| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government. By Markus Dirk Dubber. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xviii, 268 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-231-13206-9.)

One puzzle in the contemporary politics of policing is the continuing popularity of the "broken-windows" theory. According to this theory, urban neighborhoods where windows are left unrepaired communicate an absence of informal social control and thereby invite criminals into their midst. This theory's popularity has transformed American policing, most famously in New York City, where a "zero tolerance" policy legitimates widespread arrests for such misdemeanor offenses as vagrancy, public drunkenness, and other signs of "disorder"; to arrest these low-level offenders today presumably means reducing more serious crime tomorrow. However, this theory is now disproven; various empirical tests demonstrate that the link between disorder and crime does not hold. Yet despite this scrutiny, the broken-windows logic remains part of the common sense of policing.

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