Sitting in a highrise. Staring out into space.
She turns and asks: “what do you think they’re doing in that window over there?”
It’s 3:30am, and one of the city’s most expensive hotels bursts through the low-rise jungle foliage less than a stone’s throw away. Its western face sits directly across from their elevated garden patio.
In a well-lit window themselves, they muse about the nature of their own story, and how the exercise would be just as enjoyable from the other side of that same visual equation, staring out at their own towering spire through that well-lit window in the fancy hotel.
“They’re make-up artists,” she said with confidence, “and they need the bright light to paint some beautiful faces before a morning date with the camera.”
A distinct possibility, for sure. But the scenario begs a far bigger question: why do we judge our surroundings the way we do? And better yet, does that judgement actually influence the way we interact with our environment? Does the fact that the hotel is “fancy” alter our basic expectations? What if it was a crackhouse? Or a flower shop? Or a private daycare center?
To address these issues in perceptual analytics, we need to look no further than Kelling’s landmark paper on the great crime epidemic in 1970s new york. Kelling’s theory proceeds from three fundamental principles, which together help to explain why we sometimes think and act the way we do: 1) we are all products of our immediate environment; 2) people stop caring when no one else does, and 3) crime will undoubtedly flourish if the first two principles are satisfied.
To illustrate, he calls our attention to certain specific visual cues that prevailed in the Big Apple during the 70s and early 80s, like broken windows on buildings and graffiti on walls and subway cars, all of which (in his opinion) can have an extremely powerful but often subconscious impact on a local population. When present, says Kelling, these less than flattering signs of general urban disrepair grant a sort of “passive permission” for area residents to engage in more serious levels of socially deviant behaviour.
Similarly, when that same couple stares out from their ritzy condominium on the upper east side, the activities that they might expect to take place in a hotel across the street are perfectly matched to the visual cues around them, like fine-car dealers, chic art galleries and various designer salons and spas, and the couple is consequently less likely to engage in crimes of mischief and negligence.
With that in mind, as a consultant to the newly minted commissioner of the New York Transit Authority, Kelling aggressively targeted vandalism along the subway’s more challenging commuter lines. His theory: that the mere sight of unauthorized graffiti spoke volumes about the New York’s commitment to fighting delinquency (i.e. if the city didn’t care, then the people wouldn’t care), and at that point, criminals really had nothing to fear.
People who might never have considered any sort of subversive behaviour began to engage in petty crime, if for no other reason than the fear of any serious repercussion was completely and devastatingly removed. Fare-dodging had grown rampant, littering had become an almost instinctual affair, petty theft and vandalism became daily inconveniences, and the whole system slowly flushed itself into a wickedly vicious criminal cycle that profoundly altered the face of New York for over two decades.
Kelling’s advice: throw on a few buckets of paint, install a few windows, take a firm stance on petty crime, and the civilian perspective will actually change. People will start to care again. Law and order will once again be restored. Crime will meet its punishment. And as a natural and beneficial consequence, what was once old and neglected would surely be reborn.
It took the commission nearly 16 years to fix up every last car and clean up every last line, but by 1990, the back of the New York crimewave had finally been broken. Giuliani’s zero-tolerance policy had effectively proven to criminals that the city did “care”, and along with the subway rehab, these two important social programs actually reversed the criminal epidemic that swept so rapidly through the cradle of modern capitalism only a quarter century before.
As the broken windows were fixed and the crime-rate slowly (but surely) declined, money and tourism finally returned to the city that never sleeps, and a distinctly virtuous cycle of empowered social consciousness finally spread through those five ancient burroughs, bringing the sleeping american juggernaut back to life.
In the end, that same couple on the upper east side might have expected an entirely different scenario in the hotel across the way if their neighbourhood was infested not with Rolls Royce dealers and fancy boutiques but with shattered panes of glass and layers of multi-coloured paint…
“They’re gangsters,” he mused with equal conviction. “Dropped off a few kilos from the Montreal Angels, spent a big night out on the town, and came back to the hotel with several ladies in tow from the local ballet.” Who knows, the pair might have even shattered a few windows themselves if the windows stayed broken for long enough.
But that’s really the point. That’s why we act the way we do. Because we judge the way we do. Because we take our cues from the immediate environment when we’re trying to figure out “right” from “wrong”. That’s how we synthesize all aspects of our life into acceptable social activity: by borrowing permission from the world around us. When the windows are fixed, that fancy hotel might host a dozen make-up artists. when they’re broken, it might host a dozen crackheads.
For the young couple, it was simply an observation of the seemingly infinite possibilities that might unfold from a single bright light in a room across the way.