My liberal professor of political science at Sierra Community College nonetheless assigned James Q. Wilson’s poli sci textbook in 1986.
I remember how impressed I was by the book’s fairness and quality. I particularly liked its chapter on the media and its left-wing bias.
In January of 2008, I heard James Q. Wilson speak at a conference on downtown policing.
Here’s my video:
James Q. Wilson, a political scientist who coauthored the influential “Broken Windows” article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, which became a touchstone for the move toward community policing in Boston and cities across the country, died early this morning in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
He was being treated for leukemia, according to a family friend.
Dr. Wilson, who was 80 and lived North Andover, returned to Boston a few years ago to become the first senior fellow at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College, and a distinguished scholar in the college’s political science department.
He had taught at Harvard University for 26 years before leaving in the late 1980s for California, where he had grown up, to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine University.
Considered one of the nation’s most significant thinkers about crime and other urban matters, Dr. Wilson cowrote the Atlantic article with George L. Kelling.
The article, Dr. Wilson said last year in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, suggested that “public order is a fragile thing, and if you don’t fix the first broken window, soon all the windows will be broken.”
Kelling and Dr. Wilson wrote in the Atlantic that “at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)”
