Tim Burgess's Gladwellian Anti-Crime Stand

City Hall, as seen by our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth

Next Monday, the full City Council will vote on council member Tim Burgess's revised aggressive solicitation ordinance (pdf). Last week, the ordinance passed out of committee by a 3-1 vote (Burgess, Conlin, Bagshaw, aye; Licata, nay). Argued Nick Licata at the time: "Aggressive panhandlers are regularly convicted under Seattle's current law." That's not good enough, says Burgess, who invokes Malcolm Gladwell in declaring that Seattle's street disorder is near "a tipping point."

It's a controversial ordinance, but after the initial questions have been raised--Will this target the simply homeless? How precisely and fairly will it be enforced?--what you're struck by is that ex-policeman and detective Burgess (1971 to '78) is trying to reinvent policing style from outside the precinct walls. He writes on his blog:

At a broader level, there are two policing strategies that I hope our police commanders will embrace wholeheartedly--concentrated deterrence and re-asserting community norms against violence and disorder.

Concentrated deterrence is built on the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, popular in business. There, it suggests that 80 percent of your business comes from 20 percent of your clients. Burgess would simply substitute "crime" and "criminals" for business and clients. He notes that when Seattle police targeted the most active car thieves locally, car theft fell by 66 percent between 2005 and '08.

Remove the most frequently aggressive street "solicitors" from the equation, Burgess suggests, and you'll see a change far out of proportion to the number of people you've taken off the street.

An equally important element is based on behavioral psychology and "making the punishment fit the crime." Animal trainers will tell you that corrective responses need to be delivered swiftly and consistently, so that a lesson can be learned and integrated into behavior. Turns out that's true of people, too.

Letting things slide, and giving law-benders "a break" from heavy-duty sanctions, doesn't impress people with your compassion--it teaches them that violation of that law isn't that big a deal. So with smaller infractions, you get better results if you promise a minimal--but immediate and certain--punishment. Is Burgess's $50 ticket the right stick? We'll have to see.

"Re-asserting community norms" means, in one sense, simply responding to the public outcry about how disagreeable it is downtown. Here Burgess approvingly cites Gladwell's citation of New York's "broken windows" policy and its effect on crime. Criticism of that policy is lively and widespread, though, with even the Freakonomics guys debating its real impact (abortion, they notoriously said, was a more likely primary factor).

It may be that zero-tolerance policies like "broken windows" simply appeal to law-and-order personalities, and shopowners who don't appreciate the wellspring of creativity that is the teen who's tagged their shop windows for the umpteenth time. I sympathize, but I have more faith in concentrated deterrence. On Monday, we'll get to see where the City Council's faith lies.