The Tipping Point Chapter 4 Analysis

In chapter four his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the crime epidemic in New York City in the 1980’s, and more so what happened to turn the epidemic around. With compelling and intricate arguments, he detailed how something called the Power of Context and the Broken Windows Theory managed to turn the New York subways, and eventually the city as a whole around from alarming high amounts of crime to the widespread belief that shooting someone on the subway was a radial notion. This discussion starts out with the brief story of Bernard Goetz shooting four black youths on a subway train in 1984, this story is the basis of the discussion of how that event came to be, and how similar events were prevented in the future. The …show more content…
Kelling was hired by the city as a consultant and cracked down on graffiti, from 1984-1990, to the point where a car was not allowed to go out unless it was clean and they would wait in the yard for kids to finish their graffiti and paint over it right in front of them to show them that they are wasting their time. After that, Kelling was hired as the head of the transit police and cracked down on farebeating. This problem hadn’t been taken care of before because police didn’t think an arrest was worth a $1.25 fare token or the time it would take to get to the station for one arrest. When those things are singled out, its true that its not worth it, but nobody realized the other crimes that those little thing lead to. Kelling redesigned a city bus to be a moving station with a fax machine and everything so all police officers had to do was handcuff fare-beaters, wait until they had a decent amount, and wait for the bus to come around to process the arrests. This solution took care of the time it took to get to the station, as well as the public humiliation fare-beaters endured. In addition to this, when a fare-beater was processed, they were background checked, and it turned out that one out of seven had a warrant out and one out of twenty had a weapon of some sorts. In the first few months of this, ejections for stations tripled and cops started to understand that these “quality-of-life” crimes, were indeed …show more content…
However, the arguments presented in many publications suggest that people are forgetting what the theory behind broken windows policing is. They complain and argue about arresting someone for minor offenses and how it sets people back but the premise of broken windows is to stop the small things in order to prevent the big things. In an article by K. Babe Howell, he states that broken windows policing is really just zero-tolerance policing, and that it makes public spaces very dangerous for black people. He brings up the case of Eric Garner and specifically states “In New York City today, Eric Garner would not be dead and his children would have a father if not for zero-tolerance policing” (Howell, 2016). This statement implies that zero-tolerance policing is what caused a specific cop to act over aggressively towards Eric Garner, and kill him. Yet, looking back at the original premise for broken windows policing, nothing was said about being over aggressive, but it did essentially say to arrest the man illegally selling cigarettes so that others don’t think it is ok and snowball onto worse crimes. Howell also provides statistics, saying that there were almost 200,000 more non-felony arrest made in 2014 than in 1989, and that the revenue