Baudl Novice Pack Broken Windows Policing - MR Chad Edit

Broken Windows Policing
Novice Pack 2015-2016
BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING: YOU DECIDE
BAUDL NOVICE PACK:
BROKEN WINDOWS
POLICING
Broken windows policing is based on a metaphor: a building where a broken window goes
unrepaired will soon be subject to far more worse treatment, like lots of broken windows
because it sends a message that the building owners cannot or will not control the
area. In real life, broken windows means: a neighborhood where minor offenses go
unchallenged soon becomes a breeding ground for more serious criminal activity and,
ultimately, for violence. Police departments measure their broken windows success by
increasing misdemeanor arrests, such as for panhandling, smoking marijuana, public
drinking, loitering, graffiti, turn-style jumping, and prostitution. The affirmative says
broken windows is racially biased and targets Black and Latino/a neighborhood. Many
say broken windows is responsible for the death of Eric Garner and others. The negative
says the plan text problem-oriented policing is worse idea. Either the plan is just not a
big enough change to stop police violence, or the plan is a switch to an unproven theory
of policing and may let crime spiral out of control, 1980s style.
Who is right and who is wrong? The answer is up to you.
Welcome and Hot Tips............................................................................2
1st Affirmative Constructive ....................................................................4
Affirmative Case Evidence ...................................................................13
Answers To Negative Arguments...........................................................23
Core Negative Arguments.....................................................................37
Dear Novice,
The pack is a tool box of proof and argumentative ideas. You should think critically about
the arguments you want to make on the topic and pick evidence from the pack to
support your arguments. When you are ready to find your own evidence, please use the
articles in the pack at the end of each section. Are you ready to really find your own
evidence beyond the pack? Excellent, you are ready for JV!
1

With love,
BAUDL
NOVICE DIVISION GUIDELINE: ALL EVIDENCE MUST COME FROM THE PACK.

WELCOME
AND
HOT TIPS
Welcome to Debate.
Debate is an opportunity for you to build your voice and be heard.
When you debate, you will have the chance to speak your mind on topics from Iraq to
poverty in the inner city, and to prove your skills against young people from all over the
bay. Debate is a sport: it calls on you to join a team, represent your school, and win
trophies, championships, and prizes. If you commit yourself to this sport you will have
much fun; most importantly, you will gain the tools to better yourself, to earn college
scholarships, and to speak up for your entire community.
What is Debate?
Debate is a competition between two teams, each with two debaters. One team takes
the Affirmative, proposing a plan to change the world and explaining why it is a good
idea. The other team is the Negative, who attacks the plan and tries to prove that it will
do more harm than good.
There are 8 speeches and 4 cross-examinations in a debate round. You and your partner
will each take the lead on 2 speeches (1 Constructive and 1 Rebuttal) and 1 crossexamination.


EVIDENCE
FOR THE
AFFIRMATIVE:
CORE AFF

1ST AFFIRMATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE CASE

Contention 1: Inherency
Broken window policing argues that the appearance of disorder will cause
more crime and small crimes, like graffiti and panhandling, lead to serious
crimes, like murder and robbery. Broken windows theory is now common police
policy all over the U.S.
Adam M. Samaha, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, May 2012,
Harvard Law Review, REGULATION FOR THE SAKE OF APPEARANCE, 125 Harv. L. Rev. 1563,
p. 1621-1623
A broken windows theory of misconduct was popularized before it was specified, and there is more than one
conceivable version. Different versions can suggest different hypotheses regarding the rate of misconduct, the
seriousness of misconduct, and the mechanism by which either is influenced by appearances. Thus, one might
hypothesize that the appearance of a broken window will soon lead to an outbreak of window breaking and
nothing else, or that much more serious misconduct will follow. Much scholarship concentrates on the
implications for serious crime, such as homicide or robbery. Equally significant, more than one mechanism
might be at work. All versions of the theory suppose that the appearance of a location influences behavior in that
location, but the influence might occur through norm internalization, signals about the state of the
neighborhood, herding behavior among the ill-informed, shifts in social meaning ascribed to what had been
considered misconduct, or something else. Not every possible mechanism directly implicates a self-fulfilling
prophecy that runs through shared perceptions and expectations. But a theme in broken windows theories of
misconduct is that the appearance of disorder suggests to observers that disorder is uncontrolled, and this
perception prompts some people toward even greater disorder that is, in fact, not controlled.
These hypotheses are not just academic curiosities. They now form the rationale for a common policing policy.
Broken windows theories of misconduct were matched with broken windows policing strategies, which took
hold in several jurisdictions. The most notable example is New York City. Following Kelling's arguments, in
1990 the city's transit police began more aggressive enforcement of misdemeanor offenses, such as turnstile
jumping. Subway misdemeanor arrests and ejections tripled within a year, with arrestees booked quickly on a
mobile "Bust Bus." In 1994, the strategy moved above ground. The plan was for city police to boost arrests for
fairly minor, if quite visible, misdemeanors and ordinance violations - such as graffiti, littering, panhandling,
public drunkenness, public urination, and prostitution. The police department announced that such enforcement
measures would be "the linchpin" of its effort "to reduce crime and fear in the city. By working systematically
and assertively to reduce the level of disorder in the city, the NYPD will act to undercut the ground on which
more serious crimes seem possible and even permissible." Between 1994 and 1998, adult misdemeanor arrests
increased by at least 40,000 per year. During the 1990s, the violent crime rate plunged. For example, the total
number of homicides in New York City dropped more than seventy percent between 1990 and 1998 (from 2245
to 633).
Your Words.
Glossary: Broken Windows Policing learn more by watching Molly Crabapple: How broken windows
policing harms people of color at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXI1QJRqPD8
norm internalization Believing for yourself what society tells you is true/normal.
Hypotheses- Proposed ideas to answer a question.
Jurisdictions Area of authority.
Linchpin A person or thing that is vital to a whole operation/organization.
Systematically Together as a whole system.



Contention 2: Racial Incarceration
1. Broken Windows theory does not work and should be eliminated. It is a
leading contributor to mass incarceration in the U.S.
Derrick Z. Jackson, December 29, 2014, Boston Globe, Broken windows, broken policy,
google.com
THE DEATHS of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and others at the hands of police demonstrate that the broken
windows theory of policing doesnt work and should be eliminated. The theory that targeting low-level crimes
will reduce major ones has led to the deaths of unarmed blacks by police over petty crime, mistaken identity, toy
guns, bungled raids, and rash judgments based on stereotypes.
Even the criminologists who introduced the theory knew that broken windows could break innocent black lives.
How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? James Q.
Wilson and George Kelling asked in their seminal 1982 Atlantic article. We can offer no wholly satisfactory
answer to this important question.
Still, broken windows was born, adopted most notably by New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police
commissioner, William Bratton. Violent crime did drop in New York, but it also dropped nationwide, under
many different policing styles. A 2004 National Academy of Sciences report said that research does not provide
strong support for broken windows. More likely reasons for the crime rate drop were the ebb of the 1980s
crack epidemic, population shifts, intense policing of specific serious problems, and community policing that
best promoted, according to the academy, direct involvement of police and citizens.
Worse, broken windows morphed into something more insidious. In a 2004 study, Harvard and Michigan
researchers found that perceptions of disorder had less to do with decrepit physical surroundings than if black
people dominated the street scene. Such findings reconfirmed the continuing intensity of stereotypes about the
dangerousness of blacks.
Because of that perceived dangerousness, black people themselves became the broken windows, joined in recent
years by Latinos. The result was a tsunami that swept untold people of color off the streets. Between 1980 and
today, Americas prison population exploded five-fold, to 1.5 million. Broken windows coincided with harsh
drug policies that put away untold nonviolent offenders for long mandatory sentences. Even though there are no
major differences by race in illegal drug use, African-Americans, 13 percent of the nations population, have
made up more than a third of state drug and public order imprisonments and account for more than a third of
federal inmates.
In recent years, financially strapped states have begun to curb the warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders,
and Congress has reduced sentencing disparities that disproportionately punish African-Americans.
But the broken windows theory is still used in police departments across the country, resulting in racial profiling
and unleashing other indiscriminate policies on black people, such as stop-and-frisk, that are never similarly
applied in white neighborhoods. The failure of broken windows to do anything except discriminate is a constant
theme running through investigations of police departments by the Justice Department under President Obama.
It found major patterns of excessive force in Cleveland, Albuquerque, Seattle, and Miami and harsh treatment of
Latinos in traffic stops in Maricopa County, Ariz. and East Haven, Conn.
It found discriminatory stops of pedestrians and drivers of color in Newark, N.J., and Antelope Valley, Calif.,
and discriminatory policing of people of color, gay citizens, and women trying to report domestic violence in
New Orleans.
Your Words
1
Glossary: bigotry intolerance towards people who are different or have different opinions


2. I cant breathe, if I cant eat. Arrest records dramatically reduce the chances of
getting employment or attaining an education. Mass incarceration is a poverty
chokehold on black communities.
Hannah Giorgis, April 30, 2015, The Guardian, We need racial and economic justice. We
cant breathe if we cant eat
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/racial-justice-economic-justicebaltimore-we-cannot-breathe-if-we-cannot-eat
Arrest records, even when they dont lead to sentencing, can dramatically reduce someones chances of attaining
an education or stable employment. For black people, who are already pushed out of the workforce by so many
other factors, an arrest incurred for simply pissing off police can be the difference between having a job and
starving.
Indeed, the violence of the state extends beyond fatal or expensive encounters with trigger-happy law
enforcement officers, long before the final breaths now played on harrowing, infinite loop. To stifle a
community slowly, without the decisive replay value of a chokehold, you criminalize poverty while withholding
the resources needed to escape it. There are many quiet ways to rob someone of breath.
Across the US, racial and ethnic wealth gaps continue to increase, climbing to record highs even as the economy
slowly churns out of a recession. In 2013, the poverty rate among white Americans was 9.6%; among black
Americans the number jumped to a whopping 27.2%. The wealth of white American households in 2010 was
eight times the median wealth of black households; by 2013 it had risen to 13 times greater.
Your Words
Insidious harmful and evil in a subtle way.

decrepit worn out, neglected.
1
Glossary: stifle restrain, stop


3. Poor youth of color are under assault in the US. Broken windows policing is
a cover for occupying, killing, torturing, or reducing to only survival
neighborhoods who would oppose the racial caste system.
Matt Peppe, writer on politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America, Dec. 29, 2014,
Counterpunch, Broken Countries Policing,
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/broken-countries-policing/
There is a strong correlation between race and socioeconomic status in the U.S. Racial minorities
suffer disproportionately lower socioeconomic status compared to whites, creating a racial caste system. With
the drastic decline in recent decades of agriculture, manufacturing and other forms of manual labor, populations
previously depended on for cheap labor have become disposable in the modern economy.
The state has undertaken a system of social control to prevent any solidarity and political opposition that would
recognize and oppose unjust racial castes. Not coincidentally, broken windows policing has been carried out
predominantly against African American and Latino citizens.
The public is constantly getting out of control, Noam Chomsky says. You have to carry out measures to
insure that they remain passive and apathetic and obedient, and dont interfere with privilege or power. Its a
major theme of modern democracy. As the mechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth,
the need to control people by other means increases.
This is accomplished by employing a police force that operates like an occupying army in poor neighborhoods
of color under the guise of crime prevention. It would be impossible to admit publicly that the police mission in
these communities is repression and subjugation. The idea of broken windows as a deterrent to violent crime
provides cover to justify what is in reality a racist, punitive, paramilitary occupation.
As Henry Giroux wrote in a Truthout article on December 5 (State Terrorism and Racist Violence in the Age of
Disposability: From Emmett Till to Eric Garner) we are living in an age of disposability which has seen the
rise of the punishing state as a way to govern all of social life.
Under assault are those individuals and populations considered excess such as poor youth of color and
immigrants who are controlled by fear of punishment, of being killed, tortured, or reduced to the mere level of
survival, Giroux writes.
Your Words
Glossary: Racial caste system separation into different levels of privilege based on race
correlation connection, relationship
Solidarity unity, agreement with.
Predominantly mostly
Apathetic uncaring
Enfranchisement giving privilege
Repression subduing someone or something with force
Subjugation one group of people having their freedom taken away by another group
Punitive having to do with punishment for something
Paramilitary an unofficial force organized similarly to a military force.
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4. This affirmative demands zero death and zero trauma. We should
contribute to another civil rights movement that gives meaning and honors the
lives lost in police violence.
Joy James, interviewed by George Yancy, December 23, 2014, The New York Times,
Black Lives: Between Grief and Action,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/black-lives-between-grief-and-action/?
_r=0
G.Y.: So, where do to we go from here?
J.J.: Congressman John Lewis, a former S.N.C.C. activist, has said that Ferguson may have sparked another
civil rights movement. During the civil rights rebellion, Ella Baker emphasized that the movement was about
more than a hamburger more than the right to consumer society. Today, as all lives experience so much
violence and sorrow, we can see how certain historical leadership, that of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa
Parks, Audre Lorde, prepared us for the present moment. If the current tragedies have sparked movement, then
it is not only about the martyrs, it is about the mothers and families and communities that organize in the face of
all forms of illegitimate violence, including that by police who are rarely brought to justice.
Weve seen Fergusons and police violence before. Well see them again until there is substantive change.
Activists are challenging the dynamics of violence and intimidation: racial-denigration and contempt; rape and
domestic violence; schools as dropout factories or pipelines to prison; banning of speech for the (politically)
imprisoned; incompetent medical care on both sides of razor wire.
The good news is that the young are resilient. Student activists educate about The Black Womens Blueprint,
and black womens leadership in Ferguson addressing racism, sexism and homophobia in order to forge
dynamic, political responses to violence. They have also pointed out how the underreporting of activist black
female leadership, and the scant attention to police sexual and physical assaults against black women and girls,
limits our view of political agency and womens contributions towards healing, accountability, and building
protected communities.
Movements also appear on a Harlem4Kids listserv, where mothers cite Canadian politicians who call for zero
death in the wake of police shootings of unarmed people. We can raise the bar and demand zero trauma
that is, peaceful, not terrorized, communities as the bedrock for a functional society, and the public standard for
police set by their ability to diminish rather than create trauma.
Black lives matter. My students who have visited Ferguson tell me that this statement of fact was introduced
into our shared language by women who understand the lives of their communities as crossing gender
boundaries and traditional roles of political leadership. Black lives matter because we make them matter.
Your Words.
Glossary: martyrs people who were harmed or killed for the sake of others
Illegitimate not authorized by the law
Substantive significant
Dynamics the forces of growth or change in a system or process
Denigration criticizing, speaking poorly of someone/something
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1ST AFFIRMATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE CASE [PLAN

REQUIRED]
Because the problem wont fix itself, we need a plan of action. The affirmative
suggests:
Plan:
The United States Department of Justice will require police departments practicing
broken windows policing to adopt a strategy of community problem-oriented
policing.
The Affirmative reserves the right to clarify intent, and fiats the plans passage by usual
means.
Your Words
If you would like to know more about problem-oriented policing, check out this Interview
with Herman Goldstein at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d33MoqolDwU.
Glossary: Department of Justice branch of the government that is in charge of the FBI and enforcing
civil rights laws.
Problem-oriented policing policing with an emphasis on the wide range of problems the police confront. It
requires analyzing problems and coming up with a custom-made solution to the problem. There are many
alternatives to problems and law enforcement is only 1 alternative. Problem-oriented policing is proactive,
instead of reactive.
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Contention 3: Solvency
1. Problem-oriented policing responds to the patterns of problems in the
community and implements solutions. It is a departure from broken windows.
Alana Semuels, May 28, 2015, The Atlantic, How to Fix a Broken Police Department,
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/cincinnati-police-reform/393797/
Problem-oriented policing was developed in 1979 by Herman Goldstein, a University of Wisconsin professor,
and was first adopted in Newport News, Virginia. Other police departments, such as Baltimore, have used the
method and then abandoned it, said John Eck, a criminologist at the University of Cincinnati who helped the
city adopt problem-oriented policing (which it calls Community Problem-Oriented Policing). The strategy
suggests that police should not just respond to calls for service. It says they should also look for patterns in these
calls to service, determine what is causing the patterns and then implement solutions to solve them, he said.
If hospitals notice an inordinate number of emergency patients coming in with facial injuries due to glass beer
bottles being broken over their heads in fights, as was the case in on British precinct, police work with the bottle
manufacturer to make bottles are made out of material that wont break, he said. If police notice a women is a
repeat victim of domestic violence because her partner breaks into her ground-floor apartment, they work with
the landlord to move her to a higher floor, link her to a social-services agency and help her find free daycare so
she doesnt have to rely on her abusive spouse for help. In another example, when police noticed an increase in
metal thefts in a neighborhood, they worked with property owners to paint their copper pipes green, posted signs
about the pipes being painted green and then informed scrap yards of the program to gain support, which led to
a reduction in copper thefts.
The strategy requires that police intimately know members of the community and listen to their concerns, even
if doing so doesnt lead to arrests. It requires that they get out of their cars and walk the streets, and it requires
that they reach out to partners they traditionally would battle, such as the owners of buildings in high-crime
spots, or community groups like Legal Aid.
New policing approaches come and go, seemingly every year, but leaders such as Herold say that problemoriented policing differs in important ways from other strategies. Broken-windows policing, for example, holds
that police can prevent bigger crimes by cracking down on disorder and small crimes in a neighborhood. But
law-enforcement officers often end up just making a lot of arrests with broken-windows policing, instead of
addressing the problems that lead to small or big crimes in the first place.
Your Words.
Glossary: : high-crime spots areas that experience frequent crimes

Incarceration getting locked up in jail
Legal Aid free legal advice or representation for someone who cant afford it
Vigilant keeping careful watch for possible danger or difficulties
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2. Cincinnati is a model of community problem-oriented policing. After the
Justice Department enforced the move away from broken windows, there were
large reductions in police use-of-force incidents & complaints, violent crimes
went down, and misdemeanor arrests went down.
The city that once served as a prime example of broken policing now stands as a model of effective reform.
Cincinnatis lessons seem newly relevant as officials call for police reform in the aftermath of the deaths of
Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Ferguson and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. Indeed, the recently
released report from President Obamas Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommends that departments
adopt some of the strategies used by Cincinnati. A task force convened by Ohio Governor John Kasich cited
Cincinnati as a model for community-oriented policing and recommended that other law-enforcement agencies
in that state develop similar reforms.
And on Tuesday, when the Justice Department and the city of Cleveland announced theyd entered into an
agreement over how to resolve policing problems, their consent decree looked very similar to what had been
drawn up in Cincinnati. Both documents stress the need for deep community involvement in policing as part of
the reforms.
The central component is the community policing, Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said at a news
conference Tuesday. If we dont ensure that our officers and our community have a better relationship, then a
lot of what were trying to implement now in terms of this agreement is going to be hard to do.
But the lessons of Cincinnati are complicated. Success required not just the adoption of a new method of
policing, but also sustained pressure from federal officials, active support by the mayor, and the participation of
local communities. If Cincinnati is a model of reform, then it is equally a sobering reminder of how difficult it
can be to change entrenched systems.
Looking back, the results of Cincinnatis reform efforts are startling. Between 1999 and 2014, Cincinnati saw a
69 percent reduction in police use-of-force incidents, a 42 percent reduction in citizen complaints and a 56
percent reduction in citizen injuries during encounters with police, according to a report by Robin S. Engel and
M. Murat Ozer of the Institute of Crime Science at the University of Cincinnati. Violent crimes dropped from a
high of 4,137 in the year after the riots, to 2,352 last year. Misdemeanor arrests dropped from 41,708 in 2000 to
17,913 last year.
Yet it might not be so simple to adopt Cincinnatis changes in other cities. It took a long timefive to ten years,
by some countsto get police to actually buy into the reforms. Nobody likes it when somebody comes into
their workplace and tells them how to do their job. The changes Cincinnati adopted were nothing short of a
complete turnaround in how the city approached incarceration, crime and its relationship with its residents. And
to make sure they were adopted, the federal government had to apply constant pressure, reminding all parties
involved about the need to stay vigilant about reform.
Your Words.
Glossary: community policing a system where the police are from the community they work in, and
they get to know people.
misdemeanor a small, petty offense
Sobering serious, solemn, calming.
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3. Success is possible, but the Justice Department will have to require police
departments to adopt the plan.
Cincinnatis reforms wont be easy to replicate in other cities. Each time I asked a participant in the
Collaborative about whether other police departments could follow Cincinnatis lead, I got the same answer:
Probably not without a Justice Department order to do so.
I think it's very hard, Mayor John Cranley told me. It's a combination of carrots and sticks, and the Justice
Department is a pretty big stick.
Police departments may adopt some principles of problem-oriented policing, but its much easier to just
continue policing as they always have, Herold said. Without a document like the Collaborative to refer to
whenever an issue arises, departments will likely move onto the next fad, said Eck, the criminologist. And
without city money to train police officers, hold community meetings and pay an independent monitor, it will be
difficult for police to change.
Reality tells us that it does not occur without this federal intervention, said Streicher, who now consults police
departments trying to reform. You can very easily slide back into the same problems and issues you had in the
past, unless your feet are held to the fire and the person youre answering to is a federal judge.
Your Words.
Glossary: Independent monitor unrelated person or group who monitors/surveils.

Intervention coming in to stop something from happening.
16

HARMS: RACIAL INCARCERATION

Broken windows contributes to mass incarceration of Black and Latino people
Joe Catron, May 19, 2015, Mint Press, Gentrifiers, Prison Profiteers Are ReEngineering the NYPD, http://portside.org/2015-05-23/gentrifiers-prison-profiteers-are%e2%80%9cre-engineering%e2%80%9d-nypd#sthash.rMt4R7q1.dpuf
Broken windows policing has been a major component of the criminalization, demonization and mass
incarceration of Black and Latino people, Travis Morales, a Stop Mass Incarceration Network NYC steering
committee member, told MintPress. This New Jim Crow is the systems strategy of suppression of millions of
people for whom this system has no jobs, education or future, Morales said. Both Ramarley Graham and Eric
Garner, killed by the NYPD, were victims of broken windows. The doctrine also spurred vertical patrols of
apartment complexes, like the one during which Officer Peter Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley in Brooklyns
Louis H. Pink Houses on Nov. 20. Bratton acknowledged that Gurley, who was slain in a stairwell of his own
building, had been totally innocent. But the patrols, criticized as racially discriminatory and violations of both
the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as New Yorks state constitution, have continued.
Broken Windows is a color-blind cover for policing to maintain the boundaries

of whiteness
Nancy A. Heitzeg, July 17, 2015, Truthout, Broken Windows, Broken Lives and the
Ruse of Public Order Policing, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31936-brokenwindows-broken-lives-and-the-ruse-of-public-order-policing
The reality of public order policing in NYC and elsewhere has been "harassment" policing, which has targeted
communities of color and the poor. The rise of Broken Windows theory and related police practices neatly
coincides with the War on the Poor, extensive criminalization of poverty/homelessness, Black
motherhood, appearance and the use of public space, the escalation of the War on Drugs and attendant mass
incarceration. It too provides a convenient "color-blind" cover for warrant-less pretextual stops of "suspicious"
people (read Black), mass arrests for minor offenses, and sweeps of entire communities. "Disorder" became the
new proxy for race, and public order policing maintains the literal and figurative boundaries of whiteness. This
certainly became clear via stop/frisk data revealed in Floyd v City of New York: over 86 percent of the stops
were of Black or Latino individuals. Still Bratton's successor, Ray Kelly, argued that Blacks were' "understopped," despite the fact that nearly 90 percent of the people stopped were released without the officer finding
any basis for a summons or arrest.
Your Words.
Glossary: demonization being made to look evil

Jim Crow system of laws from 1877-1954 that segregated black people in the US.
Doctrine a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a church, political party, or other group.
Vertical patrols posting officers on different floors in buildings at the same time and sweeping down the
building to catch criminal acts
17

HARMS: RACIAL INCARCERATION

Mass incarceration is the criminalization of Black life which has the same
impact as Jim Crow laws
Matt Peppe, writer on politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America, Dec. 29, 2014,
Raven Rakia describes in a Truthout article on November 20 (Subways Are an NYPD Hotspot in de Blasios
New York) how low-level infractions have been disproportionately enforced against people of color, sweeping
thousands into the criminal justice system and further marginalizing people already struggling economically.
Arbitrary rules such as no sleeping on a subway car in a way that is hazardous or interferes with others have
turned into the NYPD brutally arresting a man on his way home from work in an almost empty subway car. He
was later charged with resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and violating local law (the
MTA rules), Rakia writes.
Repressive policing has long been used to maintain political and economic domination over minority groups in
the United States. After African Americans were nominally liberated from slavery following the Civil War,
southern states manipulated the legal system to replicate their control over freed slaves.
In his Pulitzer-prize-winning book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From
the Civil War to World War II, Douglas Blackmon describes how southern states criminalized black life, using
the legal system to punish black and then lease them to corporations to work in coal mines, steel furnaces,
farms, quarries and factories. This served the dual purposes of marginalizing blacks politically and supplying
cheap labor to capitalist commercial interests.
The original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations
of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding
freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity or loud talk with white women, Blackmon writes.
The criminalization of black life has continued since the Reconstruction era, morphing into a new form.
Whereas once there was convict leasing, now there is mass incarceration. People are warehoused in prisons at
the highest rate in the entire world. Public prisons create jobs for construction workers and corrections officers
in rural, mainly white communities, while private prisons turn prisoners into profit centers for corporations and
their investors.
One hundred years ago, African Americans were persecuted through the criminal justice system en masse.
Today the system is remarkably similar. Besides exploitation for profit, criminalization of African American
enables many of same types of discrimination as previously existed under Jim Crow.
Michelle Alexander notes in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that
discrimination against African Americans today is arguably even more pernicious than under Jim Crow because
it is carried out under a nominally colorblind legal system. However, the mindblowing numbers of imprisoned
ethnic minorities who are imprisoned mostly for nonviolent crime make the racial aspect of the system
indisputable. The result is eerily similar to post-Civil War discrimination against blacks.
The whites only signs may be gone, but new signs have gone up notices placed in job applications, rental
agreements, loan applications, forms for welfare benefits, school applications, and petitions for licenses,
informing the general public that felons are not wanted here. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the
forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind discrimination in employment, housing, education, public
benefits, and jury service, Alexander writes.
1
Glossary: Infractions violation of the law, an agreement, or a rule.

Obstructing blocking, slowing down, making something difficult or impossible to do.
Nominally small, below average, insignificant
18

Persecuted being harassed, especially because of race, political beliefs or religious beliefs.
19

HARMS: MASS INCARCERATION

People of color are disproportionately overrepresented in the prison system
Kelly K. Koss, January 30, 2015, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Leveraging Predictive
Policing Algorithms to Restore Fourth Amendment Protections in High Crime Areas in a
Post-Wardlow World, Vol 90, Iss 1, p. 321.
Mass incarceration refers to the American cultural phenomenon of the imprisonment of comparatively and
historically high proportions of the population that cannot be accounted for by changes in crime rates.
Currently, the United States has the largest reported incarcerated population in the world, and by far the highest
rate of imprisonment. The number of prisoners in both federal and state facilities has increased by nearly 430
percent between 1979 and 2009. Moreover, [r]acial disparities in imprisonment rates are striking. For every
100,000 Americans in each race or gender group, there are 478 white males, 3,023 black males, 51 white
females, and 129 black females incarcerated in state or federal prison. Undeniably, people of color are
disproportionately overrepresented in the criminal justice system. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander
describes how the War on Drugs and the structural racism embedded in our criminal justice system have
devastated low-income minority communities across the United States. The culture of heavy policing created by
the War on Drugs in low-income minority neighborhoods has fostered significant animosity between the police
and residents of these neighborhoods. Alexander observes that even though studies show that rates of drug use
are similar across races, each year a disproportionate number of African American men are swept into the
criminal justice system for low-level drug offenses because of racially biased police discretion.
Your Words.
Glossary: phenomenon
Disparities
20

HARMS: GENTRIFICATION
Broken Windows policing is a method of gentrification
Aaron Miguel Cant, Sept 28, 2014, Truthout, Policing for Wealth, google.com
For Bratton to cite changes in gentrified Williamsburg and Fort Greene as justification for a focus on minor crimes
means the strategy is about something other than the reduction of crime: It's about the reduction of the perception of
crime. But the perception that really matters is the one harbored by developers, investors and other members of the
capitalist class who can "come and build" for future residents who, in broken windows parlance, are "more orderly" whether or not these residents commit offenses outside the purview of the broken windows conception of "disorder."
And as the record indicates, and as previous investigations have revealed, "orderly" is often a proxy for whiteness.
Thus, broken windows isn't about making a dangerous neighborhood safer for those who live there so much as it is
about using police power to scythe the way forward for the gentrification process. We witness the broken windowsgentrification duality not only in New York, but also in other places across the country, evidencing that one seems to
always accompany the other.
Gentrification is institutional violence which is more insidious and widereaching than other forms of violence
Daniel Jose Older, April 10, 2014, Alternet, The Violence of Gentrification in American
Cities, google
Its easy to fixate on physical violence. Movies sexualize it, broadcasters shake their heads as another fancy graphic
whirs past sensationalizing it, politicians build careers decrying it with one side of their mouths and justifying it with
the other. But institutionalized violence moves in far more insidious and wide-reaching patterns. Gentrification,
Suey Park and Dr. David J. Leonard wrote in a recent post at Model View Culture, represents a socio-historic
process where rising housing costs, public policy, persistent segregation, and racial animus facilitates the influx of
wealthier, mostly white, residents into a particular neighborhood. Celebrated as renewal and an effort to beautify
these communities, gentrification results in the displacement of residents.
Gentrification is violence. Couched in white supremacy, it is a systemic, intentional process of uprooting
communities. Its been on the rise, increasing at a frantic rate in the last 20 years, but the roots stretch back to the
disenfranchisement that resulted from white flight and segregationist policies. Real estate agents dub changing
neighborhoods with new, gentrifier-friendly titles that designate their proximity to even safer areas: Bushwick
becomes East Williamsburg, parts of Flatbush are now Prospect Park South. Politicians manipulate zoning laws to
allow massive developments with only token nods at mixed-income housing.
Beyond these political and economic maneuvers, though, the thrust of gentrification takes place in our mythologies
of the hood. It is a result, as Park and Leonard explain, of a discourse that imagines neighborhoods of color as
pathological and criminal, necessitating outside intervention for the good of all. Heres where my pistol-whipped
patients revelation about his cinematic experience kicks in. The dominant narrative of the endangered white person
barely making it out of the hood alive is, of course, a myth. No one is safer in communities of color than white folks.
White privilege provides an invisible force field around them, powered by the historically grounded assurance that
the state and media will prosecute any untoward event they may face.
With gentrification, the central act of violence is one of erasure. Accordingly, when the discourse of gentrification
isnt pathologizing communities of color, its erasing them. Girls, for example, reimagines todays Brooklyn as an
entirely white community. Heres a show that places itself in the epicenter of a gentrifying city with gentrifiers for
characters it is essentially a show about gentrification that refuses to address gentrification. After critics lambasted
Season 1 for its lack of diversity, the show brought in Donald Glover to play a black Republican and still managed to
avoid the more pressing and relevant question of displacement and racial disparity that the characters are, despite
their self-absorption, deeply complicit with. Whats especially frustrating about Girls not only dodging the topic
entirely but pushing back often with snark and defensiveness against calls for more diversity is that its a show
that seems to want to bring a more nuanced take on the complexities of modern life.
1
Glossary: Gentrification - represents a socio-historic process where rising housing costs, public policy,
persistent segregation, and racial animus facilitates the influx of wealthier, mostly white, residents into a
21

HARMS: VIOLENCE AGAINST
THE
HOMELESS
Broken Windows Policing is the reason for escalation against homeless

populations; it creates fear of anyone who seems disorderly or unclean.
Tana Ganeva, March 20, 2015, Alternet, You Shouldn't Be Scared of Homeless People,
Homeless People Should Be Scared of You, http://www.alternet.org/you-shouldnt-bescared-homeless-people-homeless-people-should-be-scared-you
The media and public officials terrorized the public with imagery of urban horror, refracting a multitude of race
and class anxieties through the figure of the prostitute, drug dealer or dreaded squeegee man in NYC. Politicians
like Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton positioned themselves as the heroes who took bold, necessary action to
make cities safe. Inspired by broken-windows theory, which posits that serious crime arises from public disorder
and petty crimes, they sought to scrub the city clean of undesirables. In 1990s and 2000s Bratton took brokenwindows policing on the road, applying its precepts to Los Angeles as police commissioner and in other cities as
a consultant.
Concepts of danger and disorder/uncleanliness may have some natural overlap, but broken-windows conflates
the two to an extreme degree. The literal cosmetic nature of broken-windows theory makes it perpetuates a
tendency to see danger in unwashed hair, dirty clothes, darker skin. What it does not do is realistically or
statistically assess the likelihood that the guy begging on the corner has either the desire or ability to cause you
harm.
Homeless people get demonized and treated like they arent real people.
Tana Ganeva, March 20, 2015, Alternet, You Shouldn't Be Scared of Homeless People,
Homeless People Should Be Scared of You, http://www.alternet.org/you-shouldnt-bescared-homeless-people-homeless-people-should-be-scared-you
"Urine, feces, hypodermic needles,' Boden says. "That's the mantra attached to the homeless now. There's a
concerted effort to get rid of people, so you have to demonize them."
"You can't talk about human beings and treat them that way." Boden continues. "It gives the idea, "This isn't a
real person, let's kick their ass."
Your Words.
particular neighborhood
1
Glossary: Posits assumes is a fact
Conflates combine into one, but usually means combined/associated in a way that doesnt make sense or
isnt true.
Mantra a statement or slogan that is repeated frequently
22

SOLVENCY: POP
IS
BETTER POLICING
Problem-oriented policing is better for two reasons: first, it comes up with

strategies to deal with actual problems. Second, it builds relationships in the
community
Anthony A. Braga & Brenda J. Bond, 2008, Criminology, Policing Crime and Disorder
Hot Spots: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Volume 46, No 3, p. 577
These findings suggest that when adopting a policing disorder approach to crime prevention, police departments
should work within a problem oriented policing framework and adopt a community coproduction model rather
than drift toward a zero tolerance policing model that focuses on a subset of social incivilities, such as drunken
people, rowdy teens, and street vagrants, and seeks to remove them from the street via arrest (Taylor, 2001,
2006). Misdemeanor arrests obviously play a noteworthy role in dealing with disorder; however, arrest
strategies do not deal directly with physical conditions. In devising and implementing situational strategies to
deal with a full range of disorder problems, police must rely on citizens, city agencies, and others in numerous
ways. As Ralph Taylor (2001, 2006) suggests, incivility reduction is rooted in a tradition of stable relationships
with the community and responsiveness to local concerns. Community coproduction requires the police to build
partnerships with other organizations and the community, which brings its own set of challenges (Crawford,
1997; Rosenbaum, 2002). Nonetheless, this research suggests that a sole commitment to increasing
misdemeanor arrests is not the most powerful approach to community crime prevention and, according to many
observers (e.g., Taylor, 2006), may undermine relationships in low-income, urban minority communities where
coproduction is most needed and distrust between the police and citizens is most profound.
Problem-oriented policing is going to help reform society by getting to heart of

a problem instead of just feeding the criminal system.
Karen Bullock & Nick Tilley. Crime Reduction and Problem Oriented Policing. 2012. pg.
5
The appeal of problem-oriented policing on both sides of the Atlantic, indeed across the globe, is not difficult to
understand. It appears to offer a way of dealing constructively with the gap created through the much faster
growth in the call demand on the police compared with the police resources. Identifying patterned problems,
interrogating their underlying sources and finding some points of intervention that will reduce the problems
seem to make sense. It promises a way of better managing resources and of improving services to the
community at the same time. Problem-oriented policing describes the application of the scientific method,
which has apparently delivered successfully in other spheres, to the problems the police are expected to address.
It also seems to take policing back to its roots in the sense that it is about dealing with problems effectively
rather than about feeding prisons and the criminal justice system more generally.
Your Words.
Glossary: Vagrants a person without a settled home or regular work who wanders from place to place.
Noteworthy worthy of notice or mention.
Incivility rude or impolite speech/behavior
Interrogating questioning
23

24

SOLVENCY: FEWER ARRESTS & LESS BIAS

Moving away from broken windows policing means fewer arrests and a
reduction in police violence.
Robert C. Koehler, January 08, 2015, Common Dreams, Turning Our Backs (on a
Broken World), http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/08/turning-our-backsbroken-world
Last month, during a mayoral press conference about the shooting of the two officers, a memo was distributed
among attending police that read: Absolutely no enforcement action in the form of arrests and or summonses is
to be taken unless absolutely necessary and an individual must be placed under arrest.
No arrests that are not absolutely necessary? The New York police, in letting up on arrests for petty violations
of every sort vagrancy, public drinking, vandalism and the like (maybe even the sale of loose, untaxed
cigarettes) are challenging the fundamental tenets of broken-windows policing, Matt Ford wrote last week
in The Atlantic. Ironically, anger about this sort of policing is central to the nationwide protests.
The theorys critics dispute its effectiveness and contend that broken-windows policing simply criminalizes the
young, the poor, and the homeless, Ford writes, adding: If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why
havent they done it before? . . .
Maybe the NYPDs new absolutely necessary standard for arrests would have produced a less tragic outcome
for [Eric] Garner then. Maybe it will for future Eric Garners too.
Problem-oriented policing reduces bias by facilitating human contact

Recent criticisms of police have focused on how conscious and unconscious biases may influence the ways in
which individual officers act. But problem-oriented policing is also the best approach to reducing biases, Eck
said, because it forces police to interact constantly with different members of the community.
Whenever we come to a situation with a particular bias, that bias gets facilitated by lack of human contact, he
said. The more you get police directly engaged with members of the public, the better it is.
Your Words.
Glossary: Vagrancy status of being homeless and jobless, travelling around.

Tenets principle or belief, especially of a religion or philosophy.
Conscious bias an unfair assumption that you make which you can control.
Unconscious bias an unfair assumption that you make which you do not have control over.
Facilitated make an action or process easy/easier/quicker
25

SOLVENCY: DEPARTMENT
OF JUSTICE
The Department of Justice investigation and reform power is wide spread. This
is the best tool to reform police departments.
Sarah Childress, March 4, 2015, Public Broadcasting System, How the DOJ Reforms a
Police Department Like Ferguson, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminaljustice/how-the-doj-reforms-a-police-department-like-ferguson/
The law is the only tool that exists to compel widespread change within a police department. The Justice
Department can threaten to sue a department for constitutional violations, forcing it to enter into a negotiated
settlement, such as a consent decree.
Its often hard to reform police departments without external intervention, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of
the University of California-Irvine law school, and an expert on constitutional policing. Institutions are
resistant to change. None of us like to have somebody outside telling us what to do. And police departments are
especially that way. They have their own internal culture.
In the past 20 years, the Justice Department has launched at least 65 so-called pattern or practice
investigations of law enforcement agencies, 32 of which have led to agreements to reform , according to an
analysis of DOJ data by Stephen Rushin, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School who studies police
misconduct.
Thats a small number compared to the nearly 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Still, the reforms have had an impact: today, nearly one in five Americans is served by a law enforcement
agency that has been subject to a DOJ investigation under this law, according to Rushins analysis.
Not solving immediately is not a reason to vote neg. Police reform takes time.
Simone Weichselbaum, May 26, 2015, The Marshall Project, Policing the Police,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/23/policing-the-police
Obviously these things dont happen overnight, said William Yeomans, a former senior official of the Civil Rights
Division. There are always forces that will pull police departments towards reverting to practices that got them into
trouble in the first place. It is not something that you do once and then walk away from.
The Department of Justice will make lasting police reforms

Simone Weichselbaum, May 26, 2015, The Marshall Project, Policing the Police,
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/23/policing-the-police
Then there is the challenge of making the policing reforms last. Even where local leaders have embraced
Washingtons prescriptions, Justice Department officials have increasingly found themselves returning to grapple a
second time with problems they thought they had fixed.
What we want to do is make sure that we are opening investigations and seeing sustainable reforms through to the
end, the head of the departments Civil Rights Division, Vanita Gupta, said in an interview.
1
Glossary: constitutional the supreme law of the United States of America. The Constitution, originally
comprising seven articles, delineates the national frame of government
Sustainable - able to be maintained at a certain rate or level
26

SOLVENCY: COMMUNITY POLICING

Community policing works Richmond is proof.
Todd Whitney, 2015 City of Richmond Thinks Outside the Box, KALW
http://kalw.org/post/city-richmond-thinks-outside-box
When Chris Magnus took over the Richmond Police Department in 2006, he was tasked with cutting back
violent crime in what was then known as one of Americas most dangerous cities.
Since that time, the Department has experienced over 80% personnel turnover, and a new culture has taken root
among officers. Part of the new culture is the expectation that every officer in Richmond is a community police
officer, someone who maintains the same beat on a daily basis. This approach has helped Richmonds officers to
develop a familiarity with citizens.
"Before, we kind of responded to services, just going from call to call. Now were looking from a broader
approach, says Captain Bisa French, of RPDs Northern District. Part of that broader approach is working with
other city services to think of more holistic ways of engaging with citizens.
The Richmond Police Department isnt the only organization in the city putting in work to cut back on crime. In
2007, Richmond created the Office of Neighborhood Safety, or ONS, which reaches out to Richmonds most
violent young men to convince them to stop the violence.
We let the streets dictate to us where we go and who we talk to," says Kevin Yarbrough, a Neighborhood
Change Agent at ONS. "If it's a hotspot where it can be a next shooting, or situation where a gun may be
involved, we'll be in that area. Wherever the drama is we'll be ... [to] lessen the situation.
Yarbrough is part of a team that drives around Richmond neighborhoods each day, making and maintaining
contact with young men at risk for participation in gun violence.
An important part of ONS' mission is including young men in the process of changing their lives. Yet Devone
Boggan, the director of ONS, says he acknowledges "the city's failure to help them be successful, our failure to
not see them as part of the solution."
Part of Boggans pitch to young men to get them to participate in the intensive 18-month mentorship program is
to take them on trips to college campuses and to other countries. You get on a plane with me to travel the state
or the country, you gotta be willing to travel with your enemy -- somebody in a rival group, says Boggan. This
move is geared toward helping rival gang members squash their beefs by having them become familiar with one
another on a personal level.
Another important part of ONS curriculum is a privileged stipend. ONS is a city department funded with a mix
of public and private dollars. After six months of satisfactory participation in the fellowship, ONS fellows
become eligible to earn up to $1,000 a month for nine months.
Both the Office of Neighborhood Safety and the Richmond Police Department are getting better results from
their innovative approaches. The city's violent crime and property crime have experienced significant declines
over the last decade and both ONS and the police department are nationally lauded for their approaches.
Your Words.
Glossary: dictate lay down authoritatively; prescribe
27

SOLVENCY: AGENTS
OF
CHANGE
We are responsible for making a world where justice and the dignity of every
person matters. The goal of this affirmative case is to reimagine democracy
and social justice so that we, the debaters, can become agents of social
change.
Henry A. Giroux, May 24, 2015, Educated Hope and the Promise of Democracy,
Commencement Speech at Chapman University,
http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2015/05/26/educated-hope-and-the-promise-ofdemocracy/
Fear now drives the major narratives that define social relations and legitimize dominant forms of power freed
from any sense of moral and political responsibility, if not accountability. These conditions raise a number of
challenges for your generation, which I am sure you will address. How will you enable young people to develop
their critical capacities to be change agents? How will you dismantle the school to prison pipeline? How will
you disrupt the mechanisms that want to turn all black men into criminals in the schools and on the streets? How
will you address the widespread anti-intellectualism that enables a culture of thoughtlessness and violence to
continue? What limits will you put on the growing atomization and isolation of everyday life and the ludicrous
assumption that shopping is the highest expression of citizenship?
How a society both represents and treats its children is a measure of how it values itself, the ideals of
democracy, and the future. This is an especially important insight because the future that young people inherit is
not of their own making. Yet, no one can escape responsibility for the future because the future we create for
generations of young people who follow us are tied to our ability to imagine a more just world, one infused by
our responsibility to others. Imagining a more just future presents a serious challenge for your generation
because the language of democracy and social justice have been emptied out as a result of the triumph of
individual rights over social rights, the collapse of the public into the private, and the celebration of self-interest
over the common good. Democratic values are under siege in a world dominated by commodified, corporatized,
and instrumentalized standards. In a post-Ferguson world, the space of shared responsibility has given way to
the space of shared fears and the ongoing spectacle of violence; moreover, exchange value has become the only
value that matters, and the rise of celebrity culture suggests the triumph of a commodified and infantilized
culture over all that matters in a democracy, which means among other things putting up with the likes of the
Kardashian sisters as role models.
Education should be preparing people to enter a society that badly needs to be reimagined. As future educators, I
would hope you would teach your students to become agents of social change, teach them the skills, knowledge
and values that they can use to organize political movements capable of stopping the destruction of the
environment, ending the vast inequalities in our society, and building a world based on love and generosity
rather than on selfishness and materialism. You can use your classroom to do this, even though that may mean
transgressing established norms and bureaucratic procedures. I also want you to remember that schools are not
going to change one classroom at a time. Teachers need to organize not just for better pay, but also to once again
gain control over their classrooms. That means building a movement to create a different kind of educational
system and a more democratic society. Get involved in politics, run for local school boards, become publicly
engaged citizens, use the power of ideas to move your peers and others, and work to develop the institutions that
allow everybody to participate in the creation of a world in which justice matters, the environment matters, and
living lives of decency and dignity matter.
1
Glossary: narratives a spoken or written account of connected events; a story

Accountabilities accepting responsibility
Anti-intellectualism hostility towards and mistrust of people who value education and educational
pursuits, particularly a college education
28

EVIDENCE
FOR THE
AFFIRMATIVE:
ANSWERS
TO NEG
Materialism - a way of thinking that gives too much importance to material possessions rather than to
spiritual or intellectual things
29

ANSWER TO: BROKEN WINDOWS
IS
OBJECTIVE
Social disorder is a social construct based on different cultural backgrounds

and life experiences. Its not universal or objective.
Lauren Kirchner, January 7, 2014, The Pacific Standard, Breaking Down the Broken
Windows Theory, http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/breaking-broken-windowstheory-72310
Finally, and fittingly, criminologists Joshua C. Hinkle and Sue-Ming Yang present a sort of meta-argument in
the Journal of Criminal Justice, against the methodology of any scientific attempts to test the broken windows
theory out in the field. Many researchers, many more than the ones mentioned here, have tried to measure
disorder and its resulting effects on neighborhood residents feelings of fear, and on crime, but Hinkle and
Yang describe how subjective and imprecise these experiments necessarily are. Who decides how much litter on
the street is acceptable, or what is normal, or transgressive behavior, in a given neighborhood? In every study
they looked at, the neighborhood residents perceptions of social and physical disorder differed from the
researchers perceptions. That is, people with different demographic backgrounds and life experiences might
react to the same environment in very different ways, the authors write, and conclude, social disorder is a
social construct, rather than a concrete phenomenon.
Broken windows policing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The arrests and overpolicing are a cycle that justify each other.
Eugene Robinson, May 6, 2015, Fixing Americas Broken Approach to Young Black
Men, http://www.truthdig.com
Central to the crisis is zero-tolerance or broken windows policing, which basically involves cracking down
on minor offenses in the hope of reducing major crime as well. Whether this strategy works is the subject of two
arguments whose right answers can only be inferred, not proved.
The first involves the contention that police should be more aggressive in patrolling inner-city minority
communities because thats where the criminals are. Those who hold this view might point to Grays history of
drug arrests. They might argue that the police officers were justified in thinking Gray must have been guilty of
something, especially when he ranand that if he had nothing to hide, he should have simply stayed put.
But this overlooks a universal phenomenon: We find things where we look for them.
If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or
probable criminal, they will conduct more searchesand make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of
young men in that neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for
continued hyper-aggressive police tactics.
Your Words.
Glossary: Objection a reason for disagreeing

Zero-tolerance refusal to accept antisocial behavior, typically by strict and uncompromising application of
the law
Social disorder disrupting the systematic functioning or neat arrangement of a community
Transgressive involving a violation of accepted or imposed boundaries
Demographic categories of the population
Hyper-aggressive tending toward unprovoked offensives, attacks, invasions, or the like
Self-fulfilling prophecy prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true
30

31

ANSWER TO: COMMUNITIES SUPPORT & DEPOLICING

The communities most impacted by police arent the ones who get polled.
Support for broken windows comes from the middle and professional class who
have internalized racism.
Kirsten West Savali, September2, 2014, The Root, Black New Yorkers Want Increased
Police Despite Eric Garners Death,
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/09/broken_windows_policing_poll_reconcilin
g_black_attitudes_toward_law_enforcement.2.html
And with black men being three times more likely to be killed by police officers than white men during an
encounter, the question arises: Why would black voters in New York City want a heavier police presence in their
neighborhoods if that reality is more likely to lead to more brutality and black deaths?
If [we are to] assume the study is reliable, then you have to ask, What black people? Generally, more middle
class and professional people will prioritize protecting property, said Arlene Eisen, the author and primary
researcher of Operation Ghetto Storm, a frequently quoted study on the extrajudicial killing of black people.
Then, you need to consider the level of political education of whoever responded to the survey. This includes
what a lot of people call internalized racismwhere black people learn a lot of the same views of themselves
as whites. Unfortunately, there is very little in the education system and corporate media to counter the
hegemonic status of white supremacy.
What black people, indeed. Older black people are more likely to be registered voters than younger black
people, and in populations most affected by police brutalitylow-income, black communitiesaccess to a
landline or cellphone is not assured. When reading these results, one also has to take into consideration
the disenfranchisement restrictions placed on black voters on parole.
De-Policing threats subvert 1st Amendment rights and present a false choice.
Police should reform to stop abuse.
Mariano Castillo, June 4, 2015, CNN, Is a new crime wave on the horizon?,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/02/us/crime-in-america/
CNN Political Analyst Van Jones said tying the protests over the deaths of unarmed black men to increases in
crime is disingenuous. "Police unions are trying to link any crime to First Amendment protests and cherrypicking data," he told CNN's Erin Burnett. "This is all part of an attempt to tell black people that if we exercise
our First Amendment rights, we are somehow now responsible for people who engage in crime," he said. "Why
should the black community have to choose between police abuse and police neglect? That's a false choice."
Your Words.
Glossary: internalized racism the personal conscious or subconscious acceptance of the dominant
societys racist views, stereotypes and biases of ones ethnic group
Hegemonic ruling or dominant in a political or social context
Disenfranchisement to deprive of a legal right
Disingenuous not sincere
Cherry-picking electively choose (the most beneficial items) from what is available
32

33

ANSWER TO: BROKEN WINDOWS DECREASES

ARRESTS
Stops and misdemeanor offenses are the gateway to the criminal justice
system; they sweep people in and make it difficult to get out.
Kelly K. Koss, January 30, 2015, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Leveraging Predictive Policing Algorithms to Restore
Fourth Amendment Protections in High Crime Areas in a Post-Wardlow World, Vol 90, Iss 1, p. 322-323.
[H]ypersegregation . . . has made the round-up easy. Confined to ghetto areas and lacking political power, the
black poor are convenient targets. Heavy policing of these low-income neighborhoods has created an
expectation among residents, particularly among young black men, that they will be stopped, interrogated, and
frisked numerous times in the course of a month, or even a single week. In her book, Alexander shares a story
from a law student who participated in a ride-along with a Chicago police officer. The student described how,
[e]ach time we drove into a public housing project and stopped the car, every young black man in the area
would almost reflexively place his hands up against the car and spread his legs to be searched. These regular
encounters with law enforcement are problematic because they often function as the gateway into the criminal
justice system for non-violent, low-level offenses such as marijuana possession. Arrests for low-level nonviolent offenses have created a climate where a staggering 5.1 million people [are] under community
correctional supervisioni.e., on probation or parole. Moreover, an individual does not even need to be
convicted of a crime to be barred from gainful employment, access to public housing or other public assistance
getting arrested is enough to essentially lock someone out of mainstream society. Once a person has been
swept into the criminal justice system, it is difficult to get out. Scholar, Loc Wacquant has described this
phenomenon of people cycling in and out of prison and trapped by their second class status as a closed
circuit of perpetual marginality. Thus, requiring narrower definitions of high-crime areas could reduce the
number of Terry stops that occur in these neighborhoods. Reducing the number of Terry stops occurring in these
neighborhoods may, in turn, reduce the number of young minority men who are swept into the criminal justice
systems closed circuit of perpetual marginality for committing low level, non-violent offenses.
Violent crime went down in every major urban city whether they were
practicing broken windows or not.
Robert McCartney & Wesley Lowery, May 2, 2015, The Washington Post, Protests
likely to accelerate retreat from tough police tactics of the 1990s,
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Defenders of the strategy say the results are self-evident. As OMalley tweeted Friday, FBI statistics show
violent crime dropped by 41 percent while he was mayor, the largest reduction for any major U.S. city.
But skeptics note that violent crime has dropped sharply across the nation and even around the globe over
the past two decades. The phenomenon is not fully understood and has been attributed to factors, including
broad demographic trends, that have nothing to do with the police.
Crime has gone down in every large urban area in the country, including places that havent practiced zero
tolerance or broken windows policing, said Robert Gangi, director of the Police Reform Organizing Project in
New York.
Your Words.
Glossary: hypersegregation when a race/ethnic group is highly separated from others in multiple ways
Marginality in a place or position of lesser importance, influence, or power
Self-evident obvious
34

35

ANSWER TO: NEW YORK CRIME RATES

San Diego didnt use broken windows & saw twice the crime rate drop of New
York City during the same time period.
Ginia Bellafante, January 18, 2015, The New York Times, Darkened Windows, Section
MB, pg. 1
Additional testimony before the president's task force this week included a report from Dolores Jones-Brown, a
former prosecutor and director of the John Jay College Center on Race, Crime and Justice, who argued that San
Diego, a model for alternative techniques, had experienced a greater long-term reduction in violent crime than
New York had without resorting to broken-windows tactics. From 1991 to 1998, she wrote, New York's
homicide rate declined by 70.6 percent but San Diego's dropped by more than 76 percent. From 2002 to 2012,
while violent crime in New York fell by 19 percent, violent crime in San Diego fell by 27 percent.
How was this accomplished? In the '90s, for example, when a spate of robberies occurred around a particular
bus stop, the San Diego police, rather than flooding the area with officers or making mass arrests, simply
relocated the bus stop to a spot in front of a convenience store, which provided more light. The thought, which
turned out to be correct, was that the robberies were largely crimes of opportunity, committed by impulsive
young people who would not bother to set up shop elsewhere.
Crime may have went down in New York City, but police brutality and
corruption charges went up.
Brent T. White, Simone M. Sepe, & Saura Masconale, professors of law, 2014, Emory
Law Journal, URBAN DECAY, AUSTERITY, AND THE RULE OF LAW, p. 32-33
From a normative perspective, our theory radically departs from the BWT. Based on the presumptive existence
of a causal link between minor disorder and serious crime, the BWT advocates a policy of strict coercive
enforcement. It emphasizes the necessity of pervasive police presence in urban communities and a high arrest
rate, combined with other aggressive enforcing techniques - an enforcement strategy referred to as "order
maintenance policing" or "quality-of-life initiative." This approach, however, overlooks the fact that social and
coercive enforcement only are substitutes to a limited and imperfect extent. Harcourt's examination of the
effects of the quality-of-life initiative New York City adopted in the 1990s supports our argument. Consistent
with our predictions, he found that New York's quality-of-life initiative coincided with a sharp increase in
complaints of police brutality and other forms of officer misconduct. He similarly found that law enforcement
costs rose exponentially under that policing strategy, both in economic and social terms. At the same time, he
cast doubt on whether the huge costs New York citizens were required to bear could be credited with having
exerted any direct impact on the reduction in crime rates New York experienced in those years.
Your Words.
Glossary: normative establishing, relating to, or deriving from a standard of behavior

Presumptive expected to develop in a particular direction under normal conditions
Causal involving a relationship between two things or phenomenon
Misconduct unacceptable or improper behavior
36

37

ANSWER TO: CRIME DISADVANTAGE

Broken windows policing effectiveness is overstated. There are many
explanations for a drop in crime anti-theft technology, rise of the debit card,
summer jobs programs and more!
Emily Badger, December 31, 2014, The Washington Post, Broken windows boosters
are giving the idea too much credit,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/31/broken-windowsboosters-are-giving-the-idea-too-much-credit/
In fact, these conditions have probably resulted from many factors, police tactics among them. The Marshall
Project recently rounded up 10 of the most popular theories for why urban crime has declined. So many exist
from the rise of legal abortion to the decline of lead-based fuel and paint precisely because the phenomenon
has proved so difficult to explain. Can we really dismiss, for instance, the fact that anti-theft technology in
vehicles has grown much more sophisticated? Or the fact that the crack epidemic finally waned? Or that our
increasingly cashless economy makes people harder targets for crime ?
We recently wrote about a Chicago summer-jobs program that appears to have cut down on violent arrests by atrisk teens. Those results further support the notion that crime and violence (their presence) are intimately tied to
economic opportunity (and its absence). How, then, can we argue that economic factors are irrelevant?
While it's hard to say exactly how much each of these factors matters, it's implausible that none of them do
that contested police tactics are the only thing standing between us and 1980s-era crime.
The logic of broken windows policing defies common sense. Sleeping on BART
is not the gateway to becoming a murderer.
MATT PEPPE, writer on politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America, Dec. 29, 2014,
Despite being disproven as a strategy for reducing crime, the broken windows policing theory is still utilized in
New York and throughout in the United States to crack down on disorder and nonviolent crime. To think that
harsh enforcement of this type of crime would prevent serious crime like homicide and assault is patently
absurd on its face. If you want to rid society of the most serious crimes, you should be enforcing the most
serious crimes, like aggressive war. Call it broken countries policing.
In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping turnstiles, dancing on the
subways, and having small amounts of marijuana, but not for assassination, torture, anal rape, illegal
surveillance, or invading, occupying and bombing sovereign countries.
The broken windows theory that you can nip violent crime in the bud by punishing minor quality of life
violations like smoking and drinking in the street or sleeping on the subway is so transparently nonsensical it is
hard to believe anyone could even consider it seriously.
It is equivalent to a diet to prevent obesity that consists of forgoing vegetables and grains because foods with the
least calories are a gateway to fatty, fried foods with no nutritional value. Corn seeds are not twinkies, and
sleeping on a subway train is not murder.
Basic common sense and years of empirical data demonstrate that broken windows theory has no effect on
preventing serious crime. When you understand this, it is easy to see that the broken windows theory put into
practice is about something entirely different than its professed aims.
1
Glossary: Phenomenon a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen

Intimately very closely and personally
38

Implausible - not realistic

Absurd ridiculous, not believable
Empirical based on undeniable facts.
39


Turn Broken Windows policing wastes police resources by focusing on minor
crime instead of major crimes.
Rob McManamy, March 30, 2006, The University of Chicago Chronicle, Study authors
find cracks in broken-windows,
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/060330/brokenwindow.shtml
So, prioritizing broken-windows policing in the current fiscal climate for most cities simply does not make
sense, Harcourt and Ludwig concluded. In our opinion, focusing on minor misdemeanors is a diversion of
valuable police funding and time from what really seems to helptargeted police patrols against violence, gang
activity and gun crimes in the highest-crime hot spots , said Harcourt. Its not about being pro-cop or anticop. Its about using police officer time and limited resources intelligently.
Turn Broken Windows policing wastes resources

Bernard E. Harcourt, Professor of Law at University of Chicago. 10/21/2005, Debate
Club, Is Broken Windows Policing Broken?,
legalaffairs.org/webexclusive/debateclub_brokenwindows1005.msp
The key trade-off that I have discussed in this debate is a trade-off about our crime-fighting dollars. We, as a
society, allocate some money for education, some for public health, some for roads and tunnels and bridges, for
national security and national emergencies, for charitable workand some money to fight crime. It's those
crime-fighting dollars that I am talking about. Those dollars are scarce, as they are for education and housing.
My argument is that we need to be very careful in allocating those crime-fighting dollars, and that it is more
effective to direct those scarce law enforcement dollars to targeted policing of violent and gun crime than it is to
spend them on aggressive misdemeanor arrests: it is better to disband the Graffiti Habitual Offenders
Suppression Team and to redirect those eleven police officers to deal with gang homicides. We get more bang
for the buck.
Naturally, we as a society will have to make other trade-offs between, for instance, the money we invest in
crime fighting and the money we invest in education and public health and in public art projects, in poverty
relief, and in humanitarian aid. But just because targeted law enforcement is more effective than broken
windows policing does not mean that we will invest all our resources in hot spots approaches. It does not mean
that we should not invest money in housing and public toilets to deal with the plight of the homeless persons on
Skid Row. What it does mean is that those dollars allocated to crime-fighting should not be squandered on
ineffective measures.
Your Words.
Glossary: Squandered wasted
40


There is no crime wave as a result of calls for police reform. Crime is down
significantly since the 90s and data cannot link short-term crime with
incidents like protests. This argument is a page out of undermining civil rights
movements 101.
Bernard Harcourt, June 6, 2015, The Guardian, Dont believe the fictitious crime trends
used to undermine police reform,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/06/dont-believe-ferguson-effectfictitious-undermine-police-reform
Pulling a page out of the conservative playbook from the 1960s, some are arguing that America is seeing a
dramatic crime wave as a result of the protests against police shootings in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson.
But the so-called Ferguson effect is just the latest example of conservative crime fiction being used to
undermine the recent gains of the countrys newest civil rights movement.
The causal link underlying the Ferguson effect is unfounded, as any honest social scientist will tell you. Given
the complexity of identifying short-term crime trends and of determining reliable causal antecedents even with
decades of hindsight and troves of big data, which is certainly not the case here the idea that we could observe
a Ferguson effect on crime today is preposterous. One need only glance at
the voluminous scientific controversy surrounding the massive crime drop since the early 1990s in the United
States and Canada to understand this perfectly.
The point of the Ferguson effect, though, is not to be accurate. It is instead to distract us from the growing
evidence about the magnitude and extent of police use of lethal violence in the United States as powerfully
documented just this week by The Guardian and the Washington Post and to besmirch the #BlackLivesMatter
movement.
Its a strategy that Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater inaugurated in his campaign in 1964,
almost single-handedly turning crime into a political weapon against the civil rights movement.
Turn Broken Windows increases crime

Steward Ian, May 9, 2008, The Press Police draw 'line in sand', News: National: p. 1
Bott said many sociologists did not credit Broken Windows with resurrecting New York but rather pointed to a
drop in the city's cocaine epidemic and rising property prices forcing lower socio-economic groups from the city
centre.
"While Broken Windows seems compelling, it may actually lead to an increase in crime," Bott said. The policy
led to criminalisation and "disaffection with police", particularly from youths.
Your Words.
Glossary: conservative holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or
innovation
Preposterous ridiculous
Voluminous occupying or containing much space
Sociologists The study of human society
Resurrecting revive the practice, use, or memory of
41

42

ANSWER TO: REFORM BWP COUNTERPLAN

Broken Windows Policing should not be reformed. The counterplan ignores the
calls of protesters call to reign in police departments.
Josmar Trujillo, Feb. 09, 2015, Huffington Post, Broken Windows Cracks But Police
State Grows, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josmar-trujillo/broken-windows-cracksbut_b_6634968.html
Ultimately, if the goal is to end the Broken Windows era then the conversation must be kept away from
attempts, both genuine and disingenuous, to simply reform it. It must be ended. That Broken Windows could be
uprooted in New York, where it started, would be the most fitting end to its dark chapter in city history.
However an ever-growing police state must also be minded. The political power of the NYPD is seemingly only
matched by its firepower as our elected officials stumble over themselves to give the department whatever it
wants. This dynamic doesn't only ignore protesters nationwide that call for local police departments to be
reigned in, it also puts us all in very real danger.
Broken windows cannot be fixed with incremental reform; it must be

abandoned.
The Nation, June 17, 2015, You Cant Fix Broken Windows, So End It Now,
http://www.thenation.com/article/you-cant-fix-broken-windows-so-end-it-now/
Instead, the most prominent defender of broken windows, NYPD Chief Bill Bratton, has descended into
absurdity. Recently, he complained that he cant hire more blacks as cops because so many of them have spent
time in jail. At the same time, he steadfastly defended the very policy that created this inequity. This circular
logic cannot be squared by incremental reform. The politics will be tough, but it is time our leaders
acknowledge broken windows as an immoral, ineffective, and racist ideaand toss it into the dustbin of
history.
Reforms dont respond to the root of the problem. Put away the idea that black
and brown communities have become the broken window and cities are made
safe by harassing them.
Kai Wright, Dec 4, 2014, Colorlines, The Ugly Idea That Killed Eric Garner,
http://www.colorlines.com/articles/ugly-idea-killed-eric-garner
In the hours following the grand jury announcement, the idea of body cams for cops morphed quickly from a
hopeful reform to a Twitter punchline. After all, the whole incident here was recorded and the whole world has
seen it. Still, maybe body cams will bring some marginal reforms; the record's mixed in jurisdictions where
they've been deployed. But the real killer here isn't in the margins. It's not the tools cops use. It's not their
training. It's not the rigged game of grand juries. At least, these things aren't at root. The root problem is a
consensus that we make cities safe by harassing the residents of their black neighborhoods. It is that idea that
must be indicted and convicted and put away for good.
Your Words.
Glossary: prominent important

Immoral not conforming to accepted standards of morality
43

Indicted formally accuse of or charge with a serious crime
44

ANSWER TO: ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK

Perm Do the plan and challenge anti-blackness. Immediate and short term
remedies do not prevent larger systemic changes. The affirmative recognizes
we need both.
National Urban League, August 18, 2014, A Unified Statement of Action to Promote
Reform and Stop Police Abuse, http://nul.iamempowered.com/content/unifiedstatement-action-promote-reform-and-stop-police-abuse
Beyond Ferguson, we must similarly demand mutual respect from law enforcement and elected officials toward
other affected communities where lives have been tragically lost and endangered.
As we call for immediate and short term remedies to address the challenges in Ferguson, we know that more
must be done to prevent future abuses across the nation. Nothing will be resolved until there is systemic change
throughout this nation in the implicit and explicit bias against people of color and particularly African American
youth who are routinely targeted by law enforcement even within their own communities.
Even if the affirmative plan is not perfect, it is a step towards a better future.
Theres inequality throughout the country still, and theres still police brutality and a growing problem with
incarceration. But in Cincinnati, a diverse group of people, including police officers and citizens, are trying to
understand one another. Thats led to fewer arrests, fewer people in jail, less crime, and more dialogue between
police and the community that pays them to do their job. For a great many other cities, Cincinnatis imperfect
present provides a glimpse of a much better future.
#BlackLivesMatter. The first step for black communities is claiming

personhood. The affirmative plan is a challenge to policy that treats black and
brown communities as subpersons.
Charles Mills, 1997, The Racial Contract, p. 118-119.
What does it require for a subperson to assert himself or herself politically? To begin with, it means simply, or
not so simply, claiming the moral status of personhood. So it means challenging the white-constructed ontology
that has deemed one a "body impolitic," an entity not entitled to assert personhood in the first place. In a sense
one has to fight an internal battle before even advancing onto the ground of external combat. One has to
overcome the internalization of subpersonhood prescribed by the Racial Contract and recognize one's own
humanity, resisting the official category of despised aboriginal, natural slave, colonial ward. One has to learn the
basic self respect that can casually be assumed by Kantian persons, those privileged by the Racial Contract, but
which is denied to subpersons. Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves, the importance of developing self-respect and
demanding respect from whites is crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts "how a man was made a slave" and
promises "you shall see how a slave was made a man. But a hundred years later this struggle is still in progress.
"Negroes want to be treated like men," wrote James Baldwin in the 1950s, "a perfectly straightforward
45

statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare,
Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable."
1
Glossary: subperson below the value of a human; a human who is not treated with the rights and
dignities of a human
Ontology - philosophy concerned with being, the way humans be in the world
46

ANSWER TO: ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK

Turn the affirmative is part of preventing anti-black future.
Charlene A. Carruthers, Political Organizer and Director of Black Youth Project 100,
February 3, 2015, Huffington Post, Black Future Month: End the Anti-Black Police State
I walked through a metal detector and past police officers every day before entering a classroom as a high
school student in Chicago. Ten years later, I can still find at least three cop cars in one square mile almost
anywhere in my neighborhood -- high police presence. I've been pulled over, accused of drug possession, and
violently harassed by a police officer in North County, St. Louis. These experiences fit into a much larger
narrative of criminalization of Black people across the United States. We must have radical change if Black
people are to survive and thrive in America.
A future for Black people in America must include full decriminalization of acts not considered to be criminal
when performed in non-Black bodies. Where we go from here requires approaches to public safety that don't
hinge on the control of Black people, empowerment of police and reliance on punitive measures. Our call to
action must support restorative justice practices, quality public school systems and good living-wage jobs. The
call for an end to mass criminalization must include a call to the end of the Anti-Black Police State.
BYP100 Agenda to Keep Us Safe defines criminalization as a process in which behaviors and people are
presumed criminal. Criminalization has less to do with what is actually done, and more to do with society's
ideas about who is "other," whose behavior is wrongful and who should be punished. The law, media and public
perception drive criminalization.
From the local beat cop to the police chief, law enforcement agencies, have too much power over our lives. I
want to live in a world where police department budgets don't take up over 20% of overall budgets while
community services are allocated 6% or less, as they do in cities like Chicago and Oakland. I want to live in the
world where society prioritizes quality public education, well-rounded social and mental health services and
sustainable infrastructure.
The officers who killed Aura Rosser in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, Ohio and Mike
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri are reflections of a broad and powerful Anti-Black Police State. Individual police
officers are just one party in the breathing-while-Black-pipeline to jail, prison, sexual assault or death. I am less
invested in focusing on the character of an individual police officer than the character of the entire system.
The Anti-Black Police State protects elected officials who advocate for more police officers while public
schools in Black communities are closed and underfunded en masse. Communities must organize against
candidates who call for more police and support candidates who have commitments and records of protecting
teachers, parents and the public school system.
Where we go from here requires us to see that the systems that fund tear gas in Ferguson, MO, the police
officers gun in Cleveland, OH, the tanks in occupied Palestine and the detention centers in Arizona are all
connected. If enslaved Africans in the Americas could imagine a future where their grandchildren would not be
slaves, we can imagine a future without mass criminalization, incarceration and the Anti-Black Police State. Our
freedom dreams must be radical. Our way forward must be radically inclusive or it will repeat the same
strategies, tactics, policies and ideas that have failed our people before.
We'll know Black lives matter when the anti-black police state no longer exists and all people can live with
dignity.
Your Words.
Glossary: punitive inflicting punishment
47

ANSWER TO: BAN POLICE COUNTERPLAN

The police prevent future harm, meet our needs, and help us heal.
Doug Wyllie, April 3, 2015, Police One, Answering the question: How would a world without
police look? http://www.policeone.com/police-heroes/articles/8517432-Answering-thequestion-How-would-a-world-without-police-look/
While the anti-police group Copwatch wants to create no-cop zones, Van Fossen seemingly wants to do away
with all law enforcement, writing on her blog that a just and free world means a world without police. Chew
on that for a moment a world without police. Van Fossen opened her anti-police argument thusly: Whether
we call them because of a dispute between neighbors or a robbery, a shooting or sexual violence, the police
rarely meet our needs. They dont help us heal. And they dont prevent future harm. According to this line of
thinking, have the police who recovered an elderly womans most treasured memento of her late husband
her simple gold wedding band not met her needs? Have the officers who arrest the gang members on both
sides of a gunfight that left an innocent woman dead while shielding her children from the hail of gunfire, not
helped those children on their long road to healing? The cop who arrests a man guilty of domestic abuse and
the prosecuting attorneys who see that arrest is converted into a conviction involving incarceration has not
prevented future harm? Has the multi-jurisdictional task force that dismantled a human trafficking ring in
which countless victims suffered heinous abuse not prevented future harm? Has the patrolman arresting a drunk
driver who blew a deuce not prevented even the potential for untold future harm? I need not go further in
exposing how Van Fossens logic is false on its face you get the idea.
There are some situations beyond the ability of people to naturally resolve.
Police intervene when no other compassionate or rational intervention by the
community is possible.
Doug Wyllie, April 3, 2015, Police One, Answering the question: How would a world without
police look? http://www.policeone.com/police-heroes/articles/8517432-Answering-thequestion-How-would-a-world-without-police-look/
Van Fossen says that without cops, people would naturally just work out their differences. By eliminating the
involvement of the state in social conflicts, we increase our opportunity to practice methods of conflict
resolution like mediation, dialogue, and reconciliation. Van Fossen quotes Luis Fernandez Professor of
Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University as saying that most of our human
interactions are already outside of the purview of police officers... Most social relationships between people do
not require police intervention. This is true. But police exist because most interactions doesnt equal all
interactions. Most people have never committed a crime nor would they. But some do. Most people
have never been so horrified that they dial 911 with fumbling fingers and plead for help in vibrating voices. But
some do. Newsflash: You cant coexist with people who are trying to kill you, rape you, maim you, and take
from you all that you hold dear thats why we have police officers to protect us.
Your Words.
Glossary: conviction a formal declaration that someone is guilty of a crime

Dismantled to take apart
Fumbling clumsy while doing something
Maim wound
48

49

ANSWER TO: BAN POLICE COUNTERPLAN

Perm Do both. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams work best
together with police. Independently, the counterplan does not protect
neighborhoods.
Derek M. Cohen, a policy analyst for the Center for Effective Justice with the Texas Public
Policy Foundation, January 6, 2015, The Federalist, Ignore Rolling Stones Dangerously
Naive Ideas About A Cop-Free World http://thefederalist.com/2015/01/06/ignore-rollingstones-dangerously-naive-ideas-about-a-cop-free-world/
The first suggestion Martn offers is to employ boots-on-the-ground mediators, much like those used in New
York or Detroit: Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their
neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This means employing and training scores of wellrespected individuals from high-crime neighborhoods and, in the event of an incident, deploy them to cool
down the situation to prevent retaliation.
This is, at best, a nave reading of the genesis and efficacy of streetworker programs. Simple streetworker
programs have not been shown to reduce crime. In fact, an evaluation of the SNUG program in New Yorkthe
very one Martn toutsfound that crime was wholly reduced in only of the five program sites; the one with the
second-worst adherence to the programs model. To say this outperforms simple random variation is an
indefensibly charitable analysis.
Perhaps the grand irony of this suggestion is that the only instances where the streetworker strategy has been
part of a notable drop in crime is when they are a tertiary approach to a focused deterrence policing initiative
like CeaseFire or CIRV. These programs focus the resources and efforts of law enforcement on serious
offenders and have been shown to improve public safety when used in very high-crime areas. Streetworker
strategies work because of, not in lieu of, the police.
The counterplan will result in vigilantes and community violence when

members fundamentally disagree with each other.
Derek M. Cohen, a policy analyst for the Center for Effective Justice with the Texas Public
Policy Foundation, January 6, 2015, The Federalist, Ignore Rolling Stones Dangerously
Naive Ideas About A Cop-Free World http://thefederalist.com/2015/01/06/ignore-rollingstones-dangerously-naive-ideas-about-a-cop-free-world/
Heavy in bombast and rhetoric and short on justification, Martns suggested reforms have a faade of
legitimacy built up around little substance. His article can be easily boiled down to how to live without police:
everybody cooperate to enforce social norms. As simple and placating as that may be, the author fails to
explore what happens in instances where communities, or even large swaths of one community, are at odds in
normative values or how to address violations thereof. It is a system that allowsno, mandatesvendetta,
vigilantism, and (actual) capricious use of force. These are not hallmarks of an evolved society, but a descent
into barbarism.
Your Words.
Glossary: efficacy the ability to produce a desired or intended result

Adherence sticking to
Deterrence a strategy intended to discourage an opponent from taking an action
Capricious - given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood
50

51

READY
TO
CUT YOUR OWN EVIDENCE? TRY THIS.
Eugene Robinson, May 4, 2015, The Washington Post, Its time to seriously rethink
zero tolerance policing, https://www.washingtonpost.com
The first two steps toward uplifting young black men are simple: Stop killing them and stop locking them in prison for
nonviolent offenses.
Subsequent steps are harder, but no real progress can be made until the basic right to life and liberty is secured. If anything
positive is to come of Freddie Grays death and the Baltimore rioting that ensued, let it be a new and clear-eyed focus on
these fundamental issues of daily life for millions of Americans.
Central to the crisis is zero-tolerance or broken windows policing, which basically involves cracking down on minor
offenses in the hope of reducing major crime as well. Whether this strategy works is the subject of two arguments whose
right answers can only be inferred, not proved.
The first involves the contention that police should be more aggressive in patrolling inner-city minority communities
because thats where the criminals are. Those who hold this view might point to Grays history of drug arrests. They might
argue that the police officers were justified in thinking he must have been guilty of something, especially when he ran
and that if he had nothing to hide, he should have simply stayed put.
But this argument overlooks a universal phenomenon: We find things where we look for them.
If police concentrate their patrols in a certain area and assume every young man they see is a potential or probable
criminal, they will conduct more searches and make more arrests. Which means a high percentage of young men in that
neighborhood will have police records. Which, in turn, provides a statistical justification for continued hyper-aggressive
police tactics.
In New York, where a federal judge ruled then-mayor Michael Bloombergs stop and frisk policy unconstitutional, an
analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that 85 percent of stops in 2012 involved African Americans or
Hispanics who make up just half the population. The No. 1 goal of the practice, city officials said, was to get illegal
weapons off the streets. But minorities were found to be carrying weapons just 2 percent of the time, while 4 percent of
whites who were stopped and frisked had weapons.
This doesnt mean the New York Police Department should have deployed all its resources to the Upper East Side. What it
strongly suggests is that officers, when deciding whether to stop and frisk whites, exercised greater discretion. It suggests
police were more likely to single out whites who genuinely had something to hide and to detain African Americans and
Hispanics indiscriminately.
The second argument about aggressive policing is about impact: The advent of broken windows has coincided with a
dramatic decline in violent crime across the nation.
Did one lead to the other? It is easy to show a correlation but impossible to prove causality. It is not as if police
departments were ignoring inner-city communities before the practice of rousting suspects on drug corners was known by
a fancy buzzword. And violent crime has also fallen sharply in many communities that either abandoned zero-tolerance
policing or never adopted it.
Has crime fallen because so many hard-core criminals are in prison? Believe me, my heart does not bleed for any
murderer, armed robber or rapist who is behind bars. But thousands of black men are in prison for possessing or selling
marijuana, a drug that is now legal in the nations capital. Blacks and whites smoke pot at equal rates, but African
Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for doing so.
In the larger war on drugs, the victims have been black and brown. The American Civil Liberties Union reported last
year that African Americans facing drug charges are imprisoned at a rate 10 times that of whites and that sentences for
black men are nearly 20 percent longer than those for white men, on average. Punishment for possessing or selling crack
cocaine remains vastly greater than for an identical quantity of the upscale powder variety.
Back to Freddie Gray and Baltimore: At 25 years old, without education, employment or immediate prospects, he was
hardly what anyone would call a pillar of the community. But neither was he any sort of menace to society. Perhaps some
intervention would have gotten his life on track. Perhaps not. Well never know.
When he saw police, he ran. Was that illogical? The officers chased him down, pinned him in a folded position like
origami, according to a witness, and tossed him into a police wagon. Was that necessary?
The answer to both questions is no. Therein lies the problem.
52

53

EVIDENCE
FOR THE
NEGATIVE:
CORE NEG
54

CASE DEBATE: RACIAL PROFILING

Broken Windows Policing is based on objective data about crime trends, not
subjective perceptions of where crime is. If neighborhoods werent calling the
police, then the police wouldnt be there.
William Bratton & George Kelling, Winter, 2015, City Journal, Why We need Broken
Windows Policing, http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_broken-windows-policing.html
A small portion of the minority population drives the street crime and disorder in these neighborhoods,
victimizing entire communities. In 2013, for example, 92 percent of murder suspects in New York were AfricanAmerican or Hispanic, as were 97 percent of identified suspects in shooting incidents. One hundred years ago,
the perpetrators might have been Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish, but the underlying social conditions and the
patterns of crime and disorder would have been similar.
With modern, data-driven policingexemplified by Compstat, which uses exhaustive crime data and mapping
to identify crime trends and hold precinct commanders accountable for their areasthese patterns, not some
determination to target minorities, determine law enforcements response . That is, when the NYPD analyzes and
maps crime and disorder in the city, and then develops its crime-prevention plans and allocates resources to
specific neighborhoods, the effort will necessarily target high-crime areas, and those tend to have a
preponderance of African-Americans and Hispanics and are usually the poorest neighborhoods in the city. In
neighborhoods without high levels of victimization, crime, and disorder, residents maintain order through
informal mechanisms and support networks and dont need to call 311 or 911 regularly for assistance; in these
areas, police presence is far less intrusive.
Regardless of racial background, people dont want disorder in their

neighborhood.
But the notion that different racial groups have different standards about what constitutes unacceptable disorder
is a gross distortion. Our experience working with community groups corresponds with the research of
Northwestern Universitys Wesley Skogan, as reported in his book Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral
of Decay in American Neighborhoods. In a survey of 13,000 residents of 40 neighborhoods in six large cities,
Skogan found not only a direct link between disorder and serious crime but also a broad consensus in
communitiesregardless of race, ethnicity, or classabout what constituted disorderly conditions and
behavior. Topping the list were drunken and loitering youth, street harassment and panhandling, street
prostitution, abandoned houses, graffiti, and other behaviors and conditions (which can include drug dealing,
excessive noise, and reckless driving). Far from being a divisive issue, concern about disorder brings people
with different backgrounds together. They know what disorderly behavior and conditions are, and they want
something done about them.
Your Words.
Glossary: Preponderance being greater in number, quantity, or importance.

Intrusive invasive of personal space or property
Distortion pulling or twisting out of shape, making something misleading
Consensus general agreement between people
Divisive causing divides between because of differences between people.
55

56


Turn - Black and Latin neighborhoods are in favor of broken windows policing
Our experience suggests that, whatever the critics might say, the majority of New Yorkers, including minorities,
approve of such police order-maintenance activities. After all, most of these activities come in response to
residents demands, which are made to patrolling officers directly, to precinct operators by telephone, to precinct
commanders at community meetings, and via the 311 and 911 call centers. Contrary to conventional wisdom,
citizens almost invariably are more concerned about disorderly behavior than about major crimes, which they
experience far less frequently. We have attended countless meetings with citizen groups in high-crime areas,
and, almost without exception, disorderly behavior and conditions are the central concerns. As recently mapped
by the NYPD, 311 and 911 complaints about quality-of-life conditions and lesser crimes correlated almost
exactly with neighborhoods in northern Brooklyn and the central Bronx, where many Broken Windows arrests
are made. Conversely, some large minority communities in southern Queens and the eastern Bronx make far
fewer complaintsand the police make far fewer arrests for Broken Windows offenses in those areas.
In August 2014, in the wake of Eric Garners 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 Garners 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 all64 to 34 percent. The poll results reflect the underlying
public support from all races for this kind of enforcement.
Your Words.
Glossary: Precinct a district of a city or town as define for police purposes

Conventional based on what is generally done or believed.
Invariably without any change from the pattern
57


Turn - The affirmative argument is insulting to Black and Latin communities
who deserve the same standards of orderly conduct in their neighborhoods as
exists in white middle class neighborhoods.
Patt Morrison & George Kelling, January 6, 2015, Los Angeles Times, 'Broken
windows' policing isn't broken, says criminologist George L. Kelling,
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-morrison-kelling-20150107column.html#page=1
[Crime scholar] Wesley G. Skogan's research found a broad consensus as to what constitutes disorderly
behavior, and it wasn't dependent on race or class. The African American and Hispanic community want the
same kind of orderliness that the white middle-class community wanted . In some respects it's a pejorative view
of the African American community that somehow their values aren't very similar.
Broken Windows Policing cleaned up neighborhoods and ended chaos on the

streets of NY neighborhoods. Dont end a good program because of bad
enforcement.
Donna Ladd, June 8, 2015, The Guardian, Inside William Brattons NYPD: broken
windows policing is here to stay, http://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2015/jun/08/inside-william-bratton-nypd-broken-windows
Eric Adams, a black former NYPD captain who is now borough president, says that just last month, a mother
called him because her son was arrested for smoking marijuana on the street. He went to the 71st Precinct in
Crown Heights to deal with it.
I discovered the cops actually didnt see him smoke pot and had conducted an illegal search, Adams tells me.
He says a pot arrest is expensive: If I take a young person, arrest him for that possession of marijuana, put him
through the system; now hes 21, 22, and he goes to American Express and try to fill out a job application, and
he has an arrest record.
Adams wants discriminatory enforcement to end, but he says people confuse broken windows with more
harmful practices like stop-and-frisk. He says the city was in a state of utter chaos in the 1990s, with the open
drug sales, public urination and other disorder that made life miserable in most neighborhoods. Im a supporter
of broken windows, he says. Dont throw out the baby because of a problem with the bathwater.
Your Words.
Glossary: Pejorative expressing contempt or disapproval

Stop-and-frisk if the police feel a crime has been, is being, or is about to be committed, a person can be
stopped and patted down.
Dont throw out the baby with the bathwater dont get rid something that is good just because there is a
part of it that is bad.
58


Broken Windows Policing is based on a Stanford psychology study and
demonstrates white communities are as likely to commit crime in a disorderly
environment. Its the environment, not race, that matters
George Kelling & James Q. Wilson, the original broken windows study, March 1982,
The Atlantic, Broken Windows: The police and neighborhood safety,
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, reported in 1969 on some experiments testing the broken-window
theory. He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the
Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California. The car in the Bronx was attacked by
"vandals" within ten minutes of its "abandonment." The first to arrive were a familyfather, mother, and young
sonwho removed the radiator and battery. Within twenty-four hours, virtually everything of value had been
removed. Then random destruction beganwindows were smashed, parts torn off, upholstery ripped. Children
began to use the car as a playground. Most of the adult "vandals" were well-dressed, apparently clean-cut
whites. The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a
sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in. Within a few hours, the car had been turned upside down and
utterly destroyed. Again, the "vandals" appeared to be primarily respectable whites.
Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder and even for people who ordinarily
would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding. Because of the
nature of community life in the Bronxits anonymity, the frequency with which cars are abandoned and things
are stolen or broken, the past experience of "no one caring"vandalism begins much more quickly than it does
in staid Palo Alto, where people have come to believe that private possessions are cared for, and that
mischievous behavior is costly. But vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriersthe sense of
mutual regard and the obligations of civilityare lowered by actions that seem to signal that "no one cares."
We suggest that "untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood
of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders
can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle. A piece of property
is abandoned, weeds grow up, a window is smashed. Adults stop scolding rowdy children; the children,
emboldened, become more rowdy. Families move out, unattached adults move in. Teenagers gather in front of
the corner store. The merchant asks them to move; they refuse. Fights occur. Litter accumulates. People start
drinking in front of the grocery; in time, an inebriate slumps to the sidewalk and is allowed to sleep it off.
Pedestrians are approached by panhandlers.
Your Words.
Glossary: Anonymity being anonymous, not having your identity known

Vandalism harming, destroying, or effacing the property of someone else.
59

CASE DEBATE: MASS INCARCERATION

Turn Broken Windows Policing reduces prison trends. Early intervention
prevents length prison stays.
Another charge against Broken Windows is that it results in over-incarceration, especially of the poor and
minorities. But the opposite has proved true. Because of the crime turnaround in New York, felony arrests in the
city are down by about 60,000 per year from 1990 levels. Imprisonment in New York State penitentiaries has
declined by 25 percent since 2000, driven by a 69 percent decline in the number of New York City court
commitments. Likewise, the Gotham jail population has declined 45 percent since 1992. These trends all stand
in distinct contrast to the growth of prison populations in many other areas of the country.
Young men may be receiving summonses and desk-appearance tickets for quality-of-life misdemeanors, but
early and swift intervention has likely kept some of them from more serious criminal behavior that would result
in lengthy incarceration. In any case, far fewer go to jail and prison. In their 2012 Vera Institute study, How
New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration, James Austin and Michael Jacobson acknowledge that reducing
mass incarceration in New York might be worth more misdemeanor arrests.
Turn Order reduces the overall number of arrests. It has a deterrent effect
and reduces opportunities for crime.
Apart from the deterrent effect that minor arrests may have on individual offenders, the management of public
spaces to reduce disorderly behavior also lessens daily opportunities for crime. Just as disorder encourages
crime, order breeds more order. As bullies and shooters get driven off street corners and the risks of being killed
or terrorized diminish, the law-abiding community reemerges and starts to exert the kind of informal social
control common to more prosperous neighborhoods. In these transformed public spaces, peopleespecially
young peopleare subject to more restraint and are less likely to wind up in jail. Its important to note, too, that
quality-of-life arrests represent only a portion of the overall total of misdemeanor arrests in the city. About 35
percent of misdemeanor arrests in New York City are for assault and larcenycrimes that most people would
not consider minor. Traffic offenses account for 16 percent. Another 12 percent are for theft of service in the
subway (fare jumping) and frauds involving MetroCards. Steady increases in these categories have been
primary factors behind rising misdemeanor arrests in recent years. Taken together, traffic-related offenses, fare
jumping, and crimes against persons, including domestic violence and theft of smartphones and other electronic
equipment, account for 63 percent of all misdemeanor arrests in New York City. Broken Windows critics tend to
overlook the fact that fewer than 10 percent of misdemeanor arrestees, of any type, are actually sentenced to jail
time in New York City, and few of those for Broken Windows offenses.
Your Words.
Glossary: Deterrent something that keeps people away

Larceny theft of personal property
Arrestees people who have been arrested
60

CASE DEBATE: GENTRIFICATION

Gentrification is productive for a community. It rebuilds neighborhoods, brings
diversity and job sectors
Anne Cleval & Mathieu Van Criekingen, 2015,Gentrification or ghetto: making sense
of an intellectual impasse", Metro Politics, http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Gentrificationor-ghetto-making.html
Does gentrification contribute positively to urban regeneration and heritage protection?, gave the following
response: The answer is yes. In order to prevent an irreversible loss of built heritage, accepting measured
gentrification can be a solution. The arrival of wealthier populations in an underprivileged neighbourhood leads
to the renovation of the areas buildings by these new residents, who have the means to improve and refurbish
their dwellings. This helps to protect heritage. Others claim that gentrification brings with it new diversity
(social, functional and usage-related) in working-class neighbourhoods, a byword for urbanity that involves all
the components of urban society (Lvy 2013). Gentrification, it is purported, keeps the human capital
required by advanced service-sector and high-tech activities in the heart of the city, and also leads to the
development of new patterns of cultural or retail consumption. Lastly, it is often held that gentrification helps to
resolve the environmental crisis by slowing down urban sprawl. In sum, gentrification is portrayed as having
become a positive dynamic to be encouraged and managed rather than discouraged or combatted.
Gentrification breaks up damaging concentrated poverty that can affect people

for generations.
Jonathan Grabinsky & Stuart M. Butler, February 10, 2015, Brookings, The AntiPoverty Case for Smart Gentrification, Part 1, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/socialmobility-memos/posts/2015/02/10-gentrification-poverty-mobility-butler
The Damage of Concentrated Poverty
Being poor is obviously bad, but being poor in a really poor neighborhood is even worse. The work of urban
sociologists like Harvards Robert J. Sampson and New York Universitys Patrick Sharkey highlights how persistent,
concentrated neighborhood disadvantage has damaging effects on children that continue throughout a lifetime, often
stifling upward mobility across generations. When a community experiences uniform and deep poverty, with most
streets characterized by dilapidated housing, failing schools, teenage pregnancy and heavy unemployment, it appears
to create a culture of despair that can permanently blight a young persons future.
Gentrification: Potentially Benign Disruption
So what has been the impact of gentrification in the few places where it has occurred? There is some evidence,
crisply summarized in a recent article by John Buntin in Slate, that it might not be all bad news in terms of poverty. A
degree of gentrification can begin to break up the homogenous poverty of neighborhoods in ways that can be good
for all residents. New wealthier residents may demand improvements in schools and crime control. Retail offerings
and services may improve for all residents and bring new jobs, too. Gentrifiers can change neighborhoods in ways
that begin to counteract the effects of uniform, persistent poverty. On the other hand, gentrification can hurt lowincome households by disrupting the social fabric of neighborhoods and potentially pricing out families. It depends
on how its done. Well turn to that tomorrow.
Your Words.
Glossary: blight visible and physical decline of a property, neighborhood or city

Benign not harmful in effect
61

62

CASE DEBATE: SOLVENCY TAKE-OUT: JUSTICE

DEPARTMENT
No Solvency - The Department of Justice (DOJ) brings very few police officers to
trial.
Alex S. Vitale, April 30, 2015, Al Jazeera, Dont count on Loretta Lynch to tame the
police, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/4/dont-count-on-loretta-lynch-totame-the-police.html
The first problem with DOJ intervention is that individual prosecutions and pattern and practice investigations
are fairly rare. The DOJ civil rights division that oversees this process has only 50 lawyers, some of whom are
assigned to other tasks. In individual actions, the standard of proof requires evidence of intent to deprive
someone of his or her rights under the law a hard standard to meet, since if actions are taken in the heat of the
moment and if any possible threat to officers exists, that undermines such prosecutions. Even former Attorney
General Eric Holder said that the bar in such cases is very high. The DOJ is reluctant to undertake such
prosecutions because they can be viewed as major federal intrusions into local justice systems; only the most
clear-cut cases are likely to be brought. In a country with close to 1 million police officers, only about 100 cases
a year are pursued. The DOJ was unable or unwilling to bring charges in the Trayvon Martin and Brown cases.
No Solvency There are many reasons the Department of Justice cannot

control police
Pattern and practice cases are expensive and complicated and always politically fraught. Local police are often
reluctant or completely unwilling to cooperate, forcing additional litigation, increased costs and delayed
reforms. Another challenge is that the U.S. has about 17,000 independent police departments, each with its own
way of doing things. While some states have uniform policy standards and the Supreme Court has set some
limits on police, most departments have remarkable autonomy. A political or legal victory imposing changes on
police in one jurisdiction may have no bearing on the one next door .
No solvency Loretta Lynch, the US Attorney General, wont undertake

structural reforms against police. She ignores patterns of misconduct.
Unfortunately, nothing in Lynchs past suggests that she will undertake structural reform. As U.S. attorney for
the Eastern District of New York, she was involved in only one case of police misconduct, the brutal 1997
beating and sexual assault of Abner Louima. While her team won a conviction, Louimas lawyer accused her of
failing to bring charges in other clear cases of abuse. Others charged her with ignoring broader patterns of
misconduct that might have implicated the NYPDs street crimes unit the plainclothes anti-crime unit
involved in the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Lynch has continually stressed that minority communities need to place more trust in police. According to her
aides, she sees improving police morale as one of her top priorities. Unlike Holder, she has been a forceful
participant in the war on drugs and opposes exploring changes in federal marijuana law. The Justice Department
63

has never been an ideal institution for taming the police, but under Lynch the fight for reform may
become even more difficult.
Your Words.
Glossary: litigation the process of taking legal action

Autonomy freedom from external control
Implicated show someone to be involved in a crime
64

CASE DEBATE: SOLVENCY TAKE-OUT PROBLEMORIENTED POLICING

Problem-Oriented Policing has many problems in implementation which
prevent solving the affirmative harms.
Karen Bullock & Nick Tilley. Crime Reduction and Problem Oriented Policing. 2012. pg.
6-7
The widespread implementation and mainstreaming of problem-oriented policing has , however, proven
difficult. Though Lancashire Constabulary has probably most comprehensively put problem-oriented policing in
place, few if any of those in the service would claim that it describes the way all in the force are operating.
Common obstacles experienced in forces where problem-oriented policing has been tried include the following:
1) The imperative to respond to emergencies. Habits of response to a wide range of incidents have been hard to
shift. It is often not clear at the point of receipt of a all that has nothing to be gained by an immediate
response.
2) Middle-ranking officers, especially sergeants and inspectors, caught between needs to respond and needs to
steer and facilitate a problem-oriented way of working. The here and now calls for a response tend to take
precedence. Attention to them takes away resources needed if problem-oriented policing is to be conducted.
3) Cynicism among many officers about headquarters-inspired reform movements. Those officers are apt to
conform minimally and sit out what they construe as the latest fad (Leigh et al. 1998).
4) Pitching responsibility for problem-solving at beat officers. Early efforts to implement problem-oriented
policing in this country allocated responsibility for problem-oriented policing to community beat officers
was not a popular or well regarded specialism. The result was a shortage of officers with the energy and
ability to deliver what is demanding work. Some commendable efforts were made but they tended to be very
parochial and to make use of traditional police detection and enforcement methods. Clarke (1998) has
suggested that this kind of work be construed as problem-solving rather than problem-oriented policing
properly speaking, the latter term to be reserved for larger-scale work including systematic analysis.
5) Hasty, inadequately thought-through implementation. In some cases chief constables wanting to have
problem-oriented policing in their forces underestimated what would be needed to make it happen. In one
case a sergeant came to the Home Office to ask for advice on implementing problem-oriented policing forcewide in three weeks time. His was an extreme version of quite a common underestimate of what is required.
Your Words.
Glossary: imperative of vital importance

Conform comply with rules, standards, or laws
Commendable deserving praise
65

CASE DEBATE: DE-POLICING

When police feel under political attack, they will de-police and violent crime
will rise
Police Lt. Randy Sutton, a 33-year law enforcement veteran, May 5, 2015, New York
Post, The dangers of de-policing will cops just stand down?,
http://nypost.com/2015/05/05/the-dangers-of-de-policing-will-cops-just-stand-down/
Concerned about overzealous prosecution or runaway civil liability, cops are understandably considering a
logical option: de-policing. Theyll handle calls, write a ticket or two but do nothing proactive. Its selfpreservation from a physical, legal and administrative standpoint in an environment where police careers and
lives appear to be expendable. De-policing has occurred before within a few agencies but never on a national
scale. We saw a brief glimpse of it in New York after the killings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu,
when the city saw a huge drop in officer-initiated activity and a resulting increase in violent crime.
Police will stop policing neighborhoods that criticize them and violent crime
will rise in those neighborhoods
Mariano Castillo, June 4, 2015, CNN, Is a new crime wave on the horizon?,
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/02/us/crime-in-america/
"If there's a national mood that starts to see police as the bad guys, the police as the enemy responsible for these
problems, it makes it a hell of a lot harder to police," said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and
professor of policing. "One way that cops deal with that is that they just stop policing those people." A former
New York Police Department officer, Bill Stanton, agreed that an uptick in crime can be linked to police being
less assertive. "When you take away police pride and you take away giving them the benefit of the doubt ... and
you're going to call them racist and you're going to prosecute them for doing nothing wrong ," Stanton said,
"then what happens is they're going to roll back. They're not going to go that extra mile."
Your Words.
Glossary: de-policing removal of police presence from an area

Uptick a small increase.
Prosecute to take legal action against a person or organization.
66

CASE DEBATE: TURN ESCALATION

Turn - Order Maintenance policing is necessary to prevent the public from
escalating to exclusionary and punitive tactics against people they consider
disorderly
David E. Thacher, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning at University
of Michigan, October 18, 2005, Debate Club, IS BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING
BROKEN? , http://legalaffairs.org/webexclusive/debateclub_brokenwindows1005.msp
The questions you raise about police priorities are clearly important, though I'm not convinced that the tradeoffs
are as stark as you suggest. (The notion that expecting police to do something when they see a guy urinating in
the middle of the street is comparable to wishing that everyone owned Mercedes-Benz's has me puzzled.) Are
you really saying that a police officer walking past my parade of horrors ought to just keep walking? That police
should stop maintaining order entirely and devote 100% of their time to burglary investigations and vehicle
stops searching for guns (forgetting the fact that order maintenance itself helps police uncover contrabanda
point I thought you acknowledged in Illusion of Order)? Mayors have lost their jobs for that, because the public
expects police to maintain order.
And the public is right to expect it. Without some basic modicum of order, society is not just unpleasant but
impossible. If, for example, we are going to have shared public spaces, everyone has to observe some basic
norms of cooperation and civility in order for those spaces to remain usable at all. People simply abandon the
subways, parks, and buses when disorder becomes severe. That's not a problem for the corporate executives who
can drive straight to work from their gated communities to their suburban office parks, but the rest of us expect
and need our public spaces to be livable. Forgive me for being a little polemical, but when did the left become
the hardnosed realists with lowered expectations about what our public assets can aspire to?
You seem to suggest that order maintenance is about getting rid of the homeless and treating every form of
panhandling as "wrong," but that's simply not true. As George Kelling has explained in detail, and as I've
discussed too, serious order maintenance (as opposed to the absurd and ultimately impossible "zero tolerance"
idea it's too often confused with) is not about excluding "undesirables" from public spaces but about ensuring
that everyone abides by the standards of order that make public life possible, and treating them with the dignity
involved in believing that everyone is a moral agent who can tell appropriate from inappropriate behavior.
When those tasks go untended, as they have in places like the New York City subway during the 1980s (read
Malcolm Gladwell's characteristically gripping account of how those conditions led to the bizarre and ultimately
frightening celebration of Bernhard Goetz as a kind of "hero" after he shot four young black men on the subway
during its darkest days), that's when the public demands that the homeless simply be gotten rid ofshunted into
prisons or out to isolated skid rows where no one will have to see them. The exclusionary and punitive political
attacks on the homeless in San Francisco over the past decade or so (such as the cuts and restrictions on general
assistance benefits) followed widespread public sentiment that behavior by too many of them had become
intolerable and the refusal of the mayor to take action against the chaos in city parks. Only by maintaining and,
where necessary, enforcing some reasonable expectations about everyone's public behavior is it possible for a
diverse society to share its public spaces peaceably. (Thomas Nagel defends a version of this idea in a brilliant
essay.) The only alternative, as far as I can tell, is the segregation and exclusion that you rightfully seem to be
worried about. Maybe order maintenance is like democracy: The worst option, except for all the others.
Your Words.
Glossary: Modicum a small quantity of a particular thing, especially something considered desirable or
valuable
Polemic a strong verbal or written attack
Shunted moving to an alternate course
67

68

CASE DEBATE: TURN COMMUNITY POLICING

Turn - Community policing is a vague concept that really serves as a Trojan
horse for more policing
Josmar Trujillo, Dec 30, 2015, Truthout, Liberals, Trojan Horses and the Myth of PoliceCommunity Relations, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28267-liberals-trojanhorses-and-the-myth-of-police-community-relations
If that's not clear, you're not alone. Few understand what "community policing" is. On paper, it advocates cops
working with community groups and institutions to "proactively" police communities. This can mean a
community affairs officer at local events, maybe even organizing youth programs. More often than not
"community policing" is public relations mixed in with attempts by cops to build a rapport with community
members who might come in handy down the road.
More importantly, "community policing," at its core, serves as a Trojan horse for more policing and more
funding of it. At the end of September, outgoing US Attorney General Eric Holder announced a new $124
Million grant from COPS to police departments across the country. He emphasized "community policing."
Earlier this month, President Barack Obama, sitting down with officials including one Mayor de Blasio, called
for more "trust" and announced a $263 million initiative - paying for body cams and training - to go along with
a new task force that would work with COPS to bolster the concept of "community policing."
Community policing today is little more than a talking point, an echo. Bratton, who originally scoffed at the idea
of cops as "social workers," now embraces what he calls "collaborative" policing. And while local police
unions laugh at it, community policing's most strident advocates are liberals who fundamentally believe in the
role of the police as it stands.
Your Words.
Topicality Curtail
What does curtail mean?
-Defined: The negative defines curtail as
Explain to the judge why increasing policing means more government surveillance in
your own words.
-Violation:
Explain why it is unfair for the judge to allow the plan to be non-topical in your own
words.
-Fairness:
1
Glossary: Rapport a close and harmonious relationship

Trojan horse a person or thing intended secretly to undermine or bring about the downfall of an enemy or
opponent
69

Vote Neg to preserve the integrity of debate
70

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: 1ST NEGATIVE

CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
A. Broken Windows policing has brought crime rates to historic lows
Michael J. Jenkins & Michael Allison, March 12, 2015, World Politics Review, Fixing
Broken Windows Policing to Make It Work for Latin America,
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com
Broken windows policing is based on a theory expounded by two college professors, George L. Kelling and
James Q. Wilson, in an article in The Atlantic in 1982. Kelling and Wilson connected smaller acts of public
disorder, like graffiti and public drinking, to more serious crime. Bratton and his disciples spread these policing
methods across the U.S., implementing them most prominently in New York City in the early 1990s, where
levels of crime and disorder plummeted. Today, crime rates in U.S. cities, many of which used some form of the
broken windows policing, including Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, are nearing 50-year lows.
B. Enacting the affirmative plan will increase crime. Ending broken window
policing has been a historical failure.
George L. Kelling, professor at Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, May 12, 2015, New
York Post, How Broken Windows Policing empties prisons & jails,
http://nypost.com/2015/05/12/how-broken-windows-policing-empties-prisons-jails/
In fact, the policing actions involved in recent incidents either ignore or misrepresent the Broken-Windows
approach that we conceived either in theory or in policy and practice or both. Theres every reason to believe
de-policing high-crime minority neighborhoods would be a disaster. We tried it in the past, and its taken
decades for us to regain control of public spaces, and even now some neighborhoods remain under threat.
Similarly, we experimented with decriminalization in New York City from the 1960s through the 1980s, most
memorably in the subway. The transit police at the time, using their discretion, decriminalized farebeating by
not enforcing the law. The result was a disaster with 250,000 people a day not paying their fare and creating
chaos in the subways. The real issue is to do policing, including Broken-Windows policing, right. Heres how.
Your Words.
Glossary: farebeating illegally avoid paying a fare, as by jumping a turn style

Decriminalization getting rid of a criminal penalty
Chaos complete disorder and confusion
71

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: 1ST NEGATIVE

CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
C. The Impact: Crime challenges the fabric of society. No one in society can
escape the impact of crime and violence.
Elma Whittaker-Augustine, Clinical Psychologist, October 11, 2013, Amandala, The
Psychological Impact of Crime and Violence,
http://amandala.com.bz/news/psychological-impact-crime-violence/
We are all in this together. No one in our society escapes the impact of crime and violence which has affected
our community in so many ways; crime interferes with our daily life, our personal sense of safety, and our
ability to trust. It challenges the fabric of our society, our way of life. Lives are forever changed when parents
are gunned down, breadwinners are murdered, and our youth die prematurely. Additionally, our respect for
human life and sense of right and wrong erode; we forget problem solving and conflict resolution skills, the
norm is to shoot or pay a youth a little change to shoot someone we have a problem with and so our children
learn that violence is a solution to problems. We also disrespect each other and feel that we have a right to take
someones property; hence the need for burglar bars and other protective measures. We are afraid to walk the
streets, afraid to go to certain neighbourhoods, and we are hesitant to participate in social activities. These are
just some examples of the impact of crime and violence and do not include other impacts, e.g. economical,
including the cost to non-fatal victims such as medical expenses, the physical cost such as being paralyzed by a
bullet, etc.
Your Words.
Glossary: breadwinners a person who earns money to support a family

Erode gradually wear away
Paralyzed incapable of movement
72

73

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: LINK EXTENSIONS

Increasing misdemeanor arrests reduces felony arrests. Ending broken
windows will bring back high crime
Rocco Parascandola, Jennifer Fermino & Larry McShane, May 1, 2015, Daily News,
NO 'PANES,' NO GAINS Bratt, pg. 4
"In many respects, we need it now more than ever," Bratton declared. Under the broken windows approach,
attention to small-scale crime both improves the city's quality of life and reduces more serious crime. In the
accompanying report, Bratton noted that "more misdemeanor arrests ultimately led to fewer felony arrests
because the NYPD was preventing crime more effectively ."
Major felony arrests are indeed down by 36%, or 60,000, from 1994 to 2014.When Bratton arrived in 1990 as
head of the Transit Police, his focus on evaders bore immediate fruit: One in every seven had an outstanding
warrant, and one in 21 carried a weapon. "Let's not repeat history and reduce our ability to enforce," he said. Ed
Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, echoed his boss' assertion that the end of broken
windows would mark a return to the high-crime era of the '70s and '80s.
Broken Windows Policing prevents one violence crime for every 28

misdemeanor arrests. In 9 years, over 60,000 violent crimes were prevented.
Adam M. Samaha, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, May 2012,
Harvard Law Review, REGULATION FOR THE SAKE OF APPEARANCE, 125 Harv. L. Rev.
1563, p. 1625
Although much more could be said about broken windows theories of misconduct, our focus on appearancejustified government decisions suggests that we move to the evidence on policing strategies. With respect to
their effect on serious crime, we can look to several relatively recent efforts. The optimistic side is represented
by George Kelling and William Sousa's 2001 report for the Manhattan Institute. They investigated precincts in
New York City during the 1990s and found a large and statistically significant relationship between
misdemeanor arrests and violent crime (a combined measure of homicide, rape, robbery, and felony assault).
Kelling and Sousa could not find a significant positive relationship between the violent crime rate and proxies
for cocaine use, the young male population, or poor economic conditions. These proxy variables are by
definition imperfect, as is the correspondence between misdemeanor arrests and what can plausibly be
called broken windows policing, and perhaps an omitted variable was driving violent crime rates down. That
said, the numbers are striking. The authors claim that precincts "could expect to suffer one less violent crime for
approximately every 28 additional misdemeanor arrests," and that "over 60,000 violent crimes were prevented
from 1989 to 1998 because of "broken windows' policing."
Your Words.
Glossary:
74

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: IMPACT EXTENSIONS

Violent crimes are incredibly expensive. Violent crime can make entire
communities poor.
Robert J. Shapiro & Kevin A. Hassett, June 19, 2012, Center for American Progress,
The Economic Benefits of Reducing Violent Crime,
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2012/06/19/11755/theeconomic-benefits-of-reducing-violent-crime/
Violent crimes are costly. Murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies impose concrete economic costs on the victims
who survive as well as the families of those who lose their lives, in the loss of earnings and their physical and
emotional tolls. Violent crimes also impose large costs on communities through lower property values, higher
insurance premiums, and reduced investment in high-crime areas. In addition, violent crimes impose significant
costs on taxpayers, who bear the financial burden of maintaining the police personnel and operations, courts,
jails, and prisons directed toward these crimes and their perpetrators.
Fortunately, the incidence of violent crimes in the United States has fallen sharply over the last 20 years. From
1960 to 400 1990 the rates of these crimes rose sharply as did their attendant costs. Over that period murder
rates nearly doubled, rates of rape and robbery increased fourfold, and the rate of assault quintupled. Since the
early 1990s, however, rates of most violent crimes have been cut nearly in half.
Poverty can destabilize the entire country. It is a vicious cycle passed through
generations.
Scarlet Shelton, August 3, 2013, The Borgen Project, Effects of Poverty on Society,
http://borgenproject.org/how-poverty-effects-society-children-and-violence/
The vicious cycle of poverty means that lifelong barriers and troubles are passed on from one generation to the
next. Unemployment and low incomes create an environment where children are unable to attend school.
Children must often work to provide an income for their family. As for children who are able to go to school,
many fail to see how hard work can improve their lives as they see their parents struggle at every day tasks.
Other plagues accompanying poverty include:
Crippling accidents as a result of unsafe work environmentsconsider the recent building collapse in
Bangladesh.
Poor housinga long-lasting cause of diseases.
Water and food related diseases that occur simply because the poor cannot afford safe foods.
Ultimately, poverty is a major cause of social tensions and threatens to divide a nation because of income
inequality. This occurs when the wealth of a country is poorly distributed among its citizenswhen a tiny
minority has a majority of the money. Wealthy or developed countries maintain stability because of the presence
of a middle class. However, even Western countries are gradually losing their middle class. As a result there has
been an increased number of riots and clashes. For society, poverty is a very dangerous factor that can destabilize
an entire country. The Arab Spring is a great example of how revolts can start because of few job opportunities
and high poverty levels.
Your Words.
Glossary: perpetrators someone who has committed a crime

Vicious really mean
Destabilize to cause to be incapable of functioning or surviving
75

Arab Spring a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests , riots, and civil wars in the Arab world
that began on 17 December 2010 in Tunisia with the Tunisian Revolution
76

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: ANSWER

DOESNT WORK
TO
BWP
Broken Windows Policing crime statistics are supported multiple independent

studies. The best evidence is on the side of the neg.
Until recently, Broken Windows critics could dismiss New Yorks success in fighting crime as anecdotal,
suggesting correlation without causation. But in recent years, at least three randomized experiments, published
in refereed journals, attest to Broken Windows impact on crime. Rutgers criminologist Anthony Braga and his
colleagues conducted two field experiments: the first in Jersey City, New Jersey; and the second in Lowell,
Massachusetts. In each case, multiple high-crime areas of the city were identified and randomly assigned to
experimental and control conditions. Police in the control areas continued routine policing. In the experimental
areas, police took a problem-solving approach that, in both cities, involved aggressive order maintenance. Crime
declined in the experimental areas at greater rates than in the control areas and was not displaced to adjacent
neighborhoods.
In the Netherlands, experimenters took a different approach. Their findings support the central social insight of
the Broken Windows theory: that disorder breeds crime. University of Groningen social scientist Kees Keizer
and his colleagues conducted six field experiments in which they artificially created opportunities for crime in
both orderly and disorderly environments. In one case, they placed an envelope containing visible cash so that it
was hanging out of a postbox. The baseline condition was a clean postbox; the experimental condition was a
postbox covered with graffiti and surrounded by litter. In the baseline condition, 13 percent of those who passed
the postbox stole the money. In the experimental condition, 27 percent stole the money. The other five
experiments had similar outcomes.
New York proves broken windows policing can reduce crime

The Economist, Jan 27, 2015, What broken windows policing is,
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-18
When the broken windows theory was first published, urban crime was a seemingly uncontainable problem in
America and around the world. But in the past two decades crime has fallen at an extraordinary rate.
This change has been especially profound in New York City, where the murder rate dropped from 26.5 per
100,000 people in 1993 to 3.3 per 100,000 in 2013lower than the national average. Plenty of theories have
been concocted to explain this drop, but the citys decision to take minor crimes seriously certainly played a
part. While Mr Bratton was head of New Yorks transit police in 1990, he ordered his officers to arrest as many
turnstile-jumpers as possible. They found that one in seven arrested was wanted for other crimes, and that one in
20 carried a knife, gun or other weapon. Within a year, subway crime had fallen by 30%. In 1994 Rudy Giuliani,
who had been elected New Yorks mayor after promising to clean up the citys streets, appointed Mr Bratton as
head of the NYPD. Scaling up the lessons from the subway, Mr Bratton found that cracking down on
misdemeanour offences, such as illegal gun possession, reduced opportunities for crime. In four years, the city
saw about two fewer shootings per day.
Your Words.
1
Glossary: causation the relationship between cause and effect
77

78

CRIME DISADVANTAGE: ANSWER

RESOURCES
TO
WASTING
People are willing to spend the resources to prevent violent crime.

Annie Lowrey, October 21, 2010, Slate, True Crime Costs,
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2010/10/true_crime_costs.html
To put a price on murder, researchers perform a poll. They ask a nationally representative sample of people how
much they would pay to reduce the incidence of homicide in their community by 10 percent. Then they can
extrapolate how much society writ large would offer to stop a single murder.
The answer? For homicide and other forms of violent crime, Americans are willing to pay a whole lot. In
DeLisi's study it is not the "victim costs, criminal justice system costs, lost productivity estimates for both the
victim and the criminal" that make up the bulk of the $17 million cost, though all of those are included. It's the
"estimates on the public's resulting willingness to pay to prevent future violence." That accounts for a bit more
than $12 million per murder.
"That number sounds like a lot, but people radically change their behavior in response to violent crime," DeLisi
says. "Think about the D.C. sniper case, for instance. When that happened, two people on a rampage changed
the behavior of millions of people. It was not just the cost of the state spending thousands of dollars on extra
patrols and traffic stops, and the cost of the 10 left dead."
Still, the $17 million figure sounds high to Cohen. Why? Traditionally, willingness to pay is considered one
yardstick for determining the cost of murderan alternative and more comprehensive measure than the
calculate-all-the-costs-and-add-them-up method. Adding them together is counting twice, he says. Cohen and
other researchers generally estimate the price of murder at $10 million to $12 millionjust the "willingness to
pay" number.
Violent crime is very expensive. Broken windows is worth the cost to prevent
violent crimes.
Annie Lowrey, October 21, 2010, Slate, True Crime Costs,
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2010/10/true_crime_costs.html
Researchers at Iowa State University recently attempted to run the numbers. They wanted to include not just the
direct coststhe damaged property and lost careers and prison upkeep and lawyer feesbut also the broader
and more intangible societal costs, such as more frequent police patrols, more complicated alarm systems, and
more expensive life-insurance plans. If we knew how much a crime costs society, their reasoning went, maybe
we could better decide how much money to spend trying to stop it.
They found that each burglary in the United Statesa car break-in, for examplecosts $41,288. For armed
robberies the cost increases eightfold, to $335,733. Every aggravated assault costs $145,379. Each rape costs
$448,532.
Then there is murder. The researchers, led by sociologist Matt DeLisi, put the price tag at a whopping
$17,252,656. That means in 2009, according to the FBI, murder cost the United States almost $263 billion
nearly as much the federal government annually spends on Medicaid.
Your Words.
1
Glossary: extrapolate projecting known information
79

80

REFORM BROKEN WINDOWS COUNTERPLAN: 1ST

NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
Counterplan Text:
The United States federal government should apply broken windows policing
theory to the infractions of law enforcement entities.
Contention One: Competitiveness
1. The Counterplan is Mutually Exclusive The affirmative plan eliminates
broken windows, but the neg would keep it. One cannot enact both policies.
2. The Counterplan is Net Beneficial The counterplan solves the crime
disadvantage and better addresses police corruption and excessive use of
force.
Contention Two: Solvency
Reforming broken windows policing by applying it to the police would be
effective at managing the crimes of law enforcement entities.
Dr. James Peterson, December 7, 2014, director of Africana studies at Lehigh
University, The Sunday Times, If police had zero tolerance for their own crime, fewer
black Americans would die, p. 18
Too many of us have suffered under its boot for too long. Sadly these minor infractions will rarely bubble up to
the national and international level that the recent spate of murders of unarmed civilians has done. And rightly
so. But what if "broken windows" theories of policing actually work best on "broken systems" of policing and
meting out justice? It was the academics George Wilson and James Kelling who first defined the concept of
policing minor crimes such as loitering and disorderly conduct as a means of reducing major crimes. The theory
is that if a community had fewer "broken windows" it would ultimately have less serious violent crime. Whether
or not this policing tactic or others can account for the precipitous decline in violent crime across the US is
difficult to prove. In the aftermath of the failure of grand juries in two states to secure indictments of officers
who killed unarmed black men, many black Americans have come to terms with the fact our justice and legal
systems are more broken than our windows. The data from stop-and frisk searches alone suggests to us that in
the hearts and minds of law enforcement it is often people of colour - especially black men - who are the broken
windows. Their presence in places such as street corners or in front of convenience stores seems to compel
officers to police them. One way of re-ordering policing and law enforcement tactics is to apply the principles of
the "broken windows" model to the American criminal justice system: to police aggressively the minor
infractions of conduct that police officers get away with regularly. If we had done so, then Tamir Rice, 12, shot
in Cleveland, Ohio, for holding a toy gun, would be alive. Eric Garner would be alive. It is tragic to deal in
"what ifs" when so many families and communities are in pain. But wouldn't a tactic that law enforcement
thinks effective at managing crimes in our communities be equally - if not more - effective at managing crime in
theirs?
1
Glossary: infractions a violation of law

Entities a thing with distinct and independent existence
Precipitous dangerously high or steep
81

82

REFORM BROKEN WINDOWS COUNTERPLAN:

Failure to apply broken windows to police leads to serious consequences.
Police can kill without consequence if there arent laws consistently punishing
that behavior.
Conor Friedersdorf, DEC 8, 2014, The Atlantic, Applying 'Broken Windows' to the
Police, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/applying-broken-windowsto-the-police/383490/
One of the most influential policing concepts of our era, the broken-windows theory, holds that disorder and
crime are "usually inextricably linked in a kind of developmental sequence." At the community level, ignoring
disorder leads to more of it, just as a building with a broken window soon has other windows broken. That
insight has been widely embraced by law enforcement in the United States. But as Ken White observed in a
recent post, we've yet to apply it to police agencies. "If tolerating broken windows leads to more broken
windows and escalating crime," he asks, "what impact does tolerating police misconduct have?" He points to
recent examples in order to argue that the consequences are dire:
[J]ust as neighborhood thugs could once break windows with impunity, police can generally kill with impunity.
They can shoot unarmed men and lie about it. They can roll up and execute a child with a toy as casually as one
might in Grand Theft Auto. They can bumble around opening doors with their gun hand and kill bystanders, like
a character in a dark farce, with little fear of serious consequences. They can choke you to death for getting a
little mouthy about selling loose cigarettes. They can shoot you because they aren't clear on who the bad guy is,
and they can shoot you because they're terrible shots, and they can shoot you because they saw something that
might be a weapon in your handsomething that can be ... any fucking thing at all, including nothing.
... We're not pursuing the breakers of windows. If anything, we are permitting the system ... to entrench their
protected right to act that way. We give them ... third and fourth chances. We pretend they have supernatural
powers of crime detection even when science shows that's bullshit. We fight desperately to support their word
even when they are proven liars. We sneer that "criminals have too many rights," then give the armed
representatives of our government stunning levels of procedural protections when they abuse or even kill us.
I'd never thought about police abuses in quite this way before. But it seems to me that the reforms implied by
applying broken-windows theory to police officers are very similar to many of the policy changes that critics of
policing have lately been advocating. How to consistently punish police officers at the first sign of disordered
behavior? Record their interactions to a cloud server that they do not control. Assign independent prosecutors to
handle cases of unlawful behavior. And end the practice of arbitrators reversing punishments given to
misbehaving cops.
As a former St. Louis policeman put it in the Washington Post, "The problem is that cops arent held
accountable for their actions, and they know it. These officers violate rights with impunity. They know theres a
different criminal justice system for civilians and police. Even when officers get caught, they know theyll be
investigated by their friends, and put on paid leave. My colleagues would laughingly refer to this as a free
vacation. It isnt a punishment. And excessive force is almost always deemed acceptable in our courts and
among our grand juries. Prosecutors are tight with law enforcement, and share the same values and ideas."
Your Words.
Glossary: impunity not being punished, exempted from punishment

Arbitrators an independent person or body officially appointed to settle a dispute
83

RACE KRITIK: 1ST NEGATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL

KRS-One Thats the Sound of the Police
A. The affirmative case confronts a symptom, but not the foundation of racism.
The problem is not police brutality, but policing as an arm of white supremacy.
Jared Ball & Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world
Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 5-6
JB We want to start with a question that was posed to you during a Q & A at which we were present. Someone
asked you a question about police brutality. You said, Im not against police brutality, Im against the police.
Can we start there, and can you reflect on the most recent goings-on in Ferguson, MO and the continued police
violence against Black folks in the US and around the world?
FW: That was at Haile Gerimas bookstore in DC, and it was an all Black audience, so I didnt have my guard
up. I might have said it differently in a classroom, who knows. What I meant there was, well it was a bit tongue
in cheek, but of course I hate police brutality. I havent been brutalized in the past ten years, but when I was
brutalized I did hate that. I hate the harassment. However, I feel that what my critical work is trying to
contribute is to say that Black people in the US and worldwide are the only people -- and I say this categorically
-- for whom it is not productive to speak in terms of police brutality. I know that we have to, because were
forced to speak in these terms, and there is a way in which all Black speech is always coerced speech, in that
youre always in what Saidiya Hartman would call a context of slavery: anything that you say, you always have
to think, what are the consequences of me speaking my mind going to be? The world -- and this goes for
Democracy Now, it goes for our post-colonial comrades, etc. -- is not ready to think about the way in which
policing affects Black people. And so what we have to do is ratchet-down the scale of abstraction, so that we
dont present the world with the totality of our relation to the police, which is that we are policed all the time,
and everywhere. We have to give the world some kind of discourse, some kind of analysis in bite-size pieces
that they are ready to accept, so that they can have some kind of empathy for us, some kind of political or legal
adjudication. That is why police brutality becomes the focal point of the problem.
Police brutality has never identified our problem. Our problem is one of complete captivity from birth to death,
and coercion as the starting point of our interaction with the State and with ordinary white citizens (and with
ordinary Latino, Mexican, Asian citizens, Native Americans). And so when I was in that room and I said I dont
hate police brutality, I hate the police, I think most of the people in that room immediately understood what I
was saying, but also understood the problems with going outside and saying that.
Your Words.
Glossary: Good Historical Reading: http://blackmillennials.com/2015/07/27/an-incredibly-brief-history-ofanti-black-surveillance/

Categorically unconditional
Coerced persuade (an unwilling person) to do something by using force or threats
Abstraction the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events
Captivity being imprisoned
State a government
Blackness the slave and non-human
Anti-black the paradigm that binds blackness and death together so much so that one cannot think of
one without the other
84

ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK: 1ST NEGATIVE

CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
B. The affirmative plan is a bite size discussion of Black problems that does not
change the fundamental structure of antiblackness and, as a result, reinforces
it.
Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world AntiBlackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 9
Normally people are not radical, normally people are not moving against the system: normally people are just
trying to live, to have a bit of romance and to feed their kids. And what people want is to be recognized, to be
incorporated. And when we understand that recognition and incorporation are generically anti-Black, then we
dont typically pick up the gun and move against the system, we typically try to find ways to be recognized, to
be incorporated, even though thats impossible. And I think that our language is symptomatic of that when we
say that I dont like police brutality. Because, here we are saying to the world, to our so-called people of color
allies and to the white progressives, were not going to bring all the Black problems down on you today. If you
could just help us with this little thing, I wont tell you about the whole deal that is going on with us.
C. Antiblackness is a genocide on Black people & other people of color.

Dr. Connie Wun, January 16, 2015, Berkeley Review of Education, Beyond Police
Violence: A Conversation on Antiblackness, #BlackLivesMatter, #WeChargeGenocide and
the Challenge to Educators,
http://www.berkeleyreviewofeducation.com/fergusonblacklivesmatter_blog/beyondpolice-violence-a-conversation-on-antiblackness-blacklivesmatter-wechargegenocideand-the-challenge-to-educators
We should understand that genocide is not a hyperbolic term to describe the condition that Black people are
living under. When we understand genocide, we understand that Blacks are the prototypical targets of police
violence and other forms of state violence. We must also understand that Black people are subject to forms of
violence that are not archived and are even more mundane than police violence. There is violence that is woven
into the fabric of other state institutions and every day social relations. In combatting an antiblack genocidal
project, we must understand that police violence is a part of the U.S. As educators, we have to identify the
relationship between police violence with other institutionalized forms of violence against Black people.
Your Words.
Glossary: symptomatic exhibiting or involving symptoms

Hyperbolic exaggerated
Mundane boring
Genocidal the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
Race a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant
elements of morphology and/or ancestry (Ian F. Haney Lopez, The Social Construction of Race, 1994)
Gratuitous uncalled for; without cause
85

ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK: ALTERNATIVE

The Alternative is to End the World. The liberation of Black people is
tantamount to moving into a way of knowing the world that we cannot
imagine. This kritik asks us to stay in a place of analysis, to understand the
totalizing nature of Black oppression, before we move to the question what
can be done.
Frank B. Wilderson, III, October 2014, Were trying to destroy the world AntiBlackness & Police Violence After Ferguson, p. 17-18
FW: Many years ago, right before George Jackson was murdered, Angela Davis was being interviewed by a
journalist, who asked her: George Jackson has said that America is a fascist state. Do you agree with that? And
whats important here is the next thing that she said, because this is the moment where we see how the Black
psyche is coerced by the hydraulics of terror . She said that, if I were to say as Jackson did that America is a
fascist State, the only way I can say that is if there were some outside force that was ready to come in and deal
with it, and she referenced the Americans and the allies going into Nazi Germany, bombing the hell out of it,
and turning it into something other than a fascist state. So what Im trying to say here, and this is something that
happens to all Black people including myself, is that youre faced with this person who wants something
coherent from you, so her mind moves from the question, which is a question of pure analysis, is this
fascism?, and shifts over to the register of Lenins question, what is to be done?
What her unconscious here had done at that moment is to realize that the totality of the fascism we live in is
beyond what I can think of as redress. So let me then corrupt my own analysis, and say that this is not fascism,
so that I can have some kind of speech act about what is to be done. She avoided the question, or the
unconscious made a switch from pure analysis to ooh, let me come up with an answer. This is what happens to
us all the time. If we can help Black people to stay, as Saidaya Hartman says, in the hold of the ship, that is, to
stay in a state of pure analysis, then we can learn more about the totality and the totalizing nature of Black
oppression. And then, move into a conversation about what is to be done, realizing that our language and our
concepts (post-colonial, marxist discourse) are so much a part of other peoples problems, problems that can be
solved, that well really never get to the thing that solves our problem because its already there in Fanon: the
end of the world because at least if we dont have a strategy and tactics for this end of the world, at least we
will not have altered and corrupted our space of pure analysis to make it articulate with some kind of political
project.
Your Words.
Glossary: tantamount the same as

Coherent logical and consistent
Fascism intolerant views or practice
86

ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK: IMPACT EXTENSIONS

White supremacy is essential to the formation of America. White supremacy is
a social organization that produces genocidal and militarized conceptions of
human difference. It is the organizing logic to the extermination of
difference.
Dylan Rodriguez, professor at the University of California, Riverside, November 2007,
Kritika Kultura, American Globality and the U.S. Prison Regime: State Violence and White
Supremace from Abu Ghraib to Stockton to Bagong Diwa, Issue 9
Variable, overlapping, and mutually constituting white supremacist regimes have in fact been fundamental to the
formation and movements of the United States, from racial chattel slavery and frontier genocide to recent and
current modes of neoliberal land displacement and (domestic-to-global) warfare. Without exception, these
regimes have been differently entangled with the states changing paradigms, strategies, and technologies of
human incarceration and punishment (to follow the prior examples: the plantation, the reservation, the
neoliberal sweatshop, and the domestic-to-global prison). The historical nature of these entanglements is widely
acknowledged, although explanations of the structuring relations of force tend to either isolate or historically
compartmentalize the complexities of historical white supremacy.
For the theoretical purposes of this essay, white supremacy may be understood as a logic of social organization
that produces regimented, institutionalized, and militarized conceptions of hierarchized human difference,
enforced through coercions and violences that are structured by genocidal possibility (including physical
extermination and curtailment of peoples collective capacities to socially, culturally, or biologically reproduce).
As a historical vernacular and philosophical apparatus of domination, white supremacy is simultaneously
premised on and consistently innovating universalized conceptions of the white (European and euroamerican)
human vis--vis the rigorous production, penal discipline, and frequent social, political, and biological
neutralization or extermination of the (non-white) sub- or non-human. To consider white supremacy as essential
to American social formation (rather than a freakish or extremist deviation from it) facilitates a discussion of the
modalities through which this material logic of violence overdetermines the social, political, economic, and
cultural structures that compose American globality and constitute the common sense that is organic to its
ordering.
Your Words.
Glossary: Variable able to be changed

Chattel a personal possession
Regimented very strictly organized or controlled
Hierarchized people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority
Vis--vis in relation to
Penal discipline punishment by imprisonment
White - the settler, master, and human
87

ANTIBLACKNESS KRITIK: ANSWER TO: PERM

Police Reforms are meaningless. We need structural change.
Henry A. Giroux, July 28, 2015, Taking notes 48: Americas new brutalism: the death
of Sandra Bland, http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/07/28/taking-notes-48americas-new-brutalism-the-death-of-sandra-bland/
Not surprisingly, the discourse of terrorism once again is only used when someone is engaged in a plot to
commit violence against the government but not when the state commits violence unjustly against its own
citizens. What needs to be recognized as Robin D. G. Kelley has pointed out is that the killing of unarmed AfroAmericans by the police is not simply a matter that speaks to the need for reforming the police and the culture
that shapes it, but also for massive organized resistance against a war against black youth that is being waged on
U.S. soil. The call for police reform, echoed throughout the dominant media, is meaningless. We need to
change a system steeped in violence, racism, economic corruption and institutional rot. We dont need revenge,
we need justiceand that means structural change.
There is no place for reforms. The plan is just a tweak on the existing system
of policing rather than preventing racist violence.
Dante Barry, June 21, 2015, Truthout, Surviving White Terrorism: Next Steps in the
Struggle for Black Lives, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/31480-surviving-whiteterrorism-next-steps-in-the-struggle-for-black-lives
Black people have always had a complicated and violent relationship with citizenship in this country. There has
been a monopoly on who has the right to feel and be safe - a monopoly that is often regulated and enforced by
cops and corporations. This week's attack at Charleston's Emanuel A.M.E. Church was an undeniable act of
terrorism to incite fear into Black communities where we have bravely declared that Black lives matter.
Over the past year, in response to a series of high-profile police killings, communities across the country have
erupted in massive protests, sustained acts of civil disobedience, and militant and unapologetically Black direct
actions. Born in Ferguson, this movement spread like wildfire to New York City and South Carolina, to
Baltimore and Oakland.
Many conversations about policing, state power and anti-Black racism focus exclusively on tweaks to existing
policing and incarceration practices. (For example, some cities have funded taskforces and police body
cameras.) Meanwhile, the state spies on Black communities rather than using its surveillance mechanisms to
prevent racist vigilante attacks.
Your Words.
Glossary: monopoly exclusive possession or control

Civil disobedience the refusal to comply with certain laws as a peaceful form of political protest
Unapologetically not being sorry
Tweaks small twists/changes
Vigilante - a member of a self-appointed group of citizens who undertake law enforcement in their
community without legal authority (think Batman)
88

NO POLICE COUNTERPLAN: 1ST NEG

CONSTRUCTIVE SHELL
Counterplan Text:
Disband the police.
Contention 1: Competitiveness
1. The Counterplan is Mutually Exclusive The affirmative plan maintains
police departments through reform and the negative counterplan will not have
police departments.
2. The Counterplan is Net Beneficial The affirmative harms would be much
better solved by members of the community acting without hierarchy.
Additionally, the counterplan coexists with the Antiblackness Kritik.
Contention 2: Solvency
Police are not inevitable; community unarmed mediation and intervention
teams are trained to effectively keep peace in neighborhoods.
Jose Martin, December 16, 2014, Rolling Stone, Policing is a Dirty Job, but Nobodys
Got to Do It http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-butnobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-20141216#ixzz3e31xa1AI
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael
Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically
qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent
years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who
snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity
down here on Earth.
But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for
centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years
ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems
that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of
a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out
just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:
1. Unarmed mediation and intervention teams
Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb
violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that
police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns so are the
members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There
are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from catcalling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited
from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success
through peace rather than war.
1
Glossary: rhetoric persuasive communication

Barrios the Spanish-speaking quarter of a town or city
89

90

NO POLICE COUNTERPLAN: SOLVENCY

The negative needs a world without police. It is time to create a world where
police are not necessary. There are dozens of societies practicing
transformative justice without police.
Peter Gelderloos, activist and author, December 29, 2014, CounterPunch, A World
Without Police, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/
The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system. Past and
present efforts to reform them have demonstrated that reformism cant solve the problem, though it does serve
to squander popular protests and advance the careers of professional activists. Faced with this situation, in
which Left and Right unwittingly collude to prolong the problem, the extralegal path of rioting, seizing space,
and fighting back against the police makes perfect sense. In fact, this phenomenon, denounced as violence by
the media, the police, and many activists in unison, was not only the most significant feature of the Ferguson
rebellion and the solidarity protests organized in hundreds of other cities, it was also the vital element that made
everything else possible, that distinguished the killing of Michael Brown from a hundred other police murders.
Whats more, self-defense against state violence (whether excercized by police or by tolerated paramilitaries
like the Klan) is not an exceptional occurrence in a long historical perspective, but a tried and true form of
resistance, and one of the only that has brought results, in the Civil Rights movement and earlier.
What remains is to speak about possibilities that are radically external to the self-regulating cycle of tragedy and
reform. What remains is to speak loudly and clearly about a world without police.
We dont want better police. We dont want to fix the police. On the contrary, we understand that the police
work quite well; they simply do not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police entirely,
and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary.
Far from being a nave position, I believe it is the only one that can withstand serious scrutiny, whether in the
form of a comprehensive historical analysis of the role and evolution of police and the effectiveness of reform
movements, or of an examination of the breadth of possibility that human societies have already demonstrated.
No one can effectively argue that the police are necessary in an absolute sense. They are a relatively recent
invention, as far as institutions go. The only question is what kind of society needs police, and whether that kind
of society makes the systematic murders, torture, beatings, and surveillance worth it.
Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of
conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place. From the Din (Navajo) to the
Semai, there are dozens of societiesall of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialismthat
have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever
having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or
mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that
face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western
societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.
Your Words.
Glossary: authoritarian favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority

Institution an established law, practice, or custom
Collude to act together through a secret understanding, especially with evil or harmful intent
Apparatuses a complex structure within an organization or system
91

READY
TO
CUT YOUR OWN EVIDENCE? TRY THIS.
David W. Murray & John P. Walters, June 5th, 2015, The Hudson Institute, 'Broken
Windows' Policing is Not Broken, http://www.hudson.org/research/11353-brokenwindows-policing-is-not-broken
Following the crisis in Americas cities involving the police and minorities, calls for justice reform have become even
more frequent than have interventions from the Department of Justice.
Tragically, a surge in violent victimizations has swept across several American cities in the past two weeks. This may well
be a reflection of what happens in the public square when the forces of order are weakened or demoralized.
Reform may well be necessary. Though not all the cases that inflamed the crowds were, in fact, instances of injustice, the
application of needless force has often produced a sense of oppression for inner-city citizens, and justice is the loser.
Data from every major report show profound declines in crime in the U.S. over the past two decades, accompanied with
sharp increases in incarceration. In this sense, our court system has worked. But the Obama Administrations Department
of Justice has shown troubling signs it hopes to use racial politics to prevail over the courts and public safety.
Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, A revolt of the judiciary is more dangerous to a government than any other, even a
military revolt. Now and then it uses the military to suppress disorder, but it defends itself every day by means of the
courts. The fear is that some in the judiciary, guided by radical theory, will revolt against the police on the street.
The criminal courts are driven by the daily actions of the cop on the beat, the point of intersection between the violence of
victimization, and the quest for justice. While the cause and effect between incarceration and crime rates remains
unsettled, we know that there is no incarceration without policing.
There is no more important daily function for our justice institutions than when police maintain order, summarized in the
idea of broken windows policing. Famously, policy experts George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson noted one
unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. Some today regard
broken windows policing as the cause of unrest.
The Washington Post recently called for a softer approach, contrasting it with the pattern of aggressively arresting
people for minor crimes, a strategy known as zero tolerance.
However, New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, in a report to New York City, defines the matter more
carefully, emphasizing problem solving policing, which is not zero tolerance, but rather actions driven by police
discretion.
There are two ways that Brattons approach works: halting the withdrawal of the mechanisms that sustain community
norms, and breaking the vectors transmitting the criminal conduct. As Kelling and Wilson wrote, The essence of the
police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. When the
community withdraws in fear, disorder enters that space.
As Bratton notes, Serious crime was more likely to occur in a lawless environmentand ubiquitous low-level disorder
signaled lawlessness even more than serious crime, which was less common.
As for breaking the vector, Bratton introduced ideas from what would today be seen as basic epidemiology. Arresting
someone for a misdemeanor frequently prevents him from graduating to committing felonies, for which severe sanctions
like prison may result.
Misdemeanor arrestees dont go to prison, and they rarely go to jail. Yet an encounter for misdemeanor drug or alcohol
intoxication may take a weapon, and a shooter, off the streets.
Did it work in New York City? There were 1,946 men, women, and children murdered in 1993. In 2014, there were 328.
In some measure, regardless of your theory, cops were the instrument of that achievement.
When accused of racial targeting, Bratton stresses addressing behavior. As he put it, Our policing is based on conduct,
not demographics. Where the statistics show concentrated racial impact, Bratton argues that Blacks and Hispanics
represent half of our citys population, but 96.9 percent of those who are shot, and 97.6 percent of those who commit the
shootings.
That is, the strictest equality in crime is that between victimizers and victims. The dilemma for police is that nearly all
shooters/victims are Blacks/Hispanic, yet nearly all Blacks/Hispanics are not shooters/victims. Hence, the need for
discretion, based on conduct.
92

Moreover, broken windows may yield a peace dividend. Bratton again: As crime and disorder decrease,
arrests and summons issuance should follow, and so they have. in 2014, there were 60,000 fewer felony
arrests than there were twenty years ago. The city jail population on Rikers Island was nearly halved between 1993 and
2013. Thats why, from 1990 to 2012, New York City has sent 69% fewer people to state prisons.
Social theorists have not settled the why for the sharp increase in crime we experienced, or the steep decrease that
followed. Factors include demographics, economic performance, incarceration, fatherlessness, even abortion. Surely
the Post would not call for the police to stand down. New laws related to domestic violence, for example, have
increased arrests for crimes against persons in the home. Should we want these efforts to be turned off?
Let us not forget who cops are, many with low pay and miserable working conditions, and the wife and kids who wonder
every night whether youre coming home or will be shot in the face sitting in your patrol car. Citizens, and those who
protect them, have a duty to each other.
Regardless of theory, if we succumb to the wrong diagnosis, and insist on unmasking policing as no more than racial
oppression, we can break the thin blue line of men and women, of all races, who serve and protect. Injustice will surely
flow from that outcome, unstaunched.
93

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BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING: YOU DECIDE