Zero tolerance policing is the style of policing generally associated with the full and complete enforcement of all criminal violations, from minor infractions (such as disorderly conduct or public loitering) to major crimes (such as robbery and burglary). Many commentators trace zero tolerance policing to the style of policing implemented by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his first police commissioner, William Bratton, in 1994. Their strategy was based on the broken-windows theory first articulated by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an Atlantic Monthly article in 1982—namely, the idea that minor physical and social disorder, if left unattended, would cause more serious crime in a neighborhood.
Elected in 1993 on a platform that focused largely on crime, disorder, and quality-of-life issues—especially on the notorious “squeegee men”—Giuliani appointed William Bratton police commissioner in December 1993, and, together, they soon began implementing a policing strategy called “the quality-of-life initiative,” which was expressly premised on thebroken-windows theory. Both Giuliani and Bratton cited the ”Broken Windows” essay as the main source of their initiative. As soon as Bratton took over as police commissioner in early 1994, he began implementing a policy aimed at creating public order by aggressively enforcing laws against quality-of-life offenses, such as public drunkenness, loitering, vandalism, littering, public urination, panhandling, turnstile jumping, prostitution, and other minor misdemeanor offenses.
In Police Strategy No. 5: Reclaiming the Public Spaces of New York, Giuliani and Bratton explained the premises of the quality-of life initiative:
More than ten years ago, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, authors of the ground breaking article, ”The Police and Neighborhood Safety” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, postulated the ”broken windows” thesis that unad-dressed disorder is a sign that no one cares and invites both further disorder and more serious crime. By examining the Wilson-Kelling hypothesis in more than 40 cities, Wesley Skogan has found that disorder is indeed the first step in what he terms”the downward spiral of urban decay.”
The quality-of-life initiative immediately resulted in a surge of misdemeanor arrests in New York City that extended well into the 1990s. According to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, in 1993, the year before Giuliani and Bratton began implementing broken-windows policing, total adult misdemeanor arrests stood at 129,404. By the year 2000, the number was up to 224,663— an increase of almost 75%. What is particularly interesting is that the vast majority of those arrests were for misdemeanor drug charges, which increased almost 275%, from 27,447 in 1993 to 102,712 in 2000. At the same time, the NYPD implemented an aggressive stop-and-frisk policy. Between 1997 and 1998, for instance, the Street Crime Unit—with approximately 435 officers at the time—stopped and frisked about 45,000 people.
The quality-of-life initiative was one of a number of policing strategies that Bratton implemented during his two years as police commissioner. Other strategies targeted gun possession, school violence, drug dealing, domestic violence, auto theft, and police corruption. In addition, Bratton also increased the power of precinct commanders and instituted biweekly meetings, known as Crime Control Strategy Meetings or COMPSTAT (for computer-statistics meetings), where the top administrators would grill precinct commanders on crime in their beat (Kelling and Coles 1996, 146). But, in the words of Bratton himself, the quality-of-life initiative was the “linchpin strategy” (Bratton 1998,228).
The quality-of life initiative was soon called by many zero tolerance policing because of the surge in arrests for minor offenses, and the approach to policing that focuses on enforcing minor violations has been come to be known as zero tolerance. This is particularly true in Europe, especially in the United Kingdom and France, as well as in Australia and
New Zealand, where the broken-windows approach is generally referred to as zero tolerance policing. In France, for instance, most criminologists and politicians refer to zero tolerance as the approach initiated in New York City and a number of topics have been authored under that very title. Because of its close association to New York City and the broken-windows theory, this style of policing is more accurately called broken-windows policing.
The use of the rubric zero tolerance policing to describe broken-windows policing is, however, a matter of some contention. George Kelling, the coauthor of the original ”Broken Windows” essay, adamantly opposes the rubric zero tolerance, arguing that the essence of the broken-windows theory is the discretion afforded police officers to decide when to enforce minor infraction laws and when not to. As a result, significant battle lines have been drawn around these terms. Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic, for instance, has suggested that the New York City’s policing strategy fundamentally changed—in his words, “morphed”—from a broken-windows approach to a policy of zero tolerance once the Giuliani administration realized that aggressive misdemeanor arrests resulted in the arrests of serious criminals.
The truth is, however, that Bratton’s approach was, from its inception, a zero tolerance approach. Bratton himself describes his first experiment in the New York subways as a “fare evasion mini-sweep.” ”I put a sergeant and five, eight, sometimes ten cops in plain clothes at these problematic stations day and night, and they arrested the people who were streaming in for nothing. The cops nabbed ten or twenty jumpers at a time. They pulled these men and women in one by one, cuffed them, lined them up on the platform, and waited for the next wave” (Bratton 1998, 153). This is not an exercise of police discretion. It is zero tolerance. Similarly, Bratton’s strategy with ”squeegee people”—the first wave of thequality-of-life strategy—was not about discretion. It was about sweeps—about constantly checking and rechecking the squeegee corners and arresting all violators (Bratton 1998, 213-14). Bratton and Giuliani understood, from the beginning, the close relationship between order-maintenance, sweeps, and catching criminals (Bratton 1998, 154).
Another semantic dispute has surrounded whether zero tolerance policing can be considered a form of community policing. Community policing, at its most general level, stands for the idea that police officers can prevent crimes by integrating themselves into the community and solving community problems, rather than by merely responding to emergency calls. Community policing is prevention oriented, in contrast to the earlier reform model—the model of professional crime fighting—which centered around the 911 strategy. It seeks to share with the public the tasks of problem identification, problem solving, and crime control—and it is a means of developing greater communication between the police and the community. In essence, community policing ”consists of two complementary core components, community partnership and problem solving” (Community Policing Consortium 2000, 118). It rests on the idea that ”effective crime-fighting is based upon a partnership between police and the residents of the immediate community they serve” (Spitzer 1999, 47).
The difficulty is that community policing comes in a wide variety, and, as George Kelling concedes, ”has come to mean all things to all people” (Kelling and Coles 1996, 158). Some understand community policing to be a type of order maintenance, where police officers maintain neighborhood order by aggressively arresting low-level offenders. Kelling himself, for instance, has characterized New York City’s quality-of-life initiative as community policing (Kelling and Coles 1996, 109, 145, 161-63). Others understand community policing as a style of community integration where the beat cop specifically withholds enforcement as a way to build community contacts. For instance, in Chicago, some police officers on the beat reportedly tolerate disorder in order to ingratiate themselves with the community (Skogan 1997; Eig 1996).
The variations on the theme of community policing are numerous. This may explain why community policing has swept police departments in the United States and abroad during the past twenty years. In a recent National Institute of Justice survey of police departments, more than 80% of police chiefs polled stated that they were either implementing or intended to implement some aspect of community policing. The truth, however, is that the popularity and success of community policing is attributable, in large part, to the vagueness of the definition, to the recent seven-year national decline in crime, and to the fact that the term community policing is far better for public relations than terms such as aggressive misdemeanor arrests, stop and frisk, or mass building searches. It is important, then, to distinguish carefully between the specific types of community policing that are being discussed. Zero tolerance policing may, to some, qualify as a form of community policing, but is certainly different from other expressions of that policing approach.
