Sam Sullivan in his first year as mayor of Vancouver has been an unmitigated disaster for the city. So completely empty is the “pro” side of the ledger, the question on citizen’s lips is, “What in the world did you want this job for, anyway?”

The latest harebrained, hasty and hackneyed scheme, the Civil Cities project, is a study in Marie Antoinette-ism, combined with a good dose of Titanicism. With all the problems that are currently alarming the citizens, the Mayor wants to crack down on cyclists on sidewalks who don’t wear helmets? This is what he has heard the citizens clamouring for? Where does he hang out anyway, the Arbutus Club?

The false reasoning behind Civil Cities comes from a loose reading of the flawed “broken windows” theory that swept civic administrations across the continent a generation ago—which would put the phenomenon smack in the middle of Sullivan’s formative years. The theory has ascended to the most widely-known and subscribed-to article of faith in the pantheon of law-and-order beliefs. The theory, as it was first stated in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, has it that if a broken window in a bank of windows in the wall of a building is repaired quickly, vandals won’t break more windows, but that if the broken window is left alone, vandals will soon break them all—and carry on to more serious crime like squatting in the building or setting fires to it. The theory was extended to litter as well: if small litter is left on a sidewalk, soon whole bags of garbage and discarded furniture will show up on the sidewalk, followed by break-and-entering in the neighbourhood and stolen cars.

The theory has since been used in cities across the US to promulgate all manner of new laws and new levels of enforcement of existing laws all to do with the seemingly smallest and most innocuous of transgressions of law and order, from transit fare evasion to littering to “squeegee boys.” Police love the “broken windows” theory because it brings a huge increase in that behavior which is deemed criminally significant, crime being the critical renewable resource to police forces as crucial to the maintenance of their budgets as logs are to sales at the saw mill.

Elected officials love the theory too because it’s relatively easy to be seen doing something pro-active about the small things like litter and squeegee boys, and moreover, the supposed link between those small transgressions and major crimes like break-and-enters and car thefts allows elected officials to claim to be doing something about major crime, when in fact they are doing nothing at all.

The elite of the citizenry love the theory too because it finally gives them hope somebody can do something about their growing fears of disorder and lawlessness (even though their fears grow as a result of the heightening relative value of their accumulated wealth compared to the lower classes, rather than because of crime itself). So, civic politicians happily make laws about littering, police happily enforce them, and the elite happily applaud the leadership, because this is how they all believe major crimes, like theft, murder and rape, can be addressed.

The problem is, the observation about broken windows does not lead to the conclusions about the causes of crime and disorder that proponents say it does. In fact, the phenomenon leads exactly to the opposite conclusions. So-called vandals respect property so much, they’ll only take out their frustrations or enjoy their recreations against buildings that seem to have no property owners at all. It’s not that a broken window will cause someone to break another window; that conclusion can only arise in those minds that believe mankind is inherently evil and always needs curbs to his naturally-occurring and ever-tempting anti-social and criminal tendencies. But there is another school of thought, by far the more popular, if not always acknowledged in the elite-owned press, that says that mankind is naturally inclined toward positive social behavior, but that conditions at times and places can conspire to lead a person, either for survival, for social status, or out of misguidedness abetted by mental illness, into committing crime.

Breaking a window is good fun, every kid knows. But because we are all naturally inclined to do no harm to fellow man, few people, even amongst the most hard-bitten and toughest street types, will break a window in a building where it appears it would do someone else harm. Only where it appears it would do no one no harm does anyone, street criminal or bored kid, dare to throw a rock through a window. Who amongst us, when we found ourselves in some abandoned warehouse area where most windows were smashed, did not out of recreation pick up a stone and try to take another one out? That’s because we all know that that isn’t really wrong.

A totally smashed wall of windows in an apparently abandoned building, a scene that suggests to elites, political leaders, and police that law and order is rapidly breaking down, instead shows that law and order is alive and well even amongst those who have the least reason to invest in the status quo and to respect law and order.

Major crime of the kind citizens worry about does not occur because there are opportunities available to safely break a window or dump a bag of garbage. Major crime that worries citizens of Vancouver, like gang beatings of strangers, sexual assaults, home invasions, armed hold-ups and street racing, is not linked in any way to bicycle helmets, riding on sidewalks, or panhandling. Most crime that citizens want reduced is caused by poverty and worsening conditions for the impoverished, like tougher welfare rules, relatively smaller (non-inflation-adjusted) cheques, and higher rents, and by social alienation and dissociation, especially amongst young immigrant and native males who have yet to find their place and are daily battling for it.

The solutions to lower crime of the kind that worries citizens is increased welfare that respects real-world costs of survival, some means of preserving and enhancing the stock of housing at the lower end of the affordability curve, and better, more carefully crafted public arts and culture policies that weave social fabric where it is most torn—among the immigrant and native populations, and in particular among the young males in them. (That is to say, fire the Vancouver Symphony and sell the Orpheum, and put that money into, perhaps, sponsorships of new powwows, for example).

But none of these policies involve bigger policing budgets, so the police don’t like them, their effects are neither rapid nor obvious, so politicians don’t like them, and their adoption requires a bit of reflection, reasoning, and mind-changing, so elites—usually wealthy, successful older white men who are accustomed to being listened to and who regard admission of a changed mind as a fate worse than death—don’t like them either.

But Sam Sullivan, a police-friendly politician with crucial support from the elites, loves the broken-windows theory, and his Civil City project is his attempt to take Vancouver right back down that same hole so many other cities have disappeared in before us. It’ll be a disaster, of course. Like the beautifully plastic-coated living room in the house where incest, rape, and wife-beatings are hidden upstairs, Vancouver will look good for Olympic visitors and media, but the tension in our welcome smiles will be extreme and obvious.

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