Police have often felt as though they are bailing oceans with thimbles. Forty-three years ago, however, they got some assistance from academia. In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling published in The Atlantic their essay on “broken windows” and crime. Broken windows, if not repaired, will, they said, proliferate. Abandoned cars, litter-strewn vacant lots, public urination: Quality-of-life offenses produce a menacing sense of spreading disorder. This atomizes communities, dissolving the glue of mutual regard and obligations of civility. People stay indoors, surrendering public spaces to marauders. The urban doom loop accelerates. Sophisticated scientific research has confirmed what grandma knew (about exercise, rest and nutrition). Wilson and Kelling confirmed what did not look like common sense until they articulated it concerning the social incubation of crime. Bethel says “broken windows policing” works only if employed by officers who practice the subtle craft of police work: by not making their attention to obnoxious behaviors obnoxious. “Overpolicing” — “going after everything” — can, Bethel warns, “boil the city.” The key to what he calls “resetting norms” is the elusive, crucial ingredient in all of life: judgment. It is, Bethel says with intense terseness, “not normal” for children leaving school to see “someone sticking a needle in his arm” or for people to come out on their porch and see people relieving themselves on their lawn. He means such things should not be normal. It is, however, normal in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, with its notorious open-air drug market. The invention of automobiles gave criminals mobility, and the interstate highway system has exacerbated Bethel’s problems: I-95, a north-south drug trafficking corridor, passes not far from Kensington, bringing customers and product to what has been called “the Walmart of heroin.” And of even worse drugs, such as xylazine, a horse tranquilizer that produces necrotizing wounds: flesh-eating bacterial infections. (See Charles Fain Lehman in the Manhattan Institute’s winter 2025 City Journal.)