Blog #4 Disorder and Broken Windows

      When we, by that I mean we humans, look at something we often fill the blanks with our own bias and information we have at our disposal. For example, I recently visited my daughter who lives in the suburbs of New Jersey. When I travel back East I often have to catch connecting flights which often take me through cities like Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and other large cities. When I have the opportunity I venture out from the airport to see the city or some of the sites I may be interested in. When I come across areas of poverty or disorder my mind fills in the blanks for what I perceive to see and for what I do not understand. When we look at the world around us we actually process more visual information than actually exists, our brains fill in the edges with what we think should be there. In psychology this is referred to as boundary extension. We make judgement based on our experiences, knowledge and our biases. One of the other student blogs I read, titled perception, (sorry I can't remember whose it was) mentioned how people perceive safety when they see policeman on the streets. I often find myself making judgments based on perception and not reality when I visit a strange place. My mind goes through this boundary extension by filling in visual information that may or may not exist  If I see a group of dangerous looking people in an alley; I just witnessed a drug related crime. After reading the information in chapter six I had a thought that took me in a little different direction as I considered my emphases in business and psychology when considering how perception, ignorance, and bias have a strong effect on how people behave. From a business standpoint who would want to invest in an urban area filled with disorder. The broken windows theory as our texts describes states that predatory crime increases because the offenders assume no one cares or that no one is paying attention, or that they are merely indifferent. When potential investors from the private sector come along they may perceive the area as unsafe or potentially prone to increased crime, and therefore go elsewhere. I know this is a little bit of a tangent; however, there is a real issue with people, particularly people in poverty, having access to quality nutritious foods. The supermarkets have all but disappeared out of many lower income inner city neighborhoods. When the private sector infrastructure leaves I think that disorder appears and then the broken window theory actually takes place. Jobs become scarce, crime increases, and the beauty of diversity is eliminated and replaced by something ugly. I agree with Samson when he says that disorder leads to a lack of collective efficacy. When people lose the ability to watch out for each other and to hold each other accountable for the minimum accepted; it seems as though a domino effect takes place, and things slowly spiral down.  In this article by Sampson and Raudenbush titled Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods-Does It Lead to Crime? https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/186049.pdf they state, "physical disorder in urban neighborhoods can, if unchecked, lead to serious crime." I found that this article summed up Sampson's chapter six and was much more straight forward on the correlation between disorder and crime; reinforcing the broken window theory. the article also alludes to the problem that even the perception of disorder has on both insiders and outsiders looking at the urban environment.