Anti-Romeo squads and the ‘Broken Windows’ fallacy

Yeah, the newly elected UP government’s establishment of so-called ‘Anti-Romeo squads’ — ostensibly to nab men and boys who sexually harass women in public (which our crime laws coyly call ‘eve-teasing’) — is certain to have the blessed Bard spinning in his grave.

Oh, the ‘corruption’ of Romeo’s fair name to refer to a cad who imposes his unsolicited amorous attention on passing women has many antecedents in the Indian context, as evidenced by the pejorative term ‘Roadside Romeo’. But then, Romeo hasn’t been singled out for such infamy.

A few years ago, the police in some UP cities had set up so-called ‘ Majnu ka pinjara ’ (Majnu’s cages), named after the protagonist of the 10th-century Persian love tale that Lord Byron termed “the Romeo and Juliet of the East”. ‘Roadside Romeos’ were incarcerated in them and paraded.

Yes, but such ‘instant justice’ initiatives are popular in a State where a former Chief Minister made light of rape charges with a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ attitude.

It would appear so. As broken as the windows in the ‘broken windows’ theory.

It’s unlikely that UP government officials or the constabulary there have heard of political scientist James Wilson or criminologist George Kelling. But in spirit, the establishment of ‘anti-Romeo squads’ abides by their theory of policing of street-level misdemeanours and ‘order maintenance’ in US cities.

Wilson and Kelling postulated that a routine ‘beat patrol’ by the police to check street-level disorders — disturbances by “the ill-smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar” (and, one might add, by ‘roadside Romeos’) — can pre-empt more serious crimes. Inversely, they argued, areas in which disorderly behaviour goes unchecked become hotbeds of serious street crimes. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired , all the rest of the windows will soon be broken,” they wrote in 1982.

Only because the ‘Broken Windows’ theory got hijacked by agenda-driven politicians and police officials in a way that stokes discomfort about how it will be implemented in UP. For one thing, the theory’s contributory role in the fall in serious crimes in cities across the US was overstated. For another, in the US cities where it was implemented most rigorously, it became a channel for targeting ethnic minorities, particularly people of colour, for selective stop-and-frisk procedures. Which is why for all its perceived merits, the ‘Broken Windows’ theory became discredited to the point where Kelling said he worried about the implementation of the theory.

Yup, even one of those who propounded the well-intentioned theory backed away from it.

I’d argue that they apply in greater measure. There is already anecdotal evidence of how the ‘anti-Romeo squads’ are over-reaching themselves in cities across UP and resorting to moral policing that has nothing to do with targeting street-level sexual harassment in the way that the ‘Broken Windows’ theory arguably envisaged.

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