I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of social science in building a better democracy. I'm a finalist for the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program, and will be interviewing at the University of Michigan, and at UC Berkeley the next couple of weeks. The purpose of the fellowship is to get social scientists to turn their research agenda towards health. If I were to be selected, it wouldn't be a big transition for me. I consider myself a new jack Fabian in some ways, and I firmly believe that my scholarship doesn't mean much if it can't be used to help people build a better society.
So when I read today's New York Times article about the Science of Crime, I was immediately intrigued. From the bio of Dr. Earl it sure sounds like he should be considered part of the Old School. His tenacity, his ingenuity, and his willingness to knock down the broken windows theory proved it.
James Q. Wilson is the dean of conservative social science and one of the primary intellectuals behind the "broken windows theory" of crime prevention. In a nutshell, this theory posits that there is a relationship between tangential signs of social disorder (broken windows, weeds, graffiti, etc.) and crime. If you on the one hand punish individuals for acts of social disorder AND fix the signs themselves, you should lower the crime rate.
But there are two problems. The first is intellectual--there is little proof that there is a relationship between fixing broken windows (or punishing graffiti artists) and lowering crime rates. And when I say "proof" here I'm talking peer-reviewed journal article type proof--NOT New Republic type proof. The second is both philosophical and political. The basic policy response that emanates from broken windows theory is an aggressive form of policing that basically operates on the assumption that citizens are either criminals to be arrested, or passive standers-by to be maneuvered around.
Here is where Dr. Earls comes in. First the method and the data:
From June to October 1995, trained observers drove a sport utility vehicle at 5 miles per hour down every street in 196 carefully selected Chicago neighborhoods.As they drove, a pair of video recorders, one on each side of the S.U.V., recorded social activities and physical features: litter, graffiti, drug deals, public drinking, everything within the camera's view. When the researchers were done, 11,408 blocks had been observed and videotaped. Then the police records on homicide, robbery and burglary were pulled for each of these 196 neighborhoods, along with in-person surveys of 8,782 residents.
Just the numbers alone are impressive...but for me as a social scientist this is much deeper than that. The mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods involved in this project is a potent fusion. I don't think I would've ever thought about actually doing drive by videotaping, much less combining that with surveys AND neighborhood crime data? You've got to be KIDDING me. Ingenuity doesn't even begin to describe this approach.
But here's the kicker:
In a landmark 1997 paper that he wrote with colleagues in the journal Science, and in a subsequent study in The American Journal of Sociology, Dr. Earls reported that most major crimes were linked not to "broken windows" but to two other neighborhood variables: concentrated poverty and what he calls, with an unfortunate instinct for the dry and off-putting language of social science, collective efficacy.
What this basically means is simple. You get communities to organize themselves, and the crime rate decreases. You organize citizens and empower them, and they transform their own reality. Whereas broken windows basically requires an aggressive state apparatus to subjugate (dare I say "crush") citizens, Earls' approach requires that we give citizens the ability to establish order (whatever that means to them) from the bottom up. I talked about how our goal should be to establish policy that can be spun from ANY perspective (democratic, republican, conservative, liberal, radical)...this is an excellent example. In one fell swoop Earls moves social science forward by his innovative research design, and moves democracy forward by using the results to call for empowering citizens. Dubois would be proud.
Posted by at January 6, 2004 07:53 AM | TrackBack