After Gunn’s cleanup was well underway, William Bratton, also a disciple of The Broken Window Theory, was hired to head the NYC Transit Police. Like Gunn before him, with serious felonies plaguing the subway system Bratton decided to crackdown on the seemingly far less significant issue of fare-beating. To Bratton, fare-beating was the “broken window” that signaled disorder and invited more serious crimes.
It was estimated that nearly 200,000 people a day entered the transit system without paying. If the perpetrators were not arrested it would only snowball, and those that would otherwise not consider evading the law would slide down the slope, reasoning, “If others don’t pay, why should I?”
Bratton, with all of his resourcefulness, was hard-pressed to rally the support of police officers. The cost of the subway fare was only $1.25. For a cop to arrest a fare-beater for this piddling misdemeanor it would mean a trip to the station, filling out the necessary forms, and waiting for them to be processed, while far more felonious crimes were being perpetrated in the subway stations and trains to the tune of over 250 a week! To invest an entire day over a crime that never merited more than a slap on the wrist seemed like an egregious hemorrhage of time.
Bratton saw it otherwise. He would assign as many as ten plainclothesmen to guard the turnstiles. They would bust a fare-beater, cuff him to the grate, and leave him standing, to reflect in a humiliating, ever-increasing daisy chain of criminals for everyone else to observe until they had a “full catch.” The arrestees were then ceremoniously marched outside to a city bus that had been retrofitted into a police station-on-wheels, where they were booked, finger-printed, and placed into a holding pen. All of this just yards from the subway station, freeing up the cops to return to the station and bust the next batch.
Bratton further saw to it that all of those arrested for fare-beating underwent a background check and body search, yielding a bonanza! One out of seven had an outstanding warrant for a previous crime, and one out of 20 was carrying a weapon. The message got through and the subway was cleaned up.
Upon being elected mayor, Rudy Giuliani hired Bratton as his police commissioner; both were adherents to The Broken Windows Theory. In his first inaugural address, Mayor Guiliani famously embarked on a crusade against the “squeegee men,” who would surround a car stopped in traffic or at a signal light. They would then, unsolicited, proceed to wash the stopped car’s windshield, before demanding remuneration.
The press questioned as to why a city plagued by unemployment, traffic nightmares, homicides, inadequate housing, parking impossibilities, mass transit financial unviability, race tensions, and public school management crises (to name a but a few of Gotham’s major problems) should make its first priority such a minor nuisance?
Giuliani clarified and set policy that the near-ubiquitous presence of the squeegee men created an environment of disorder that encouraged more serious crime to flourish. Broken windows of every form would not be tolerated. A bad influence can corrupt a neighborhood and decay a city. The squeegee men went and with them went the appallingly high level of crime in New York City.
Chodesh Tov – have a pleasant month!
