Agressions, banlieues, business, cité interdite, délinquance juvénile, émeutes, géographie criminelle, incendies de voitures, insécurité, quartiers difficiles et sensibles, racket, razzia, trafic de haschisch, d'ecstasy,..., vandalisme, violences urbaines, vols, zone
Dix conseils pour se protéger
1 En cas de menace, déposer plainte auprès de la gendarmerie ou la police nationale et, dans les 24 à 48 heures, confirmer cette plainte auprès du Conseil de l’Ordre, du Procureur de la République.
« Grâce à ce dispositif, trois personnes ont déjà été interpellées. C’est la seule façon d’accélérer la procédure ». Prendre un avocat permet également d’avoir accès au dossier, quand une enquête est ouverte.
2 En visite, se faire appeler chez le patient dans le quart d’heure, qui suit, quand le motif de la demande paraît douteux. C’est une règle à SOS Médecins de Lille.
3 Relever l’identité d’un patient, auquel le médecin a rédigé un certificat ou prescrit des produits toxiques, quand il ne connaît pas cette personne.
4 Ne jamais transporter sur soi le carnet à souche de délivrance de toxiques.
5 Ne pas laisser sa sacoche médicale dans sa voiture, ne pas laisser celle-ci ouverte lors des visites.
6 Dans les « quartiers sensibles », se faire accompagner.
7 Après 18 h, fermer son cabinet et filtrer les entrées par oeilleton. Des médecins de Mantes-la-Jolie utilisent ce système.
8 Appeler la police ou les îlotiers, dès que quelqu’un paraît suspect dans la salle d’attente.
9 Mettre les médicaments sous clé.
10 Garder à l’esprit que « cela n’arrive pas qu’aux autres.. »
Géographie criminelle
En raison de la place particulière qu’elle occupe, la région Ile-de-France (et ses composantes) fait l'objet d'un commentaire spécifique.
1 - PARIS ET L'ILE-DE-FRANCE (cf. annexe 9)
L'Ile-de-France constitue la région qui comptabilise le plus de crimes et de délits. Un peu plus d’une infraction sur quatre constatées en France en 2000 l'a été dans cette région (plus précisément 26,71 % contre 26,92 % en 1999).
La progression en Ile-de-France est de + 4,83 % au cours de l'année 2000.
Les départements franciliens ont connu des progressions plus ou moins marquées de leurs crimes et délits.
Par rapport à la tendance
nationale (+ 5, 72 %), la moitié d'entre eux a enregistré des hausses inférieures
: + 1,69 % pour Paris, + 1,79 % pour la Seine-et-Marne, + 2,46 % pour l’Essonne
et + 5,30 % pour les Yvelines. Les autres départements ont connu des hausses
plus accentuées : + 6,11 % pour les Hauts-de-Seine, + 7,07 % pour la
Seine-Saint-Denis,
+ 8,63% pour le Val d’Oise, + 10,48 % pour le Val-de-Marne.
En ce qui concerne les trois composantes de la région Ile-de-France, les variations sont les suivantes :
CRIMINALITE GLOBALE |
Année 1999 |
Année 2000 |
||
en ILE de FRANCE |
Nombre faits constatés |
Variation 1999/1998 |
|
Variation 2000/1999 |
-
Paris intra-muros (75)
- Petite Couronne (92-93-94) - Grande Couronne (77-78-91-95) ILE DE FRANCE |
291.630
321.762 347.265 960.657 |
+
1,99 %
+ 4,23 % + 1,15 % + 2,41 % |
296.558
346.725 363.821 1.007.104 |
+
1,69 %
+ 7,76 % + 4,77 % + 4,83 % |
Au sein de la région Ile-de-France, la grande Couronne concentre 36,12 % de la criminalité régionale (36,15 % en 1999), la petite Couronne 34,43 % (33,49 % en 1999) et Paris intra muros 29,45 % (30,36 % en 1999).
En ce qui concerne Paris intra-muros, la progression (+ 1,69 %) est moins marquée que celle observée en 1999 (+ 1,99 %).
La typologie de la délinquance parisienne reste largement dominée par les vols qui représentent 65,93 % des crimes et délits (61,90 % pour la France entière). Cette catégorie enregistre en 2000 une baisse de – 1,35 %.
Les infractions économiques et financières progressent de + 21,26 %. Elles représentent 11,19 % du total de la criminalité parisienne (contre 9,38 % en 1999).
Il en va de même pour la catégorie des crimes et délits contre les personnes qui enregistre, quant à elle, une augmentation de + 7,77 %, mais dont la part dans la criminalité parisienne reste toutefois faible (3,86 %).
La catégorie "autres infractions dont stupéfiants", qui représente 19,02 % de la criminalité parisienne comme en 1999, est aussi en hausse de + 1,74 %.
La délinquance de voie publique parisienne, qui concentre 41,25 % du total des crimes et délits constatés dans la capitale (contre 45,02 % en 1999), connaît une diminution sensible (- 6,83 %).
http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/statistiques/stat00/noteannuelle.doc
PARIS ET L'ILE DE FRANCE
L'Ile-de-France constitue, et de loin, la région qui comptabilise le plus de crimes et de délits. Un peu plus d’une infraction sur quatre constatées en France en 1999 l'a été dans cette région (plus précisément 26,92 % contre 26,31 % en 1998).
La criminalité de l'Ile-de-France a progressé (+ 2,42 %) au cours de cette période.
Exception faite de la Seine-et-Marne dont la criminalité est en baisse de - 1,56 %, tous les autres départements franciliens ont connu une progression de leurs crimes et délits comprise entre + 0,31 % et + 5,98 %
La majorité d’entre eux a enregistré des hausses plus accentuées que la tendance nationale :
+ 5,98 % pour la Seine-Saint-Denis,
+ 4,67 % pour les Hauts-de-Seine,
+ 4, 60 % pour le Val d’Oise,
+ 1,52 % pour le Val de Marne,
+ 1,99 % pour Paris,
+ 0,98 % pour l’Essonne
+ 0,31 % pour les Yvelines.
En ce qui concerne les trois composantes de la région Ile-de-France, les résultats sont les suivants
Criminalité globale en Ile-de-France |
Année 1998 | Année 1999 | ||
Nombre de faits constatés | Variation 98/97 | Nombre de faits constatés | Variation 99/98 | |
Paris intra-muros (75) Petite Couronne (92-93-94) Grande Couronne (77-78-91-95) ILE DE FRANCE |
285.949 308.707
343.328 937.984 |
+ 4,70 % + 0,38 %
+ 3,06 % +2,65 % |
291.630 321.762
347.265 960.657 |
+1,99 % +4,23 %
+ 1,15 % + 2,41 % |
Au sein de la région Ile-de-France, la grande Couronne concentre 36,15 % de la criminalité régionale (36,60 % en 1998), la petite Couronne 33,49 % (32,91 % en 1998) et Paris intra muros seulement 30,36 % (30,49 % en 1998).
En ce qui concerne Paris intra-muros, la criminalité connaît une progression de + 1,99 %, moins marquée que celle observée en 1998 (+ 4,70 %).
La typologie de la criminalité parisienne reste largement dominée par les vols qui représentent 67,96 % des crimes et délits (63,13 % pour la France entière). Cette catégorie enregistre en 1999 une hausse de + 1,06 %, se démarquant ainsi de la tendance nationale qui se caractérise par un recul de - 1,70 % des vols).
Les infractions économiques et financières progressent de + 4,31 %. Elles représentent 9,38 % du total de la criminalité parisienne (contre 9,17 % en 1998).
Il en va de même pour la catégorie des crimes et délits contre les personnes qui enregistre, quant à elle, une augmentation de + 6,83 %, mais dont la part dans la criminalité parisienne reste toutefois faible (3,64 %).
La catégorie "autres infractions dont stupéfiants", qui représente 19,02 % de la criminalité parisienne (contre 18,77 % en 1998), est aussi en hausse de + 3,34 %.
La délinquance de voie publique parisienne, qui concentre 45,02 % du total des crimes et délits constatés dans la capitale, connaît une très légère progression (+ 0,76 %), qui contraste ainsi avec le recul observé au plan national (- 2,95%).
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/crime/windows.htm
March 1982
Broken Windows
The
police and neighborhood safety
by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
In the
mid-l970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods
Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight
cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take
police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The
governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as
a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in
their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the
police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it
weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.
Many
police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was
hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their
chances for making a "good pinch." In some departments, assigning
officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic
experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime
rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion.
But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go
along.
Five
years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C.,
published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a
carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation
concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced
crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel
more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been
reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying
at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the
foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those
living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job
satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their
neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.
These
findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has
no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are
safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation
study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all.
They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different
from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats
did in fact make their neighborhoods safer.
But
how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone
down--in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we
understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many citizens, of
course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden,
violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large
cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear--the fear of being
bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals,
but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks,
addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.
What
foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of
public order in these neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods were predominantly
black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this "order-maintenance"
function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both
parties.
One
of us (Kelling) spent many hours walking with Newark foot-patrol officers to see
how they defined "order" and what they did to maintain it. One beat
was typical: a busy but dilapidated area in the heart of Newark, with many
abandoned buildings, marginal shops (several of which prominently displayed
knives and straight-edged razors in their windows), one large department store,
and, most important, a train station and several major bus stops. Though the
area was run-down, its streets were filled with people, because it was a major
transportation center. The good order of this area was important not only to
those who lived and worked there but also to many others, who had to move
through it on their way home, to supermarkets, or to factories.
The
people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was
white. The people were made up of "regulars" and "strangers."
Regulars included both "decent folk" and some drunks and derelicts who
were always there but who "knew their place." Strangers were, well,
strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer--call
him Kelly--knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he
was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars
observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit
on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but
not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to,
bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden.
If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was
assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger
loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his
business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons
who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at
bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet.
These
rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the "regulars"
on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these,
everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone
violated them, the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed
the violator. Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as "enforcing the
law," but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to
help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of
public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal
challenge.
A
determined skeptic might acknowledge that a skilled foot-patrol officer can
maintain order but still insist that this sort of "order" has little
to do with the real sources of community fear--that is, with violent crime. To a
degree, that is true. But two things must be borne in mind. First, outside
observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic
in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of "real" crime and
how much from a sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful,
worrisome encounters. The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and
their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order,
and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order.
Second, at the
community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind
of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to
agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the
rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods
as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale
because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others
are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal
that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always
been fun.)
Philip
Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing
the broken-window theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license
plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable
automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was
attacked by "vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment."
The first to arrive were a family--father, mother, and young son--who removed
the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of
value had been removed. Then random destruction began--windows were smashed,
parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children began to use the car as a playground.
Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut
whites. 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.
Untended
property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people
who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider
themselves law-abiding. Because of the nature of community life in the
Bronx--its anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things are
stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"--vandalism
begins much more quickly than it does in staid Palo Alto, where people have come
to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that mischievous behavior
is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers--the sense of
mutual regard and the obligations of civility--are lowered by actions that seem
to signal that "no one cares."
We
suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of
community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes,
mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can
change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening
jungle. A piece of property is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed.
Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children, emboldened, become more rowdy.
Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of the
corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter
accumulates. People start drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an
inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off. Pedestrians are
approached by panhandlers.
At
this point it is not inevitable that serious crime will flourish or violent
attacks on strangers will occur. But many residents will think that crime,
especially violent crime, is on the rise, and they will modify their behavior
accordingly. They will use the streets less often, and when on the streets will
stay apart from their fellows, moving with averted eyes, silent lips, and
hurried steps. "Don't get involved." For some residents, this growing
atomization will matter little, because the neighborhood is not their
"home" but "the place where they live." Their interests are
elsewhere; they are cosmopolitans. But it will matter greatly to other people,
whose lives derive meaning and satisfaction from local attachments rather than
worldly involvement; for them, the neighborhood will cease to exist except for a
few reliable friends whom they arrange to meet.
Such
an area is vulnerable to criminal invasion. Though it is not inevitable, it is
more likely that here, rather than in places where people are confident they can
regulate public behavior by informal controls, drugs will change hands,
prostitutes will solicit, and cars will be stripped. That the drunks will be
robbed by boys who do it as a lark, and the prostitutes' customers will be
robbed by men who do it purposefully and perhaps violently. That muggings will
occur.
Among
those who often find it difficult to move away from this are the elderly.
Surveys of citizens suggest that the elderly are much less likely to be the
victims of crime than younger persons, and some have inferred from this that the
well-known fear of crime voiced by the elderly is an exaggeration: perhaps we
ought not to design special programs to protect older persons; perhaps we should
even try to talk them out of their mistaken fears. This argument misses the
point. The prospect of a confrontation with an obstreperous teenager or a
drunken panhandler can be as fear-inducing for defenseless persons as the
prospect of meeting an actual robber; indeed, to a defenseless person, the two
kinds of confrontation are often indistinguishable. Moreover, the lower rate at
which the elderly are victimized is a measure of the steps they have already
taken--chiefly, staying behind locked doors--to minimize the risks they face.
Young men are more frequently attacked than older women, not because they are
easier or more lucrative targets but because they are on the streets more.
Nor
is the connection between disorderliness and fear made only by the elderly.
Susan Estrich, of the Harvard Law School, has recently gathered together a
number of surveys on the sources of public fear. One, done in Portland, Oregon,
indicated that three fourths of the adults interviewed cross to the other side
of a street when they see a gang of teenagers; another survey, in Baltimore,
discovered that nearly half would cross the street to avoid even a single
strange youth. When an interviewer asked people in a housing project where the
most dangerous spot was, they mentioned a place where young persons gathered to
drink and play music, despite the fact that not a single crime had occurred
there. In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by
persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime,
were the greatest. Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such
otherwise harmless displays as subway graffiti. As Nathan Glazer has written,
the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider
with the inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour
or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it
to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests."
In
response to fear people avoid one another, weakening controls. Sometimes they
call the police. Patrol cars arrive, an occasional arrest occurs but crime
continues and disorder is not abated. Citizens complain to the police chief, but
he explains that his department is low on personnel and that the courts do not
punish petty or first-time offenders. To the residents, the police who arrive in
squad cars are either ineffective or uncaring: to the police, the residents are
animals who deserve each other. The citizens may soon stop calling the police,
because "they can't do anything."
The
process we call urban decay has occurred for centuries in every city. But what
is happening today is different in at least two important respects. First, in
the period before, say, World War II, city dwellers- because of money costs,
transportation difficulties, familial and church connections--could rarely move
away from neighborhood problems. When movement did occur, it tended to be along
public-transit routes. Now mobility has become exceptionally easy for all but
the poorest or those who are blocked by racial prejudice. Earlier crime waves
had a kind of built-in self-correcting mechanism: the determination of a
neighborhood or community to reassert control over its turf. Areas in Chicago,
New York, and Boston would experience crime and gang wars, and then normalcy
would return, as the families for whom no alternative residences were possible
reclaimed their authority over the streets.
Second,
the police in this earlier period assisted in that reassertion of authority by
acting, sometimes violently, on behalf of the community. Young toughs were
roughed up, people were arrested "on suspicion" or for vagrancy, and
prostitutes and petty thieves were routed. "Rights" were something
enjoyed by decent folk, and perhaps also by the serious professional criminal,
who avoided violence and could afford a lawyer.
This
pattern of policing was not an aberration or the result of occasional excess.
From the earliest days of the nation, the police function was seen primarily as
that of a night watchman: to maintain order against the chief threats to
order--fire, wild animals, and disreputable behavior. Solving crimes was viewed
not as a police responsibility but as a private one. In the March, 1969,
Atlantic, one of us (Wilson) wrote a brief account of how the police role had
slowly changed from maintaining order to fighting crimes. The change began with
the creation of private detectives (often ex-criminals), who worked on a
contingency-fee basis for individuals who had suffered losses. In time, the
detectives were absorbed in municipal agencies and paid a regular salary
simultaneously, the responsibility for prosecuting thieves was shifted from the
aggrieved private citizen to the professional prosecutor. This process was not
complete in most places until the twentieth century.
In
the l960s, when urban riots were a major problem, social scientists began to
explore carefully the order maintenance function of the police, and to suggest
ways of improving it--not to make streets safer (its original function) but to
reduce the incidence of mass violence. Order maintenance became, to a degree,
coterminous with "community relations." But, as the crime wave that
began in the early l960s continued without abatement throughout the decade and
into the 1970s, attention shifted to the role of the police as crime-fighters.
Studies of police behavior ceased, by and large, to be accounts of the
order-maintenance function and became, instead, efforts to propose and test ways
whereby the police could solve more crimes, make more arrests, and gather better
evidence. If these things could be done, social scientists assumed, citizens
would be less fearful.
A
great deal was accomplished during this transition, as both police chiefs and
outside experts emphasized the crime-fighting function in their plans, in the
allocation of resources, and in deployment of personnel. The police may well
have become better crime-fighters as a result. And doubtless they remained aware
of their responsibility for order. But the link between order-maintenance and
crime-prevention, so obvious to earlier generations, was forgotten.
That
link is similar to the process whereby one broken window becomes many. The
citizen who fears the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning
beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior; he is also
giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct
generalization--namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which
disorderly behavior goes unchecked. The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the
first broken window. Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional,
believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they
operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing
conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from
annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the
police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually
takes place.
Some
police administrators concede that this process occurs, but argue that
motorized-patrol officers can deal with it as effectively as foot patrol
officers. We are not so sure. In theory, an officer in a squad car can observe
as much as an officer on foot; in theory, the former can talk to as many people
as the latter. But the reality of police-citizen encounters is powerfully
altered by the automobile. An officer on foot cannot separate himself from the
street people; if he is approached, only his uniform and his personality can
help him manage whatever is about to happen. And he can never be certain what
that will be--a request for directions, a plea for help, an angry denunciation,
a teasing remark, a confused babble, a threatening gesture.
In
a car, an officer is more likely to deal with street people by rolling down the
window and looking at them. The door and the window exclude the approaching
citizen; they are a barrier. Some officers take advantage of this barrier,
perhaps unconsciously, by acting differently if in the car than they would on
foot. We have seen this countless times. The police car pulls up to a corner
where teenagers are gathered. The window is rolled down. The officer stares at
the youths. They stare back. The officer says to one, "C'mere." He
saunters over, conveying to his friends by his elaborately casual style the idea
that he is not intimidated by authority. What's your name?" "Chuck."
"Chuck who?" "Chuck Jones." "What'ya doing, Chuck?"
"Nothin'." "Got a P.O. [parole officer]?" "Nah."
"Sure?" "Yeah." "Stay out of trouble, Chuckie."
Meanwhile, the other boys laugh and exchange comments among themselves, probably
at the officer's expense. The officer stares harder. He cannot be certain what
is being said, nor can he join in and, by displaying his own skill at street
banter, prove that he cannot be "put down." In the process, the
officer has learned almost nothing, and the boys have decided the officer is an
alien force who can safely be disregarded, even mocked.
Our
experience is that most citizens like to talk to a police officer. Such
exchanges give them a sense of importance, provide them with the basis for
gossip, and allow them to explain to the authorities what is worrying them (whereby
they gain a modest but significant sense of having "done something"
about the problem). You approach a person on foot more easily, and talk to him
more readily, than you do a person in a car. Moreover, you can more easily
retain some anonymity if you draw an officer aside for a private chat. Suppose
you want to pass on a tip about who is stealing handbags, or who offered to sell
you a stolen TV. In the inner city, the culprit, in all likelihood, lives nearby.
To walk up to a marked patrol car and lean in the window is to convey a visible
signal that you are a "fink."
The
essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal
control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without
committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal
control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must
accommodate them. And therein lies the problem.
Should police
activity on the street be shaped, in important ways, by the standards of the
neighborhood rather than by the rules of the state? Over the past two decades,
the shift of police from order-maintenance to law enforcement has brought them
increasingly under the influence of legal restrictions, provoked by media
complaints and enforced by court decisions and departmental orders. As a
consequence, the order maintenance functions of the police are now governed by
rules developed to control police relations with suspected criminals. This is,
we think, an entirely new development. For centuries, the role of the police as
watchmen was judged primarily not in terms of its compliance with appropriate
procedures but rather in terms of its attaining a desired objective. The
objective was order, an inherently ambiguous term but a condition that people in
a given community recognized when they saw it. The means were the same as those
the community itself would employ, if its members were sufficiently determined,
courageous, and authoritative. Detecting and apprehending criminals, by contrast,
was a means to an end, not an end in itself; a judicial determination of guilt
or innocence was the hoped-for result of the law-enforcement mode. From the
first, the police were expected to follow rules defining that process, though
states differed in how stringent the rules should be. The criminal-apprehension
process was always understood to involve individual rights, the violation of
which was unacceptable because it meant that the violating officer would be
acting as a judge and jury--and that was not his job. Guilt or innocence was to
be determined by universal standards under special procedures.
Ordinarily,
no judge or jury ever sees the persons caught up in a dispute over the
appropriate level of neighborhood order. That is true not only because most
cases are handled informally on the street but also because no universal
standards are available to settle arguments over disorder, and thus a judge may
not be any wiser or more effective than a police officer. Until quite recently
in many states, and even today in some places, the police made arrests on such
charges as "suspicious person" or "vagrancy" or "public
drunkenness"--charges with scarcely any legal meaning. These charges exist
not because society wants judges to punish vagrants or drunks but because it
wants an officer to have the legal tools to remove undesirable persons from a
neighborhood when informal efforts to preserve order in the streets have failed.
Once
we begin to think of all aspects of police work as involving the application of
universal rules under special procedures, we inevitably ask what constitutes an
"undesirable person" and why we should "criminalize"
vagrancy or drunkenness. A strong and commendable desire to see that people are
treated fairly makes us worry about allowing the police to rout persons who are
undesirable by some vague or parochial standard. A growing and
not-so-commendable utilitarianism leads us to doubt that any behavior that does
not "hurt" another person should be made illegal. And thus many of us
who watch over the police are reluctant to allow them to perform, in the only
way they can, a function that every neighborhood desperately wants them to
perform.
This
wish to "decriminalize" disreputable behavior that "harms no
one"- and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to
maintain neighborhood order--is, we think, a mistake. Arresting a single drunk
or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a
sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred
vagrants may destroy an entire community. A particular rule that seems to make
sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and
applied to all cases. It makes no sense because it fails to take into account
the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken
windows. Of course, agencies other than the police could attend to the problems
posed by drunks or the mentally ill, but in most communities especially where
the "deinstitutionalization" movement has been strong--they do not.
The
concern about equity is more serious. We might agree that certain behavior makes
one person more undesirable than another but how do we ensure that age or skin
color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis
for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in
short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?
We
can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question. We are not
confident that there is a satisfactory answer except to hope that by their
selection, training, and supervision, the police will be inculcated with a clear
sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority. That limit, roughly,
is this--the police exist to help regulate behavior, not to maintain the racial
or ethnic purity of a neighborhood.
Consider
the case of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, one of the largest
public-housing projects in the country. It is home for nearly 20,000 people, all
black, and extends over ninety-two acres along South State Street. It was named
after a distinguished black who had been, during the 1940s, chairman of the
Chicago Housing Authority. Not long after it opened, in 1962, relations between
project residents and the police deteriorated badly. The citizens felt that the
police were insensitive or brutal; the police, in turn, complained of unprovoked
attacks on them. Some Chicago officers tell of times when they were afraid to
enter the Homes. Crime rates soared.
Today,
the atmosphere has changed. Police-citizen relations have improved--apparently,
both sides learned something from the earlier experience. Recently, a boy stole
a purse and ran off. Several young persons who saw the theft voluntarily passed
along to the police information on the identity and residence of the thief, and
they did this publicly, with friends and neighbors looking on. But problems
persist, chief among them the presence of youth gangs that terrorize residents
and recruit members in the project. The people expect the police to "do
something" about this, and the police are determined to do just that.
But
do what? Though the police can obviously make arrests whenever a gang member
breaks the law, a gang can form, recruit, and congregate without breaking the
law. And only a tiny fraction of gang-related crimes can be solved by an arrest;
thus, if an arrest is the only recourse for the police, the residents' fears
will go unassuaged. The police will soon feel helpless, and the residents will
again believe that the police "do nothing." What the police in fact do
is to chase known gang members out of the project. In the words of one officer,
"We kick ass." Project residents both know and approve of this. The
tacit police-citizen alliance in the project is reinforced by the police view
that the cops and the gangs are the two rival sources of power in the area, and
that the gangs are not going to win.
None
of this is easily reconciled with any conception of due process or fair
treatment. Since both residents and gang members are black, race is not a factor.
But it could be. Suppose a white project confronted a black gang, or vice versa.
We would be apprehensive about the police taking sides. But the substantive
problem remains the same: how can the police strengthen the informal
social-control mechanisms of natural communities in order to minimize fear in
public places? Law enforcement, per se, is no answer: a gang can weaken or
destroy a community by standing about in a menacing fashion and speaking rudely
to passersby without breaking the law.
We have
difficulty thinking about such matters, not simply because the ethical and legal
issues are so complex but because we have become accustomed to thinking of the
law in essentially individualistic terms. The law defines my rights,
punishes his behavior and is applied by that officer because of this
harm. We assume, in thinking this way, that what is good for the individual will
be good for the community and what doesn't matter when it happens to one person
won't matter if it happens to many. Ordinarily, those are plausible assumptions.
But in cases where behavior that is tolerable to one person is intolerable to
many others, the reactions of the others--fear, withdrawal, flight--may
ultimately make matters worse for everyone, including the individual who first
professed his indifference.
It
may be their greater sensitivity to communal as opposed to individual needs that
helps explain why the residents of small communities are more satisfied with
their police than are the residents of similar neighborhoods in big cities.
Elinor Ostrom and her co-workers at Indiana University compared the perception
of police services in two poor, all-black Illinois towns--Phoenix and East
Chicago Heights with those of three comparable all-black neighborhoods in
Chicago. The level of criminal victimization and the quality of police-community
relations appeared to be about the same in the towns and the Chicago
neighborhoods. But the citizens living in their own villages were much more
likely than those living in the Chicago neighborhoods to say that they do not
stay at home for fear of crime, to agree that the local police have "the
right to take any action necessary" to deal with problems, and to agree
that the police "look out for the needs of the average citizen." It is
possible that the residents and the police of the small towns saw themselves as
engaged in a collaborative effort to maintain a certain standard of communal
life, whereas those of the big city felt themselves to be simply requesting and
supplying particular services on an individual basis.
If
this is true, how should a wise police chief deploy his meager forces? The first
answer is that nobody knows for certain, and the most prudent course of action
would be to try further variations on the Newark experiment, to see more
precisely what works in what kinds of neighborhoods. The second answer is also a
hedge--many aspects of order maintenance in neighborhoods can probably best be
handled in ways that involve the police minimally if at all. A busy bustling
shopping center and a quiet, well-tended suburb may need almost no visible
police presence. In both cases, the ratio of respectable to disreputable people
is ordinarily so high as to make informal social control effective.
Even
in areas that are in jeopardy from disorderly elements, citizen action without
substantial police involvement may be sufficient. Meetings between teenagers who
like to hang out on a particular corner and adults who want to use that corner
might well lead to an amicable agreement on a set of rules about how many people
can be allowed to congregate, where, and when.
Where
no understanding is possible--or if possible, not observed--citizen patrols may
be a sufficient response. There are two traditions of communal involvement in
maintaining order: One, that of the "community watchmen," is as old as
the first settlement of the New World. Until well into the nineteenth century,
volunteer watchmen, not policemen, patrolled their communities to keep order.
They did so, by and large, without taking the law into their own hands--without,
that is, punishing persons or using force. Their presence deterred disorder or
alerted the community to disorder that could not be deterred. There are hundreds
of such efforts today in communities all across the nation. Perhaps the best
known is that of the Guardian Angels, a group of unarmed young persons in
distinctive berets and T-shirts, who first came to public attention when they
began patrolling the New York City subways but who claim now to have chapters in
more than thirty American cities. Unfortunately, we have little information
about the effect of these groups on crime. It is possible, however, that
whatever their effect on crime, citizens find their presence reassuring, and
that they thus contribute to maintaining a sense of order and civility.
The
second tradition is that of the "vigilante." Rarely a feature of the
settled communities of the East, it was primarily to be found in those frontier
towns that grew up in advance of the reach of government. More than 350
vigilante groups are known to have existed; their distinctive feature was that
their members did take the law into their own hands, by acting as judge, jury,
and often executioner as well as policeman. Today, the vigilante movement is
conspicuous by its rarity, despite the great fear expressed by citizens that the
older cities are becoming "urban frontiers." But some
community-watchmen groups have skirted the line, and others may cross it in the
future. An ambiguous case, reported in The Wall Street Journal involved a
citizens' patrol in the Silver Lake area of Belleville, New Jersey. A leader
told the reporter, "We look for outsiders." If a few teenagers from
outside the neighborhood enter it, "we ask them their business," he
said. "If they say they're going down the street to see Mrs. Jones, fine,
we let them pass. But then we follow them down the block to make sure they're
really going to see Mrs. Jones."
Though citizens
can do a great deal, the police are plainly the key to order maintenance. For
one thing, many communities, such as the Robert Taylor Homes, cannot do the job
by themselves. For another, no citizen in a neighborhood, even an organized one,
is likely to feel the sense of responsibility that wearing a badge confers.
Psychologists have done many studies on why people fail to go to the aid of
persons being attacked or seeking help, and they have learned that the cause is
not "apathy" or "selfishness" but the absence of some
plausible grounds for feeling that one must personally accept responsibility.
Ironically, avoiding responsibility is easier when a lot of people are standing
about. On streets and in public places, where order is so important, many people
are likely to be "around," a fact that reduces the chance of any one
person acting as the agent of the community. The police officer's uniform
singles him out as a person who must accept responsibility if asked. In
addition, officers, more easily than their fellow citizens, can be expected to
distinguish between what is necessary to protect the safety of the street and
what merely protects its ethnic purity.
But
the police forces of America are losing, not gaining, members. Some cities have
suffered substantial cuts in the number of officers available for duty. These
cuts are not likely to be reversed in the near future. Therefore, each
department must assign its existing officers with great care. Some neighborhoods
are so demoralized and crime-ridden as to make foot patrol useless; the best the
police can do with limited resources is respond to the enormous number of calls
for service. Other neighborhoods are so stable and serene as to make foot patrol
unnecessary. The key is to identify neighborhoods at the tipping point--where
the public order is deteriorating but not unreclaimable, where the streets are
used frequently but by apprehensive people, where a window is likely to be
broken at any time, and must quickly be fixed if all are not to be shattered.
Most
police departments do not have ways of systematically identifying such areas and
assigning officers to them. Officers are assigned on the basis of crime rates (meaning
that marginally threatened areas are often stripped so that police can
investigate crimes in areas where the situation is hopeless) or on the basis of
calls for service (despite the fact that most citizens do not call the police
when they are merely frightened or annoyed). To allocate patrol wisely, the
department must look at the neighborhoods and decide, from first-hand evidence,
where an additional officer will make the greatest difference in promoting a
sense of safety.
One
way to stretch limited police resources is being tried in some public housing
projects. Tenant organizations hire off-duty police officers for patrol work in
their buildings. The costs are not high (at least not per resident), the officer
likes the additional income, and the residents feel safer. Such arrangements are
probably more successful than hiring private watchmen, and the Newark experiment
helps us understand why. A private security guard may deter crime or misconduct
by his presence, and he may go to the aid of persons needing help, but he may
well not intervene--that is, control or drive away--someone challenging
community standards. Being a sworn officer--a "real cop"--seems to
give one the confidence, the sense of duty, and the aura of authority necessary
to perform this difficult task.
Patrol
officers might be encouraged to go to and from duty stations on public
transportation and, while on the bus or subway car, enforce rules about smoking,
drinking, disorderly conduct, and the like. The enforcement need involve nothing
more than ejecting the offender (the offense, after all, is not one with which a
booking officer or a judge wishes to be bothered). Perhaps the random but
relentless maintenance of standards on buses would lead to conditions on buses
that approximate the level of civility we now take for granted on airplanes.
But
the most important requirement is to think that to maintain order in precarious
situations is a vital job. The police know this is one of their functions, and
they also believe, correctly, that it cannot be done to the exclusion of
criminal investigation and responding to calls. We may have encouraged them to
suppose, however, on the basis of our oft-repeated concerns about serious,
violent crime, that they will be judged exclusively on their capacity as
crime-fighters. To the extent that this is the case, police administrators will
continue to concentrate police personnel in the highest-crime areas (though not
necessarily in the areas most vulnerable to criminal invasion), emphasize their
training in the law and criminal apprehension (and not their training in
managing street life), and join too quickly in campaigns to decriminalize "harmless"
behavior (though public drunkenness, street prostitution, and pornographic
displays can destroy a community more quickly than any team of professional
burglars).
Above
all, we must return to our long-abandoned view that the police ought to protect
communities as well as individuals. Our crime statistics and victimization
surveys measure individual losses, but they do not measure communal losses. Just
as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than
simply treating illness, so the police--and the rest of us--ought to recognize
the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.
Copyright 1982 by
James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; March 1982; Broken Windows; Volume 249, No. 3; pages
29-38.
Kelling George L. & Wilson James Q., Broken windows, 1982, traduit et publié dans les cahiers de la sécurité intérieure en 1984
DEGRE ET FONCTIONNEMENT DE L’ECHELLE*
- degré 1 : violences en bandes dénuées de caractère anti-institutionnel (délinquance crapuleuse en bande, razzia dans les commerces, règlements de comptes, rixes, rodéos et incendies de voitures volées, vandalisme)
- degré 2 : injures verbales et gestuelles contre les adultes, provocations collectives contre les vigiles, vandalisme furtif contre les biens publics
- degré 3 : agressions physiques sur les agents institutionnels (contrôleurs, enseignants, militaires, pompiers, travailleurs sociaux, vigiles) autres que policiers
- degré 4 : attroupements lors d’interventions de police, chasse aux dealers, lapidation de voitures de patrouille, manifestations devant les commissariats, menaces téléphoniques aux policiers
- degré 5 : attroupements vindicatifs freinant les interventions, invasion du commissariat
- degré 6 : agressions physiques contre les policiers, attaque ouverte du commissariat, embuscades, pare-chocages
- degré 7 : vandalisme massif, ouvert (jets de cocktails molotov, saccage de vitrines, de voitures) en un temps généralement bref, et sans affrontement avec les forces de l’ordre, de la part de 15 à 30 jeunes
- degré 8 : émeute, guérilla, saccages massifs suivis d’affrontements avec les forces de l’ordre, répétition 3 à 5 nuits d’affilée, de la part de 50 à 200 jeunes
* L’insécurité des quartiers sensibles : une échelle d’évaluation, les cahiers de la sécurité intérieure, n° 14, octobre 1993
Bui Trong Lucienne,
1. Bandes de jeunes et insécurité, Revue du syndicat des commissaires, janvier 1991
2. Violence, drogue et territoire, Revue de l’Octris, avril 1993
3. L’insécurité des quartiers sensibles : une échelle d’évaluation, les cahiers de la sécurité intérieure, n° 14, octobre 1993
4. Insécurité dans les banlieues et action de la police, Revue de la gendarmerie, 1er trimestre 1994
5. Drogue et violence : le reflux du trafic de drogue vers certaines banlieues, revue de la gendarmerie, 4è trimestre 1995
6. Résurgence de la violence en France, futuribles, février 1996
7. Culture de quartiers : le « business » comme système de vie, informations sociales, n° 62, septembre 1998
8. Rapport des jeunes de banlieue avec l’autorité policière, centre national de documentation pédagogique, n° 112
9. Saivu, système d’analyse informatique des violences urbaines (août 1998), présenté dans le « guide pratique de la police de proximité » publié par l’ihesi, la documentation française, mars 2000. Voir dans cet ouvrage page 233, fiche 58
10. Les violences urbaines à l’échelle des renseignements généraux, un état des lieux pour 1998, les cahiers de la sécurité intérieure n° 33, 3è trimestre 1998
11. Violences urbaines : des vérités qui dérangent, Bayard 2000
12. Violence : les racines du mal, Relié 2002