Speaker Transcripts Back to List George Kelling Commencement Address to the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice and Graduate School-Newark May 20, 2005 Of “Unanticipated Consequences” and “Tipping Points”: Losing Control Of Public Spaces If the unexamined life is not worth living, the unexamined past is not worth possessing; it bears fruit only by being held continuously up to the light, and it is as changeable and as full of surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, as the future. -Brendan Gill, Here at the New Yorker I grew up in a very different world than most of the people gathered here – the 1930s and 1940s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was not necessarily a better world: the Great Depression peaked and ebbed; Hitler and his Holocaust ravaged Europe; Jim Crow was the law of the South and the de facto law of the North; Japanese citizens were interned during WWII; the nuclear age dawned. But in at least one respect it was better: I was raised in a world in which neither my parents nor I worried a whole lot about my safety. Oh, they warned me against accepting money from strangers when I went to the downtown arcade to play games. They also warned me not to accept rides from strangers. And as I got older, they told me not to hitchhike but, of course, I hitchhiked nonetheless. But this was pretty much it. Even when I was in high school, security consisted of an honor student at a desk at the entrance to the school. Streetcar and bus drivers carried change. Although some neighborhoods were tougher than others, there were none that I was afraid to play or work in as a teenager. If I minded my business, nobody would bother me. This world shattered during the 1960s. Crime and fear of crime went out of sight. Even now, after years of declines in crime, areas in many of our cities remain terror zones: children cannot play in front of their homes or in parks, churches and schools cannot function, commerce is strangled, and residents struggle daily to protect their children, themselves, and their property from predators. In many neighborhoods, having to tolerate the intolerable remains the “normal” state of affairs. As my colleagues in criminal justice know, a heated debate has raged about why crime declined so much over the past decade. For a variety reasons, including the fact that I helped develop, to use Professor Michael Maxfield’s phrase, a theory of action that many believe was important in New York City, I have been an active participant in this debate. This theory is known as “Broken Windows,” however, I will not talk about it today. Now, I would like to address a different but related issue: not why did crime decline since the mid 1990s, but rather, what happened in the first place that many public spaces became zones of terror? How is it that carrying guns and killing each other became customary for youths in many neighborhoods? How did we lose control? In an absolute sense - a scientific sense - neither the question of why crime started to decline during the 1990s nor the question of why crime increased during the 1960s and 1970s is answerable. History has happened and explanations are post hoc. At best, we can reconstruct the history of events, use whatever data are available, check plausible interpretations, and select what seems to be the most credible explanation. This is what I will do here. I will frame my answer from my “personal past” – to use a phrase from Professor Rachel Hadas’ commencement address last year. This personal past for me now extends nearly seven decades. It is the sum of my childhood and adult memories, my study and reading, lessons from my mentors and, yes, my students, my professional practice as a social worker, my research, and my beliefs and inferences. As Brendan Gill suggests, this personal past is changeable and full of surprises. My argument in brief is this: starting in the 1950s, social policies and practices were put into place that weakened every institution of socialization and social control: especially families, schools, and neighborhoods. In the interests of shortening my presentation I will focus on policies affecting neighborhoods: specifically urban renewal, expressway construction, bussing to end school segregation, deinstitutionalization of the emotionally disturbed, and centralization of local government services. These policies and programs all touched my personal past: I did research on those who were displaced by urban renewal and federal highway construction, I was active in the 1960s civil rights movement, I ran a psychiatric hospital for children in the 1960s, and I have done criminal justice research, especially on police, since the 1970s. Perhaps none of the changes I will discuss, taken by themselves, would have had catastrophic social consequences. Indeed, some of them – again taken by themselves – might have had very happy results if properly implemented. Their mix, however, was catastrophic for many cities and neighborhoods. The starting point for me is urban renewal during the 1950s. Entire neighborhoods were bulldozed in the name of improving housing stock. Many of these were African American communities, almost all of them were poor neighborhoods. No provisions were made for those who were displaced. Most, being poor, moved to the least expensive housing available – often in adjacent neighborhoods that were largely white. Many whites resisted this movement. “Block busters” – unscrupulous realtors preying on racial fears and biases – went door-to-door in these neighborhoods exacerbating fear among homeowners. Housing values tumbled and whites fled. Banks redlined the areas – marked them as not worthy of housing loans. Two sets of neighborhoods were obliterated: those that were demolished and those that were undermined by overcrowding and unprincipled realtors and bankers. The housing that replaced the old stock compounded these tragedies. More often than not it consisted of large tower block construction. Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, in which I did research during the early 1980s, were the classic example of this – twenty-eight sixteen-story buildings stretching two miles along State Street. The buildings themselves covered approximately six percent of the available land. The combination of these vast empty spaces, the high-rise apartments, and external elevators that provided uncontrolled access to the balconies that all the apartments faced, meant that the resultant wasteland reached right to apartment doors. Space was configured in a way that nobody “owned” any of it. Neighborhood – with all it implies – was lost, first by demolition and then by layout and construction. Jane Jacobs, of course, predicted all of this in her classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was published in 1962, the same year that the Robert Taylor Homes were opened. By the way, by 2004 twenty-five of the buildings had been demolished. A similar story can be told about federal highway construction, also born during the 1950s. This, however, was simply a story of demolition, and it affected all races and social classes. In Milwaukee, to give one example, the Sixth Ward was a vibrant Italian community with great street life, restaurants, bars, and shops. It was demolished to make way for a central highway interchange. The residents dispersed widely throughout Milwaukee and its suburbs. The designers comforted themselves with this dispersal by holding it up as evidence that “the residents were ready to move into the melting pot of American society.” In other words, the designers really did the Italian community a favor by forcing residents out of their homes and neighborhood. The Sixth Ward was an example of the obliteration of a neighborhood, but just imagine how many neighborhoods and communities were split and/or cut off by expressways crisscrossing our cities. During the 1960s, we further weakened neighborhoods by bussing children to schools. The goal, of course, was to achieve racial balance in our schools – surely a laudable goal and certainly one that would be highly thought of in a place like Rutgers Newark University, which is justifiably proud of being the country’s most diverse university. This might be one of those changes that as I discussed earlier, had it been taken by itself, might have had a happy outcome. But what was not understood was the importance of neighborhood schools to communities. Neighborhood schools rivet parents’ attention on streets. To protect the comings and goings of their children, they have to own the streets. As children were withdrawn from the streets on which they had walked to schools, their parents' watchful eyes and presence left as well. Also, starting during the 1950s, advocates for the emotionally disturbed and severely disabled called for their deinstitutionalization. They had good reason. Conditions in many decrepit state hospitals and institutions were awful. The promise of antipsychotic drugs and the community mental health movement, as well as the prospects of saving money, resulted in the drastic curtailment of involuntary commitment laws, the subsequent wholesale release of thousands of patients, and the closing of most state mental hospitals. As we now know, the community mental health centers never came to fruition and a good share of the severely disturbed refused to take or could not manage their medications. As a consequence, many persons we refer to as homeless are in truth severely ill, their illness is often complicated by alcohol and/or drug addiction, and aside from many living on the streets, many others who are emotionally ill are housed in jails and prisons. Moreover, personal and family tragedies abound; dangerous persons whose threat is not “imminent” remain on the streets; and, many neighborhoods, especially in poor communities, are further destabilized by aggregations of severely disturbed “homeless.” Accompanying urban renewal, federal highway construction, bussing, and deinstitutionalization, a movement in urban governance – centralization – reached its peak during the 1960s. In the minds of urban reformers, centralized facilities and bureaucracies could best provide public services efficiently and equitably. This belief came into its heyday for police during the 1950s and 1960s. Police business became riding around in cars, after-the-fact criminal investigation of major crimes, and rapid response to calls for service via 911. Abandoned were foot patrols, traditional crime prevention, peacekeeping, and order maintenance. (I could give similar examples of the centralization of other criminal justice agencies and their impacts on neighborhoods here, however, in the interest of brevity will move on.) The good news was that the vast majority of young persons were relatively unaffected by these policies. Moreover, many neighborhoods, including poor ones, resisted the tide and maintained control over public spaces. Yet in many other neighborhoods, some place along the line we reached a “tipping point” – Malcolm Gladwell’s popular phrase – and residents lost control. For "wannabes" (youths who are not really intent on mayhem, but who do enough posturing and "woofing" that they intimidate people) and real predators, to say nothing about the violent emotionally ill, the breakdown in neighborhoods was made to order. Intimidation, extortion, and "in your face" confrontations were not only had to be tolerated in the name of self protection, but in many cases were elevated by social science and legal lore to expressions of cultural diversity that should "enrich" their victims. To use Norman Podhoretz's phrase, "tolerating the intolerable" became a civic duty for decent people. If I am correct in my examination of the past, what are the implications? First, in some respects, I am optimistic. We got into trouble not because of the economy, and not because of the increase in the number of youth in our population; we got into trouble because of bad policies. This can change and there is a lot of evidence that we are correcting some of these bad policies. In my business – criminal justice – community and problem-oriented courts, for example drug courts, are springing up throughout the country; probation and parole officers are again starting to work in neighborhoods and communities; community policing is widespread and gaining in sophistication; and community prosecution is catching on. In each case it is understood that their business is not just to respond to crimes after they occur; their business is to stop the next crime. It is also understood that they have to learn to work together if they are to succeed. I can point to other developments: neighborhoods have mobilized and are recovering public spaces; business improvement districts are reclaiming commercial neighborhoods; the tower block buildings are coming down; crime prevention theories, many of them developed here at Rutgers Newark University, are proving to be effective; the list could go on. But we have done a lot of damage. We have the social disaster of imprisoning a generation of African American youth. Many of these youths are returning to neighborhoods ill prepared by their prison experiences for productive lives. Gangs are shifting from being a local and national problem to an international problem. And, while most crimes continue to decline, shootings and homicides are on the increase in many communities. This is a story of gun-carrying, drug-dealing youths who are draping themselves in colors and killing each other most often over trivial incidents. And I have not even talked about terrorism. So, what is to be learned from these experiences? First, good intentions do not result in good policies. People of good faith do want to improve housing conditions for the poor; they do not want the emotionally disturbed to be warehoused; they do want to recognize and capitalize on diversity both in our schools and broadly in society. Yet we must understand that social action to improve the quality of life of citizens always has costs and unanticipated consequences. Second, we must be careful of over reliance on experts and elites. It was not bad people or dumb people who got us into the crime mess; it was well-intentioned professionals who simply did not take the extra necessary steps to think things through properly. Finally, at least in this context, programs interact. At a time when neighborhoods were under assault, well-meaning criminal justice professionals decided to pull out of them. Had police, for example, still been in neighborhoods during the 1960s and 1970s – not just driving around waiting for the next call – perhaps they could have shored up weakening citizen claims over public space. Had prosecutors and courts been present in communities, perhaps they would have been aware of what was really bothering residents. So there is a lot to do. But if your children are ever to live in a safe world like I did as a child, it will require, first, your personal commitment to good citizenship – a commitment to mind your own behavior, to control your children, to oversee public spaces, to care for your neighbors, and to seek social and economic justice. But for many of you, it will require a professional commitment as well. That is, especially for you who enter public life, you must find the fact that people still live in terrorized neighborhoods absolutely intolerable. We must maintain the will to assist them and develop the skill to free them. We must not lose our indignation that there are children in Newark, Irvington, East Orange, Trenton, Camden and other cities who cannot safely play in their yards or parks. This is unacceptable. footnotes: Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Little, Brown, and Company, Boston, 2000. Norman Podhoretz, “My New York,” National Review, June 14, 1999, p. 41. Back to List