What does "broken windows" policing mean?

Nobody agrees — and that’s why we don’t know if it works

I like to write about cities. In recent years, this has meant writing a lot about crime and policing debates in which the concept of “broken windows policing” looms large.

On one side of these debates are people who are absolutely convinced that the problem of urban crime has been solved, conceptually, and that the solution is a set of policies called “…