LOS ANGELES — James Q. Wilson, a social scientist who helped launch a revolution in law enforcement as the co-inventor of the “broken windows” theory — the idea that eradicating graffiti, public drunkenness and other signposts of community decay was crucial to making neighborhoods safer — died Friday in Boston. He was 80.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said his son, Matthew Wilson.
Often called the “father of community policing,” Wilson — who was born in Denver and taught for many years at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine University — was a widely admired public intellectual who wrote more than two dozen books on American government, criminal justice and moral issues.
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.”
As crime rates soared across the country, the two academics made a provocative argument about the role of police: Instead of defining themselves mainly as crime fighters, Kelling and Wilson wrote, the police should become keepers of public order. Instead of focusing principally on the big crimes, the authors said, they should pay more attention to the smaller problems that were eroding the quality of life in people’s communities.
James Quinn Wilson was born May 27, 1931, in Denver and grew up in Long Beach, Calif. 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.
