case, Mellon was known as Britain's most aggressive, some say brutal, police chief. His district has the dubious distinction of using more tear gas than any other in the country. He admires Margaret Thatcher, whose prime ministerial reign included episodes of unprecedented police brutality against people of color, from Brixton to Toxteth, and against British miners. Mallon nonetheless feels that policing under the iron lady was soft. A villain will get up in the morning, steal a newspaper and a pint of milk from a doorstep, snatch someone' s bicycle and go on a shop-lifting spree, he explains. By lunchtime he will have committed a dozen (The Scotsman, 1997). His preferred artillery for this war on crime is imported from New York City: the doctrine known as tolerance. Zero tolerance stems from a two-decade-old study by two conservative social scientists who proposed the broken thesis: if people are allowed to break windows with impunity, not only do smaller crimes lead to more serious ones, but the disordered appearance of the neighborhood perpetrates criminal disorder (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). The geographic signs of disorder produce the disorder itself; zero tolerance for even minor crimes nurtures an anticrime environment. The study was written as U.S. liberal urban policy lay in decay, but it was only seriously applied in the 1990s when alternatives to that liberalism were being energetically constructed. Most inftuentially implemented in New York City by police chief William Bratton and Mayor Giuliani, zero tolerance was only part of a much larger shift in U.S. urban policy. The bankruptcy of liberal urban
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