Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving beyond Strong Causal Reasoning

A backlash has set in against order maintenance policing strategies, if not among policymakers and the public, then at least among criminologists. This backlash has several components, but the most prominent rests on empirical studies that have claimed to cast doubt on James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling's broken windows theory. Thacher argues that this backlash focuses too narrowly on the broken windows theory in its assessments of order maintenance policing.