Cleaning up crime, literally

We're all products of the system as much as we are of ourselves. Apparently, our personalities and intelligence (I.Q.) are largely heritable. If so, I'd say it becomes extremely important to solve problems by focusing on the system. That people are predisposed towards certain behaviours more than others doesn't mean you should just give up in despair when they behave like arseholes - although God knows Trump supporters make that tempting - but instead it would be better to concentrate on designing a system which exploits those tendencies productively. In this case, people aren't going to clean up their own neighbourhoods, but if you do it for them, they just might sustain the change for themselves. Shouting at them that they should just behave better won't help. You can't change the people (at least not directly) but you can change their actions. And then feedback sets in...

One of the team’s first research projects involved two natural experiments in Philadelphia. In one, they examined violent crime around 2,356 abandoned buildings that had been in violation of Philadelphia’s anti-blight ordinance. A set of six hundred and seventy-six buildings had been remediated by the owners, which meant they had been “treated” with replacement doors and windows; the rest had not. Every month, for a three-year period between 2010 and 2013, the researchers compared violent-crime levels around the treated buildings with violent-crime levels around a randomly selected, geographically matched group of buildings that remained in disrepair.

The second experiment compared violent crime around vacant lots. According to the team’s research, there were 49,690 such lots in Philadelphia. P.H.S. had remediated at least 4,436 of them, which meant it had cleared trash and debris, graded the land, planted grass and trees to create a parklike setting, and installed low fences with walk-in openings to facilitate recreational use and deter illegal dumping. Again, Branas and his colleagues compared the treated sites with a set of randomly selected, geographically matched properties. In this study, they measured crime annually, over a full decade, from 1999 to 2008.

Compelling theories, as critics of broken-windows policing know all too well, are often betrayed by evidence. That’s why Branas was so surprised by the findings from their first study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, which showed a thirty-nine-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated abandoned buildings and a smaller—but still meaningful—five-per-cent reduction in gun violence in and around remediated lots. These are extraordinary numbers, at a level of impact one rarely sees in a social-science experiment.

Equally powerful, Branas said, was that there was no evidence that the violence had simply shifted to nearby places. The declines were real. And they lasted from one to nearly four years, making the benefit far more sustainable than those of other crime-reduction programs. “Honestly, it was a bigger effect than we’d expected to find,” he said.

The reasons are straightforward. Abandoned houses are good places for people involved in crime to hide when on the run. They’re also good places to store firearms. Untended lots are notoriously useful for drug dealing—in part because most law-abiding residents avoid them, and in part because dealers can hide their products in the weeds and tall grass if the police drive by. For communities, and for the police, they are hard places to monitor and control.

“Simple treatments of abandoned buildings and vacant lots returned conservative estimates of between $5.00 and $26.00 in net benefits to taxpayers and between $79.00 and $333.00 to society at large, for every dollar invested,” the team wrote. It’s not only more dangerous to leave the properties untended—it’s more expensive.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-other-side-of-broken-windows