In addition to amounting to vandalism, graffiti can be a costly and unsightly blight upon the community. Now, as Vancouver authorities deal with what seems to be an uptick in unwanted markings upon public and private property, it brings to mind the “broken windows” theory.
A recent article in The Columbian detailed what appears to be an increase in incidents of graffiti throughout the city. This, admittedly, is difficult to quantify, with multiple agencies involved in cleaning up the mess left by vandals and with no firm statistics being compiled. Vancouver Public Works, for example, removes graffiti from city streets and rights of way, while Clark Public Utilities, the Washington Department of Transportation, and C-Tran also are responsible for various locations.
In the process, those agencies wander into a long-standing issue involving social science and criminology.
In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling put forth the “broken windows” theory, postulating that allowing small crimes such as broken windows or graffiti to go unchecked lessens a community’s sense of safety and leads to larger crimes. “At the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” they wrote for The Atlantic.
During the 1990s, under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, New York City adopted “broken windows policing” in which small crimes, especially visible ones such as littering, were aggressively prosecuted and cleaned up. Giuliani was quick to credit the philosophy with a decline in the city’s crime rate, but that conclusion has faced much criticism from criminologists. For one thing, crime throughout the country declined during the 1990s, including in places that did not adopt broken windows policing; for another, New York City employed numerous additional reforms that also had an impact upon the crime rate.
As Patricia J. Williams, a law professor at Columbia University, wrote for The Nation in 2014: “Good policy can’t be based on superstition. U.S. crime rates have declined, including in cities without such tactics. The resistance to facts about crime reduction is as blindly irrational as climate change denial.”
All of that is a roundabout way of talking about graffiti in Vancouver. The city’s Public Works Department reported 110 requests for graffiti cleanup during the final three months of 2017, compared with 68 requests for the same period the previous year. But officials with the city and other agencies are reluctant to draw conclusions, with Loretta Callahan of Vancouver Public Works saying, “Removal data are just that, not indicators of causation.”
There are many causes that can lead a perpetrator to create graffiti, and each of them reflects a level of selfishness that diminishes the attractiveness and the livability of the city. Vandalism can be nearly impossible to prevent, but quickly painting over graffiti sends a small message that residents and officials will not allow chaos and lawlessness to reign.
Wilson and Kelling might have jumped to conclusions regarding their theory of broken windows and whether attention to minor offenses can reduce major crime. But cleaning up graffiti and, when possible, holding perpetrators accountable can help make Vancouver the kind of city we like to live in.
