Graffiti as Devil on the Shoulder
November 26th, 2008
Keeping quality-of-life crimes in check is viewed by many as a means of sandbagging against the possibility of a crime wave resulting from the economic downturn.
Julia Vitullo-Martin told AMNY last week that the city needs to keep cracking down on such offenses. “Our sidewalks are mess, streets are a mess, there’s dirt all over the place, quality-of-life offenses are clearly going up, there’s graffiti all over the place, there’s awful acid vandalism that one sees increasingly in the subway,” she cautioned.
But the theory that petty crime leads to more serious crime, referred to as the “Broken Windows” theory, had never been scientifically tested - until now.
A study published in the online journal Science found that people will indeed commit crimes if they see that others have gotten away with something.
In a series of experiments that played out over two years, Kees Keizer, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, created environments in public places to test the theory.
In one experiment, Kees and his colleagues painted graffiti in an alleyway used to park bicycles. He then attached fliers for a nonexistent sporting event to the bikes and observed how many people littered the fliers. He also observed how many people littered the fliers when the alleyway was clean.
The result? Nearly 70 percent of those observed littered when the walls had graffiti (which was painted sloppy so that it wouldn’t be mistaken as art). But when the walls were clean, only a third littered.
Pictures of the experiment are posted on the Not Rocket Science blog.
But zero-tolerance polices used to keep such quality-of-life crimes in check can be counterproductive, Keizer warns, because people view it as a declaration of war.
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In category: Arts, Community Development, Crime
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