East Timor Journal: (Not) Tipping in Dili

This weekend, at Telibert’s urging, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point.” It’s clever, though a bit bubblegum, as it pops out unconventional explanations for phenomena ranging from teen suicides in Micronesia to the runaway success of Airwalk sneakers.

Gladwell is interested in rapid social change – exponential increases or declines in certain behaviors. While most would recognize fads as having these massive accelerations (and decelerations), he points out that sharp decline crime in New York City in the 1990s also followed that pattern. He identifies the “Tipping Point” as the critical moment when the behavior (teen suicide, shoe buying or not committing crime) takes off.

In the case of Timor Leste, no one wants the low levels of violence to “tip” and become widespread and more destructive. Currently, violence remains localized and lo-tech (mainly people throwing rocks). Yet in May, people burned houses and thousands of residents fled Dili. In May, the situation may, however briefly, have tipped.

So, how do you prevent low-level violence from getting out of hand?

One theory that has been kicking around since a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling suggested that crime surges when the conditions of a neighborhood decline. A broken window signals that people don’t care about the building, leading to more busted window, graffiti (gasp!), squatting, drug sales, etc. (This became its own trend, and police departments across the US subscribed to the “broken-windows theory.”)

This also, I have decided, applies to communal dishwashing. Never leave dishes in the sink because the sink will soon be populated by their ownerless offspring. This idea also mirrors the very Yankee axiom: “a stitch in time, saves nine.”

So do your dishes, clean up the trash, fix the broken windows and don’t let the burnt buildings signal that the residents of Dili have given up.

Now, over the last 24 years scholars have challenged the broken-window theory; for example, one study (2005) has shown that perceptions of a neighborhood’s decline cleaves to demographic changes rather than objective changes in the physical condition of the block. Is racism, not vandalism, to blame? Others argue that the dramatic decline in NYC crime may more appropriately be tied to incarceration, aging, abortion rates (the Freakanomics guys’ theory) or the end of the crack epidemic than the decision to clean graffiti off all the trains.

Regardless of the wisdom of applying broken-windows theory to crime prevention in Dili, the book’s overall emphasis is on small, simple innovations precipitating massive change. What difference would fixing up burnt out buildings make? What about giving homes fire extinguishers*?

For Gladwell, you just have to be clever enough to figure out which switch to flip. It is about communication and signaling, the whole as much more than the sum of the parts (or panes).