Broken Windows Theory

In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. 

The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.

Taking a step away from physically broken windows in a building. 

Can we look at our lives, our faith, family, finances, and fitness and find broken windows? 

Will fixing those small things lead to bigger things? 

The psychology behind the theory is the same. Fix the small things.

Join Richard as he discusses his thoughts on the Broken Windows Theory on the podcast.

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Transcript

Richard (00:00):

Hey, welcome. You're listening to the Live it Full podcast. This is the first episode of the 20 23 20 23 year. What a great new year it is, right? If you if you've listened to the podcast, if you love us, go share us. Leave us a five star review. Might well wait till the end, I guess, before you do that, cause I might change your mind. But go share us on social media. That's how we grow this. Find us@livefull.com. All our links are there. Go shop our Amazon store and all that fun stuff. but go spread the word. We want others to live it. Full believe this is gonna be episode 89. Kind of crazy getting close to that a hundred mark in a, in about a two year period. March 1st will have been two years. We'll be starting our third. And you know, it, it's ebbed and flowed, but we've always put out an episode and I'm proud of that.

(00:51):

Maybe good, maybe bad, I don't know, but they get downloaded, so I won't complain. Today I want to talk about something that has, it starts in criminology. part of it has to do with events that happened in our real estate business, which isn't abnormal. I posted about it on social media this week. So it probably made it seem like it was a once, you know, one time thing. we had a house rented out. You know, we do real estate and basically it wasn't left in the best of shape. People skip out on rent. It's not the first time. It's not the last time. It's probably the first time I've publicly ranted about it. My goal wasn't to rant about what they actually did cause people leave holes and walls. Unfortunately. It was more just, I wish people would understand the mindset that when you don't leave things better than you found them, like you're never gonna have nice things.

(01:39):

Like it doesn't matter how little you have, if you don't take care of what you have, you'll never be given more. The world doesn't work that way. Call it karma. Call it providence, call it divine intervention. Like, I don't know. But I think our creator, I mean the Matthew Principal, those that have, will have more in those that don't, won't. But it's that per, you know, the parable of the talents, if you don't use your resources as good stewards, you're not gonna be given more anyways. So I was ranting about that and it made me just start thinking about a concept that I had learned in originally in, I think an intro to criminal justice. It was like an elective class. I took my first year of college called Broken Windows Theory. And there's in a criminology sense, there's, I mean, there's some debate on it, and I'll go through that a little bit.

(02:23):

I don't really wanna talk about criminology, I wanna talk more about the psychology side of it, or even the sociology side of it. which isn't discussed a whole lot in this spectrum, but I think that it applies to so many areas of our life, not physical broken windows. Okay? And so broke, for those of you that don't know, I'm gonna give a little bit of background on that. Like I said, it's a criminology term. It probably got some bad press in the nineties in like Giuliani era, New York because of the way they policed it. but I'm gonna give the background on what it is and what we can do to, I, you know, think about it in our lives and then I'll connect it to kind of the real estate that I was talking about. Like what, what I think that connection is.

(03:08):

And so it had been on my mind to, to talk about prior to this obviously, and then that happened and or, you know, kind of saw the aax of some damage at a property we own. And so it just made me think about it. And so in criminology, the broken window theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. So I think you do see it in urban areas like Detroit or Chicago in areas that start to become run down. But basically what it, what it says is the theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fairy eva, which would be like jumping the toll I guess at the subway help create an atmosphere of order and longness.

(03:58):

And so I think we're where it gets some negative presses in criminology or in, in the criminal justice world, you might prosecute minor offenses, more vigilantly than you do, than you would otherwise because you feel like it, it keeps order, it keeps things from deteriorating into chaos. And so the issue is when you take it to the extreme with anything right, left, when you take it to the extremes, you get some zero tolerance or some ry zealots that take it too far. And so I think that's where it got some of the negative press. But I think that as so it put it in simple terms cuz it didn't really even talk about what a broken window means. But basically, if you have a building, and there's been a lot of studies on this all around the world that confirm this process. If you have a building, it's vacant and somebody breaks a window and it's not repaired every other window and that building will be broken, it will be start to be vandalized. People will break in, they'll kick in doors, they'll graffiti it, it deteriorates because of that one broken window. Okay? If that window is repaired, it doesn't happen.

(05:20):

And so I started thinking about that with, by fixing things you prevent more vandalism, right? Like people know not to vandalize, like they know that's wrong whether the windows are broken or not. But psychologically I guess people feel like, well, starting one window busted, why wouldn't I bust another? And I think that immaturity has a lot to do with that. Young adults or, you know, people under 25, I could see as a teenage boy. Like, that makes sense. Well, it's nobody, nobody's taking care of it. So why does it matter?

Speaker 2 (05:57):

And they've done that study with not only buildings, they've done it with cars, left cars, nice cars in bad neighborhoods. What's crazy is when the car was in good shape, like the windows weren't busted, nothing else happened to it. Like it wasn't stolen, there wasn't crime done to it, but you break one window, the thing gets looted. And so it's pretty wild that it works that way. But I started thinking about it and I don't wanna talk about it in like a criminology way. I wanna talk about it in your own internal, internal life, kind of what you're thinking. So one of the things that I thought about and, and I'm gonna relate it to our personal life is the last two times we've sold houses, like personally, our personal residence, not, not flips or, or investment properties, but our personal houses. I remember we had a friend who mentioned something about this, and I'm like, that's so true. Like a lot of times when you're gonna sell a house, there's things you have to do to get it ready. Maybe you're gonna paint some doors, fix some things, you know, reco, some windows fix some baseboard. You know, maybe there's a broken tile and you fix it to sell it. Or maybe those are things that under option, you know, a, a buyer is requesting that you do. Why don't we do those things while we're living there and enjoy it?

(07:15):

I don't know why we don't, but it's, it's a thought process in there. That to me anyway, since I was thinking about that, we don't always fix those things in our lives until we have to. And sometimes those things get a little more run down because we're like, well, it's already beat up. It's already ugly, it's already, you know, my car's five years old. I, it really doesn't matter at this point. It's not the brand, it doesn't have the brand new car smell. But we do that. And I caught myself doing that in both times that we've sold houses in the past 10 years, that we did things that we would've enjoyed. We would've liked just to sell the property. Why wouldn't we? And I feel like we're pretty responsible people. but there's something there that, you know, you just don't always, but can you let it go downhill to the point that you don't care anymore because of the broken windows? And so I don't wanna talk about literal broken windows. Oh, I think that there is a component to that.

(08:14):

I wanna talk about like the things in our lives that are broken windows and how we can try to fix that to live a better life, right? To live it full. I know that I will take better car or better, sorry, better care of a clean vehicle. Why is that? Well, psychologically, I don't want it to get dirty again, but I also know that it's clean and pretty and it may be older, but I will take better care of it. I will pull the trash out of it, I'll wipe it down, I'll run it through the car wash. But if you let that car just get run down, down dirty, nasty, trash everywhere, guess what? You get in that mindset that, well, it's old and I just don't mess with it. How many things in our life do we do that with? Whether it's our jobs, it's doesn't even have to be physical things that we're not happy with the situation that it is right now. So we're not gonna put any more effort into it. And so this kind of comes around full circle for me with one of our rentals that had some damage to it, holes in the wall. I mean, it looks like somebody probably punched a punched. A few things got, maybe got thrown into one. There's one's a few shoulder hu I've run into situations where people have been in bad spots financially, emotionally, but they take care of their things.

(09:50):

I know those people are gonna be okay. They will get through the tough times when they still keep things clean. When they may not have a lot, but they take care of what they do have. They may have an older car that's not in the best shape, but it's clean To me, I know those people are gonna be okay because they understand that what you do with little is what you will do with much. And so I'm, as I'm thinking about this, I've met people who live lives where they don't take care of the little and they wonder why they can never get ahead.

(10:34):

They see the broken windows as their lives and instead of trying to repair that window to make the entire thing better and to, to not have bad things happen to them, they say screw it. And they break all the windows. They start graffiti in the place, they kick in the doors of their lives. So I think the point of this, where I'm trying to go with it and, and get my thoughts together on it is if there are broken windows in your life right now, fix them one at a time. If you have to, small steps forward.

(11:21):

I mean, I've had people tell me, I don't know how to get my finances together because it's just so bad. I probably ought to filed bankruptcy. Maybe that's what you do as a last resort. But yeah, there's broken windows. Start fixing 'em one at a time and the whole place starts to look better. People quit doing things to it. Paint over the graffiti, fix the doors. No, maybe you can't do everything in a day. Maybe you can't fix all your emotional issues in a day from the childhood trauma that you have that's unresolved. But can you fix one thing? I've listened to Jordan Peterson a lot through the last couple years and that's one thing that he says, if you're in a spot where you feel stuck, where you feel like, I don't know where to start, there's a pile of things, piles of bills on my desk. There's a pile of just crap everywhere. I am so overwhelmed, the windows are all broken. I don't know where to start.

(12:17):

He says, organize everything into piles. At least like start somewhere. If that's the win for today, take that win. But I'm telling you, we, we all go through these things in life where we have these broken windows, metaphorically, that we just don't fix 'em. And I think what happens is internally, the same way that somebody who would break a window in a building just because one's already broken, we feel broken as people and we don't feel worthy of fixing that window. We feel broken. So when we have these broken windows in our life, we don't feel like we are capable or worthy of fixing them. But I'm telling you, the same psychology that works in criminology with broken windows works in our lives. I don't care if you have a lot or you have a little, you have to take care of what you have, take care of your mental health, take care of your, and it goes back to, it's something that, I mean it probably is a little redundant, but it goes back to the faith, family, finance and fitness for me, for my family, those are our priorities. Do I have some broken windows and all of those probably, am I trying to fix them? Yes.

(13:55):

Because when you don't, things deteriorate. They get worse. Very seldom in life do we stay the same. I've always had the mantra in business that you are either growing or you are shrinking. There is very little ever staying the same. Cuz the way the world works, if you stay the same, you're shrinking. You're not growing. And so I want you to think about this as you go about your week. Look at where your broken windows are. Maybe there are some physical ones in your house. Fix them. Throw some paint on a wall that needs it. Fix some baseboard, fix that window. Fix the door. That doesn't shut quite right.

(14:47):

Organize something small steps, but fix those broken windows. Maybe it's in your faith life, you have some broken windows, you think that God can't love you because of the things that you've done. Or maybe that he doesn't love you because of the things you feel that he didn't do. We're all worthy. Treat your life like it's a great building. Your body's your temple, right? Fix those broken windows. Don't let things get worse. Same thing in your family. Your faith, your family, your finances and your fitness. I think there's a huge aspect to fixing physically broken things, but also fixing the mental things. So go fix them. If you need help, reach out. Shoot us a dm. I'll give you advice. I can't, you know, it's free. It's worth what it is. But go fix the broken windows in your life. I hope that you got something out of this. Go to www.liveitfool.com, check out our website. There's a lot of good information on there. I'll have this podcast up on there as well as probably a a video link to YouTube. If that's more your style, find some shorts on Instagram and Facebook. I hope you continue to live it full. God bless. Have a great week and we'll see you next week on the live full podcast.