On Monday, November 26 2012, Deputy Commissioner for New York City Police Department, Paul Browne, clocked out of work on a day that left many officials confused: not a single violent crime was reported in the city.

No shootings. No stabbings. Nothing.

Of course, this was a far cry from the 1990s: in 1994, for example, 4,967 people were shot – almost 14 a day.

What changed? How did New York City become one of the safest cities in America and more importantly, what can we learn from it?

If we can change bad behaviours on a societal level, how might we change them on an individual level as well?

To answer those questions, we need to go back two decades . . .
 
In the 1990s, crime declined in the United States. There were a number of reasons for this. The crack epidemic tipped down, the economy tipped up and people sought employment instead of crime, and the population aged: older people tend to abide by the law.

In New York City, however, another story unfolded. The economy was in dire straits and welfare cuts meant citizens from impoverished neighbourhoods struggled to earn a living.

The above average number of immigrants arriving in the city meant the population wasn’t aging – it was getting younger.

And although the crack cocaine epidemic tipped down like it had done in neighbouring cities, it had been gradually declining before the crime dip.

What was going on?

Introducing Broken Windows Theory

In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling theorised crime is a result of urban disorder – and Broken Window theory was born.

In his bestselling book: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell explains: “If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from building to the street on which is faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

In a city like New York, broken windows became invitations for further law breaking like, burglary, rape and murder.

If law enforcement was going to clean up its city, it had to start from the bottom.

Bad habits are like a crime epidemics: they’re contagious.

If your friends drink irresponsibly, it’s likely you do as well.  

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”, wrote Jim Rohn.

But, even if your peers don’t influence you, bad behaviours like drinking irresponsibly, eating unhealthily and thinking negatively, can begin when we permit ourselves to do imperceptibly bad behaviours – once.

These are our Broken Windows and when left unrepaired in our environment, they can become invitations to misbehave again in the future and perhaps more severely.

As we learned when we looked at Choice Architecture, if our environment is designed in a way where positive habits are accessible and negative habits are inaccessible, we’re more likely to commit to the behaviours we really want.

Gladwell writes:
“The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behaviour is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment.

The Broken Windows in New York weren’t all literally broken windows – although, vandalism did play a part of the problem – it was more of a metaphor.

The real broken windows – those moments of critical mass that caused the epidemic in the first place – were not a result of felonies like kidnapping, arson or robbery as one would expect: they were a result of misdemeanours like graffiti and farebeating.

These were crimes police officers had previously overlooked as insignificant but the question was: If graffiti and farebeating became the focus of the clean up, would the crime rate tip down?

The Clean Up

In the 1980s, George Kelling was hired by the New York Transit Authority as a consultant and immediately put the Broken Windows theory into practice.

A new subway director was employed to mange a multi-billion dollar rebuilding of the New York City subway system as well. That man was David Gunn and he had one focus: clean up the subway graffiti.

His decision was met with disapproval from his colleagues, but Gunn insisted:
“The graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system. When you looked at the process of rebuilding the organisation and morale, you had to win the battle against graffiti. Without winning that battle, all the management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen.