
evaluate whether Broken Windows, in light of these potential
changes, is more or less equipped to explain the effect of
graffiti’s impact on its area as a visible sign of ‘disorder’.
The chapters that follow will detail the study’s findings, how
they were collected and analysed, and how they relate back to
this body of literature. Beginning with a methodology chapter
that will detail the research design and explain how it relates to
these discussions, the thesis will progress to reveal its findings
whilst constantly looking back to the body of literature detailed
here as a reference point. Thus, the arguments and studies
detailed here should be kept in mind, and will be referred to,
throughout the duration of the rest of this thesis.
Chapter III:
Methodology
Having acknowledged the gaps and ambiguities within existing
knowledge on Broken Windows theory’s (Wilson and Kelling,
1982) accuracy and the effectiveness of Broken Windows
policing, here I will outline the methods used in this project’s
attempt to answer its research questions and help establish some
clarity on the topic. What follows, then, is the detailing of: the
method used; the decision making and interpretation involved in
several stages in the research; some of the shortcomings
previously identified in the use of such methods; and how such
shortcomings have been compensated for within aspects of the
methodology engaged here. Following in the vein of Ralph
Taylor’s (1999, 2001) use of various methods to come to

41. understand the validity of Broken Windows theory in Baltimore,
this chapter will detail how the mixed methods approach
adopted here, which utilises examples of both quantitative and
qualitative approaches, provides the best means of answering
our research questions. As was concluded at the end of the last
chapter, studies that have pursued a purely method have both
individually and collectively told us relatively little about the
accuracy of Broken Windows theory and the success of its
associated policing practices. Proceeding in two sections,
organised around the two respective stages of quantitative
analysis and qualitative research conducted as part of this
thesis, this chapter will also outline how the research conducted
here provides the broad picture and small-scale specificity
required to address this issue.
Quantifying and Mapping Crime and Graffiti: The Search for
Correlations
In the first stage of this research, a combination of crime maps
populated with recorded crime data and photography will be
utilised to first quantify crime and graffiti in Canterbury, before
identifying correlations between these variables. Though it is
therefore a quantitative method used here, this is not to be
confused with a strictly ‘scientific’ process by any means: it
instead involves subjective decision-making and interpretation
on the part of the researcher at several stages[footnoteRef:3].
Thus, this section will not only reveal the specifics of this
methods, but it will also acknowledge where, how and why such
judgements have been made and acted upon, as well as how
weaknesses in this method have been confronted. It will, of
course, also highlight the value of the insights that can be
gained through the use of this approach. [3: Furthermore, the
subjectivity within crime statistics is recognised. As Lea and
Young (1942: 12-13) put it, ‘both the interpretation of whether
or not an act is criminal and the resources available for
labelling acts as criminal make an enormous amount of
difference to the final statistic. Nor is this a result of an

42. imperfect world where, if only we had more tightly written laws
and a lot more police, we could arrive at the ‘true’ crime rate.
Rather, it lies in the nature of crime itself that there is an
important level of human interpretation in the definition of what
is criminal’]
Recorded crime statistics were drawn from the newly-launched
police.uk website and used to quantify crime within 10 selected
areas of the city for the 6 month period of December 2011-May
2012. The designation of these 10 zones was based on the
researcher’s decision making, though underpinned by an attempt
to replicate the conditions being tested to those described in the
Broken Windows thesis. The leading imperative was that each
of the ‘zones’ designated for this research project be roughly of
equal size and, where possible, their boundaries were selected
so that each would represent an identifiable part of the city or a
neighbourhood/estate as they are regarded locally. Thus, zones
include the Knight’s Avenue Estate, Spring Lane Estate, or the
city centre which is separated from the rest of Canterbury by the
medieval city walls. This was done in an effort in to replicate,
as accurately as possible, the conditions described by Wilson
and Kelling in their article; where the emphasis is placed
around their being a manifestation of communities or
‘communal barriers’ (1982: 34) that are affected by fear of
crime and, then, criminal invasion. By trying to make these
zones applicable to areas in the town that are likely to consider
themselves communities, such as a self-contained housing
estates, it is hoped that this has been successfully replicated
somewhat so that the analysis provides the most appropriate
framework for testing this thesis and answering the research
questions.
The process of quantifying graffiti was similarly based on
interpretation, though a logical one, as there appeared no self-
evident method of quantifying writing objectively. Indeed such
problems in enumerating graffiti have been previously
acknowledged to be troublesome. As Greg Snyder notes, the

43. very nature of graffiti makes it hard to quantify exactly the
amount in any given area: while some is plainly visible, some
remains intentionally hidden in concealed locations and will
often evade the sights of local residents, authorities and touring
researchers. While it is therefore ‘difficult to compare the
amount of graffiti in an exact quantitative fashion’ (2009: 51) in
a study of this nature, exploring these areas by foot and
documenting writing via photography remains the most viable
way of doing so. Bearing this in mind, other scholars have
sought to use of photography as a means of quantifying writing
in urban spaces; where previous examples include Snyder’s
(2009) photography of mailbox graffiti in New York, as well as
Heitor Alvelos’ (2004) long term study of urban graffiti using
similar visual methods. Marked on the map shown below are, as
well as the boundaries of each zone being studied, the locations
in which graffiti was found on walking tours of the city. These
are represented by black dots. Dots were marked for locations
where there was interpreted to be a noticeable and substantial
amount of graffiti: locations in which there were one or two
relatively small tags were ignored, whilst anything upwards
from 3 or 4 tags or any larger pieces and murals (or a
combination of these types of writing) visible from the same
spot saw the marking of a dot on the map. This was based on a
reasoning that again related back to the Broken Windows thesis:
it was judged that an area with a more dense collection of
writing would be more likely to give the impression of repeated
criminality that would inspire fear of crime in residents, thus
potentially giving the impression of an ‘uncontrolled and
uncontrollable’ environment (Wilson and Kelling 1982: 34),
whilst an isolated tag could be more easily dismissed or
disregarded by locals. Thus, to categorise a single tag on a par
with more conspicuous clusters of writing would both
misrepresent the prevalence of writing across the city and see
the research divert from the nature of Broken Windows claims.
In addition, to avoid marking locations too close together and
misrepresenting one pocket of writing as two clusters, if two

44. examples of graffiti were within seeing distance of one another
(this often constituted a distance of no more than around 50
metres) then only this only counted towards the marking of one
dot.
Following the quantification of each of the variables (‘graffiti’
and ‘crime’) through these 10 areas of the city, analysis of this
data was conducted to determine what correlations lie between
these two measurements; whether meaningful relationship
between graffiti and crime exist across the city. SPSS was used
to process the data and to conduct this analysis. This formed the
extent of the quantitative element of the project and will serve
to test the basic premise of Wilson and Kelling’s thesis by
revealing whether, through an observed positive correlation, it
appears the graffiti and crime tend populate the same areas (as
is implied by Broken Windows logic). The value of such an
approach, regarding obtaining answers to our research
questions, is that provides a broad picture of the relationship
between crime and graffiti across the city: offering basic
indications of the theory’s accuracy concerning graffiti’s causal
relationship with wider crime, and a testing the empirical
foundation on which Broken Windows policing is allegedly
based.
The map of Canterbury produced through the first stage of this
research, where the demarcations for each of the 10 zones and
pockets of graffiti have been plotted
Zone Key:1 = City Centre, 2 = Wincheap,
3 = Knight’s Avenue Estate, 4 = St. Dunstan’s Area,
5 = St. Stephen’s Area, 6 = Hales Place Estate,
7 = Vauxhall Road Estate, 8 = Military Road Area,
9 = Spring Lane Estate, 10 = Old Dover Road Area
The Shortcomings of Official Data and Crime Mapping
While there is evident value in using both recorded data and

45. forms of mapping to obtain an idea of crime levels across
Canterbury, in a process offers that practical advantages of
convenience and a lack of expense and gives a broad view of the
relationship between graffiti and crime, potential problems do
arise from the use of official data and forms of crime mapping
that underpins this approach. These problems have, however,
been acknowledged and compensated for in the methodological
design of this research, meaning that such shortcomings’ impact
on our ability to effectively answer the research questions
remain limited. The nature of these problems, as well moves to
restrict their negative impact and offer solutions to them, will
be outlined in this section.
Police.uk’s mapping of recorded crime data across the UK’s
streets, which maps crime for each street in the UK and makes
data freely available to any individual interested in ‘identifying
crimes right on their doorstep anywhere in the country’
(Whitehead, 2011: 1), presents new opportunities for
criminologists interested in researching crime rates by allowing
researchers (and the public) to chart the distribution of crime
across and within an entire city at the click of a few
buttons[footnoteRef:4]. Whilst this innovative method of
presenting data freely on this internet offers convenience for
scholars interested in studying crime rate, pre-existing concerns
regarding the validity and reliability of official data dictate that
we must continue to exercise caution in how we use such crime
statistics in research. Amongst criminologists and statisticians
alike, the long-standing criticism of crime figures is that they
‘do not give a clear picture of the social or situational context
of crimes’ (Maguire 2002: 343) and remains a powerful check
on the use of official data as the base for any research seeking
to accurately convey the reality of crime. Certainly, it is widely
known amongst criminologists that problems of differing
interpretations of criminality that impact upon decisions
whether to report record or crimes on the part of several actors,
a dark figure of crime, and a variety of other shortcomings
severely affect crime data’s ability to do so (see, for example,

46. Mclintock, 1963, Cicourel, 1968). In light of this, the
‘subjective and political nature of the ‘official’ crime statistics’
(Lea and Young, 1984: 16) sees such data regarded as
‘embodiments of police discretion’ and ‘governmental agenda’
(Ferrell et al, 2008: 195-196) rather than hard facts by some. It
may then appear that the use of such data may jeopardise the
project’s ability to test the Broken Windows thesis with
accuracy. That would certainly be the case if they were relied to
convey a precise picture of crime throughout the city of
Canterbury. However in a basic capacity crime statistics
maintain the ability to notify us of increases or decreases in
crime, as well as providing a basis on which we can compare
levels of criminality across different areas, therefore potentially
fulfilling a viable role in a variety of criminological projects.
As John Lea and Jock Young remind us, it would be a mistake
to dismiss them entirely: [4: One should always keep an eye
out for anomalies produced by errors in data, however, as there
have been teething problems with the police.uk project. For
instance, one street in Preston was recorded as having suffered
152 incidents of recorded crime in a single month, despite only
actually having has 3 incidents (Bunyan, 2011)!]
‘We must handle the figures with caution, and, most
importantly, that we must develop a sense of realism. We must
avoid both the alarmism which takes the figures simply at their
face value and the sense of false calm which insists that the
same statistics are a mere product of police practices’ (Lea and
Young, 1984: 16)
What remains crucial is that criminologists approach official
crime data ‘in a critical frame of mind’ (Maguire, 2002: 322),
namely by being aware of such failings and accommodating for
them in their methodological designs. By and large, crime
statistics have proven useful when allowing criminologists to
largely discern when crime is increasing or declining and
whether particular areas suffer from particularly high or low
levels of crime, rather than being relied upon to convey an

47. accurate representation of the nature or a precise measurement
of crime and its effects more generally (Lea and Young, 1984).
It is in this limited capacity that such statistics are used in this
project, where data is merely used to provide a general
measurement of crime that allows the research to establish
which areas of Canterbury tend to suffer from higher crime
rates than others for the purpose of identifying correlations.
A similar (but healthy) scepticism is useful when assessing
the usefulness of crime mapping in conveying an accurate
picture of crime; a practice intricately connected with the
collection of crime statistics as it sees such data plotted on
forms of maps (e.g. police.uk). Whilst practices of
geographically mapping crime extend back to ‘the progenitors
of environmental criminology’ (Hayward, 2012a: 443) in the
Chicago school of sociology (see Park, 1925, Burgess, 1925), it
is in the last couple of decades that contemporary forms of
crime mapping have become an increasingly popular method of
presenting official data and regarded as an effective method
through which authorities and criminologist alike may come to
understand crime and measure the performance of those tasked
with reducing it. As Mike Maguire notes in relation to such
techniques:
‘the amount of sophistication of analysis will also grow as data
from different sources are increasingly combined in ‘data
warehouses’, ‘mapped’ via grid references, and so on –
developments being actively encouraged by the new regional
‘crime reduction directors’ who have been appointed to
facilitate the work of local crime and disorder partnerships’
(Maguire, 2002: 369).
While there is clearly great fervour for the development of
crime mapping on the part of administrative criminologists (see
also Harries, 1999), authorities across the country and also the
public, there have, however, been an abundance of problems
identified with developing an understanding of crime purely
from the bird’s-eye gaze of crime maps. The most pertinent of
which is that crime mapping actually does very little to

48. illuminate understandings of urban criminality by encouraging
the criminologist to engage with crime from an abstracted and
detached position, therefore making them ignorant to the
intricacies of street level conditions in which crime is
committed and the complexities of the criminal act itself. The
kind of city seen through such maps and designs is referred to
by de Certeau (1984) as the ‘Concept-city’; Keith Hayward
explains:
‘This is the city as seen by planners, developers, statisticians
and, all too often, criminologists. Here the pluralistic fabric and
contradictions inherent in urban life… are distilled to leave only
quantitative data, demographics and rational discourse’ (2004:
2).
Such an understanding of the city, where one may gaze from a
bird’s-eye view to see a city void of human inhabitants, is,
however, problematic:
‘The problem… is that the life of the city, the constellation of
lives that make a city what it is, the actual experience of the
city, in other words, is not contained in the concept of the city.
Lives can not be mapped in this way – cannot be read – or even
truly rendered readable by maps… something always slips
away’ (Buchanan, 2000: 110).
As Hayward puts it in relation to urban crime, ‘the unfortunate
thing for… ‘crime analysts’ is that crime, incivility and
transgressive behaviour are very complex, multi-faceted, ever-
changing socio-cultural phenomena’, and thus maps populated
with quantitative data alone are ‘of no use whatsoever in
helping us to understand the complex and diverse social and
cultural motivations and individual experiences behind a great
many criminal offences’ (2004: 110-111). Thus, using crime
maps for research purposes does little to tell us about the
contexts in which crime is committed and the experiences and
motivations behind criminal acts, both of which were identified
as integral to understanding the relationship between crime,
disorder and space in the literature review. In that sense the
maps of police.uk and those created in this research (shown

49. earlier in the chapter), alone, offer relatively little in the testing
of the Broken Windows thesis and answering our research
questions: they tell us where graffiti and crime exist but do very
little in illuminating exactly how one may impact upon the
other.
While the solution to the problems associated with official
crime statistics was seen in limiting their influence over the
project, these issues within mapping practices have been tackled
by adding an alternative view of Canterbury’s streets to the
analysis. Crime mapping and statistics may provide us with a
model through which we can observe the broad distribution of
crime across urban areas (an undoubtedly useful tool in
assessing the Broken Windows account of urban decay), they,
however, only present a computer-generated veneer of city life
and the dynamics of crime, disorder and culture that simmer
underneath. The following section will now outline how these
problems are addressed in the second level of analysis, and how
the research takes its cue from De Certeau and Hayward’s
arguments regarding the need for to see the city as a duality: the
combination of the ‘Concept-city’ perspective alongside an
experiential dimension of urban living that mapping fails to
capture and which can only be obtained from street level
research. This dual mapping, it will be argued, provides
platform from which the research questions can most effectively
be answered by combining the broad perspective developed here
with a close inspection of locations filled with a more vivid and
detailed description of how graffiti and crime interact on a
street level.
Street Level Analysis
While the value of using official statistics, crime mapping and
quantified graffiti writing towards identifying city-wide
correlations between graffiti and crime has been emphasised by
the broad picture it provides, it is correctly uttered by
criminological scholars and statisticians alike that ‘correlation

50. is not causation’ (Hope, 2005: 56, emphasis added). This being
true, the correlations drawn from the first level of analysis in
this research will clearly not suffice to provide a convincing
answer to the issues thrown up by the research questions laid
out at the beginning of this thesis. While they offer a valuable,
yet basic, insight into the accuracy of Broken Windows theory
and the imperative under which Broken Windows policing is
advocated, a second level of more detailed analysis is clearly
required to flesh out this findings and better explain the
relationships lying behind these figures. Such a realisation
among others who have embarked on such analysis has, in the
past and very much the present, led vast swathes of
criminologists further into the depths of regression analysis in
attempts to compensate for this shortcoming and reach casual
explanations with other forms of statistical sophistication.
However, such advanced analytical techniques have previously
been found to be ill-equipped to fulfil such an undertaking
(Mills, 1959, Young, 2011); as was demonstrated by the
collective existence by of an altogether ambiguous statistical
assessment of Broken Windows theory laid out in the last
chapter. The progression to a second level of analysis in this
research, in order to circumnavigate this trading off of statistics
and duelling of data-sets and towards something more useful,
will instead take to the streets to observe first-hand how
dynamics between graffiti, disorder and crime interact.
Quantitative analysis is therefore used in the manner outlined
by Jock Young in The Criminological Imagination (2011),
where the role of this method is both critically viewed and used
‘in a much more limited and circumspect way’ (2011: ix). For
Young, this is ‘a question of setting rules and limits… of
determining where statistical testing is useful and where it is a
distraction’ (2011: 55); words heeded in the restrained use of
statistical analysis outlined above. Therefore, the second level
of analysis adopted here is a qualitative one that is more attuned
to uncovering the subtleties within urban space and writing
practices that may impact on the relationship between graffiti

51. and wider crime (in the vein Paul St. Jean and Ralph Taylor’s
previous work on this topic).
Specifically, this involved the closer inspection of 3 small-scale
studies of areas within the city, developed from the same
walking tours and photographs used to quantify the amount of
graffiti throughout the city; thus providing a more detailed
street-levelanalysis of graffiti’s impact on its immediate
environment. It is through this part of the research that flesh
may be added to the bone of the correlations observed in the
earlier analysis; that we can add a detailed and theoretically
infused critique to the plots on the graph. It is intended that this
element of the research project will develop some of the basic
insights offered by the quantitative analysis and provide a
contextually driven understanding of the relationship to graffiti
in Canterbury. Through an attentive gaze, it will also seek to
provide a vivid description of examples of either the successes
or failures of Broken Windows policing in particular locations
and how the effects of such policing approaches are visible in
such urban spaces. Thus, while the initial analysis will indicate
whether Broken Windows logic and policing appear useful, this
stage of the research will shed light on how and reasons why
Broken Windows logic may un/successfully explain what is
found, and whether Broken Windows policing is successfully
policing these areas.
While the use of visual methods to quantify graffiti has already
been outlined, the second function of the walking tours taken
throughout the city contributes to this second level of analysis
and pertains much more to the critical discussions of mapping
practice outlined in the previous section. Penetrating below the
bird’s-eye-view found on police.uk, and therefore providing a
means through which we may better understand the lived reality
of these locations in the vein of de Certeau’s duality and
Hayward’s cultural criminology, this street-level analysis
provides a means of better knowing the full reality of the
relationship between graffiti and crime in the locations subject
to study here. As Hayward, in his cultural criminological

52. critique of crime mapping practices, states:
‘Any understanding (or ‘mapping’) of urban space must
therefore place great store in the multi-layered interactivity that
takes place at ‘street level’, the cultural and social dimensions
of everyday city-life that enable the formation of a very
different interpretive framework’ (Hayward, 2004: 2).
The study of these spaces developed form walking tours and
visual analysis being used to ascertain a sense of the street level
experience of the city, will indeed be reflected upon to give a
more rounded and detailed appreciation of these dynamics and
thus directly confront the weaknesses earlier identified
police.uk’s mapping method. Earlier evident in the works of
Walker Evans (Agee and Evans, 1960) and W Eugene Smith
(1998) and more recently been emphasised by several cultural
criminologists (see Hayward and Presdee, 2009, Vergara, 1995),
such street level visual analysis has the potential to provide the
contextualised picture of urban space required for such an
undertaking; providing a platform from which the kind of
understanding that is regularly found to be lacking in detached
forms of crime mapping can be developed. Thus, the use of
photography in this project will specifically add a street level
view of graffiti and the visible signs of disorder around it, in
keeping with a cultural criminological approach, and allow the
research to project to develop a context-specific sense of
graffiti’s likely impact on its surrounding area. By doing so, the
project is well-placed to scrutinise both Wilson and Kelling’s
claims and the elaborate on the tentative conclusions reached
through the first level of analysis.
Summary
This chapter has outlined the methods used in this project,
the nature of their use and how they are tailored to answering
the project’s research questions. It has set out to explain how
this research will develop over two stages, and how the
weaknesses in each of the methods used is compensated by the
strengths of the other. In short, this approach combines a broad

53. gaze and narrow, more detailed view that will combine to
answer whether (or not) Broken Windows logic and policing
succeed within the city, and why this is the case. The mixed-
methods approach adopted here sees rudimentary statistical
analysis conducted to provide a basic testing of Broken
Windows logic. Here the relationship between graffiti and crime
across the city is tested to see if the two variables correlate with
one another: according to the rationale laid down by Wilson and
Kelling, one would expect to observe a positive correlation that
shows high graffiti areas to also suffer the highest rate of
recorded crime. Whether or not such a correlation materialises
will be the initial test of Broken Windows theory, and an
indication of whether Broken Windows policing practices are
worth pursuing. The weaknesses in this approach, where crime
statistics and detached forms of mapping tell us very little about
why graffiti may or may not cause crime, have been combatted
somewhat by a more detailed analysis of case studies of
locations within the city. It has been explained here that visual
analysis of street-level locations and photographs of graffiti
taken on extensive walking tours of the city will not only to
quantify the amount of graffiti in the city, but also provide the
kind of contextualised insights into how graffiti interacts with
the space around it that forms of crime mapping can not offer.
The following chapters will present the findings of this
research. Beginning first with the statistical analysis in the next
chapter, from which tentative conclusions will be drawn, a more
fleshed out analysis of the street-level case studies will follow
afterwards.

54. Chapter IV:
City Wide Correlations: Quantitative Analysis
This chapter will present the results of the statistical
analysis conducted as part of this research project. As was
explained in the methodology chapter, the scope of this analysis
is purposefully limited and its methods are intentionally
simplistic and elementary in comparison to other scholarly
works that have previously sought to test the Broken Windows
thesis and Broken Windows policing impact on crime rates (see
Thomas et al, 2011 and Kelling and Sousa, 2001 for example).
What follows is a the detailing of the findings in this search for
correlations between graffiti and crime rates across 10 areas of
Canterbury, as well as a discussion of how these results relate
to the research questions posed in the introductory chapter of
this thesis. This analysis will shed light on whether or not the
sequential decline described by Wilson and Kelling materialises
through recorded crime figures, or a prevailing status quo where
areas with a prevalence of graffiti also suffer high crime. It will
also reflect on the decision of local authorities to commit
resources to a programme of Broken Windows policing, under
the guise that aggressively controlling graffiti will reduce and
prevent other forms of crime; revealing whether this approach’s
focus on graffiti is empirically supported and likely to bring
about a reduction in general crime rates. The value of this
research in particular is that it will help establish a broad
coverage of the relationship between graffiti and crime across
the majority of the city, however, a second level of examination
is required to elaborate on these findings, where a more detailed

55. visual analysis of street-level locations within the city will be
introduced to add flesh to the bone of the findings presented
here. What follows here, then, is one half of this project’s
findings and some brief discussions and soft conclusions drawn
from them: the correlations here will be used to offer tentative
answers to our research questions whilst, acknowledging that
correlation is not causation, a more detailed causal explanation
to underpin these results will be developed in the next chapter.
Findings
The correlations that lie between the distribution of graffiti
and crime across these 10 zones in the 6 months of December
2011-May 2012, as is shown in the graph below, appear to show
a weak or no relationship between these variables (a fit line
inserted on to the graph shows there to be a weak negative
relationship). This scatter-plot actually reveals there to be little
difference in the crime suffered in areas of low and high
graffiti. Whilst it is shown that there are indeed some low
crime/low graffiti areas of the city, the upwards diagonal line
one would expect to see leading away from the intersect of the
X and Y axis never materialises: what we instead see, by the
positioning of the points on the scatter diagram below, is that
there is little difference in the amount of crime suffered in both
low and high graffiti areas. Indeed, in some cases it points to a
high graffiti / low crime character of parts of the city: for
example, the area in which the level of crime is the lowest
amongst each of the zones and across this 6 month period also
contains the second most pockets of graffiti writing (the St.
Stephen’s area). More fundamentally, however, the graph shows
there to no meaningful relationship between the two variables
across the entire 10 zones: suggesting that both high and low
graffiti areas within the city will suffer similar levels of crime.

56. Furthermore, taking apart the data and inspecting it more
closely does little to contradict these findings. As the below
image of the data broken down into its component monthly
totals illustrates, the correlations between graffiti and crime
remain fairly constant over each month within this period.
Indeed, a correlation similar to that shown for the entire 6
month period is each shown in five of these graphs. The only
exception is shown in February 2012, where it appears that the
three zones containing the least graffiti each experienced a
decline in crime, whereas the rest remained relatively constant.
What this breakdown shows is that the correlation identified
above has not been skewed by one or two anomalous figures
that do not represent the character of crime distribution of
across the rest of this time period; an important factor to
consider when we bear in mind Harcourt’s (1998) re-analysis of
Wesley Skogan’s datasets that proved such influences to
sometimes have a significant effect on such analyses. On the
contrary, the below images reveal this 6 month correlation to be
based on relatively stable figures showing a lack of a
relationship between the variables that tend to repeat
themselves over the individual months within this period.
Furthermore, where this pattern repeats itself time and time
again, with the possible exception of February 2012, this re-
affirms what conclusions we may draw from the initial graph
and the correlation it offers. With some confidence that these
results are not corrupted by anomalous results, we can therefore
maintain that there appears to be no relationship between
graffiti and crime within these 10 areas of Canterbury.

57. The correlations between graffiti and crime for each of the
respective months within the December 2011-May 2012 period
Interpreting the Figures
What answers, then, do these figures and correlations offer to
our research questions? At a simplistic level, these results
tentatively suggest that the relationship between graffiti writing
and wider crime in Wilson and Kelling’s thesis bears little
resemblance to graffiti’s impact on spaces throughout
Canterbury. These results then initially indicate that, in answer
to our first research question, that a Broken Windows model of
understanding graffiti’s impact on crime throughout the city is a
fairly inaccurate one. Where we would expect to find a
supposed connection between graffiti other forms of crime,
which would see at the very least a moderate (perhaps even a
strong) positive correlation between the variables emerge, this
result indeed prompts us towards rather different conclusions.
Thus, what we see is an apparent failure in Broken Windows
logic, which would suggest that areas in which there is the most
graffiti there will also be the most crime, and its ability to
explain the relationship between graffiti and other forms of
criminality: areas in which graffiti was most widespread were
found to have roughly the same, and sometimes less, crime than
areas with a much less writing. Furthermore, through the
breakdown of monthly figures shown above, we can also
observe that there appeared little evidence of crime rising in
high graffiti areas, in the vein of the sequential decline
described by Wilson and Kelling, over this 6 month period. In
light of this, these figures neither point to a scenario where
graffiti has already attracted criminality to the areas in which it
is most widespread, nor do they bear any evidence of graffiti
causing an increase in crime over this period of time. In short,
then, these results suggest that Broken Windows theory is of
relatively little use in explaining how graffiti effects its

58. surrounding environment across the city (therefore being
comparable to the findings of Yang, 2007, Chappell et al, 2011,
Cerdia et al, 2009 Harcourt, 1998, Sampson and Raudenbush,
1999, 2004). They insinuate, then, that factors outside of
graffiti’s visible disorder will be more useful in explaining the
prevalence and distribution of throughout in the city.
These findings would, by implication, also appear to cast doubt
on the effectiveness, and potential for success, of Broken
Windows policing. Indeed, this analysis simultaneously offers
some answers pertaining to the project’s second research
question surrounding policing practices born from the rationale
used in Wilson and Kelling’s thesis. If, as these correlations
infer, it is indeed true that areas in which disorder (in the form
of graffiti writing) is most prevalent tend to suffer marginally
less crime than those in which disorder is much less visible,
then the value of tackling that disorder as a means of reducing
crime must surely be questioned. While these figures offer
little in terms of establishing a causal explanation for the
distribution of crime throughout the city, they do suggest that
graffiti is unlikely to be a catalyst for criminal behaviour.
Suggesting graffiti to have little impact on criminality within
the city, and therefore undermining the empirical foundation
and basis on which Broken Windows policing is advanced
against writing, they therefore hint that attempts to reduce
crime by reducing and controlling graffiti will be largely futile.
It is in this vein that these findings correspond with other
studies that have similarly suggested, through statistical
analysis and other methods, Broken Windows policing to be
ineffectual in reducing wider crime (see Katz et al, 2009,
Karmen, 2000). While it is conceded that this analysis can offer
no insights into other driving forces behind criminal behaviour
within the city, it does intimate that a Broken Windows policing
model that will continue to consider graffiti to have a role to
play in causing further criminality is unlikely to be successful
in its aims. We should therefore continue to look, through
further research and the deconstruction of local data, for

59. alternative explanations for the prevalence of crime in areas of
the city, from which alternative policing methods that better
correspond to the causes of crime can be developed.
While this analysis appears to offer some valuable insights that
we may to use to begin to answer the project’s research
questions, we must take caution before overstating the strength
of these conclusions. As was discussed in the methodology
chapter, crime statistics have a limited value in bearing the
reality of crime, which as Lea and Young remind us ‘are not
hard facts’ (1984: 12), whilst statistical analysis has a restricted
potential in revealing the causal factors underlying criminal
behaviour (Young, 2011). In this vein, what this kind of
analysis does not provide us with is any serviceable insight into
why Broken Windows theory’s predictions fail to materialise on
Canterbury’s streets; whether these failings, for instance,
potentially stem from the meaning of disorder being
inappropriately charged on to writing, or perhaps that such
disorderly sights having little effect in breeding criminality in
their surrounding environment. Furthermore, in relation to
Broken Windows policing practices, these figures merely
suggest that the basis on which Broken Windows policing is
alleged to be successful possesses little relevance to Canterbury
and its graffiti writing. Thus, all that we can, at this point,
conclude is that writing appears to not have had the impact on
the city that Wilson and Kelling’s theory would suggest, much
to its discredit, and that Broken Windows policing practices are
unlikely to be result in a reduction in crime across the city.
Conclusions
The findings presented in this chapter have corresponded
very closely with other attempts by scholars to quantitatively
test the Broken Windows hypothesis, both in terms of their
findings and usefulness. As have many other examinations of
the Broken Windows thesis (see Yang, 2007, Sampson and
Raudenbush, 1999, Cerdia et al, 2009), these findings cast doubt
on the premises of Wilson and Kelling’s claims by showing,

60. through correlations, there to be no evident relationship
between crime and visible disorder (in this case, specifically
graffiti writing); which its authors claim ‘are usually
inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence’
(Wilson and Kelling, 1982: 31). The figures that were laid out
here revealed there to be no meaningful correlation between the
variables of disorder and crime across the city: it was shown
that a high prevalence of graffiti in an area was not a good
predictor of high crime rates. Amidst these correlations, where
this relationship was fairly constant across a 6 month period,
there was also no evidence to suggest that graffiti has been
acting as a catalyst to kick-start a downward trajectory into
increased criminality in areas of the city. Crime rates remained
consistently low in areas in which graffiti was particularly
prevalent. As discussed above, these findings therefore have
negative implications for how the accuracy of the theory and its
associated policing approaches may be judged.
This chapter has, however, also acknowledged the limited value
of this methodological approach when conducting such
investigations. Whilst these findings clearly speak to the claims
made by Wilson and Kelling (1982), they do little beyond
merely tentatively indicate that aspects of the theory appear to
possess little relevance to Canterbury and that policing
practices developed from its central premise are unlikely to
successfully reduce crime throughout the city. As was argued in
the literature review and the last chapter, the complex
relationships between crime, graffiti and space require
criminologists to physically enter such spaces to closely inspect
the nature of these connections from an interpretive standpoint.
Thus we will now progress to the next chapter, based on a
street-level analysis of three case studies within the city, to
flesh out this analysis: to move beyond these simplistic findings
that offer guidance on the accuracy of the theory more broadly
and to a level where we may diagnose the specific failures of
Broken Windows theory (and policing) where they are found on
the city’s streets.

61. Chapter V
Breaking Down the Walls: the Street-Level Gaze
The thesis will now progress to its qualitative case study
analysis of three locations within the city. As was mentioned in
the methodology chapter, the case studies here are based on
walking tours and photographs taken (by the author) of areas
within the city, as well as various other sources of information
(including local campaign literature and local media articles)
that provide a greater sense of the area than does the statistical
information drawn from the bird’s-eye gaze of police.uk’s crime
maps. The findings presented here are, then, an interpretation
based on this immersion in the localities in Canterbury with
which this project is concerned. Whereas the last chapter
offered a broad scope and soft conclusions suggesting that
Broken Windows theory fails to explain the relationship
between graffiti and wider crime across Canterbury, and that
associated policing practices are subsequently likely to fail in
their aims, here these discussions are fleshed out with a narrow

62. focus and increased detail. A description of the spaces
underlying these figures, and the processes and developments at
work within them, is intended to lead us closer to an
explanation of exactly how and where the theory succeeds or
fails, and ultimately provide more robust answers to the
research questions at the centre of this project. Throughout this
chapter, the findings presented here will also be placed in on-
going discussions of graffiti, crime, urban space and the
relationship between them. Through such discussions, cultural
criminology emerges as an alternative framework through which
we may understand how the relationship between graffiti and
crime plays out within Canterbury’s streets.
The photos used in this project offer a window into a variety of
street-level settings within Canterbury, providing a medium of
penetrating beneath the bird’s eye view found on police.uk (as
shown above).
Case Study I: Inside the City Walls
Contrary to what Broken Windows logic might predict, the
prevalence of graffiti inside Canterbury’s medieval city walls,
which surround the city’s main shopping district, is relatively
low whilst crime rates are extremely high. The amount of crime
in this central region of the city between December 2011-May
2012, totalling 824 offences, measures alone at over 37% of all
recorded crime in the 10 zones of the city covered in the
previous chapter. On the city’s high-street and main shopping

63. arcades there is little graffiti in plain sight, whilst much of the
graffiti there is exists in small pockets among the narrow roads,
alleyways and subways that flow from and around this main
parade. They mostly take the form of small tags. Overall, this
central area of the city, whose attractions include: the city’s
high-street; various shopping arcades; the city’s largest theatre;
the historic Canterbury Cathedral; as well as a variety of
restaurants, pubs and bars, can reasonably be described as
extremely well-kept. Indeed, the variety of hanging baskets,
colourful banners along the high-street, plush trees and bushes
and clean shop fronts indeed seem to cast a good impression on
those who walk around the city-centre. Moreover, the frequent
sight of patrolling police officers (both on foot and in squad
cars), various litter-pickers and chewing gum removers, as well
as the private army of staff hired to maintain and police the
Whitefriars’ shopping area, indicate that this is a part of
Canterbury in which authorities, developers and property
owners intend to protect the impression of security the area
gives in order to attract shoppers (and their money) to the city.
In light of this sense of orderliness and the lack of the graffiti
in the area, it appears to make little sense to attribute the blame
for the high crime rates experienced here on visible disorder in
the mould of Broken Windows theory.
.
As these photos (above) show, the area in and around
Canterbury’s city centre appears well-kept and gives the
impression of security and orderliness.

64. This description, however, only applies to Canterbury city-
centre as a day-time hive of shopping, consumption and
relaxation, whereas we must look to the use of this same space
at night in order to explain why the city-centre boasts such high
figures of recorded crime. At night, other sources of revenue
and forms of consumption tend to occupy these same streets and
transform the city into a somewhat different place: a tale that is
told both through recorded crime figures and walks through the
city on busy evenings. Like many so-called ‘beer towns’ across
the UK (Hobbs et al, 2005), in which the night-time industry
‘spawns criminal violence at every turn’ (Ferrell et al, 2008:
204), much of Canterbury’s local economy runs on night-time
consumption of alcohol, in turn, apparently suffers from a high
amount of crime committed by night-time drinkers. In light of
this, it appears more appropriate to characterise the city’s night-
time economy as the catalyst for acts of criminality, rather than
visible signs of disorder (as Broken Windows theory would
suggest)[footnoteRef:5]. As the figures on police.uk reveal,
much of the city-centre’s crime is, unsurprisingly, clustered
around the town’s most popular drinking spots; further
compounding suggestions that it is indeed the city’s night-time
industry that lies at the heart of much of the area’s crime.
Furthermore, police.uk is able to reveal that the types of crime
committed in this area are largely consistent with those
associated with night-time economies by existing literature (see
Winlow and Hall, 2006, Hobbs et al, 2005). Take, for instance,
the area around the Cherry Tree pub in the month of May 2012
which illustrates such dynamics: of the 18 crimes committed in
the nearby area that month, the variety of anti-social, violent,
drugs and public disorder offences do just this, and indeed
present just one piece of a wider jigsaw of similar locations
throughout the city-centre that provide an illustration of the
same dynamics. [5: Another explanation for the high rates of
crime in this area, though one that appears less influential than
night-time drinking, is day-time shoplifting. Given the wide
array of shops in the city centre, opportunities for shoplifting

65. here obviously exceed those provided anywhere else in the city.
Thus, we should still take care not to claim that all crime in the
area is driven by the city’s night-time economy.]
Such findings, told through crime figures and first-hand
observation, raise issues of contention against those who
promote Broken Windows in the city, and accentuate how the
theory’s emphasis on visible disorder as a cause of criminal
behaviour fails to relate to particular urban environments.
Indeed, this example has shown how graffiti emerges as a non-
factor in explaining the prevalence of crime in this area. In
contrast it has been demonstrated that the city’s night-time
economy, alongside the kind of shoplifting crimes that are an
inevitability in such shopping spaces, rather than visible
disorder, emerges as a more reasonable explanation for the
extremely pronounced recorded crime figures inside the city
walls. Ill-equipped to consider the often parafunctional nature
of urban space (Hayward, 2012a), what is revealed through this
example is that Broken Windows’ lack of reflexivity means that
the theory fails to account for how Canterbury’s city-centre can
both resemble a secure shopper’s paradise and one of the
‘brutal, instrumental urban site of alcohol-driven excess and
violence’ (Ferrell et al, 2008: 106) located in and around the
country. Thus, in order to explain crime in this area it is appears
necessary to turn to alternative bodies of work, some of which
include: cultural criminological literature on the multiple uses
of urban space (see Hayward, 2012a); studies of behaviour
amidst hedonistic night-time consumption of alcohol and illicit
drugs providing a greater understanding of how, why and when
crime will be committed in such environments (see Hobbs et al,
2005); as well as cultural criminology’s appreciation of the
social, economic and cultural conditions that makes such
pursuits popular (see Presdee, 1999), to provide a more relevant
wisdom for accounting for crime in this area. Thus this case
study, in answer to our first question, demonstrates how Broken
Windows logic fails to account for the causes of crime in this

66. area (and this crime’s relationship with visible disorder), and
can obscure more useful explanations from high crime rates
with its distracting logic. Showing there to be high crime in a
low-graffiti and highly ordered environment clearly suggests
that the theory is of little use in explaining why crime rates
remain high in this zone. Furthermore, this case study suggests
that Broken Windows policing will be unsuccessful in its
attempts at reducing crime generally: visible disorder is clearly
not the cause for much of the criminality in the city-centre, so
the policing of graffiti is unlikely to have any significant impact
on wider rates of offences in the area.
Case Study II: Kingsmead Road
Kingsmead Road’s relationship with graffiti and crime is a
complex one, and perhaps demonstrates best among these case
studies the value of taking to the street to closely inspect the
complex and nuanced dynamics at work between graffiti, crime
and culture in urban space. Alongside a dense collection of
graffiti writing, the area hosts: a large supermarket; council-run
swimming pool and gym; as well as a medical centre. While
there is indeed a greater prevalence of graffiti in this small area
than is typically found across Canterbury, alongside an above
average rate of crime, one should be cautious before concluding
that Broken Windows theory offers the best theoretical
framework for explaining the interactions between these
phenomena in this area. As will be revealed here, there is more

67. than meets the bird’s eye view in this particular case. Indeed,
the Kingsmead area presents a fine example of the varieties in
graffiti’s meaning and also emphasises the need to adopt a
cultural criminological perspective, rather than Broken
Windows rationale, in order to unravel these complicated
dynamics within a wider cultural backdrop.
Whilst the prevalence of graffiti in this microcosm of the city
may suggest that writing has, in some way, been responsible for
its relatively high crime rates, a closer inspection indicates that
such blunt and simplistic reasoning fails to account for wider
cultural dynamics that influence how it is likely to be perceived
and interpreted by local residents. Firstly, however, the issue of
the night-time economy appears to raise its head once more as
the confounding factor that can more reasonably be held
accountable for the levels of crime here. The Penny Theatre, a
large premises lying adjacent to two late-night kebab houses on
the corner where Kingsmead Road meets Northgate, is one of
the city’s most popular drinking spots amongst local students
and young adults. As was the case with night-time spots in the
previous section, the crime committed in this area can largely
be attributed to a number of anti-social behaviour, public
disorder and violent offences committed inside or just outside
the pub (at their worst, totalling 9 incidences in the month of
May 2012). Revealing the majority of crime in this small area to
be clustered around the Penny Theatre, rather than the dense
collection of graffiti surrounding the nearby youth club, it thus
compounds the suggestions made in the last case study that the
city’s night-time industry tends to lies at the root of much of
criminal disruption throughout the city.
The legally written graffiti surrounding the youth club (above)
appears to be more technically sophisticated than the majority
of writing across the city, whilst appearing to do little in attract
crime and disorder to the area.

68. The Riverside Youth Centre, on Kingsmead Road, alternatively
brings to the fore some of the complications intricately tied into
graffiti’s contemporary cultural meaning, and simultaneously
throws another spanner in the works of Broken Windows’
portrayal of graffiti acting as a bearer of bad news. Indeed,
contrary to such an interpretation of graffiti’s meaning, the
writing that decorates the wall of the buildings appears to
function as a symbol of inclusion (an invitation for young
people to enter the club) and as a celebration of graffiti within
mainstream youth culture. At the manager’s request, local
writers were invited to write on the walls of the club and
subsequently created a variety of colourful murals and pieces
along the front of the main building’s walls and also the on-site
five-a-side football pitch[footnoteRef:6] (see Tandasatu,
2/4/2010, for a video of this process). That those running this
youth club, funded by the local council, saw fit to have it
decorated with graffiti, speaks volumes about: the way graffiti
is valued within the current cultural context; the alternative
meanings that different parts of the local population attach to
different examples of writing; and the distinctions
criminologists accordingly need to make between different
varieties of graffiti. In particular, the painting of the youth club
corresponds with wider developments identified by cultural
criminologists; where it has been noted that graffiti, amongst
other crimes, has been ‘packaged and marketed to young people
as a romantic, exciting, cool and fashionable cultural symbol’
by a number of industries. Keith Hayward explains, ‘it is in this
cultural context that transgression becomes a desirable
consumer choice. Within consumer culture, crime is being
aestheticised and stylised, presented in the mass media as on a
par with a fashion aesthetic’ (both quotes from Hayward, 2004:
169). Driven by representations in commercial advertising and
the use of graffiti’s style in many commodities themselves,
through this process, graffiti has evolved from a feature of
counter-culture to become part of the mainstream. As a result,

69. graffiti, its visual style and emotional sensations of
transgression are now ‘celebrate[d] and very importantly,
commodif[ied]’ (Hayward, 2004: 173) by industries selling
products to youth markets. Recent examples of this are beyond
counting; however they include the use of graffiti within adverts
for Adidas clothes and Converse trainers; the use of graffiti (or
graffiti’s style) as an advertising medium itself; fashion items
that themselves adopt graffiti’s visual style; and even video
games (such as Mark Ecko’s ‘Getting Up’) and; now evidently
by youth clubs attempting to aesthetically express the style of
those who use the clubs and also to attract new members: [6:
However, some writing was not welcomed by those who run the
club (this mainly consists of a few tags that have been peppered
around the club’s walls and also some large containers near the
building)]
‘Graffiti style has also gone mainstream; as graffiti has become
the lingua franca of hip, artistic rebellion has indeed turned into
big money… suggesting of course that whatever cultural
authenticity the law can’t kill, the market can’ (Ferrell et al,
2008: 151).
The appropriation of graffiti’s style and urban edginess has
been evident in graffiti-based products: such as Marc Ecko’s
Getting Up Video Game (above left); the use of graffiti
writing’s transgressive sensations in Adidas advertising
campaigns (above centre), and the use of graffiti aesthetic for
adverts by Sony (above right).
Once we contextualise the graffiti surrounding the Riverside
Youth Centre in these cultural processes, it quickly becomes
clear that Wilson and Kelling’s blunt understanding of graffiti
as a symbol of disorder is both ignorant to these cultural shifts
and unable to accurately characterise this graffiti’s meaning to
nearby urban audiences. While perhaps the tag continues to

70. represent senseless vandalism to some (Ferrell et al, 2008: 101),
the murals decorating the youth club appear to represent
something rather different. Indeed, this case study has
specifically shown that, within this evolving and mutating
cultural context, the youth club’s use of graffiti signals to the
community that this is a space for young people and to signal to
young people themselves that this is a cool and fun place to be.
In doing so, it also relates to wider examples of the
appropriation of graffiti to attract people to an area: for
example, Snyder’s finding that certain shopkeepers in areas of
New York encouraged graffiti writing inside their stores in
order to ‘tell shoppers that this is a cool space’, and
demonstrate graffiti is indeed ‘good for business’ (2009: 53).
This case study thus demonstrates the value of cultural
criminology’s culturally aware and interpretive approach to
graffiti writing in comparison to Broken Windows blunt and
unwavering characterisation of graffiti as a sign of disorder.
Whereas a static Broken Windows logic leads us to assume that
the Riverside Youth Club’s graffiti might inspire crime, a
reflexive cultural criminological approach sees the lack of
crime around the club better explained through the ‘plac[ing of]
criminality and its control in the context of culture’
(culturalcriminology.org, 2012); in this case meaning situating
Kingsmead’s graffiti within writing’s journey into mainstream
youth culture. Suggesting, therefore, that understandings of
graffiti as a sign of disorder, in Broken Windows arguments,
remain too rigid in light of graffiti’s use as a sign of urban cool
to young audiences, the graffiti on the Riverside Youth Club
reminds us that criminologists must remain attentive to the
diverse and ever-changing meanings that writing can hold and
the distinctions between different variations of writing. This
case study then, pertaining to the first of our research questions,
shows Broken Windows theory spectacularly failing to explain
graffiti writing’s impact on its environment through wildly
misinterpreting what writing means to particular urban
audiences. Moreover, it then implies that Broken Windows

71. policing will be entirely ineffective in reducing wider crime by
virtue of this writing both being legal and symbolising
mainstream faux-edginess rather than genuine urban disorder.
Case Study III: Westgate
Whereas the previous case study raised pertinent issues
regarding the discrepancy between Broken Windows theory’s
interpretation of writing and that of Canterbury’s residents, the
case of the Westgate area concerns the actions of writers
themselves. Providing a fine example of the unintended
consequences of Broken Windows policing it, in short, tells a
story of crime displacement brought about by methods of crime
control used, within a popular model of Broken Windows
policing, to counteract the movements of writers. Drawing on a
precedent identified in cultural criminological literature, this
case study will provide a demonstration that, rather than
preventing and controlling writing as they intend, in certain
cases such measures ‘will, over time, be circumnavigated or
outwitted, by dint of simple force, innovative criminal practice
or, that old nemesis of situational crime prevention, crime
displacement’ (Hayward, 2004: 186). It therefore, in relation to

72. our second research question, points to a significant failing in
this policing approach.
As visitors walk from the Westgate gardens’ entrance (above
left), they will pass features of beautiful greenery (above
centre) before coming across the steel gate and graffiti at the
area’s edge
The entrance to the Wesgate gardens lies adjacent,
unsurprisingly, to the West gate of the Canterbury’s medieval
city wall. As one enters the gardens and walks by the plush
foliage found along the river Stour’s banks within this peaceful
pocket of Canterbury, there is little to suggest that within a
stone’s throw lies one of the most dense collections of graffiti
in the city. Certainly, visitors to the gardens will find
themselves a world away from the disordered landscapes
populated with drunks and drug dealers and associated with
graffiti writing by Wilson and Kelling’s (1982) Broken
Windows theory. However, at the far end of this most tranquil
and peaceful part of the city, full of open green areas in which
people regularly come to read, play, picnic or merely spend an
enjoyable lunch hour, the gated entrance to the underside of the
road-support bridge (which is arguably unsightly in its own
right) at the end of the garden signals a divide between the
serene lawns and a supposed symbol of urban decay. Boasting
some the city’s most intricate and most technically-
sophisticated graffiti, the underside of the bridge contains a
diverse range of writing styles exhibited on almost every
available inch of the walls and pillars on show. Posing yet
another contradiction to Broken Windows logic, they, however,
appear to have had very little effect on crime and disorder
nearby: not only do the gardens themselves still give the
impression of a safe and peaceful haven within the city,
recorded crime in the surrounding area of Westgate remains
among the lowest throughout the rest of the city.
While the lack of crime surrounding this graffiti once more

73. undermines the premises of Wilson and Kelling’s theory, more
significantly, the appearance of writing in such a location points
to failings in a Broken Windows policing method of crime
control. Indeed, the location of the vibrant collection of murals,
pieces and tags found here corresponds very closely with
discussions of the displacement of writing identified in other
cities by Snyder (2006, 2009) and Ferrell (1996, 1998), among
others (Hayward, 2004, 2007), and in doing so offers another
contradiction to Broken Windows logic. As has been
acknowledged by cultural criminological scholars, displacement
has been identified as a regular consequence of situational
approaches to crime control (Hayward, 2007), many of which
tend to be included in models of Broken Windows policing
(Manning, 2001, McLaughlin, 2008a). Specifically towards
graffiti in Canterbury these have included: the swift removal of
graffiti; the use of anti-graffiti paint to coat surfaces; a variety
of surveillance techniques including CCTV (Canterbury City
Council, 2012a); on the spot fines for those caught writing
(Warren, 23/8/2012); and the frequent prosecution of writers
(Claridge and Alston, 18/2/2010). The result, as has been shown
in many cases, is that graffiti tends to merely be moved to
obscure and less-visible locations rather than prevented or
reduced; to locations where writers can avoid surveillance and
develop sophisticated and time-consuming pieces of writing
without fear of punishment[footnoteRef:7]. What is found in the
Westgate gardens serves as an example of these very processes
playing out in Canterbury’s urban landscape: where the city
centre and other areas of the city are subject to this policing,
the edge of the garden offers the kind of unsurveilled location
that writers have elsewhere been increasingly shown to favour
(see Ferrell, 1996). Furthermore, evidence of this displacement
effect is also evident across other areas of the city in which
writing is found where much writing is now found in hidden
pockets of the city landscape. Much like Jeff Ferrell found that
writers in Denver ‘were pushed into real obscure places where’
and left ‘basically… painting for other writers and puttin’ up

74. wallpaper for winos and bums’ (Eye Six quoted in Ferrell, 1990:
11) by similar crackdowns on writing, in Canterbury it has been
subways frequently used by the city’s homeless for shelter and
begging that similarly offer some of the most dense collections
of graffiti in the area. As the Westgate gardens and several
other collections of writing located in hidden pockets of
Canterbury’s urban landscape then demonstrate, these dynamics
equally appear to be playing out in space across this small
Kentish city. [7: In other cases, such measures have also been
shown to frequently encourage writers for whom the main
motivation for writing is risk taking (see Ferrell, 1996, Snyder,
2009, Lyng, 2005, see also Katz, 1988) where, as Ferrell,
Hayward and Young put it, such measures have ‘ironically
accelerated graffiti’s experiential seductions’ (2008: 150) in the
past.]
The underside of the bridge (above) reveals one of the city’s
densest collection of graffiti, as well as some of the city’s most
technically-sophisticated pieces.
Displacement is evident across the city, both with writing
increasingly appearing to be hidden from view (above left),
whilst some writers appear to use the example of the Pacman
video game to taunt authorities’ inability to control their actions
(above right).
We must also consider, in order to fully comprehend the driving
forces lying behind these developments in writing, factors
external to the cat and mouse interplay between authorities and
writers that are driving such changes. The increasing
significance of photography to writing and writers that has seen
graffiti increasingly shared via graffiti-based media
publications, and more recently the internet, is relevant here.
This, it would seem as previously suggested by cultural
criminological scholars, has also accelerated the displacement

75. effect caused by Broken Windows policing (see Hayward, 2007,
2012) in many locations by leading many writers to prize
visibility gained through sharing digital photography above
being seen in their own cities . As Greg Snyder writes:
‘Photographs [make] ephemeral graffiti pieces permanent,
allowing writers to view the work of others without attachment
to a specific place or time. The inclusion of these ‘flicks’ in
magazines created a space where graffiti pieces from all over
the world could come together to be judged, critiqued, and
offered as instruction’ (Snyder, 2006: 93).
Not only does this apply to the magazine publications
mentioned by Snyder (such as Getting Up and ON the Go), but
also now internet forums and sites that bring together writers
from all parts of the globe (Mills, 2011). Where ‘the World
Wide Web has added another path to fame that doesn’t include
illegally saturating city walls with a name’ (Snyder, 2009: 35),
the need for writers to attain visibility in their own cities has
been superseded by recognition for quality of work among a
global network of peers, where graffiti is now mediated either
through print or virtual media (Snyder, 2006). This has resulted
in writers seeking out obscure locations to write, in which they
can produce better work, and contributed to the displacement of
writing in locations where techniques of Broken Windows
policing have been utilised. Evidence of this development’s
relevance to Canterbury’s writing scene can indeed be found
with a few clicks of a mouse, thus compounding these
suggestions that the internet and Broken Windows theory have
collectively driven graffiti writing to the margins of the city.
Aside from whatever content has been beamed into various
channels in multiple internet forums and millions of discussion
threads, these include videos showing examples of graffiti
around the city (see, Chapman-Jones, 2009, Soflesviolence,
2010) as well as a dedicated Canterbury Bombs website.
By looking to these cultural criminological analyses of graffiti
culture, ones that takes into account the unintended
consequences of Broken Windows policing and the role of new

76. media in criminal sub and counter-cultures, we can therefore
explain why, contrary to Broken Windows’ expectations,
Canterbury’s graffiti can increasingly be found in locations like
the Westgate gardens. It is through these progressions that we
can also identify a failure in Broken Windows policing, which
appears to fall at the first hurdle in relation to graffiti writing:
if it is believed that aggressively policing writing will herald a
reduction in crime, a claim that has thus far been suggested to
lack an empirical foundation anyway, the inability of this
approach to actually to control writing surely undermines it
entirely! Rather than consider writers as rational actors who
will be deterred by such policing, cultural criminologists’
attentiveness to the supposedly ‘irrational’ (in that they stand
contrary to the expectations of rational choice theorists)
features of writing practices has proven useful in discussions of
these findings (see Hayward, 2007). Once more, where it has
been observed that Broken Windows logic and policing have
been observed to have failed, cultural criminology has proven
useful in explaining how and why writers have changed their
writing practices in the face of Broken Windows policing
practices.
Conclusions
In light of the findings of these three case studies, and in
combination with the elementary insights drawn from this
project’s quantitative analysis, Broken Windows emerges as an
extremely problematic theoretical framework for understanding
the effect of graffiti on its immediate environment. The last
chapter’s findings tentatively suggested that the relationship
between graffiti and crime across Canterbury more broadly bore
little relation to the dynamics described in Broken Windows
theory, where graffiti among other crimes is described as a
catalyst for urban decline and an increase in crime. They also
suggested that there was little empirical imperative under which
to advocate a Broken Windows policing model against graffiti
writing in the fight against crime more generally; suggesting

77. this policy is unlikely to herald a reduction in wider criminality.
Alongside this discovery of a weak relationship between the
distribution of graffiti and crime throughout the city, this
chapter has ratcheted up this critique of Broken Windows theory
by throwing up examples of how and why this theory fails in its
explanations of crime’s causes. In relation to our research
questions, this chapter has demonstrated how high crime areas
may appear highly ordered and contain little graffiti, how
graffiti may often not symbolise disorder in the manner Wilson
and Kelling claim, and how Broken Windows policing practices
fail to control writing practices. As a result, the tentative
conclusions reached at the end of the last chapter have been
reinforced: the theoretical premises of Broken Windows theory,
and the policing practices that have been spawned from its
rationale, have each been revealed to have significant flaws.
Also pointed to, in the night-time economy, features of the city
that appear to have had a greater effect on crime rates than any
form of writing or lingering and visible disorder.
Moreover this chapter has, through discussions of how we can
better interpret these findings, introduced several elements of
cultural criminology that tally with what has been observed
here. Be it acknowledgements of distinctions between different
variations of writing, awareness of graffiti’s transition into
mainstream youth/consumer culture as a feature of selling
products to young people, or processes of displacement brought
about by Broken Windows policing and online digital culture,
the nuanced and reflexive interpretive framework that cultural
criminology brings to this topic has clearly been demonstrated
to be more useful than Wilson and Kelling’s thesis. These
findings and the discussions presented here, thus, suggest that
we must move away from Broken Windows theory and
reconfigure our understandings of the relationship between
graffiti and its surroundings. Not only do they indicate that the
theory itself lacks accuracy, they implicitly indicate that
cognate practices of Broken Windows policing are ineffective:
both when it comes to controlling writing and reducing crime

78. generally by controlling writing. In light of this, this thesis
shares the sentiments of Hayward in regarding Broken Windows
theory largely as a ‘flawed semiotic interpretation of urban
space’ (Hayward, 2012a: 441), and those of Sampson of
Raudenbush who, after observing similar faults in this policing
approach, refer to Broken Windows policing as an ‘analytically
weak strategy to reduce crime’ (cited in Harcourt and Ludwig,
2006: 284).
Chapter VI
Conclusions
As was noted at the beginning of this thesis, Broken
Windows logic has been used frequently and fervently by local
authorities in the city of Canterbury: both to describe the effect
of writing on its immediate environment within the city (see
Canterbury City Council, 2012); and to underpin a policing
approach that would see the aggressive law enforcement against
writers (Canterbury City Council, 2012a). Acknowledging that
the value of this logic was not self-evident, and that evidence
pointing to its accuracy remained relatively unconvincing, this
research sought to test the theory’s claims in relation to graffiti
writing. It also sought to examine the effectiveness of methods
of policing born from the logic originally employed in Wilson
and Kelling’s (1982) seminal ‘Broken Windows’ article (and
pursed by the like of Kelling and Coles, 1997). Thus, it
progressed around the asking of two related questions:
· To what extent does Broken Windows theory provide an
accurate understanding of graffiti writing’s effect on its
immediate environment in Canterbury?
· To what extent is a focus on graffiti as part of Broken
Windows policing in Canterbury likely to be effective in
reducing crime as a whole?
Using a mixed-methods approach, which combined respective

79. levels of quantitative and qualitative analysis, this project has
found that the arguments in Broken Windows theory possess
little relevance to Canterbury’s graffiti writing. It also found no
empirical basis on which it could be suggested that a
programme of Broken Windows policing against graffiti has
been, or is likely to be, responsible for heralding any noticeable
reduction in crime. This research firstly involved statistical
analysis of recorded crime data that sought to unearth
correlations between crime and graffiti across 10 areas of the
city. This analysis found no meaningful relationship existing
between these two variables and, therefore, tentatively cast
doubt on Wilson and Kelling’s arguments from a broad
perspective. It seemed to also condemn its associated policing
practices by suggesting that areas in which graffiti was most
prevalent did not suffer higher rates of crime than the rest of the
city. The qualitative analysis, based on visual analysis of street
level locations and photographs, that followed took this one
step further and pointed towards examples of specific failings in
the Broken Windows thesis and Broken Windows policing
model. These included, in relation the theoretical arguments, a
noted failure to adapt its interpretation of graffiti in to account
for cases in which graffiti writing represents a symbol of
acceptable youth edginess within the mainstream consciousness
and, in relation to its cognate policing practices, the unintended
consequence of displacement of writing. Collectively these
findings serve to severely undermine this theoretical perspective
and policing approach, whilst simultaneously emphasising the
viability of cultural criminology as an alternative theoretical
lens through which we may understand graffiti’s impacts on
urban space.
As another concluding remark, we may broaden our
discussions to note how cultural criminological is also useful in
deconstructing local crime concerns about graffiti, which often
use Broken Windows logic to characterise graffiti as a social
threat, and the interests that tend to drive them to prominence.
In particular, we may reflect on how political and economic

80. interests appear to have, despite the insignificance of graffiti’s
impact on criminality in the city in comparison to that of the
city’s night-time drinking industry, established Broken
Windows rationale used against writing as a common feature in
authorities’ discussions of local crime. Indeed, the recognition
of many central and local governments’ ‘morally dubious
relationship with the UK drinks industry’, amidst ‘desperate
attempts to keep the drinks industry satisfied and the revenues
flowing in’ (both quotes Ferrell et al, 2008: 106), among such
scholars appears highly relevant the state of crime and industry
within the city. Any suspicions of local authorities willingly
ignoring the problems caused by caused by the city’s vibrant
night-time economy only appear to be confirmed amidst
accusations of ‘deliberate attempts to bury’ (Cllr Nick Eden-
Green quoted in Stafford, 12/7/2012: 2) this very issue being
levelled against those running the city council. This has
apparently included moves prevent evidence of the damage done
to the city by night-time drinking being presented at local
council meetings; leaving senior councillor Nick Eden-Green to
claim that ‘this is the gagging and censorship of a problem that,
clearly, Canterbury City Council are desperate to brush under
the carpet’ (quoted in Stafford, 12/7/2012: 2). Where previous
examples in various cities (see Austin, 2001, Snyder, 2009,
Ferrell, 1996) show such local crime discussions being ‘shaped
not just by the politics of city government, but by the
economics of ownership and enterprise’ (Ferrell, 1996: 110),
rather than the nature of the problem itself, there is clearly a
precedent in this literature with which we can identify these
attempts to simultaneously flag writing as a threat to local
tranquillity and play down the damaging effect of the city’s
(economically profitable!) night-time economy. It is for this
reason that a cultural criminology that considers ‘the ‘constant
interplay of moral entrepreneurship, political innovation and
transgression’ (culturalcriminology.org, 2012) appears better
equipped to unravel how such campaigns, ‘based not sound
social research but on the values of the business and political

81. forces’ (Ferrell, 1996: 135), are sustained. In light of this, such
concerns should also be considered by those looking to
deconstruct the emergence of Broken Windows rhetoric in
future research.
How, then, can better we understand graffiti’s impact on its
environment? The results of this research indicate that the
answer lies in the development of a more reflexive approach
towards, and contextualised understanding of, crime and
disorder than would stem from Broken Windows logic. This has
been evident in the value found in cultural criminology’s
interpretive approach to understanding of crime that emerged
through the discussions developed in Chapter V; where its
proved useful in explaining both how writing may often carry
meanings other than that of disorder, and the processes of crime
displacement that leave Broken Windows policing against
writing as an exercise in futility. Cultural criminology’s
appreciation of both immediate spatial and wider cultural
context in this regard, as well as that emphasised through Ralph
Taylor (1999) and Peter St. Jean’s (2007) previous work on
Broken Windows theory, demonstrates the importance of
accommodating for the variety of meanings that writing can
carry. This research has demonstrated that graffiti’s impact on
its environment varies; often being largely dependent a variety
of factors, including differing audiences and the styles of the
writing itself. Thus, it is a theoretical approach such as a
contextually aware cultural criminology, one that moves beyond
Broken Windows’ blunt one-size fits all approach, that appears
to be best equipped to explain the full extent of the relationship
between graffiti, space and, beyond that, culture.
Outside of Broken Windows policing, what other strategies
appear to offer a more effective method of reducing crime
within the city? The intricacies lying within urban space and
graffiti writing that suggest that such an appreciation of setting
should be a central feature of approaches used to reduce crime
in parts of Canterbury. Proponents of such a programme have
previously claimed that Broken Windows policing represents ‘a

82. method to reduce crime and disorder that would work in any
city’ (William Bratton cited in Becket and Godoy, 2010: 291),
and is capable of tackling a variety of crimes: including looting
in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans (Woolner, 2003); arson
(Thomas et al, 2011) and, of course; graffiti (Sloan-Hewitt and
Kelling, 1990). The evidence found here, however, suggests
that, in Canterbury, a programme of Broken Windows policing
unsuccessfully attempts to reduce crime by controlling graffiti,
amongst other signs of so-called ‘disorder’. This is because it
appears that graffiti actually has little effect in causing crime in
the city. The implications of this for policing in the city are
neither to accept, as a rule of thumb, that graffiti has no role at
all in encouraging other forms of criminality in urban spaces,
nor that it universally does. A more fruitful line of
understanding and, subsequently, policing may be for local
policing practitioners to pay closer attention to their own cities:
the intricacies in the flow of criminal behaviour around their
streets and; the policing approaches that can be tailored to these
conditions. That is, by acknowledging that ‘incivilities and
related problems are highly context-specific and should be
addressed accordingly’ (Gau and Pratt, 2010: 758), authorities
should be committed to identifying specifically where graffiti is
a problem, where it is relatively harmless, and where other
factors evidently play a larger role in breeding criminality. This
should not mean, however, that we reduce to our understanding
of crime purely to the identification of ‘hotspots’ of crime on
crime maps: the weaknesses of such a quantitative approach
were outlined in Chapter III (also see Hayward, 2004: 99-100).
Thus, it is recommended here that police pursue a
methodological approach similar that taken in this project:
using a mixture of statistical information, local knowledge and
first-hand observation to develop a rounded appreciation of
where crime flourishes, why, and what can be done to reduce it.
I would also argue that a continued endeavour to understand
crime within its contexts, undertaken here and previously
emphasised by the likes of Ferrell et al (2008), Gau and Pratt

83. (2010), Peter St. Jean (2007) and Ralph Taylor (1999, 2001)
among others, should lay at the heart of future scholarly
research concerned either with testing the Broken Windows
thesis and policing, or understanding the impact of particular
variances of ‘disorder’ on urban space. This thesis has offered a
critique of Broken Windows theory that remains limited in its
scope, being limited to graffiti and the city of Canterbury.
However, it is through a variety of such studies that perhaps
heralds the greatest potential for developing a useful body of
knowledge in this regard: where future studies should be tasked
with similarly adding to a mosaic of strategic understanding
which can provide precise and demonstrably accurate insights in
to the causes of particular crimes, and the contexts in which
they flourish, rather than remain inhibited by a stifling and
erroneous Broken Windows logic.
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