ExpertDabbler

So does that mean the concerns of Prabz and Narayanan sir are irrelevant? Not at all. If India is fine with democracy, then what is the answer to the corruption in the machinery, gross indiscipline in the community in general? How are we going to discipline ourselves without losing our democracy?

What is the position of Newspapers today? Do they have the freedom to write on the burning, critical issues of the country?

How come Imrana’s case is seen as Uniform Civil COde issue rather than a Criminal case. The charge is rape remember?(rightly pointed out by PB.Enakku adhu varaikum uraikalai frankly)

How are we going to handle the increasing belligerence of the minority community in the name of secularism?

Is there any precedent in a democracy where what was once a rowdy place has improved later? If yes, where and what measures were taken? And is there any logic or pattern which helps us understand the phenomenon of crime, indiscipline and lawlessness and how the menace can be tackled within the ambits of democracy.

And no Anniyan,Indian and any other Shankar jokes please, we are talking serious business here.

During the 1980s, New York city averaged well over 2000 murders and 6000 serious felonies a year. Every one of the 6000 cars in the Transit Authority Fleet, with the exception of midtown shuttle , was covered with graffiti- top to bottom, inside and out.
Fare evasion was so commonplace that it was costing the Transit Authority as much as $150 million loss in revenues annually. There were about 15000 felonies on the system a year. The crime rate was at its peak in 1990.

But by 1996, New York had become the one of the safest big city in US.

Broken Windows Theory

First expressed by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George Kelling in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982, the theory holds that if someone breaks a window in a building and it is not quickly repaired, others will be emboldened to break more windows. Eventually, the broken windows create a sense of disorder that attracts criminals, who thrive in conditions of public apathy and neglect.

The theory was based on an experiment conducted 26 years ago by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo. He took two identical cars, placing one on a street in a middle-class Palo Alto neighborhood and the other in a tougher neighborhood in the Bronx. The car in the Bronx, which had no license plate on it and was parked with its hood up, was stripped within a day.
The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for a week, until Zimbardo smashed one of its windows with a sledgehammer. Within a few hours, it was stripped.

The germ of the idea is simple and compelling. A broken window–or a littered sidewalk, a graffito, or what you like–does no great harm to a neighborhood if promptly addressed. But left untended, it sends a signal: that no one cares about this neighborhood, that it is a safe place to break things, to litter, to vandalize. Those who engage in such behaviors will feel safe here. And once these minor miscreants have become well established, perhaps it will seem a safe enough neighborhood in which to be openly drunk, in which to beg for money, and possibly extort it. In short the smallest symptoms of antisocial behavior will, left to fester, breed greater and greater crimes, all the way down to murder.

Going by these yardsicks, is not the whole of India, with a few streets as glorious exceptions, a complete mess of “Broken Windows”?

If yes, how do we fix this? Or how did New York fix this?
Former Commissioner Bratton first tested this strategy while he was commanding the New York Transit Police.

More on that later…

Reference:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell