Students in Professor Gibbons’ Fall 2014 Urban Sociology course took time to study two neighborhoods in Albany, New York as part of a semester long class assignment. Students used the mobile app Fieldnotes LT to document all of the storefronts, piles of trash, and homes with broken/boarded windows they found in the Albany neighborhoods of Arbor Hill and Center Square. Using Google Earth, students then analyzed what they collected, along with city crime data and Census data, to explore if neighborhood crime relates to social disorder. Some students used this data to call to question the validity of the ‘Broken Windows’ approach to policing, argued by some scholarship to have influenced the deadly police encounters in Ferguson and New York City. This mindset emphasizes that cracking down on minor disorders like broken windows or large amounts of trash on streets can offset more serious crimes like assaults or murders. Student projects demonstrated that the location of homes with broken windows on a block did not overlap with clusters of more serious crimes. Supporting this, other student papers suggest that instances of both minor disorders and crime are instead tied to larger issues of structural disadvantage, like racial segregation. While collecting data, students encountered a variety of people in these different neighborhoods, offering them a deeper sense of how community order manifests on the ground.
submitted by Professor Joe Gibbons