Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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In 1982, The Atlantic published what might be the most influential and widely-cited article in its history, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. The article is known for arguing, essentially, that crime is a slippery slope: if you allow vandals to break a window in an abandoned building without being punished, soon they’ll be breaking all the windows. Then other, more serious criminals will get the signal that nobody cares about crime, and the whole community will go to hell in a handbasket. The “broken windows theory” led cities to adopt more aggressive policing that targeted seemingly trivial offenses like loitering and public urination.
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the original Atlantic article did not just argue that minor lawbreaking could lead to major lawbreaking. It actually argued that police should crack down on behavior that was not even against the law, but which challenged social “order.” This was because “disorder” (not just crime) threatened to set the slippery slope process in motion.
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Thus the task of police was to deal with all of those who could undermine social “order,” as Wilson and Kelling said explicitly: “not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.”
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police should be prepared to use methods that are themselves illegal. They praise a foot patrol officer for “taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order,” conceding that “some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge.” (In other words, police should commit crimes to prevent things that are not crimes, in the name of stopping crime.)
✏️ This is potentially where we get the maverick cop routine. Break the law in order to stop crimes. Do whatever is necessary. 🔗 View Highlight
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Did Wilson and Kelling cite any persuasive evidence that this would do any good, beyond keeping the unsightly poor from annoying respectable citizens? Well, no, but who needs evidence when you have a story?
✏️ This seems to be the name of the game when it comes to most Atlantic articles, and what is performatively effective, regardless of substantially effective. Who needs data when you have a good story? It works just as well for people over and over again, as we’ve seen in my burgeoning propaganda pile. 👓 propaganda 🔗 View Highlight
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Wilson and Kelling here are just offering a rearticulation of the old “veneer theory,” which suggests that civilization is “thin veneer” and humanity will easily lapse back into barbarity and violence if order is not strictly maintained. That theory is false, but because it resonates with many people’s preconceived ideas about human nature, it is put forward without evidence.
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In the 1969 experiment, Zimbardo abandoned a car with its hood open in the Bronx, then watched as people picked parts of the car off and stole them. Then, Zimbardo conducted the same experiment on a street in wealthy Palo Alto, California. Nobody touched the car. (With one exception: “when it began to rain, one passerby lowered the hood so that the motor would not get wet!”) Then Zimbardo conducted the same experiment on the Stanford University campus. Since passersby were not vandalizing the car, Zimbardo and his students began beating up the car themselves
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The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and utterly destroyed. Again, the “vandals” appeared to be primarily respectable whites.
✏️ How they cited the zimbardo thing.. by changing it up just enough to support their broken windows theory. Completely neglecting the fact that the professor himself primed the situation by wailing on the car himself. 🔗 View Highlight
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Wilson and Kelling manipulated Zimbardo’s experiment to draw a straight line between one broken window and ‘a thousand broken windows,’” and “conveniently neglected to mention […] that the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car.” In other words, one of the most influential policing theories of all time is built on essentially falsified evidence.
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Unsurprisingly, people’s concepts of “disorder” turn out to be racist, and the degree to which an area is inhabited by poor Black people contributes more to its perceived “disorderliness” than whether it is actually disordered in a meaningful sense.
✏️ What broken windows theory is really about… racism. 🔗 View Highlight
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Just recently, New York Times op-ed columnist Pamela Paul, writing about the “embarrassment” of the state of the NYC subway, cited “broken windows” theory as legitimate, stating it as a simple matter of fact. She did this to justify her proposed solution to the problem of fare evasion, a solution she admits will be unpopular: a massive police crackdown. She also thinks that this is the “common sense” solution. But it gets worse: she says that “broken windows” has been “attacked” and that “progressives are still loath to admit that broken windows policing works.” Here we have in 2024 an opinion columnist in one of the country’s top papers of record arguing for the continuation an ugly racist practice that was never based on any solid research.
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The Houthi spokesman was right on time for our meeting. I was a little surprised by his appearance; I had half expected to see a swaggering tribesman of the kind I used to meet in Yemen—mouth bulging with khat leaves, a shawl over his shoulders and a curved dagger in his belt. Instead, Abdelmalek al-Ejri was a neat-looking fellow in a blue-tartan blazer and a button-down shirt. He kept a physical distance as he greeted me, his manner polite but guarded, as if to register that we stood on opposite sides of a chasm. I must repeat: where are the editors? Did they not query the writer: “Is there any reason other than stereotypes about Arabs that it would be surprising for a Houthi to be ‘neat-looking’ rather than a ‘swaggering tribesman’?”
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Jon Schwarz points out in Citations Needed that racist stereotypes about Arabs are nothing new in the publication, which in a 1949 report from Israel described the Palestinian Arabs of Jaffa as “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin and corruption, slinking about the streets, flatfooted, with loose, dribbling lower lip.”