Redirected from Broken Windows
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less).
Mayor Giuliani adopted this strategy in New York City. He had the police strictly enforce the law against subway fare evasion and stopped (some say persecuted) the "squeegee men[?]" who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. Rates of more serious crimes fell significantly.
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See also: broken window fallacy
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump