Is Winder going to fix its ‘broken windows?’

A couple of recent events suggest that perhaps a serious effort is being made to address these two interrelated problems.

First, Winder Police Department Chief Dennis Dorsey and his officers recently held a community-level meeting in a section of town where crime is a major issue. Other similar community meetings are scheduled in other parts of town by the WPD.

And last week, Winder officials did a drive-around by bus to see some of the town’s blighted areas in need of cleaning up. That’s part of an effort to fix substandard and dilapidated houses in the town.

Both of these actions seem to be a new recognition by city leaders and citizens that crime and neglect are major issues in the city. The root of that it seems may be substance abuse, which leads to a number of other problems.

Alcohol and drug abuse are problems everywhere, but they seem to have escalated in recent years here, especially among young people. Those issues often cascade into other crime: thefts, assaults and domestic disputes. (In domestic violence cases, a large number of people are intoxicated or high based on local law enforcement reports.)

There is a hint in the city’s recent actions that it is following the “broken window” theory. That theory, developed in the 1980s, proposes that people and communities react to their physical environment. When that physical environment deteriorates, the community itself begins to decline.

That’s the broken window. The idea is that if you have one broken window in a house left unfixed, soon all the other windows in the house will be broken. If you allow the message to be sent that nobody cares, it will soon become self-fulfilling — small neglect will cascade into larger neglect until community residents become afraid and either leave, or change their habits.

The theory has focused mostly on law enforcement and was the major idea behind the cleaning up of New York City and some other urban areas in the 1990s. Under this kind of law enforcement, New York officials began focusing on street-level problems. They put officers on foot patrols rather than just riding around in cars.
Panhandlers and vagrants were chased off the streets and sidewalks; street-level drug dealers were busted more aggressively; those who jumped subway turnstiles were arrested; graffiti was cleaned up and those creating graffiti were arrested.

The idea behind this was to make the street environment less threatening to citizens and in doing so, changing the community’s psychological view of itself. Who wants to operate a business if they feel threatened? Who wants to be on the streets if their personal space is assaulted by panhandlers? Who wants to feel as if they are surrounded by decay?

As was said in the original “Broken Windows” article in 1982, “serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked.”

Winder is not New York, of course, but on a reduced scale the same idea applies to small towns.

At the WPD community meeting two weeks ago, residents complained of street drug dealing, obnoxiously loud music coming from cars, and people racing up and down the street. Disorder rather than order had been allowed to flourish.

In traditional law enforcement thinking, all of that is minor. Unless there is an assault or shooting, the traditional view has been to not crack down on those smaller things; let a community swim in its own mess unless someone gets hurt, then have law enforcement parachute in for only a short time for major incidents.
But in the broken window theory of community law enforcement, the small problems get a lot of attention. Cars get stopped and tickets given for loud music or fast driving. Street level drug dealers get arrested. The day-to-day problems things get taken care of, not just the occasional shooting.

This theory of law enforcement isn’t without critics. Some believe it goes too far and becomes harassment, especially in minority areas. Even those who first postulated the broken window theory admitted that some things the police did in chasing away street vagrants probably wasn’t legal.

But it worked. While there are pockets of crime on the streets in NYC, many areas are now safe and non-threatening to both residents and tourists. That wasn’t the case 20 years ago.

But the broken window theory isn’t just about law enforcement. It’s also about physical neglect in a community. That’s the part of the community puzzle being addressed by the Winder Community Housing Committee. As reported in the Journal two weeks ago, “The committee decided … that it would target areas of the city that qualify for financial assistance, develop plans to repair or restructure historic homes built prior to 1939, and focus attention on acquiring vacant parcels available for redevelopment or building parks.”

These problems aren’t just the result of crime, but are in fact woven into the criminal mentality. If houses are left to rot, if a community’s psychological environment reflects neglect of the physical environment, then in a sense crime is an outgrowth of that, not just the other way around.

Perhaps if Winder is successful in revitalizing the town’s blighted areas, it will begin to shift that environment at the street and community level so that people will take greater pride in their homes and in their streets and neighborhoods. That, in the long run, can make a huge difference in how kids grow up and in the psychological and physical environment that they are surrounded by.

In the short run, however, much of this will depend on local law enforcement becoming increasingly aggressive in pursuing street crime. In fact, it seems the WPD has already begun that process. This week’s Journal lists several arrests for underage drinking, public drunkenness and other “minor” problems that are really symptoms of a much bigger problem in the community.

I have no idea what the WPD plans to do in its policing efforts, but I hope it will seriously consider incorporating some of the ideas of the broken windows theory in its law enforcement.

Crack down on the smaller things; set up roadblocks and make it difficult for the thugs and junkies and drunks to get around Barrow County. If that is done long enough, often enough and deep enough into the community, those people who cause many of the problems will find another place to live or ply their drug trade.

This could be a turning point for Winder, a step that could in the coming years have a huge impact on the local quality of life.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.