Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving beyond Strong Causal Reasoning

Abstract

A backlash has set in against order maintenance policing strategies, if not among policymakers and the public, then at least among criminologists.This backlash has several components, but the most prominent rests on empirical studies that have claimed to cast doubt on James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's broken windows theory-the theory that disorder, left unchecked, leads to crime by driving residents indoors and sending a message to would-be offenders that a neighborhood is out of control.'In this paper I argue that this backlash focuses too narrowly on the broken windows theory in its assessments of order maintenance policing, and I develop and apply alternative methods of analysis that focus more directly on the intrinsic merits of efforts to reduce disorder by using ethnographic research and normative analysis.In the process, I analyze the few grounded descriptions of order maintenance practice that have been presented in the literature to argue that at least some kinds of order maintenance policing are intrinsically valuable-regardless of the impact they have on serious crime-because they address important instances of accumulative harms and offenses. 2Policing inappropriately ignores these problems when it only focuses on serious crime.In making this argument, I draw on and extend recent ideas in policy analysis about the way scholarship can best inform public policy.In current debates, both opponents and proponents of order maintenance often presume that its benefits are best judged by its contribution to crime reduction-by its indirect effects on serious crime, rather than its direct

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