Order maintenance reconsidered: moving beyond strong causal reasoning.

• Author: Thacher, David

A backlash has set in against order maintenance policing strategies, if not among policymakers and the public, then at least among criminologists. This backlash has several components, but the most prominent rests on empirical studies that have claimed to cast doubt on James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's broken windows theory--the theory that disorder, left unchecked, leads to crime by driving residents indoors and sending a message to would-be offenders that a neighborhood is out of control. (1) In this paper I argue that this backlash focuses too narrowly on the broken windows theory in its assessments of order maintenance policing, and I develop and apply alternative methods of analysis that focus more directly on the intrinsic merits of efforts to reduce disorder by using ethnographic research and normative analysis. In the process, I analyze the few grounded descriptions of order maintenance practice that have been presented in the literature to argue that at least some kinds of order maintenance policing are intrinsically valuable--regardless of the impact they have on serious crime--because they address important instances of accumulative harms and offenses. (2) Policing inappropriately ignores these problems when it only focuses on serious crime.

In making this argument, I draw on and extend recent ideas in policy analysis about the way scholarship can best inform public policy. In current debates, both opponents and proponents of order maintenance often presume that its benefits are best judged by its contribution to crime reduction--by its indirect effects on serious crime, rather than its direct effects on public order. (3) By tying the evaluation of order maintenance policing so closely to its indirect effects on crime, this literature offers an example of what Martin Rein and Christopher Winship have described as "the dangers of strong causal reasoning"--the dangers of policy analyses that rely on claims that an intervention will have large indirect effects on some important social problem (e.g., that incentives for marriage will improve the prospects for low-income children). (4) Rein and Winship argue that claims of this kind ask social science to do too much because it can rarely identify the tight causal relationships of the kind that would be necessary; in the meantime, the focus on indirect effects tends to crowd out questions about the intrinsic wisdom of policy interventions. Order maintenance policing is a case in point. Since the early empirical studies that called attention to the order maintenance function (5) and the scholarly debates that considered its intrinsic propriety, (6) criminologists have paid little attention to questions about whether order maintenance activities and the public order they hope to create are desirable in their own right, apart from their indirect contribution to crime prevention. These questions call for qualitative study and normative analysis of a kind that recent police literature has de-emphasized--in particular, for ethnographic study of order maintenance practice that illuminates what exactly this policing strategy involves, and for normative analysis that indicates how it implicates the ideals of liberal political theory. The literature about order maintenance policing is hardly the only area to neglect these forms of research: similar gaps appear elsewhere in criminology, and indeed in modern social science more generally. (7) In that respect, this paper's argument applies more widely than the order maintenance topic itself, which simply offers a timely example of how and why criminal justice scholarship should move beyond strong causal reasoning.

I make these arguments more fully in Part I, and in Part II, I suggest how scholarship about order maintenance policing could contribute more broadly to policy debate by drawing on recent ideas about ethical inquiry; in the process, I offer a tentative argument, based on what little relevant research exists, that some kinds of order maintenance policing are appropriate. Part III concludes.

1. STRONG CAUSAL REASONING AND ITS DANGERS

   Strong causal reasoning tries to identify policy interventions that, through a complex causal process, have major indirect effects on some unequivocally important social outcome. Rein and Winship's paradigmatic example is school desegregation. When desegregation reached the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, (8) social scientists came forward with arguments and evidence claiming that segregated schools had a deleterious effect on the personal development and educational achievement of black children, maintaining that these children would learn and develop better in integrated schools. The Court relied on these social scientific arguments in its opinion in Brown, but forty years later, the social science theories on which these arguments relied have come into question, as most research has been unable to identify large effects of integrated schools on student achievement. (9)

   The conclusion that integration only produces small indirect benefits for black children's learning is, of course, relevant to the debate about school desegregation. But as in other policy debates where strong causal reasoning has played a major role, proponents of desegregation often claimed more than relevance for their arguments. They relied so extensively on social science theories about the indirect effects of integration that those effects often appeared to be the major justification for desegregation. Indeed, the objectivity of social science makes it very attractive in policy arguments because it holds out the hope of resolving intractable controversies through neutral methods of rational inquiry. But if we use causal analyses to bypass those controversies and the causal analyses come undone, we end up in a difficult position. The social scientific justification for the intervention has become illusory, and other issues that deserve attention have been forgotten or de-legitimized. A return to those issues appears quaint or hypocritical, the last gasp of a determined partisan who refuses to listen to evidence. Rein and Winship argue that "this is precisely the situation we are in today with respect to school desegregation." (10)

   [B]ecause of the perceived objectivity of the causal reasoning, the strong predictions made by social scientists, and the consequences of this for policy design, other arguments for integration were crowded out. Most importantly, after we change the rationale and terms of the justifications for the intervention we propose, it is difficult, if not impossible, to successfully advocate for a position which justifies integration as an important societal value in and of itself and not merely a means to promote the education of children. (11) BROKEN WINDOWS AS STRONG CAUSAL REASONING

   The debate about order maintenance policing has followed a similar course. Current interest in order maintenance tactics is generally credited to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's 1982 article titled Broken Windows." The Police and Neighborhood Safety. (12) That article tried to support order maintenance strategies partly with what Rein and Winship would describe as a strong causal theory. Building on the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, (13) Wilson and Kelling's theory held that disorder, left unchecked, sends a message that a neighborhood is out of control and emboldens would-be criminals to commit serious crime; at the same time, it drives law-abiding residents indoors, reducing the informal surveillance and social control that can help to prevent serious crime in neighborhoods. In short, the theory justifies order maintenance activities by referring to their indirect effects on serious crime.

   The broken windows theory received early support from several studies designed to test it (14) and from re-interpretations of past studies. (15) Moreover, many academics, policymakers, and analysts argued that order maintenance policing was responsible for a major share of New York City's remarkable decline in serious crime. (16) Partly on the basis of these claims, hundreds of police departments around the country placed more emphasis on order maintenance strategies.

   Over the past few years, however, social science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it, arguing in particular that Wesley Skogan's seminal study of the relationship between disorder and crime did not demonstrate the strong relationship that broken window proponents have claimed. (17) Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. (18) The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces. (19) Still other social scientists have questioned the effect that New York City's police strategies had on that city's crime trends, arguing that factors like the decline of crack cocaine played larger roles than order maintenance, and that other cities that have not implemented order maintenance tactics have achieved comparable reductions in crime. (20)

   These challenges to the broken windows theory have not yet discredited order maintenance policing with policymakers or the public. But among criminologists, order maintenance is clearly under siege. Thus Sampson and Raudenbush argue that "current fascination in policy circles ... on cleaning up disorder through law enforcement techniques appears simplistic and largely misplaced, at least in terms of directly fighting crime.... Attacking public disorder through tough police tactics may thus be a politically popular but perhaps analytically weak strategy to reduce crime...." (21) Their conclusions have been echoed (and often quoted) by other academic commentators on order maintenance...