Truth
As Professor Dumbledore once said: A beautiful and terrible thing.
Reaching it is either delightfully or devilishly tricky. (The pursuit of it keeps UBC running, anyways.)
Recently, one of the crafters of the Broken Windows theory passed away. His theory was picked up by one William J. Bratton, who has served as police chief in both New York and Los Angeles in his career.
During Bratton’s years in New York in the 1990s, serious crimes dropped 33% citywide and homicides by 50%. During his tenure in Los Angeles, killings were down by half and robberies by a third in 2009 compared to 2002, the year Bratton began the broken windows approach here. Arrests for the lesser crimes emphasized by the broken windows theory — such as disorderly conduct, prostitution, small-scale drug offenses — had increased 30% over the same period.
But what is the cause of this effect? How do we get to the truth?
All credit to Nicoletta's Photostream
Switch subjects: microcredit. In my mind, microcredit–> empowerment / less poverty. I believed strongly in a microcredit cause would lead to an empowering effect.
A NYT article from awhile ago made me think that maybe I wasn’t looking for the truth when I constructed my little belief. Maybe I just liked how the story sounded in my head.
