Alternatives to Broken Windows Policing surveys the range of non-enforcement and reduced-enforcement strategies that have emerged as departments and municipalities seek to address neighborhood disorder and violence while avoiding the civil liberties, racial disparity, and legitimacy costs documented throughout this silo’s policing-focused articles. This article synthesizes evidence on community-based violence-prevention programs, non-police crisis response models, environmental design interventions, and procedural-justice-oriented policing reforms, situating each alternative relative to the specific broken windows policing costs it seeks to address.
Alternatives to Broken Windows Policing addresses the practical policy question that emerges from the accumulated evidence reviewed throughout this silo: given that aggressive, discretion-minimizing enforcement variants have shown weaker crime-control effectiveness and substantially larger civil liberties costs than community-oriented and non-enforcement alternatives, what specific approaches have municipalities actually implemented in response, and what does the evaluation evidence say about their comparative effectiveness. This article organizes these alternatives into four broad categories: community-based violence prevention, non-police crisis response, environmental and situational prevention, and reformed policing models retaining some enforcement role but substantially altering its operational character.
This article should be read as a synthesis point drawing together threads developed throughout this silo, particularly Order Maintenance Policing, CPTED and Environmental Design Approaches to Disorder, Collective Efficacy Theory and Broken Windows, and Broken Windows Theory and Community Relations, each of which examines specific alternative mechanisms in greater depth.
Community-Based Violence Prevention
Focused Deterrence Strategies
Focused deterrence strategies, pioneered through Boston’s Operation Ceasefire in the 1990s, target violence prevention resources specifically at the small number of individuals and groups responsible for a disproportionate share of a community’s serious violence, combining credible enforcement threats with direct social service outreach and community moral engagement rather than broad, geographically diffuse disorder enforcement of the kind broken windows policing employs. Braga, Weisburd, and Turchan’s (2019) meta-analytic review, discussed in Stop-and-Frisk and Broken Windows Policing, found that focused deterrence strategies produced crime-reduction effects comparable to or exceeding those documented for broken windows policing while generating substantially fewer civil liberties complaints, since the strategy’s narrow targeting avoids the broad, discretion-driven street stops most associated with disparate enforcement patterns.
This narrow-targeting approach directly addresses the geographic and demographic over-breadth concerns documented in Broken Windows Theory and Race, since focused deterrence explicitly identifies specific individuals through violence involvement data rather than relying on the broader geographic hot-spot targeting that, as discussed in Broken Windows Theory and Policing, has historically generated disparate impact on entire neighborhoods rather than on the specific individuals actually responsible for serious violence within them. Kennedy’s (2011) account of the strategy’s original Boston implementation emphasized that its effectiveness depended substantially on genuine, sustained partnership between police, social service providers, and community moral voices, including clergy and family members of individuals at highest risk, rather than on enforcement alone, a multi-stakeholder structure considerably more resource-intensive to establish and sustain than conventional patrol-based order maintenance.
Papachristos, Wildeman, and Roberto’s (2015) network-analytic research on gun violence in Chicago provided further empirical grounding for focused deterrence’s narrow-targeting premise, finding that gun violence victimization risk concentrated overwhelmingly within specific, identifiable social networks defined by co-offending and associational ties, with a small fraction of the city’s population accounting for a disproportionate share of gunshot victimizations, a network-concentration finding that directly supports the focused deterrence logic of targeting intervention resources at specific, identifiable individuals and networks rather than at broad geographic areas or demographic categories.
Community Violence Interruption
Community violence interruption programs, including the Cure Violence model originating in Chicago, employ trained community members, often individuals with direct personal experience in the communities and conflicts they address, to mediate ongoing disputes and interrupt potential retaliatory violence before it escalates, operating entirely outside formal police enforcement structures. Skogan and colleagues’ (2009) evaluation of Chicago’s CeaseFire program found significant reductions in shootings and killings in several treated neighborhoods relative to comparison areas, though the program’s effectiveness varied considerably across different program sites, with implementation quality and violence interrupter staff retention identified as significant moderating factors.
This site-variability finding has proven a recurring theme across community violence interruption evaluations more broadly, with programs’ effectiveness appearing to depend heavily on violence interrupters’ genuine credibility and standing within the specific communities they serve, a credibility that cannot be readily manufactured through training alone but depends on interrupters’ own lived experience and pre-existing community relationships, a structural feature that distinguishes this approach from more standardized, replicable policing interventions and that complicates straightforward program scaling across different cities and neighborhoods.
Butts, Roman, Bostwick, and Porter’s (2015) broader systematic review of violence interruption programs across multiple cities found generally positive but methodologically heterogeneous evidence, echoing the implementation-consistency challenges discussed throughout this silo, with programs achieving high-fidelity implementation, adequate interrupter compensation, and sustained institutional support generally showing stronger violence-reduction effects than programs implemented with more limited resource investment, reinforcing that community violence interruption, like the community-oriented order maintenance policing discussed in Order Maintenance Policing, requires substantial and sustained institutional commitment to achieve its intended outcomes rather than functioning as a low-cost intervention readily substitutable for enforcement-based approaches.
Non-Police Crisis Response Models
Alternative Response to Behavioral Health Crises
Numerous municipalities have implemented alternative response models dispatching trained civilian crisis responders, rather than police officers, to address public intoxication, mental health crises, and related social disorder, discussed in greater detail in Social Disorder and Crime, seeking to address the criminalization-of-poverty and criminalization-of-mental-illness concerns that aggressive order-maintenance enforcement has generated. Programs including Eugene, Oregon’s long-running CAHOOTS program and its more recent replications in other cities have generally documented reductions in arrest rates for low-level disorder offenses without corresponding increases in recorded crime, though researchers caution that rigorous, randomized evaluation of these programs remains more limited than the scale of their recent municipal adoption would warrant.
Watson, Compton, and Draine’s (2017) review of the related Crisis Intervention Team model, which trains specialized police officers rather than replacing officers with civilians entirely, found that specialized mental health training measurably reduced arrest rates and use-of-force incidents during mental health crisis calls relative to standard patrol response, suggesting that even within a policing framework retaining officer response, specialized training targeted at the specific disorder type in question can meaningfully improve outcomes relative to generalized order-maintenance training of the kind broken windows policing historically emphasized. This finding positions the Crisis Intervention Team model as an intermediate approach between full civilian replacement and unreformed police response, illustrating the broader spectrum of reform options available between the polar alternatives that public debate sometimes frames as the only available choices.
Homelessness-Specific Response Alternatives
Given the substantial overlap between social disorder enforcement and unsheltered homelessness documented in Social Disorder and Crime, several cities have developed homelessness-specific response alternatives, combining outreach workers, temporary shelter placement, and coordinated entry systems connecting individuals to permanent housing resources, seeking to address the underlying condition generating repeated disorder contact rather than relying on cyclical enforcement that Herring’s (2019) research, discussed in Broken Windows Theory and Gentrification, found frequently failed to produce lasting resolution.
Evaluations of “Housing First” models, which prioritize immediate, low-barrier permanent housing placement over conventional sequential models requiring sobriety or treatment compliance before housing eligibility, have found substantially higher housing retention rates than conventional models, alongside documented reductions in emergency service utilization and criminal justice system contact among previously homeless individuals following stable housing placement (Padgett, Henwood, & Tsemberis, 2016). These findings have informed a broader shift among municipal homelessness policy away from the enforcement-and-shelter-based approaches broken windows-informed order maintenance historically favored and toward housing-first models explicitly designed to interrupt the disorder-enforcement cycle at its underlying source rather than managing its recurring symptoms through repeated police contact.
Environmental and Situational Prevention
Physical Disorder Remediation
The vacant lot greening and abandoned building remediation research discussed extensively in Physical Disorder and Crime and CPTED and Environmental Design Approaches to Disorder represents among the most methodologically well-supported alternatives to enforcement-based disorder response, with Branas and colleagues’ (2011, 2018) Philadelphia studies documenting significant crime reductions from environmental remediation that does not require any direct police contact with residents. This evidentiary strength, combined with the approach’s comparatively low civil liberties risk, has made physical remediation an increasingly prominent component of municipal disorder-response strategy independent of, and in many cases explicitly framed as an alternative to, traditional order-maintenance policing.
The scalability of physical remediation approaches has expanded considerably as municipalities have developed dedicated land banks and vacant property management authorities capable of systematically identifying and prioritizing remediation targets across an entire city, moving beyond the pilot-scale interventions of early research toward citywide implementation programs. This institutional scaling has required municipalities to develop sustained funding mechanisms distinct from conventional police department budgets, since physical remediation, as discussed in Physical Disorder and Crime, requires ongoing maintenance investment to sustain its documented benefits rather than functioning as a one-time capital expenditure, a funding structure that has required new intergovernmental coordination between police departments, parks and recreation agencies, and municipal planning offices not historically required for conventional order-maintenance policing.
Situational Design Beyond Residential Contexts
Building on the CPTED principles discussed in CPTED and Environmental Design Approaches to Disorder, municipalities have extended situational design interventions to commercial corridors, transit facilities, and public parks, employing natural surveillance and territorial reinforcement design modifications specifically as substitutes for, rather than complements to, intensive police presence in these spaces, an approach particularly attractive for addressing disorder concerns in gentrifying neighborhoods, discussed in Broken Windows Theory and Gentrification, where enforcement-based approaches carry documented displacement and selective-enforcement risks.
Reformed Policing Models
Procedural Justice Training and Reform
Rather than eliminating police enforcement entirely, several departments have pursued procedural justice training reforms, discussed in Broken Windows Theory and Community Relations, seeking to retain a policing role while substantially altering its operational character toward the relationship-based, community-calibrated discretion Wilson and Kelling’s original essay proposed but that aggressive zero-tolerance implementations abandoned. Wood, Tyler, and Papachristos’s (2020) randomized evaluation of Chicago procedural justice training, discussed in Broken Windows Theory and Community Relations, found measurable reductions in citizen complaints and use-of-force incidents following training implementation, providing methodologically rigorous evidence that reformed policing approaches can achieve meaningful behavioral change without abandoning a policing role entirely.
This reformed-policing category occupies a distinctive position among the alternatives surveyed in this article, since it represents the only approach that retains broken windows theory’s original policing-centered institutional structure while substantially revising its operational content, in contrast to the other alternatives examined above, which variously relocate disorder response authority to civilian responders, community members, or environmental design professionals outside conventional police departments entirely. This retained-policing-role feature makes procedural justice reform potentially more politically and administratively feasible for departments seeking incremental change than the more structurally transformative alternatives discussed elsewhere in this article, since it requires reforming existing institutional practice rather than establishing entirely new response infrastructure and interagency coordination mechanisms.
Co-Response and Hybrid Models
Several departments have implemented co-response models pairing police officers with mental health clinicians or social workers for calls involving behavioral health crises, seeking a middle path between pure police response and pure civilian alternative response, retaining police presence for potential safety concerns while incorporating clinical expertise better suited to addressing the underlying condition generating the disorder call. Early evaluations of co-response models have generally found reductions in arrest and involuntary hospitalization rates relative to traditional police-only response, though the approach’s higher staffing costs relative to either pure policing or pure civilian response models have limited its scalability in resource-constrained municipal budgets.
Morabito and colleagues’ (2012) multi-city comparison of co-response and Crisis Intervention Team models found that both approaches outperformed standard, unreformed police response on connecting individuals to appropriate mental health services, but that co-response models, by embedding a clinician directly within the responding unit, achieved somewhat higher rates of successful service connection than the Crisis Intervention Team model’s specialized-but-solo-officer approach, suggesting that the specific structural integration of clinical expertise into crisis response, not merely officer training, may meaningfully affect outcomes, a nuance relevant for municipalities weighing the relative costs and benefits of these distinct reformed-response models.
Comparative Assessment of Alternatives
Evidentiary Strength Across Approaches
The alternatives surveyed in this article vary considerably in their accumulated evidentiary strength, with physical disorder remediation and focused deterrence strategies supported by the most methodologically rigorous evaluation evidence, including randomized and quasi-experimental designs, while community violence interruption and non-police crisis response models, despite promising early evaluations, generally lack comparably rigorous evaluation evidence at the scale their rapid recent municipal adoption would warrant. This evidentiary variation has direct implications for municipal decision-making, since departments and city governments face genuine tradeoffs between adopting well-evaluated but narrower interventions and more broadly applicable but less rigorously tested alternatives.
This evidentiary asymmetry partly reflects each approach’s underlying methodological tractability rather than necessarily its true underlying effectiveness, since physical remediation and focused deterrence both lend themselves comparatively well to randomized or quasi-experimental designs, treated versus untreated lots, targeted versus non-targeted individuals, in ways that citywide policy shifts such as non-police crisis response dispatch systems, implemented uniformly across an entire jurisdiction simultaneously, structurally cannot replicate absent a comparably willing jurisdiction serving as an untreated comparison. Weisburd and Telep’s (2014) broader methodological review of hot-spots policing evaluation, a research tradition sharing this same place-based experimental tractability, similarly found that geographically bounded interventions had produced a disproportionate share of the field’s most rigorous experimental evidence relative to broader, jurisdiction-wide policy interventions, a pattern consistent with the evidentiary asymmetry this article documents across the broader landscape of broken windows alternatives specifically. Municipal decision-makers weighing these alternatives should therefore avoid treating the current evidentiary asymmetry as a definitive ranking of true effectiveness, and should instead prioritize investing in rigorous evaluation infrastructure for the newer, less-studied alternatives even as they proceed with implementation, ensuring that the accumulated evidence base continues to develop alongside these programs’ continued expansion.
Civil Liberties and Cost Considerations
Beyond crime-control effectiveness, the alternatives examined in this article vary in their civil liberties profiles and their fiscal and administrative costs, with physical remediation and civilian crisis response generally carrying the lowest civil liberties risk since they minimize or eliminate direct police contact, while co-response and procedural-justice-reformed policing models retain some enforcement-related civil liberties exposure alongside their documented behavioral improvements. These tradeoffs mean that no single alternative examined in this article represents a universal substitute for the full range of functions broken windows policing’s original, more expansive mandate encompassed, suggesting that effective disorder response likely requires municipalities to combine multiple alternatives calibrated to their specific local conditions rather than adopting any single approach as a comprehensive replacement.
Analytical Tables
Table 1. Alternatives to Broken Windows Policing Compared
| Alternative | Primary Mechanism | Civil Liberties Risk | Evidentiary Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focused deterrence | Targeted individual-level intervention | Low to moderate | Strong, meta-analytic support |
| Community violence interruption | Peer mediation, conflict interruption | Low | Moderate, site-variable |
| Non-police crisis response | Civilian responder dispatch | Low | Moderate, growing |
| Physical disorder remediation | Environmental design and cleanup | Very low | Strong, randomized evidence |
| Procedural justice training | Reformed police discretion | Low to moderate | Strong, randomized evidence |
| Co-response models | Police-clinician pairing | Moderate | Moderate, early evidence |
Table 2. Alternatives Mapped to Specific Broken Windows Policing Costs Addressed
| Documented Cost | Primary Addressing Alternative | Related Article |
|---|---|---|
| Racial disparity in stops | Focused deterrence, procedural justice training | Broken Windows Theory and Race |
| Criminalization of homelessness | Homelessness-specific response alternatives | Social Disorder and Crime |
| Displacement pressure | Physical remediation, situational design | Broken Windows Theory and Gentrification |
| Legitimacy erosion | Procedural justice training, co-response | Broken Windows Theory and Community Relations |
| School-to-prison pipeline | Restorative justice discipline | Broken Windows Theory in Schools |
Conclusion
The alternatives to broken windows policing surveyed in this article reflect the accumulated evidence and normative concerns documented throughout this silo, offering municipalities a genuinely varied toolkit for addressing neighborhood disorder and violence without relying primarily on the aggressive, discretion-minimizing enforcement that generated the theory’s most consequential civil liberties and community-trust costs. The strongest accumulated evidence supports focused deterrence and physical disorder remediation specifically, while community-based and civilian crisis response alternatives, despite promising early results, warrant continued rigorous evaluation as their municipal adoption continues to expand.
No single alternative fully replicates broken windows policing’s original, expansive mandate, suggesting that effective contemporary disorder response requires combining multiple approaches calibrated to specific local conditions rather than adopting any single alternative as a comprehensive substitute, a conclusion that reflects this silo’s broader finding that broken windows theory’s practical legacy lies less in any single, unified strategy than in the accumulated forty-year record of experimentation, evaluation, and reform its original 1982 formulation ultimately set in motion.
Eck and Weisburd’s (1995) foundational articulation of the place-based crime prevention paradigm, which substantially informed both the hot-spots and physical remediation literatures discussed throughout this silo, offers a fitting closing observation for this survey of alternatives: effective crime and disorder prevention has always depended more on identifying and addressing the specific conditions generating a given problem at a given location than on any single, universally applicable theoretical framework or enforcement doctrine, a principle broken windows theory’s own history, from its confident 1982 origins through the varied, evidence-tested alternatives surveyed in this article, has ultimately reinforced rather than contradicted.
Related Articles
- Order Maintenance Policing
- CPTED and Environmental Design Approaches to Disorder
- Collective Efficacy Theory and Broken Windows
- Broken Windows Theory and Community Relations
- Broken Windows Theory Today
References
- Branas, C. C., Cheney, R. A., MacDonald, J. M., Tam, V. W., Jackson, T. D., & Ten Have, T. R. (2011). A difference-in-differences analysis of health, safety, and greening vacant urban space. American Journal of Epidemiology, 174(11), 1296–1306.
- Braga, A. A., Weisburd, D., & Turchan, B. (2019). Focused deterrence strategies and crime control: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis of the empirical evidence. Criminology & Public Policy, 18(1), 205–250.
- Butts, J. A., Roman, C. G., Bostwick, L., & Porter, J. R. (2015). Cure violence: A public health model to reduce gun violence. Annual Review of Public Health, 36, 39–53.
- Eck, J. E., & Weisburd, D. (Eds.). (1995). Crime and Place. Criminal Justice Press.
- Herring, C. (2019). Complaint-oriented policing: Regulating homelessness in public space. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 769–800.
- Kennedy, D. M. (2011). Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America. Bloomsbury.
- Morabito, M. S., Kerr, A. N., Watson, A., Draine, J., Ottati, V., & Angell, B. (2012). Crisis intervention teams and people with mental illness: Exploring the factors that influence the use of force. Crime & Delinquency, 58(1), 57–77.
- Padgett, D. K., Henwood, B. F., & Tsemberis, S. J. (2016). Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Transforming Systems, and Changing Lives. Oxford University Press.
- Papachristos, A. V., Wildeman, C., & Roberto, E. (2015). Tragic, but not random: The social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries. Social Science & Medicine, 125, 139–150.
- Skogan, W. G., Hartnett, S. M., Bump, N., & Dubois, J. (2009). Evaluation of CeaseFire-Chicago. National Institute of Justice.
- South, E. C., Hohl, B. C., Kondo, M. C., MacDonald, J. M., & Branas, C. C. (2018). Effect of greening vacant land on mental health of community-dwelling adults: A cluster randomized trial. JAMA Network Open, 1(3), e180298.
- Watson, A. C., Compton, M. T., & Draine, J. N. (2017). The crisis intervention team (CIT) model: An evidence-based policing practice? Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 35(5–6), 431–441.
- Weisburd, D., & Telep, C. W. (2014). Hot spots policing: What we know and what we need to know. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 30(2), 200–220.
- Wilson, J. Q., & Kelling, G. L. (1982). Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety. The Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29–38.
- Wood, G., Tyler, T. R., & Papachristos, A. V. (2020). Procedural justice training reduces police use of force and complaints against officers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(18), 9815–9821.