Political scientist James Q. Wilson, whose "broken windows" theory on crime-fighting helped trigger a nationwide move toward community policing, died Friday at a Boston hospital. He was 80. 
 
 FILE - In this 1972 file photo, Harvard government professor James Q. Wilson is shown in Boston. Wilson, a political scientist whose "broken windows" theory of policing influenced a nationwide move toward... (Associated Press) 
 
 A hospital spokeswoman said Wilson died at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Wilson was being treated for leukemia, according to Peter Skerry, a family friend and Boston College political science professor. 
 
 Wilson wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books on various topics, but his study of police work and the importance of quickly attacking even small signs of disorder have resonated for decades. He was a distinguished scholar in Boston College's political science department at the time of his death. 
 
 The ideas in his 1982 "Broken Windows" article in The Atlantic influenced successful community policing efforts in cities including New York and Los Angeles. Last month, Detroit announced it was beginning its own initiative. 
 
 "He's just clearly one of the foremost social scientists of the second half of the 20th century," Skerry said. "He was a very on-the-ground kind of scholar and brought a great insight and common sense to things." 
 
 Wilson and co-author George L. Kelling argued in The Atlantic article that communities must address minor crimes and their effects, such as broken windows, to prevent larger problems from developing. 
 
 "I think Jim and I caught a wind," Kelling said in an interview Friday. "Up until that time in policing, nothing seemed to work. ... By the late `70s, policing was kind of looking for a new approach and community policing was kind of on the horizon, although not yet being really articulated." 
 
 Kelling said the article instantly resonated with law enforcement and also caught the general public's attention because the "broken windows" metaphor was so effective. 
 
 "That was pure Wilson," said Kelling, now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. "The thing about a metaphor is it takes a complex thing and simplifies it and makes it readily graspable." 
 
 The article was based on firsthand research _ Kelling walked the beat alongside Newark, N.J., police during the 1970s _ as well as the work of other scientists. In it, Wilson and Kelling argued that policing had historically been about maintaining order, but had become overly focused on solving serious crimes. 
 
 Police had shied away from walking patrols, becoming walled-off in cruisers and paying little attention to minor offenses in communities that created a sense of disorder, such as breaking windows, they said. 
 
 They argued the crime of vandalism wasn't as damaging as the message the broken window sent about the community, leading to more serious crimes there. 
 
 "Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing," they wrote. 
 
 The article concluded, "Police ought to protect communities as well as individuals. ... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police _ and the rest of us _ ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows." 
 
 Police and politicians responded in subsequent years with changed tactics to crack down on minor offenses and bring officers closer to communities and their problems. In the New York subway system, for instance, police cracked down on so-called minor offenses such on graffiti, panhandling and fare jumping and saw dramatic improvements in perception of public safety. 
 
 William Bratton, former New York City police commissioner and Los Angeles police chief, said police need more than a "broken windows" strategy to prevent more serious crime, but the success he's seen in cities where he worked wouldn't have happened without it. 
 
 "It could not have been done without using broken windows as almost the linchpin strategy," said Bratton, now chairman of Kroll, Inc., a risk management company. 
 
 Wilson's studies weren't limited to police work. He wrote extensively on topics ranging from marriage to the nature of bureaucracy and even penned a tribute to Bill Watterson when the cartoonist retired his comic strip, "Calvin and Hobbes." 
 
 In his work, Wilson was preoccupied with studying and restudying the evidence, trying to see only what was in front of him, Skerry said. 
 
 "He didn't get caught up in abstruse theories or sophisticated methodologies," Skerry said. 
 
 In his personal life, Wilson was also well-grounded, Skerry said, describing him as a typical native of southern California: "open and egalitarian." 
 
 "He was just as comfortable having a burger at a joint on the Pacific Coast Highway that bikers would go to as he would be at his favorite steakhouse in New York or his favorite hotel in London," Skerry said. 
 
 Wilson taught at Harvard for 26 years, then moved in the late 1980s back to California to teach at the University of California at Los Angeles and Pepperdine. 
 
 He later returned to New England to be closer to his two children and grandchildren. ||||| During Mr. Giuliani’s tenure, from 1994 to 2001, the rate of violent felonies plunged, amplifying his reputation as a crime-fighter — he had been a prosecutor — and increasing his popularity. 
 
 Mr. Bratton left New York to become commissioner in Los Angeles, where crime also fell. 
 
 But Mr. Wilson’s theory and its application have had their critics. Some accused Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bratton of waging an overly aggressive campaign against panhandlers and the so-called squeegee men, who confronted motorists. And some researchers have questioned the efficacy of the program, saying that other factors, including the waning of the crack epidemic, were more responsible for the declining crime rate than the “broken windows” approach. The theory was first espoused by Mr. Wilson and George L. Kelling, a criminologist who had studied foot patrols in Newark, in 1982 in an article in the magazine The Atlantic. 
 
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 The approach is psychologically based. It proceeds from the presumption, supported by research, that residents’ perceptions of the safety of their neighborhood is based not on whether there is a high rate of crime, but on whether the neighborhood appears to be well tended — that is, whether its residents hold it in mutual regard, uphold the locally accepted obligations of civility, and outwardly disdain the flouting of those obligations. 
 
 In Mr. Wilson’s metaphor — Mr. Kelling gave Mr. Wilson credit for it — when a window is broken and someone fixes it, that is a sign that disorder will not be tolerated. But “one unrepaired broken window,” they wrote, “is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” 
 
 The authors argued that acts of criminality are fostered by such an “untended” environment, and that the solution is thus to tend it by being intolerant of the smallest illegalities. The wish “to ‘decriminalize’ disreputable behavior that ‘harms no one’ — and thus remove the ultimate sanction the police can employ to maintain neighborhood order — is, we think, a mistake,” Mr. Wilson and Mr. Kelling wrote. “Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community.” 
 
 “A particular rule that seems to make sense in the individual case makes no sense when it is made a universal rule and applied to all cases,” they added. “It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.” 
 
 Mr. Bratton said in an interview on Friday that he had become interested in the “broken windows” theory independently, when he was working in Boston, where residents living in high-crime areas told him that what they worried most about was prostitution and graffiti. 
 
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 “The importance of what Wilson and Kelling wrote was the emphasis not only on crime committed against people but the emphasis on crimes committed against the community, neighborhoods,” Mr. Bratton said. 
 
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 James Quinn Wilson was born on May 27, 1931, in Denver, and grew up mostly in Long Beach, Calif. His father, Claude, was a salesman; his mother, Marie, a homemaker. 
 
 He graduated from the University of Redlands in the San Bernardino Valley, east of Los Angeles, then served in the Navy during the Korean War (not in combat). He then pursued advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, where he earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. 
 
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 He arrived at Harvard in 1961. He later taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Pepperdine University. 
 
 Mr. Wilson, who lived in North Andover, Mass., for the past three years after more than 20 years in Southern California, met his wife, the former Roberta Evans, in high school; they married in 1952. 
 
 Besides his son, Matthew, he is survived by his wife; their daughter, Annie Gilbert; a sister, Diane Gray; and five grandchildren. 
 
 Mr. Wilson’s first book, “Negro Politics” (1960), was among the first serious sociological analyses of the role of blacks in urban politics. Since then, in dozens of articles for publications that included Commentary, The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in several books, he explored individual behavior and its relationship to institutions and to society as a whole. 
 
 In “Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It” (1989), he analyzed the inner workings of agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as prisons and schools, pointing out the general disconnect between the people at the top who make the policies and the people at the bottom who do the work. 
 
 The largest percentage of his oeuvre, however, was devoted to the issue of crime. An early book, “The Varieties of Police Behavior,” led to an invitation to serve on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Crime and the Administration of Justice. On the issue of crime and punishment, as in other areas, Mr. Wilson was an avowed conservative, arguing, for example, that strict punishment for criminals, including the death penalty, has a deterrent effect on crime. 
 
 But even his critics acknowledged that he was less an ideologue than a scientist; he supported the war in Iraq and wrote that marriage should be defined by the union of one man and one woman, but he dismissed criticism of Darwin and suspicion of the theory of evolution. 
 
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 “I know my political ideas affect what I write,” he acknowledged in a 1998 interview in The Times, “but I’ve tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I’ve written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn’t know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.” ||||| In the mid-1970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers. 
 
 Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a "good pinch." In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along. 
 
 Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars. 
 
 These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer. 
 
 But how can a neighborhood be "safer" when the crime rate has not gone down—in fact, may have gone up? Finding the answer requires first that we understand what most often frightens people in public places. Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed. 
 
 What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods. Though the neighborhoods were predominantly black and the foot patrolmen were mostly white, this "order-maintenance" function of the police was performed to the general satisfaction of both parties. 
 
 One of us (Kelling) spent many hours walking with Newark foot-patrol officers to see how they defined "order" and what they did to maintain it. One beat was typical: a busy but dilapidated area in the heart of Newark, with many abandoned buildings, marginal shops (several of which prominently displayed knives and straight-edged razors in their windows), one large department store, and, most important, a train station and several major bus stops. Though the area was run-down, its streets were filled with people, because it was a major transportation center. The good order of this area was important not only to those who lived and worked there but also to many others, who had to move through it on their way home, to supermarkets, or to factories. 
 
 The people on the street were primarily black; the officer who walked the street was white. The people were made up of "regulars" and "strangers." Regulars included both "decent folk" and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who "knew their place." Strangers were, well, strangers, and viewed suspiciously, sometimes apprehensively. The officer—call him Kelly—knew who the regulars were, and they knew him. As he saw his job, he was to keep an eye on strangers, and make certain that the disreputable regulars observed some informal but widely understood rules. Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops, but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden. If a dispute erupted between a businessman and a customer, the businessman was assumed to be right, especially if the customer was a stranger. If a stranger loitered, Kelly would ask him if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy. Noisy teenagers were told to keep quiet. 
 
 These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the "regulars" on the street. Another neighborhood might have different rules, but these, everybody understood, were the rules for this neighborhood. If someone violated them, the regulars not only turned to Kelly for help but also ridiculed the violator. Sometimes what Kelly did could be described as "enforcing the law," but just as often it involved taking informal or extralegal steps to help protect what the neighborhood had decided was the appropriate level of public order. Some of the things he did probably would not withstand a legal challenge. 
 
 A determined skeptic might acknowledge that a skilled foot-patrol officer can maintain order but still insist that this sort of "order" has little to do with the real sources of community fear—that is, with violent crime. To a degree, that is true. But two things must be borne in mind. First, outside observers should not assume that they know how much of the anxiety now endemic in many big-city neighborhoods stems from a fear of "real" crime and how much from a sense that the street is disorderly, a source of distasteful, worrisome encounters. The people of Newark, to judge from their behavior and their remarks to interviewers, apparently assign a high value to public order, and feel relieved and reassured when the police help them maintain that order. ||||| James Q. Wilson, a social scientist who helped launch a revolution in law enforcement as the co-inventor of the "broken windows" theory — the idea that eradicating graffiti, public drunkenness and other signposts of community decay was crucial to making neighborhoods safer — died Friday in Boston. He was 80.The cause was complications of leukemia , according to his son, Matthew Wilson.Often called the "father of community policing," Wilson, who taught for many years at UCLA and Pepperdine University, was a widely admired public intellectual who wrote more than two dozen books on American government, criminal justice and moral issues. Former Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once called him "the smartest man in the United States."In 2003, Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush Wilson changed the face of American policing in 1982 when he and colleague George L. Kelling wrote an article for the Atlantic titled "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety."As crime rates soared across the country, the two academics made a provocative argument about the role of police: Instead of defining themselves mainly as crime fighters, Kelling and Wilson wrote, the police should become keepers of public order. Instead of focusing principally on the big crimes, such as robbery and murder, the authors said, they should pay more attention to the smaller problems that were eroding the quality of life in people's communities and weakening their defenses to major crime.Or, as Wilson and Kelling explained in deceptively simple terms: "One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.""That's where American policing was falling down on the job," William J. Bratton, who implemented the broken windows theory with dramatic success during his tenures as police chief in New York in the 1990s and Los Angeles in the 2000s, said in an interview Friday. "Jim Wilson and George Kelling reshaped the way law enforcement thought about its role and staunchly defended the idea of proactive policing that focuses not only on preventing crime but disorder."The broken windows approach bolstered the rise of community policing, which emphasized a closer partnership between citizens and police and was embraced by law enforcement agencies across the country.The theory remains controversial. It alarms liberal critics who say it ignores the root causes of crime — factors such as poverty, racism and lack of economic opportunity. Other critics argue that broken windows strategies have not worked or unfairly target some populations. "A disproportionate number of minorities have been arrested, and police misconduct complaints have increased as stops, frisks and arrests for minor crimes have multiplied," Bernard E. Harcourt wrote in his 2003 book "Illusion of Order.""The broken window theory, which was a very subtle argument for police discretion, was being represented as zero tolerance … which was used in a pejorative sense," Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said in an interview. "We were not advocating zealotry on the part of police."What Jim and I did was, in a sense, rediscover the past, when police were concerned about disorderly behavior," Kelling noted. "We gave police a rationale to pay attention to the problems bothering citizens."According to Bratton, who carried extra copies of the Atlantic article to hand out at conferences and other gatherings, the theory was often misrepresented as a crime cure-all, instead of as "an essential medicine in my medicine kit."During Bratton's years in New York in the 1990s, serious crimes dropped 33% citywide and homicides by 50%. During his tenure in Los Angeles, killings were down by half and robberies by a third in 2009 compared to 2002, the year Bratton began the broken windows approach here. Arrests for the lesser crimes emphasized by the broken windows theory — such as disorderly conduct, prostitution, small-scale drug offenses — had increased 30% over the same period.Calling Wilson his intellectual mentor, Bratton added, "Jim understood that the style of policing in the '70s and '80s, which had retreated from controlling disorder in our streets, was like neglecting a cancer . Broken windows says get the melanoma on the surface before it gets in and kills you."James Quinn Wilson was born May 27, 1931, in Denver and grew up in Long Beach. He graduated from the University of Redlands in 1952 and served three years in the Navy before entering the University of Chicago , where he earned a doctorate in political science in 1959. One of his key influences there was political science professor Edward C. Banfield, who taught the importance of translating complex ideas into plain and forceful English.Decades later, fans of Wilson would attest that the lesson was well learned.In 1961, he joined the faculty at Harvard University , where his scholarship on policing drew the attention of President Johnson's administration. He was invited to join a presidential commission on crime, which sparked an inquiry that eventually became the focus of his professional work."The standard question was why did people commit crimes. I wanted to ask why people don't commit them," he told the New York Times in 1998.Many of his books tackled thorny questions of crime and race, such as "Crime and Human Nature," co-written with Richard J. Herrnstein and published in 1988."Even to allude to the possibility that races may differ in the distribution of those constitutional factors that are associated with criminality will strike some people as factually, ethically or prudentially wrong," they wrote. "We disagree."Wilson's views won favor among neoconservatives, not a popular faction at a liberal bastion like Harvard.In 1986, after more than 25 years at Harvard, he moved to UCLA's Anderson School of Management, where, some colleagues suggested, the more conservative atmosphere was a welcome change.But Wilson, referring to his early years in Southern California, said he just wanted to come home. He later taught at Pepperdine.He was often asked to advise elected leaders and LAPD brass preparing a blueprint to overhaul the policies and practices of the department in the wake of the 1991 police beating of motorist Rodney G. King during the stormy end of Chief Daryl Gates' tenure.Although best known for his contributions to policing, Wilson often said his proudest work was "The Moral Sense" (1993), which explores the basis of right and wrong behavior and makes the argument that moral impulses are shaped more strongly by biology than culture."He wanted to know what makes us tick," said Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, which recently created the James Q. Wilson Chair in American Politics and Culture. "That is a window into the character of the man. He wanted to serve and wanted people to live a better life. That's what he did with his life and his career."Reviews were mixed. "Reading this book is a little like talking to a well-intentioned, basically sound, but cranky old dinner partner," the Washington Post wrote. "Wilson is often convincing. He makes solid arguments. But every once in a while you have to pause and wait while he drones on about kids these days … or some other half-relevant project from his youth."With John Dilulio, Wilson co-wrote "American Government" (1980), a widely used college text still in print. One of Wilson's last books was "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families." (2002).In addition to his son, Wilson is survived by his wife of 59 years, Roberta Wilson; a daughter, Annie Gilbert; and five grandchildren.
– James Q. Wilson, who came up with the influential "broken windows" theory of policing and crime prevention, died yesterday of leukemia at age 80. A sample of the obituaries: Los Angeles Times: He "helped launch a revolution in law enforcement" with the windows theory—"the idea that eradicating graffiti, public drunkenness and other signposts of community decay was crucial to making neighborhoods safer." New York Times: His theory "holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down." Cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston embraced it. Associated Press: He "helped trigger a nationwide move toward community policing." Original 1982 article: Wilson pitched his theory in the Atlantic 30 years ago with coauthor George Kelling. A key line: "(I)f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. ... One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)” Read it in full here.