George Kelling, a criminologist whose “broken windows” theory, conceived with political scientist James Wilson, became a cornerstone of “community policing” throughout the nation, has died from complications of cancer at 83.
He died at his home in Hanover, N.H., on May 15, The Washington Post reported.
Drawing on research and his own field studies in Newark and Kansas City, Mo., Kelling popularized “broken windows” in an article in The Atlantic magazine in 1982 that he wrote with Wilson, who died in 2012, the Post reported.
“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” they wrote.
Kelling told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007 that he was interested in how police tactics had changed from the old-fashioned, neighborhood cop walking a beat.
“My own experience told me when a police car went by, they were always on their way to do something else,” Kelling said, the Post reported. “And when foot patrol officers walked by, they were there for me.”
Former Police Commissioner William Bratton told the New York Times that Kelling had “been the most profound influence on American policing in the last 40 or 50 years… I put into practice his theories and they worked.”
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