The Museum Of Broken Windows: Powerful, But Incomplete

Earlier this week, a “pop-up experience” appeared in Greenwich Village courtesy of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). Inside a small space on West 8th Street, the NYCLU has set up its Museum of Broken Windows, which features the work of multiple artists showcasing “the ineffectiveness of Broken Windows policing, which criminalizes our most vulnerable communities.”

As is explained inside the museum, Broken Windows is a policing strategy that was popularized in a 1982 Atlantic article by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, who claimed that by cracking down on minor offenses like selling loose cigarettes, marijuana possession, or jumping a subway turnstile, police could protect communities from more serious, violent crimes.

In reality, this approach resulted in police harassing, criminalizing, and brutalizing communities of color and poor people in general. The Department of Investigation’s Office of the Inspector General for the New York City Police Department produced a report in 2016 that analyzed six years of summons and arrest data, and found no evidence to suggest that cracking down on small “quality of life” offenses had anything to do with meaningful drops in felony crimes.

Broken Windows policing was put into practice in NYC by former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton under former mayor Rudy Giuliani, but continues to this very day under a supposedly progressive mayor who re-hired Bratton as NYPD commissioner, and then, after Bratton announced his resignation amidst protests calling for his firing, hired Bratton’s protege, James O'Neill.

When a visitor enters the museum, they’re immediately greeted by a damaged cop car with its windows broken and plants bursting out the top of the car from the inside. Many of the other works inside the museum are also emotive and eye-opening, and illustrated facts about Broken Windows policing adorn the walls of the museum. Even the men’s bathroom had facts about stop-and-frisk. The piece, “Wanted” by an artist (cleverly) named Dread Scott, was composed of three fake wanted posters with police sketches of young Black and Brown people who are “wanted” for ordinary things like “lifestyle choice,” making a "furtive movement," and for “looking out.”

Russell Craig's "Self-Portrait" is an image of the artist painted onto a canvas made out of “paperwork saved from over seven years he spent making his way through the criminal justice system” over a non-violent drug conviction. While looking at Tracy Hetzel's portraits of the relatives of people killed by NYPD holding photos of their dead loved ones, you can almost feel their pain emanating from the canvas. Ann Lewis's "And Counting" consists of over 1,000 toe tags hanging from the ceiling containing the names, the vast majority of whom you’ve probably never heard, and information behind all the people killed by police in 2016. It took me a while just to find Philando Castile.

The rest of the show includes historical artifacts, famous photographs, or images that became widespread on the internet, such as the New York Daily News’ front pages when Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell were killed, or the photograph of Edward Crawford Jr., throwing a tear gas canister during the Ferguson uprising.

Despite some great exhibits and information inside the museum, the history told on the museum’s walls only goes from the 1960s to 2010. Missing are the Black Codes and vagrancy laws from which Broken Windows ideologically descends. These post-Civil War laws severely restricted the freedom of Black people and allowed cops to arrest Black folks for minor offenses, imprison them for long sentences, and then use them as cheap labor via the convict-lease system.

The museum also largely omits the role radical, grassroots organizing has played in fighting back against racist policing. The Young Lords are mentioned, and the Black Panther Party is mentioned in reference to a case where the NYCLU represented them in court. And that’s it. One of the pieces consisted of an old subway turnstile, which would have been a perfect place to mention the #SwipeItForward campaign that began in early 2016. Instead, the history focused more on (the NYCLU's) legislative and legal victories.

Yet the NYCLU didn't speak out against Mayor de Blasio for picking Bratton as his first police commissioner, and the NYCLU has yet to forcefully speak out against the NYPD’s racist gang database, which has been compared to stop-and-frisk. Radical, grassroots groups, on the other hand, vocally opposed Bratton’s appointment as commissioner and are currently fighting against the gang database.

Heading back to the subway to go home, I tried to be optimistic and look at the museum as a sign that Broken Windows’ end was imminent and inevitable. As I walked into the station and took out my MetroCard, I saw two cops standing there. I breathed a sigh of relief, happy that I had money on my MetroCard that day and didn’t have to hop the turnstile. Though I had just left a Broken Windows museum, for a working-class person of color like me, Broken Windows is nowhere near history.

The Museum of Broken Windows is open through this Sunday, September 30.

Ashoka Jegroo is a journalist born and raised in Brooklyn.