Sarawak Police and Broken Windows

Pak Bui's broken car window post "Crime, Punishment and Torture" on http://hornbillunleashed.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/crime-punishment-and-torture, reminds us of the “Broken Windows” anti-crime policy used by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, often cited as having reduced crime in the city and ‘cleaned’ it as if by waving a magic wand.

At gatherings of the world’s top cops, the "Broken Windows" theory is often a presentation topic. The Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton built his career on the “broken windows” theory. As New York’s police chief in the mid-1990s, he implemented a quality-of-life initiative to much acclaim, and he campaigned for the top job in L.A. on a “broken windows” platform. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino cracked down on such minor misdemeanor offenses as loud house parties, public drinking and improperly disposed trash, believing that these kinds of community-disorder issues are the precursors to the violent crimes that may follow.

Giuliani and Bratton acted on the insights of the Broken Windows theory to transform New York from one of the most dangerous cities in America to the safest big city in the country by treating minor crimes like vandalism, prostitution, and loitering like broken windows.

Giuliani and Bratton deployed police to where they were most needed using the CompStat (computer statistics) system. And instead of tolerating these crimes and showing weakness to criminals and would-be criminals, the police showed strength. They instituted a “zero tolerance” policy for so-called minor crimes. When other criminals witnessed this show of strength, they were deterred.

Citizens, meanwhile, felt safer walking the streets and taking the subway. They took more responsibility for their neighborhoods and helped make them safer as well.

In the New York case, restoring a sense of order to the streets meant that police didn’t have to spend all their time responding to actual crime. Their show of strength inspired citizens to care more for their own communities and deterred criminals from committing crimes in the first place.

According to the “Broken Windows” theory, every instance of disorder, however small - such as a window broken by vandals - should be dealt with firmly. This sends a message of law enforcement and leads to a reduction in more serious crime, the theory goes. The implementation of this involved the aggressive pursuit of those who committed ‘minor’ infractions, such as painting graffiti, panhandling and jaywalking.

The influential “Broken Windows” theory that was published in a 1982 Atlantic article by James Q. Wilson, a political scientist then at Harvard, and George L. Kelling, a criminologist. The theory suggests that a disorderly environment sends a message that no one is in charge, thus increasing fear, weakening community controls, and inviting criminal behavior. It further maintains that stopping minor offenses and restoring greater order can prevent serious crime.

In 2005, Lowell, USA, was being turned into a real life crime-fighting laboratory to test the theory.
Researchers from Harvard and Suffolk University meticulously recording criminal incidents in each of the hot spots, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work - clearing trash from the sidewalks, fixing street lights, and sending loiterers scurrying. Abandoned buildings were secured, businesses forced to meet code, and more arrests made for misdemeanors. Mental health services and homeless aid referrals expanded. In the remaining hot spots, normal policing and services continued.

The results were striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the “broken windows” theory really works - that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.
The Lowell experiment offers guidance on what seems to work best. Cleaning up the physical environment was very effective; misdemeanor arrests less so, and boosting social services had no apparent impact.

This seems to be a solid basis for a policing strategy that preemptively addresses the conditions that promote crime. In traditional policing, cops go from call to call, chasing their own tail.

I trust that PDRM does have an effective policing strategy. Any lessons we can learn from Rakan Cop?

Free Universal High Quality Education for Sarawakians

Free access to high quality learning resources is something that I believe many of us Sarawakians would never have thought could be real. Today, it's our new weapon for mass education, and great quality.

YouTube EDU and Academic Earth have done well in spreading learning.

This is welcome news for students and families around the world who have had little educational choice in the past, except that provided by the public sector. It is globalisation bringing education to students across the world, shortening the distance between countries and bringing quality lectures to emerging and developed nations.

Given that we are entering into the Web 2.0 era, Google has an opportunity to go further in upsetting status quo. It can do so by launching, in tandem with YouTube EDU, contests and small prizes for students to enrich the core material.

Opportunities for improvement include creating and sharing translations, mini-case studies, transcriptions, and slides to accompany the courses. Winners of such contests can be chosen through a combination of peer voting and expert review to ensure accuracy of the proposed enhancements.

Precedents exist for engaging students from poor communities in creation of eLearning resources. At http://www.openworld.com and http://www.entrepreneurialschools.com, sample YouTube clips and online work-study research projects show what students in extremely impoverished, war-torn areas of the world can do in response to small (USD30) microscholarships, vouchers, and prizes.

Billons of camera phones capable of recording and sharing short video clips are heading to impoverished areas of the world in the next few years.

If YouTube EDU opts to encourage co-creation opportunities for students, a wealth of new eLearning resources may be generated by media-capable students who are now shortchanged by 19th century-style schools.

This may create an grassroots opportunity for new, market-sensitive learning ventures to flourish.

In line with its “Education anywhere and anytime” vision, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) imparts on students, courses on public health, art, music and various other subjects through mobile phones. IGNOU now serves about 1.8 million students in India and 32 countries abroad through 21 Schools of Studies and an elaborate network of 58 Regional centres, 1804 study centres, and 49 overseas centres.

Looking at the mobile phone penetration in Malaysia, we can think of using the medium to impart education. Education and technology cannot be seen separately. Following IGNOU's steps in spreading learning to rural India, Malaysia can likewise, take education, especially vocational education, to our kampongs through mobile handsets.

IGNOU believes in imparting quality education to the masses. These easily accessible modules would be implemented in collaboration with the Communication and Manufacturing Association of India. The courses are offered through text, video and graphics mode. IGNOU would also provide public health courses on nutrition, public health, AIDS awareness, and many other educational contents. Furthermore, students do not have to pay anything extra for the new service.

YouTube EDU launched, on 26 March 2009, an educational hub “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities”. The site is aggregating videos from dozens of colleges and universities, ranging from lectures to student films to athletic events. Some of this stuff is solid gold (the Stanford and MIT lectures are really good).

Academic Earth is an organization building a platform for video and other educational resources from top universities, think tanks, and conferences. The company has the stated goal of “giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.”

Academic Earth offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

These aren't radically new ideas. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days.

Fellow Sarawakians, you know what to do.