Throughout the 1980s, American urban residents begin to perceive deviant behavior in sidewalk dwelling, leading to greater police response to control crime and maintain order. This police response flies in the face of Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” idea, which asserts that the people on the sidewalk maintain peace through informal social norms, rather than through brute police force. But as Duneier argues, “informal social control was no longer enough” for urban America “because the eyes on the street were no longer conventional” (157). In other words, the people who serve as eyes on the street today are often poor members of minority groups who differ in racial and socio-economic composition from residents around them.

Duneier introduces social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling and their influential article “Broken Windows” in The Atlantic Monthly, whose argument in favor of formal social control radically reshapes policing of public places in the 1980s and 1990s. Their article centers on a report by psychologist Philip Zombardo, who conducted an experiment by assembling cars with their hoods up and license plates removed in Palo Alto, California and the Bronx, New York.