Another look at ‘broken windows’

Re “Bratton’s ‘broken windows,’ ” Opinion, April 20

Professor Bernard E. Harcourt’s criticism of Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton’s adherence to the “broken windows” theory of dealing with crime misses the mark. Law enforcement should be mostly concerned with working closely with the individual, widely varying communities that make up the city. Law enforcement generally has done a much better job the last decade in partnering with neighborhoods and finding out what the people think are the problems that should have priority attention.

Sometimes quality-of-life and nuisance issues of seemingly minor importance to the police are of utmost importance to the people living in that area.

Sometimes the community identifies felonious activities and combinations of serious crimes and minor violations. This may not fit neatly into an academic-based, social scientist framework, but it has become a basic tenet of good police-community relations and community-based policing.

JERRY HARPER

Chief Probation Officer

San Bernardino County

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Harcourt did not really demolish the “broken windows” model. His point was much narrower: He suggested that police resources are too finite and costly to deploy on such a strategy against crime. That may well be so. But the work of James Q. Wilson stands unindicted. If one looks at society’s overall handling of the deviant in our midst, it is clear that we depend on a hierarchy of interventions that starts with minor penalties for minor infractions and moves progressively to more severe sanctions for grosser violations of societal norms. That basic hierarchy remains fundamentally unassailed, irrespective of how well or poorly it may be implemented. No one questions the sociological finding that it is most effective to intervene with strategies of socialization earlier, when problems are more manageable, rather than later.

SIEGFRIED OTHMER

Woodland Hills