"In 2003, Wilson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush Wilson changed the face of American policing in 1982 when he and colleague George L. Kelling wrote an article for the Atlantic titled "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety. Instead of focusing principally on the big crimes, such as robbery and murder, the authors said, they should pay more attention to the smaller problems that were eroding the quality of life in people's communities and weakening their defenses to major crime.Or, as Wilson and Kelling explained in deceptively simple terms: "One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. ""That's where American policing was falling down on the job," William J. Bratton, who implemented the broken windows theory with dramatic success during his tenures as police chief in New York in the 1990s and Los Angeles in the 2000s, said in an interview Friday. “It makes no sense because it fails to take into account the connection between one broken window left untended and a thousand broken windows.” 
 
 Mr. Bratton said in an interview on Friday that he had become interested in the “broken windows” theory independently, when he was working in Boston, where residents living in high-crime areas told him that what they worried most about was prostitution and graffiti. He graduated from the University of Redlands in 1952 and served three years in the Navy before entering the University of Chicago , where he earned a doctorate in political science in 1959. Mr. Wilson, who lived in North Andover, Mass., for the past three years after more than 20 years in Southern California, met his wife, the former Roberta Evans, in high school; they married in 1952.
– James Q. Wilson, who came up with the influential "broken windows" theory of policing and crime prevention, died yesterday of leukemia at age 80. A sample of the obituaries: Los Angeles Times: He "helped launch a revolution in law enforcement" with the windows theory—"the idea that eradicating graffiti, public drunkenness and other signposts of community decay was crucial to making neighborhoods safer." New York Times: His theory "holds that when the police emphasize the maintenance of order rather than the piecemeal pursuit of rapists, murderers and carjackers, concentrating on less threatening though often illegal disturbances in the fabric of urban life like street-corner drug-dealing, graffiti and subway turnstile-jumping, the rate of more serious crime goes down." Cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Boston embraced it. Associated Press: He "helped trigger a nationwide move toward community policing." Original 1982 article: Wilson pitched his theory in the Atlantic 30 years ago with coauthor George Kelling. A key line: "(I)f a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. ... One unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)” Read it in full here.