The power of context is an environmental argument, which states that behaviour is a function of social context. Downtown business owners in our major centres need only look out their front doors to understand the concept’s validity.
Increasingly, graffiti artists or “taggers” are defacing buildings, the homeless are panhandling, bin-divers are scavenging garbage from business dumpsters, and drivers are dodging ‘squeegee kids’ at busy intersections. These activities negatively affect the business environment we invite our customers to enter.
The evenings are worse: Prostitution, auto theft and drug-selling abound.This is not rhetoric but evidence substantiated by online statistical information provided by the Vancouver and Calgary police departments. In Vancouver, 2003 saw robberies increase by 16.7 per cent; break-ins by 5.9 per cent; auto thefts by 8.7 per cent; and property crimes by 81 per cent over those reported in 2002. Calgary’s residential break-ins were up 13 per cent in 2003 over 2002; shoplifting was up 23 per cent; and other minor property offences increased by 41 per cent.
Our living environment will not improve if we continue the old practices. Headlines report that homelessness in Greater Vancouver has reached proportions never seen before. The B.C. government’s cost-cutting measures have exacerbated the situation by closing facilities and adding those with mental illness and drug dependencies to the rosters of the homeless.
The B.C. Liberal government continues to throw oil on the fire with announcements of program changes, such as restricting income assistance to an accumulated 24 months out of every 60 months. Regrettably, these indirect social costs will be borne by business owners. Increased permissiveness, combined with this old mental model, have resulted in Vancouver’s downtown East Side being turned into an outdoor asylum, driving out good businesses and abandoning these streets to petty offenders.
So what to do?
Once again, politicians must apply a new mental model. I would suggest that they examine the model New York City implemented during the late 1980s and through the ’90s. In a very similar situation, the city was dealing with both increasing welfare cuts and immigration. The solution was to adopt what has been referred to as the Broken Window Theory, the brainchild of criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling.
They argued that crimes of this nature are the inevitable result of disorder.
Basically, if a window is broken and not repaired; if graffiti mars our public transportation systems and not removed; if panhandlers obstruct pedestrians and make the city core unfriendly for tourists; if dumpsters are rummaged through routinely; then people observing this environment will conclude that no one cares and that no one is in charge.
Soon, more windows will be broken; more graffiti will appear; etc. It will send a signal that, in these areas, anarchy is permitted and anything goes.
These small offences invite more serious crime because these streets become attractive havens for opportunistic and professional criminals who recognize that the chances of being caught are significantly reduced. This willingness to overlook minor breaches of the Criminal Code and municipal regulations is contagious. It can spread throughout the community.
In the mid-’80s, the New York Transit Authority adopted the Broken Window Theory. Senior management had
previously focused on the larger issues of crime and
subway reliability, which seemed reasonable at a time when the entire system was close to collapse.
Indeed, many commented that it seemed pointless to scrub the decks of the Titanic as it headed toward the iceberg. But the new mental model prevailed. It was recognized that graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system.
Making it a battle cry, they implemented a strategy to clean the system, line-by-line, train-by-train. At the end of every run, each car would be cleaned before returning to service.
The employees’ devotion to the strategy became almost fanatical: Dirty cars were never mixed with clean cars. This sent an unmistakable message to the vandals.
In Harlem, on 130th Street where trains are parked overnight, taggers would leave their mark. It was a three-evening undertaking: On the first night, they painted the side of a train white; on the second night, they drew the graffiti outlines; and on the third night, they colourized their “masterpiece.”
When the taggers finally finished, the transit workers would immediately walk over with paint rollers and cover the youngsters’ three-day effort. They reported that many of the kids were in tears. It sent a message to vandals that painting trains was a waste of time and their artwork would never see the light of day. It took perseverance, but at the end of six years, the system was cleaned.
The transit authority also focused on fare-beating, another small expression of disorder that invited more serious crimes.
It was not an easy fight.
The $1.25 fare was small and many suggested that it was the wrong strategy to pursue such a small amount. However, the transit authority stuck to the new mental model and hired 10 plainclothes policemen, positioning them at unannounced turnstiles. Fare-beaters were arrested, handcuffed and left standing in a ‘daisy chain’ on the platform. The change publicly signalled a serious crackdown. The police made it a business.
A city bus was retrofitted into a fully equipped, rolling police station. This reduced the turnaround time to less than an hour. Soon, the “bad guys” got the message, left their weapons at home and paid the fares.
Shortly after becoming New York’s mayor in 1994, Rudolph Giuliani hired the Broken Window Theory champions from the transit authority and put them in charge of the New York City Police Department.
Applying the same concepts, they instructed police to crack down on quality-of-life crimes such as the squeegee kids and panhandlers, graffiti taggers, the publicly drunk and publicly urinating, offenders throwing empty bottles on the streets, and those involved in relatively minor property damage.
These examples demonstrate that criminals are acutely sensitive to their environments and alert to its shifts. It is time to change the environments of our cities, so that we stop providing fertile ground for small crimes. If we succeed, the rewards are great – we can prevent the bigger crimes.
So who pays?
Our federal government had the opportunity to support innovative, new mental models such as this by simply diverting the $1-billion-plus spent on creating a gun-control registry. I suspect the statistics provided would be much different if cash-strapped police forces such as those of Calgary and Vancouver had access to funding of this magnitude.
Unfortunately, poor public policy decision-making results in business owners carrying these hidden costs – truly a tragedy.
(Terrance Power is a professor of strategic and international studies with the School of Business at Royal Roads University in Victoria. He can be reached at tpower@businessedge.ca)
