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Steve Herbert, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 1, June 2006, Pages 196–197, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486097
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One puzzle in the contemporary politics of policing is the continuing popularity of the “broken-windows” theory. According to this theory, urban neighborhoods where windows are left unrepaired communicate an absence of informal social control and thereby invite criminals into their midst. This theory's popularity has transformed American policing, most famously in New York City, where a “zero tolerance” policy legitimates widespread arrests for such misdemeanor offenses as vagrancy, public drunkenness, and other signs of “disorder”; to arrest these low-level offenders today presumably means reducing more serious crime tomorrow. However, this theory is now disproven; various empirical tests demonstrate that the link between disorder and crime does not hold. Yet despite this scrutiny, the broken-windows logic remains part of the common sense of policing.
Markus Dirk Dubber's The Police Power provides a historically and analytically capacious answer to this riddle. He traces the history of the power of police, understood broadly as the right of governments to ensure public welfare. This power, he notes, is distinguishable from another borne by Western governments, that based in law. The latter rests upon the notion of a society composed of autonomous individuals capable of self-government. In such a society, state action must be legitimated through the exercise of an articulated regime of law that respects individuals' autonomy. With the police power, by contrast, society is likened to a household, and the state its master. Here, “the state is the institutional manifestation of a household. The police state, as paterfamilias, seeks to maximize the welfare of his—or rather its—household” (p. 3).
