Definition

“According to [Broken Windows], the cause of crime is disorder that goes unchecked and is permitted to spread throughout a neighborhood or community. Disorder is theorized to scare people and makes them believe that their neighborhood is unsafe. These people subsequently withdraw from public spaces. The disorderly environment and empty streets invite crime and criminals.” ~ Broken Windows Policing by Jacinta M. Gau and Alesha Cameron

The Police and Neighborhood Safety: Broken Windows
By James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
March 1982 | The Atlantic Monthly (at 29 - 38) (PDF)
Pp. 13 – 14: The concern about equity is more serious. We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable than another but how do we ensure that age or skin color or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? 
We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question. We are not confident that there is a satisfactory answer except to hope that by their selection, training, and supervision, the police will be inculcated with a clear sense of the outer limit of their discretionary authority. That limit, roughly, is this--the police exist to help regulate behavior, not to maintain the racial or ethnic purity of a neighborhood. 

Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities 
by George L. Kelling and Catharine Coles (1996)  

Street Stops and Broken Window: Terry, Race, and Disorder in New York City
Jeffrey Fagan – Columbia Law School; Garth Davies – Rutgers University
Fordham Urban Law Journal Volume 28 | Number 2 (2000)
Our empirical evidence suggests that policing is not about disorderly places, nor about improving the quality of life, but about policing poor people in poor places. This strategy contradicts the policy rationale derived from Broken Windows theory, and deviates from the original emphasis on communities by focusing on people. Racially disparate policing reinforces perceptions by citizens in minority neighborhoods that they are under non-particularized suspicion and are therefore targeted for aggressive stop and frisk policing. 

Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-City Social Experiment.
June 14, 2005. Harcourt, Bruce and Ludwig, Jens,

How New York Became Safe: The Full Story
A citywide effort, involving many agencies and institutions, helped restore order.
George L. Kelling | city-journal.org | Special Issue 2009 

New York City Voters Want Their Broken Windows Fixed, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds
August 27, 2014 

The Problem Is the Abuse of ‘Broken Windows,’ Not the Policy
Charles D. Ellison | The Root | 1/08/15 
“[We can’t] allow headlines to generate public policy,” Eric Adams, the Brooklyn, N.Y., borough president and a former cop, told The Root recently. “Broken windows is actually good policing practice. I’m just not supporting abuse of broken windows.”

Don’t Blame My ‘Broken Windows’ Theory For Poor Policing 
The co-author of an influential approach to police tactics argues it’s been misunderstood
Aug. 11, 2015 | George Kelling | Politico

William J. Bratton and George L. Kelling Why We Need Broken Windows Policing

It has saved countless New York lives—most of them minority—cut the jail
population, and reknit the social fabric. 
Winter 2015 | city-journal.org   

This tactic has its roots in English common law and was shaped in the United States by the Supreme Court’s 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision, which established the “reasonable suspicion” threshold for stopping and questioning, carving out a public-safety and law-enforcement exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for judicial warrants. It recognized that the police officer on the street, faced with possible criminal activity, would be unable to secure a warrant—and therefore be unable to act in time to stop a crime. Terry thus held that officers lacking a warrant may make short-term, forcible stops to intervene in what they reasonably suspect to be criminal activity. If these suspicions prove unfounded, the officers must immediately release the people they have stopped. A Terry stop is generally interpreted to require a well-founded suspicion, not just a hunch.

Unlike SQF [stop, question & frisk] , Broken Windows policing is not a tactical response based on reasonable suspicion of possible criminality. Rather, it is a more broadly based policy mandating that police will address disorderly illegal behavior, such as public drinking and drug use, fights, public urination, and other acts considered to be minor offenses, with responses ranging from warning and referral to summons and arrest. Most often in these cases, police have witnessed the crime in question and are acting on probable cause, the constitutional grounds for summons and arrest—a far greater level of police intervention than a Terry stop. 

In August 2014, in the wake of Eric Garner’s death after an arrest for a quality-of-life offense on Staten Island, Quinnipiac University conducted a poll gauging the views of New York City residents toward the police and Broken Windows enforcement. The poll found that the overall approval rating of the NYPD had fallen by nine percentage points, to 50 percent, because of concerns about Garner’s death and police use of force. A full 90 percent of African-American respondents and 71 percent of Hispanic respondents agreed that there was “no excuse” for how police had acted in the Garner incident. However, even in this highly charged context, support for Broken Windows remained high. African-Americans supported it by 56 to 37 percent, whites by 61 to 33 percent, and Hispanics by the largest margin of all—64 to 34 percent. The poll results reflect the underlying public support from all races for this kind of enforcement.