When Zero is Number One
by John Kleinig
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Part 1

Is 'zero tolerance' policing the answer for Australian crime? What do New Yorkers think of Mayor Giuliani's crack-down on crime?

John Kleinig
John Kleinig is the Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics and Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Law & Police Science at John Jay College, City University of New York. He is also a founding member of the Zadok Institute.

IN THE AFTERMATH of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima's 1998 brutalisation by four New York police, one of the officers was reported to have said to the doomed man, "This is Giuliani time". It was a reference to New York Mayor Giuliani's aggressively pro- 'quality-of-life' stance.
The report was apocryphal, but a great many New Yorkers were prepared to believe that the remark was fact when it was first reported. It fitted. Although Giuliani won a landslide second-term victory on an anti-crime platform, many have been concerned about the methods that victory has spawned. And the debate about policing methods is now raging across the Western world.
The reality that New York's overall crime rate has dropped-and this fact's connection with zero tolerance-has been widely reported. But at what cost has this occurred?

We inhabit an imperfect world of strife and disparity. Whether we account for this by reference to the 'sinfulness' of the human condition or some less theological construct, the reality is that, if we are to live a tolerable social existence, we must institute some method of social policing function. There are many styles, many models: watchman, legalistic and service styles; or crime fighter, emergency operator, social enforcer and social peace-keeper models, among them.
The contemporary impetus for the 'zero tolerance' buzz-word is to be found in the reading of a controversial article titled, "The Police and Neighbourhood Safety: Broken Windows", by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (Atlantic Monthly, March 1982). This pivotal article was followed up in 1996 by "Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities", a monograph jointly authored by Kelling and Catherine Coles (The Free Press, 1996). However, recently Kelling has distanced himself from what he sees as the non-discretionary character of zero tolerance policing (see S. Howe, "Kelling's Law", Policing Today, December, 1997).

The theory enunciated by these authors can be crudely (but fairly accurately) summarised as follows: If vandalism and other social incivilities are tolerated within a community, worse things will follow. But a community that cares about its quality of life, one that shows concern about the so-called little things of social life (such as broken windows), will find larger problems are eradicated. Solutions to those larger problems will follow, so the logic goes, because many of those responsible for the smaller blights on the community parchment are also responsible for some of its larger stains.