Feminist Activisms and Broken Windows Policing, 1980s–90s

In 1982, criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling popularized the “broken windows” theory of policing, which held that the mass enforcement of nonviolent misdemeanors would promote urban “public order” and prevent more serious violent crimes. This was not a new idea. Since the 1970s, as urban business elites, politicians, and police leaders confronted the urban crisis, they reached for the same logics to argue that sexually profiled women—and Black women specifically—were agents of urban crime, violence, and economic decline.

Broken windows policing gave criminological legitimacy to urban authorities’ efforts

to roll back liberal constraints on police power and resurrect status policing to remove sexually profiled women from city streets. The early battles to legalize the project of broken windows policing were first waged on Black women’s bodies. By the mid-1980s, urban police were empowered to engage in new forms of aggressive law enforcement.

This paper focuses on the competing feminist activisms that emerged in response to this consolidation of police power. Two distinct factions of feminism, divided by different interpretations of state power and male violence, confronted and shaped the so-called Blue Revolution. Predominantly Black women mobilized in defense of Black women’s lives against police violence, arguing that urban police departments were crucial generators of the national crisis of unsolved serial murders of Black women flagged as “prostitutes.” However, predominantly white “dominance” feminists appealed to the state, demanding protection from individual men and thereby buttressing law enforcement authorities’ claims to discretionary power and protective capacities. By situating these opposing activisms within the broader context of expanded police power, this research delivers a fresh perspective on the endurance of contradictory feminist impulses to protect and punish women’s sexuality, and also provides a new, state-centered explanation for the ruptures that characterized feminist sexual politics during this period.