Mended Windows,Not Broken Windows: A Du Boisian Analysis of Urban Policing

Abstract

This study draws from W. E. B. Du Boi’s urban sociology in The Philadelphia Negro, Darkwater, and Black Reconstruction in America to offer a conceptual foil to present-day broken windows policing. We suggest that the Chicago School’s ecological model of urban life facilitated a broken windows approach to policing by labeling people and places as disordered but also that a Du Boisian approach—what we call “mended windows”—offers new ways of addressing underlying inequalities that reproduce harm. After drawing out the distinct intellectual trajectories of these two approaches, we turn to two contemporary cases of racialized police violence—Syracuse, NY, and the Antelope Valley, CA—to illustrate the theoretical and methodological significance of a Du Boisian mended windows analysis of urban policing across time and place. We conclude by considering what this approach might have foretold about contemporary movements to defund policing in favor of investing in community vitality.

“. . . [I]t is a mistake to think that attacking each of these questions [of ignorance, poverty, crime, and the dislike of the stranger] singlehanded without reference to the other will settle the matter: a combination of social problems is far more than a matter of mere addition—the combination itself is the problem.”

—W.E.B. Du Bois (1899:385)

Sociology has long been interested in evolving urban landscapes and their influence on interpersonal relationships, intergroup conflict, and physical and social mobility (Simmel 1903; Wirth 1938). A key example is the work of Chicago School scholars, who examined how migration to cities fostered community formation and propelled the growth of urban spaces through processes of invasion, succession, and segregation (Park and Burgess 1925). They also analyzed how residents upheld effective social organization using affirmative community norms as mechanisms of neighborhood-level social control (Shaw and McKay 1969; Thomas and Znaniecki 1918). This focus on mobility and urban disorder continues to shape contemporary scholarship. Most notable is the study of neighborhood effects (W. J. Wilson 1987), which initially sought to understand how neighborhood conditions such as crime, poverty, educational attainment, and other social factors impact individual life chances. Over time, these studies expanded to consider whether neighborhood disadvantage could be addressed by revitalizing communities or moving families to opportunities outside their neighborhoods.

Whether by design or coincidence, the Chicago School’s approach to social problems contributed to the belief that disorderly places cultivate disorderly people. This thesis influenced social policy and advanced the idea that structural inequalities were individualized problems. A prominent example is the concept of “broken windows” policing (J. Q. Wilson and Kelling 1982). This theory emphasized the importance of addressing “indicators of disorder” in the nation’s inner cities by identifying visible signs of disorder as potential indicators of criminal activity. However, what this theory failed to acknowledge is that visible disorder such as broken windows and abandoned properties are a product of deeply entrenched racial and power dynamics that marginalize select groups and perpetuate social deprivation. When these dynamics are ignored, it leads to the misguided belief that marginalized neighborhoods are both a cause and consequence of the structural inequality they endure.

This article reorients this dominant and concerning sociological lineage by illuminating an overlooked history: Several decades before the Chicago School’s ecological emphasis on social disorganization, a second school of thought was developing in Philadelphia (Morris 2015). It was there that W. E. B. Du Bois conducted The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996). This landmark study comprehensively examined the social, economic, and political conditions shaping the urban Black experience at the end of the nineteenth century. Through extensive fieldwork, surveys, interviews, and statistical analysis, Du Bois attended to the structural sources of urban disorder and recognized the interplay between the physical and social environment and the entangled relationship between systematic racial exclusion and social control. By rejecting Du Boi’s contributions, the discipline of sociology undermined its ability to comprehensively analyze racial inequality, labor market dynamics, family formation, and the built environment in urban contexts (Morris 2015; Wright 2016; Wright and Morris 2021).

The following study contributes to a renewed focus on Du Boi’s urban sociology by mapping out a distinctive Du Boisian perspective on race, place, and policing. We contend that conceptually and methodologically, Du Bois drew from the standpoint of communities most affected by urban inequalities and advanced a macro-level alternative to the broken windows theory that we call “mended windows.” We offer this corrective theory by extending Du Boi’s scholarship on racial hierarchies in The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996), urban sociology in Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil (1920), and policing and social control in Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2007). Specifically, the mended windows theory focuses on the structural causes of urban inequality and locates solutions to social problems in well-resourced people and places rather than policing. This approach is possible when we recalibrate how we understand windows. For instance, instead of engaging windows as a metaphor for the brokenness of people and places, we think about the possibility of transparency, reflection, and perspective that windows can offer. We also emphasize the importance of mending by asking readers to consider what urban spaces could have looked like if the intention was to cultivate health and safety rather than the overpolicing of marginalized people that broken windows legitimized.

The following sections elaborate on our mended windows framework by revisiting the divergent sociological contributions of the Chicago School and W. E. B. Du Bois and exploring their implications for contemporary policing and urban policy. We do so by following the mobility-based frameworks of social uplift commonplace in the discipline at the time and Du Boi’s intellectual journey from “reformist social scientist to radical internationalist” (Rabaka 2021:3). Building on Du Boi’s analysis of the socioeconomic forces shaping Black life, we apply mended windows to two locations—Syracuse, NY, and the Antelope Valley, CA—which are both underexamined midsized cities in urban studies. There, we examine three forms of social control central to The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996)—labor exclusion, housing displacement, and the criminalization of Blackness—and engage Du Boi’s vision of deep social change by evaluating how fundamental causes of inequality shape these outcomes. We locate the significance of the mended windows theory on the underlying racial, economic, and political inequalities that fostered overpolicing as well as community attempts to cultivate safe and prosperous communities despite police violence. We conclude with provocations about what a mended windows framework might have foretold about contemporary movements to defund policing, and how, in turn, we might change the structural conditions that unsettle Black life. We also outline the implications of this study beyond urban sociology, including the sociological study of race, policing, inequality, poverty, and mobility.

From Social Disorganization to “Broken Windows” Policing

Throughout U.S. history, European settlers used violence to seize land, exploit resources, commit genocide, and enslave and surveil people, all in the name of building well-resourced communities for themselves (Rocha Beardall 2022b). Settlers also embedded logics of dehumanization and racism—defined as the “extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability [in]to premature death” (Gilmore 2007:28)—into the social institutions they built, including American policing and carceral punishment (Rocha Beardall 2022b; Rocha Beardall 2022c). Indeed, U.S. policing embodied two primary objectives: to (1) safeguard property, and (2) shield citizens from perceived threats posed by individuals engaging in crime, violence, or other harm (Murakawa 2014). These policing strategies were instrumental in regulating and shaping the citizenship prospects of marginalized groups, criminalizing aspects of their social identities such as race, gender, class, and nationality that funneled them into the criminal legal system. This violence manifested in various forms across the country. In the North and South, policing restricted Black mobility (Muhammad 2010; Muller 2012), suppressed slave rebellions (Hinton and Cook 2021), and reinforced race and class divisions among ethnically diverse populations (Du Bois [1935] 2007; Work 1913). Meanwhile, policing in the American West facilitated Indigenous genocide and land dispossession and perpetuated race and class divisions among poor White Americans, (un)documented migrants, and other laboring populations (Lytle Hernández 2017).

Early sociologists embracing Darwinistic approaches toward the fundamental causes of racial inequality influenced the study of American cities by mimicking these repressive policing ideologies. For example, Robert Park (1915) theorized that White residents should aspire to live in majority-White communities because they were resource-abundant, composed of “moral” individuals, and “quite different from (neighborhoods) brought about by (similar) occupational interests or economic conditions” (Park 1915:610). In contrast, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay speculated that resource-deprived communities contained undesirable populations engaged in criminal activities that threatened “moral regions” (Park 1915) and the social fabric of cities themselves (Shaw and McKay 1969). These scholars emphasized that social control was a necessary order-based intervention to combat “social disorganization” and inevitable delinquency in particular areas (Merton [1949] 1968). Much like European settlers making their way West, early sociologists mapped Chicago into concentric circles with blurry boundaries and foregrounded migration as “natural” (Park and Burgess 1925; Shaw and McKay 1969), positing geographic and upward mobility as a positive pathway for all.

The Chicago School’s focus on mobility and disorder has had a lasting impact on sociological research. For example, scholars have long studied the connection between mobility, disorder, and crime, suggesting that individuals proactively engage in violence as a problem-solving tactic in neighborhoods where cohesion is low and resource deprivation is high (Kirk and Papachristos 2011). Recent scholarship has offered critiques of this school of thought, arguing that classical studies of urban disorder fail to interrogate the structural causes of crime mobilized by powerful actors and instead pathologize criminalized populations for their “criminal” behaviors (Cabral 2024; Werth 2024). Scholars emphasizing the entangled relationship between the concentration of resource deprivation in U.S. cities and its influence in structuring life chances (Sampson 2009) continue to draw connections between disorder, policing, and municipal divestment (Rocha Beardall 2019).

These studies suggest that the notion of broken windows within the academic and popular imagination can be traced to the social disorganization theory’s belief that disorderly places cultivate disorderly people. To this end, the broken windows theory differentiates between residents and places deserving of safety and others in need of social control and incarceration (J. Q. Wilson and Kelling 1982) by prioritizing visible manifestations of “disorder” as a proxy for delinquency and potential criminal activity (Park 1915; Park and Burgess 1925; Shaw and McKay 1969). Much like the shortcomings of social disorganization theory, broken windows theory has been criticized for failing to adequately acknowledge the structural causes of neighborhood inequality and normalizes punitive surveillance practices instead of people-centered investments (Gurusami and Kurwa 2021). Others find that broken windows interventions are minimally effective at reducing actual disorder (Sampson and Raudenbush 2001), in part because the material conditions of impacted neighborhoods are shaped by historical—and ongoing—policy failures, including the use of militaristic policing to eliminate perceived “criminal” threats irrespective of residents’ actual engagement in delinquent behaviors (Soss and Weaver 2017).

Despite meaningful critique, scholars and politicians have continued to mobilize “neighborhood effects” analyses to urban issues and housing needs in particular. Many advocated for individuals from lower socioeconomic communities to move toward areas with more resources. In a 2015 speech, economist Jens Ludwig reviewed the disappointing outcomes of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment from the 1990s with his University of Chicago colleagues. MTO was the nation’s largest controlled test of the neighborhood effects hypothesis. It provided thousands of public housing tenants the opportunity to move out of poor neighborhoods and into areas of higher socioeconomic opportunity. Researchers expected this move would empower tenants to achieve “greater self-sufficiency and improved individual and family well-being” and assessed these outcomes through changes in income, employment, and health, among other variables (Department of Housing and Urban Development 2023). Some health measures improved in MTO’s long-term evaluations, but participants’ incomes and employment rates did not.

Reflecting on MTO’s limited impact on participants, Ludwig suggested a new urban policy direction aligned with the bedrock principles of broken windows policing. “MTO has convinced me,” he explained, “that one of the most important things that we can do to improve the quality of life of poor families is improve public safety” (Ludwig 2015). He claimed that federal assistance programs for low-income families were ineffective and needed revision. “I think the U.S. is way under-policed right now,” he argued. “We spend about a hundred billion dollars a year on policing; [HUD’s] 40 billion dollars would represent a huge proportional change in policing intensity in some of the most dangerous inner-city neighborhoods” (Ludwig 2015). Ludwig’s prescriptions reveal how many urban sociologists and policymakers understood the necessity of policing: When mobility-based strategies for social uplift fall short, policing disorder in impoverished areas becomes the only suitable alternative. In contrast, we now turn to Du Boi’s analysis of the root causes of urban inequality and his refusal to pathologize urban, non-White, resource-deprived communities as deserving of constant surveillance (Moynihan 1965).

Interrogating Social Determinants of Safety Leads to “Mended Windows” Solutions

More than 20 years before the founding of the Chicago School, the Du Boisian tradition of urban sociology offered an overlooked roadmap to social stability and safety without policing. ¹ Most significantly, in Du Boi’s reflections on solutions to the problems he witnessed in Philadelphia, East St. Louis, and beyond, he wrote repeatedly about the type and scale of repair needed to produce a robust democratic society. His thinking reflected a clear alternative to social disorganization theory and the prevailing sociological response to social problems by taking a root-cause approach to producing community safety.

We translate Du Boi’s prescriptions about abolition democracy into questions of policing and carceral abolition and name these ideas “mended windows.” Much like the rejection of Du Boi’s career by mainstream sociology, we offer mended windows as a key concept previously denied. Grounded in the epistemological clarity of “second sight” (Du Bois 1903) and the acknowledgment of denied persons and histories, we suggest that broken social relations can be mended by addressing the underlying causes of urban inequality. In this spirit, we situate mended windows as a necessary corrective to the Chicago School’s unreserved endorsement of policing because it locates solutions to social problems through resource investments in people and places. To operationalize this framework, we transform the meaning of physical windows into a theoretical and methodological metaphor for social life, one that draws on the possibility of transparency, reflection, and perspective that windows can offer. In our theory, windows are not simply a pane in a frame: they are the very people and places that underlying social forces shape and sometimes either nurture or break. Likewise, the act of mending implies making something that was broken whole again. Not the same as it was before, but mended in ways that strengthen its utility and impact.

In the case of policing, mending requires standing in the brokenness and acknowledging what led to the break, evaluating what pieces can be mended and which cannot, and investing oneself in the process of healing people and places. In what follows, we trace four elements across Du Boisian thought that inform the mended windows theory: (1) naming how interlocking systems of oppression shape social disorder (recognition), (2) refusing the idea of inherently disordered people and places (reconciliation), (3) building communities of care through coalition building (relationality), and (4) identifying opportunities to redistribute resources to promote individual and collective safety and well-being (reparation). As the abolitionist thought builds steam, mended windows offer a way to think about building new institutions alongside the tearing down of carceral ones (Gilmore 2022:474–81). In this context, for example, a mended windows analysis could have anticipated contemporary demands to defund and abolish the police by drawing on Du Boi’s ([1935] 2007) critique of society’s unmet democratic ambition and his call for creating new social institutions to foster a more just society.

We see evidence of this mended windows framework in The Philadelphia Negro when Du Bois ([1899] 1996) rigorously recognized and historicized how racism, migration, employment, housing, and political disenfranchisement impacted Philadelphia’s 7th Ward. ² First, Du Bois identified how Black Philadelphians were forced to live in an undesirable area of the city using a checkerboard demographic distribution that “foster(ed) unevenness in the location and distribution of opportunity” (Hunter 2013:9; Loughran 2015). Second, he concluded that “disorder” was connected to the fact that Black workers were “receiving a little lower wages than usual for less desirable work, and compelled, in order to do that work, to live in a little less pleasant quarters than most people, and pay for them somewhat higher rents” (p. 296; also see the work of Katz and Sugrue 1998). This leads him to ask, “How long can a community pursue such a contradictory economic policy [by] first confining a large portion of its population to a pursuit which public opinion persists in looking down; then displacing them even there by better trained and better paid competitors . . .?” (Du Bois [1899] 1996:140). These questions foreground Du Bois’ call for recognition and reconciliation by calling attention to the demoralizing structural interests Whites deployed against Black Americans and the need for something more.

In addition, Du Bois identified that race prejudice influenced Black Philadelphians’ ascriptions of criminality, segregation into areas of concentrated disadvantage, and subsequent contact with the criminal legal system (Du Bois [1899] 1996; Gabbidon 2007; Mamet 2023). As a result, his solutions to crime and criminality emphasized remedying the underlying racism, propelling institutional mechanisms of inequality subordinating the Black community. His observations led him to conclude that there are two types of legal systems—one White and the other Black—and that anti-Black resource deprivation influenced the likelihood of documenting criminality. Ultimately, this work led Du Bois to reject the presumption that problems of “disorder” were endemic to the Black community rather than a consequence of the enduring legacies of enslavement, segregation, and anti-Black racism in Philadelphia and across the United States (Hunter 2013). For instance, in diagnosing racial disparities in contact with the criminal legal system, Du Bois ascertained that Black Philadelphians were “arrested for less cause and given longer sentences than Whites . . . [and] arrested and committed for trial were never brought to trial so that their guilt could be proven or disproven” (Du Bois [1899] 1996:239). Du Boi’s attentiveness to recognizing the fundamental causes of Black Philadelphians’ disproportionate contact with the criminal legal system led him to reconcile that this contact was the product of intentional discrimination from the site of arrest carrying through sentencing.

While one might rightfully identify that The Philadelphia Negro exemplifies Du Boi’s interrogation of racism and inequality in society, his robust structural analysis and endorsement of abolitionist politics were crystallized in his work at Atlanta University. As the inaugural director of the pioneering Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, Du Bois leveraged Atlanta’s resources and his creative authority to institutionalize the “first scientific, objective, and systematic studies of the conditions of Blacks in the United States” (Wright 2012:264; also see the work of Wright and Calhoun 2006) in the aftermath of slavery. For example, the Atlanta School centered the transnational institution of slavery in their research, providing epistemological clarity and methodological specificity in measuring its violence on Black Americans and society more broadly. Furthermore, Wright (2016) and others find that these principles pioneered by the Atlanta School eventually traveled to other historically Black universities across the U.S. South that subsequently took this research mandate global (see the work of Wright 2020). This provides another endorsement for returning to the work of Du Bois after his time in Philadelphia to better understand his evolution as a liberatory thinker who imagined pathways for abolition in the wake of transnational practices of slavery and racism.

If The Philadelphia Negro lays the foundation for mended windows analysis, a turn away from simply repairing the signs of disorder and symptoms of inequality, Du Boi’s later work illustrates what this looks like in terms of addressing racial, economic, and political marginalization. Most significant is his ongoing study of crime and the criminalization of Blackness. In Darkwater, for example, Du Bois anticipated the insufficiency of the Chicago School’s analytical reliance on spatial mobility. Much like his emphasis on Black residents’ movement between Philadelphia and the countryside (Du Bois [1899] 1996), Du Boi’s rigorous investigation articulated the relationship between the city core and its periphery, namely that St. Loui’s economic growth had led to the development of a peripheral city three miles east known as East St. Louis. He traveled to East St. Louis in the wake of its 1917 White riot, observing that industries sought unfettered opportunities to grow and created “a paradise for high and frequent dividends and for the piling up of wealth” (Du Bois 1920:84).

Du Bois highlighted that White rail workers’ racial hatred prevented them from collaborating with Black workers to eliminate unjust labor practices and build more equitable economic futures for all laborers. White workers turned against Black workers, killing many and destroying significant parts of the city (Bonacich 1972). Many “firemen, policemen, and militiamen stood with hanging heads or even joined eagerly with the mob” (Du Bois 1920:95), signaling Du Boi’s attention to law enforcement’s failure to cultivate safety within the Black community. Writing from the “flame swept walls” of East St. Louis, Du Bois warned that the inequitable conditions of labor and geography that made a White riot possible in East St. Louis might reignite elsewhere. As we will demonstrate, Du Bois would focus not on changing where Black workers lived but on changing the resources and economic power they had wherever they were. We therefore contrast the Du Boisian approach of mending inequality’s causes and consequences with the Chicago School’s focus on the inevitability of disorder and mobility. Mended windows is thus both a conceptual foil to the theory of broken windows that captured the social policy in the last half-century and a broader invocation of the need for a reparative policy.

To this point, one powerful feature of Du Boi’s later scholarship is that it explicates the role of the state and its police force in reproducing racialized social hierarchies, specifically by controlling Black social mobility and physically enforcing neighborhood boundaries (Gordon 2022). In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois underscores the growth of policing in the South as a mechanism of preserving slavery and reinforcing such boundaries. He notes that policing extended the planter class’s power by “summoning some five million poor Whites; [such that] there were actually more White people to police the slaves than there were slaves” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:8), leading White Southerners to become “an armed and commissioned camp to keep Negroes in slavery and kill the Black rebel” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:9). ³ After slavery’s end, Du Bois saw Reconstruction as an opportunity to mend and build new ways of seeing community repair from the perspective of those most harmed by state violence. In his view, “Freedom was not an End but an indispensable means to the beginning of human progress and that democracy could function only after the dropping of feudal privileges, monopoly, and chains” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:16).

However, Du Bois also noted that White people relied on racial prejudice to deter this social change by embracing the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness. Among the mechanisms Whites used to control social advantages, Du Bois turns to policing and notes that “the police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness” in the postwar South (Du Bois [1935] 2007:573). Du Bois saw this imposition of violence as an act of war against Black Americans, rationalizing that policing preserved their confinement to inequitable conditions as a practice of punishment. Yet, he remained optimistic that the solution to this problem was mending the violence’s fundamental causes by reminding us that “It is the duty of humanity to heal them” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:584). Du Boi’s bold vision for helping the United States heal from its troubled past is clear in his call for relationality in understanding the unequal hardships Black Americans endured under interlocking systems of oppression. Likewise, his emphasis on reparation centered positive investments to create safe spaces, resources, and opportunities for restorative care that benefit racially and socioeconomically diverse populations.

Scholars have extended a Du Boisian structural analysis of urban problems in dynamic ways. From the changing structure of employment opportunities in Black communities (Sugrue 1996; W. J. Wilson 1978) and the ways that predatory housing policies have sanctioned residential segregation among Black residents and other vulnerable populations (Desmond 2016; Taylor 2019), this scholarship has built the case for Du Boisian reparation policy proposals that redistribute resources and promote individual and collective well-being. Other studies have uncovered how the interdependence between physical space and social control offers insights into the ways youth and adults navigate entanglements with crime not only as a means of self-defense but also to reactively negotiate the violence they experience from several forms of relative deprivation (E. Anderson 1999; Rios 2011). Likewise, scholarship on the explicitly harmful practices of police departments shows that racialized police violence can lead to the mobilization of order-based interventions that serve the self-interests of police departments and politicians but destroy the social organization of the neighborhoods where these interventions are deployed (Gascón and Roussell 2019; Stuart 2016; Vargas 2016). In the following sections, we engage this scholarship to articulate a Du Boisian study of urban policing and advance the concept of mended windows using the analytic strengths of Du Boi’s prior research.

Data and Methods

Following calls to uncover the contemporary relevance of Du Boi’s urban sociological vision (Morris 2015; Wright 2016), we illustrate mended windows by systematically examining three forms of social control central to Du Boi’s analysis in Philadelphia: labor exclusion, housing displacement, and the criminalization of Blackness. To do so, we turn to ethnographic and archival research conducted by the first and second authors in two regionally, racially, culturally, and economically distinct cities that Du Bois himself had visited and engaged with—Syracuse, New York, as a “city within a city” (Du Bois [1899] 1996:5), and Antelope Valley, California, as a “city within a county.” Both cases substantiate Du Boi’s analysis of an urban core and periphery in The Philadelphia Negro and Darkwater and use mended windows to make sense of community demands to invest in people and places, not policing. In this way, we offer a critical re-evaluation of The Philadelphia Negro and show how ideas from that classic text evolved and were taken in new directions in subsequent years and remain salient to contemporary urban sociology.

Drawing on 5 years of fieldwork and 149 interviews in Syracuse on race, policing, and the social construction of public safety, the first author examines the entanglement between labor exclusion and the criminalization of Blackness. She received formal permission to study the Syracuse Citizen Review Board, attended public meetings on police and public safety issues, worked alongside activists galvanizing police reform, and collaborated with elected officials interested in reducing the police budget and increasing police accountability. Her interviews included residents, politicians, and police, and her archival research spans 1,112 news articles relevant to these issues, access to a private collection of activist organizing papers about efforts to “police the police” spanning 1979–2002, and a detailed analysis of primary texts. This work provided a historical orientation to ongoing community demands about the (un)necessary use of policing to address social problems in Syracuse. As we will demonstrate, these demands are the contemporary echo of Du Boi’s observations about the need to resolve underlying conditions of material deprivation where marginalized people live, not move them elsewhere.

Next, drawing from fieldwork and archival research that traces the displacement of Black tenants from Los Angeles’s urban core to its periphery in the Antelope Valley, the second author emphasizes Du Boi’s theory of housing displacement in Darkwater and the criminalization of Blackness in The Philadelphia Negro. He traces the social forces producing Black movement to the Antelope Valley using prior literature, newspaper accounts spanning the early 1930s through the late 2010s, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s dataset, “A Picture of Subsidized Housing,” and interviews with 39 tenants in the Housing Choice Voucher program, the majority of whom are Black women. Data tracing local governments’ reactions to this movement emerge from newspaper accounts, interviews with 43 local residents, and litigation documents. Finally, records of the experiences of voucher tenants are sourced from tenant interviews, litigation records, and public records from the Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles.

Both cases consider mobility and disorder by analyzing Syracuse’s policing history prior to the proliferation of neighborhood effects literature and the Antelope Valley in the fallout of the moving-to-opportunity efforts that followed. Our diverse cases allow us to better understand how Du Boi’s structural analysis functions across time and place. They also offer a more nuanced analysis of police-community relations from the perspective of race-class subjugated (RCS) communities by showing how experiences of overpolicing catalyze communal responses to the imposition of this violence. In broad strokes, Syracuse and the Antelope Valley represent the two sides of the divide between urban core and periphery illuminated by a Du Boisian analytical approach. Future evaluations of other cities within this Chicago School/Du Bois divide might complicate, contradict, or confirm the conclusions drawn here.

Syracuse, NY: Labor Exclusion and the Criminalization of Blackness

. . . the question of economic survival is the most pressing of all questions; the problem as to how, under the circumstances of modern life, any group of people can earn a decent living, so as to maintain their standard of life, is not always easy to answer. (W.E.B. Du Bois, [1899] 1996:93)

Du Bois had a long relationship with Syracuse, New York. In the 1920s, he visited the city to give lectures to local organizations, including the Jewish Communal Home, and petitioned Syracuse University to end discrimination against Black students. In the 1940s, he gave a lecture at the university on “A Program of Emancipation for the Colonial People.” ⁴ In the 1950s, he became active in the American Labor Party and its electoral work in the state.

Picking up from his focus on discrimination and labor in Syracuse, we begin our analysis of Du Bois’s urban sociology amid the labor exclusion and the criminalization of Blackness that continued to plague Syracuse in the decades after Du Boi’s visits. Located four hours northwest of New York City, this racially diverse (29 percent Black and 10 percent Latino) midsize city is known for intense snowfall and energetic college sports. Less well-known is that Syracuse was a prominent stop along the Underground Railroad and the Erie Canal, two modes of passage, one for freedom and another for commerce. Salt production made Syracuse the heart of Central New York’s economic prosperity, and in time, skilled manufacturing and urban employment thrived. General Motors, Chrysler, General Electric, and the Carrier Corporation ran large facilities in the area producing vehicles and major appliances. However, like other rustbelt towns, urban renewal and de industrialization decimated Syracuse in the mid-twentieth century as manufacturers offshored their operations, taking thousands of jobs with them.

Today, the city’s commercial zones remain mostly deserted, and the city continues to struggle with a depressed tax base and rigid residential segregation by race and income. A deep poverty envelops approximately one-third of residents, and nearly half of all Syracuse children live in poverty. Only 55 percent of the population is in the civilian labor force, and Syracusans of color experience disproportionately high underemployment. Subsequently, roughly 44 percent of Black residents and 65 percent of Latino residents live below the poverty line. These factors shape the reported crime rate, which is higher than the national average (37 per 1,000 residents). The city’s demography, however, is not reflected in its police force, where approximately 90 percent of officers are White (Syracuse Police Department 2017), live in the surrounding suburbs, and commute into Syracuse to police the city.

Using archival and ethnographic analysis, we examine how the symbiotic relationship between employment and policing developed for Black Americans in Syracuse in the 1920s–1960s. We are especially attentive to how White supremacy and the racial and economic politics of the Great Migration manufactured “disorderly” neighborhoods that legitimized police surveillance. We find that Syracuse’s racialized employment history mirrors Du Boi’s economic survival claim in The Philadelphia Negro and his racial hatred analysis of the 1917 riot in East St. Louis in Darkwater. Specifically, we find that (1) racialized labor relations shape the context in which policing takes place, (2) whether police respond to or participate in anti-Black violence, and (3) the punitiveness with which a police force responds to minoritized communities.

Racialized labor relations

In Philadelphia, Du Bois argued that European immigrants actively repressed Black workers through race and class labor segmentation. This exclusion had both physical and emotional dimensions, and Du Bois described the physical as “a whirling and scrambling among the workers” such that “they fought each other [and] climbed on each others’ backs” (Du Bois 1920:87). These Reconstruction Era tensions led “craft and race unions to spread” such that White workers formed “into closed guilds and, in combination with capitalist guild-masters, extorted fair wages” (Du Bois 1935:489) for themselves only. In addition, the emotional dimensions of anti-Black subordination heightened as White workers advanced themselves by controlling Black communities in moments of economic tension and mass unemployment; meanwhile, the Klu Klux Klan increased this violence to “subject Black labor to strict domination by capital and to break Negro political power” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:513).

These practices continued as racist labor tensions simmered after the First World War in what would come to be known as Red Summer. These issues arose in Syracuse when Polish and Italian workers went on strike from Globe Malleable Iron Works (Voogd 2008). The corporation tried to break the strike by replacing White strikers with nearly 40,000 Black workers (Rucker and Upton 2007). On July 31, 1919, instead of ending the strike, White workers focused on Black workers as competition for scarce jobs (Voogd 2008) and violently attacked them in a riot that required the activation of every Syracuse police officer to quell. However, the decision to call for law enforcement was initially delayed due to policing’s obligation to protect White capital, not Black residents. Importantly, Du Bois analyzed this inability to consolidate the working class because Whites excluded Black Americans from opportunities to “earn a decent living, so as to maintain their standard of life” (Du Bois [1899] 1996:93) and identified the role of police within such efforts. This violence, coupled with systematic divestment in Black communities, labeled Black Syracusans as “disordered,” and policing was continuously deployed to reproduce that disorder.

Police participation in anti-Black violence; public opposition to disinvestment

Beginning in the 1950s, employment in Syracuse declined by 26 percent, and in the 1970s, industry giants such as General Electric moved their manufacturing operations out of state (Smith 1971), leaving thousands of city residents without work (Crandall 2003). Some scholars and pundits argued that communities could have moved for better employment opportunities, yet prior anti-Black violence reflected an important reality. Whether they left Syracuse or stayed, Du Bois explained in Darkwater that Whites frequently “mobilized all the machinery of modern oppression, taxes, city ordinances, licenses, state laws, municipal regulations, wholesale police arrests and of course, the peculiarly Southern method of the mob and the lyncher” (Du Bois 1920:89) to force Black Americans into labor market subordination. The problem was White supremacy.

As Du Bois predicted, labor market exclusion in Syracuse was coupled with manufactured deprivation in the Black community, residential segregation, substandard housing, underfunded schools, and non-existent legal remedies when residents’ rights were violated. Yet, ongoing anti-racist activism throughout the city pushed back. For example, the Syracuse Chapter of the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE)—nationally known for organizing the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer—led several initiatives against employment discrimination. Local chapters of The National Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were also active in fighting discrimination in housing, employment, education, and Syracuse policing (Sieh 2009).

These efforts coalesced throughout the 1960s when Black Syracusans in the city’s 15th Ward—a tight-knit community home to nearly 90 percent of Black Syracusans with a sizeable portion of the city’s Jewish and immigrant families redlined out of other neighborhoods (Struck 2022)—protested and held teach-ins to save their community against the perils of “urban renewal” (The News House 2021). Their efforts refused the perception that the 15th Ward was a site of disorder and argued instead that structural forces were most responsible for its conditions. The 15th Ward, like so many neighborhoods of color experiencing systematic divestment, was labeled for “slum clearance” to make way for the city’s suburban renaissance (Struck 2022). Police violence was prevalent and concentrated in communities of color using a variety of techniques, including tear gas, batons, and broken bones. As one Black 15th Ward resident described his experiences there, “It is costly to be poor, and those of us that grew up in The Ward grew up with no illusions about the police in Syracuse . . . A more corrupt force would have been hard to come by” (Williams 1964).

In 1964, Syracuse bulldozed the 15th Ward to make way for “a Russian roulette multimillion-dollar boondoggle of concrete and steel” (The News House 2021) highway to facilitate city access from the suburbs (Struck 2022). Residents protested the 15th Ward’s demolition, and police intervened to coerce, escort, and arrest Black families from their homes to make way for Interstate 81. Syracuse police enjoyed significant support from powerful allies, including Mayor William “Bill” Walsh, who worked closely with the Police Chief to ensure police protection for carrying out these raids. Walsh famously stated, “I want [police officers] to be tough but fair . . . They are not to worry about charges of ‘police brutality.’ Let the courts worry about that” (The Post-Standard Editors 1965). Much like Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction in America, Syracuse forced Black residents into “low wages with the threat of starvation and with police control,” labeling these people and places subject to state violence (Du Bois [1935] 2007:478). The city invested its resources not into the people who needed it most but into building a new central police department just blocks from this demolished neighborhood.

Punitive policing targets minoritized communities; public organizing mends windows

Civil Rights activists in Syracuse continued to take up these interlocking systems of oppression alongside their protest against police brutality. In 1967, after police severely beat and hospitalized Willie Reese, a 20-year-old Black man, these tensions reignited. Black rebellion and White counter-violence followed, and the mayor ordered a city wide curfew. Extensive property damage and nearly 100 arrests occurred before the curfew ended (Croyle 2020). Like the Red Summer of 1919, some White officers looked away when their help was needed, and others actively participated in the violence (Rhatz 2016).

A widespread critique labeled those who fought back against police brutality as “violent” and “criminal.” These critics failed to understand that urban uprisings throughout the 1960s were rebellions “against a broader system that had entrenched unequal conditions and anti-Black violence over generations” (Hinton 2021:6–7). These rebellions insisted that to diagnose Black criminality as the cause of police violence is a misdiagnosis and that the symptoms are causes of social injustice. In showing the role that structural disinvestment played in shaping the conditions of Black residents in Syracuse, these rebellions served as a refutation of the idea of inherently disorderly or disordered places. In time, the federal government would employ a similar Du Boisian structural analysis in its landmark Kerner Commission Report, chronicling racism and resource deprivation as fundamental causes of Black rebellion in American cities (U.S. National Advisory Commission on Civil Discord 1968). In identifying that policing upheld the racist institutions of slavery and White supremacy by preserving racial inequalities across American society (Du Bois [1935] 2007; Hinton and Cook 2021), the Kerner Commission suggested that the criminal legal system ignored those it harmed and pushed these communities into further disadvantage.

Despite the Kerner Commission’s findings, little changed in Syracuse for Black residents. In 1970, for example, Officer Paul Larkin killed 18-year-old Jeremiah Mitchell, a Black high school senior and member of the Syracuse Central Tech football team. Officer Larkin and his partner Officer Frank Pallota alleged that they encountered Jeremiah while actively searching for teen suspects involved in an attempted mugging (Volmes 1970). Officer Larkin justified his actions by testifying that the teen had stopped running and turned to aim a gun at Larkin, causing him to fear for his life.

Outraged, the Black community quickly mobilized and operationalized their knowledge that the police could not be trusted to protect them. First, they formed an ad-hoc committee to do the work of ensuring police accountability. The committee’s recognition of interlocking systems of oppression empowered them to openly challenge the police narrative by gathering witnesses and demanding a grand jury investigation. These efforts revealed several critical discrepancies, including the fact that no mugging occurred that night—a fight broke out between four individuals, and Jeremiah was not involved (Andrews 1976)—and that Larkin had negative encounters with Black residents twice before and that complaints had been filed with the Human Rights Commission.

Second, Black Syracusans deployed a mended windows framework to emphasize the causes of urban inequalities in their neighborhoods and the right to live without the constant threat of police violence. Specifically, residents rooted their work in the belief that resources should be invested in people, not policing, and that everyone—regardless of their race, gender, or class background—deserved equitable access to resources that support healthy and productive lives. For example, when residents did not receive the assistance they demanded and deserved, they leaned into their social networks to marshal resources to meet their own needs and pressured the city to act (Rocha Beardall 2022a). They did so by nurturing grassroots coalitions to create communities of care invested in people, places, and just futures. Throughout their fight against the impunity of police violence, the community honored Jeremiah and cultivated space to remember this young life taken too soon.

A third way residents operationalized a mended windows framework is through refusal of inherently disordered places and persons or what we call Du Boisian reconciliation. As the months went on, for example, Jeremiah’s family would call for justice by leveraging the hiring and training of the local police force as grounds for restitution and reform—foreshadowing contemporary efforts to increase police accountability using labor and employment mechanisms. These efforts took a structural analysis of police violence and transformed community pessimism about local policing into political reparations and redistributed political power to residents. Black Syracusans emphasized that ascriptions of “crime” and “criminality” were frequently leveraged by the city to justify policing as a response to manufacture disorganization in Black communities (see the work of Du Bois [1935] 2007:511–512), reinforce their low racial and socioeconomic position, and curate their deservingness of violent policing. However, by reframing their experiences through a mended windows lens, residents refused the reproduction of racialized hierarchies and built new democratic pathways for municipal accountability.

Antelope Valley, CA: Housing Displacement and the Criminalization of Blackness

Eastward from St. Louis lie great centers, like Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York . . . [i]n every one of these centers what happened in East St. Louis has been attempted, with more or less success. (W.E.B. Du Bois, 1920:97)

As he did with Syracuse, Du Bois maintained an interest in Los Angeles. In a 1913 edition of The Crisis, he reflected on his visit to the city organized by the newly formed N.A.A.C.P. He wondered at Los Angele’s many qualities and told readers that “out here in this matchless Southern California, there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities” (S. Anderson 1996:342). But Du Bois also grasped the gap between the city’s promises and realities, cautioning that “Los Angeles is not Paradise, much as the sight of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there sharply drawn” (S. Anderson 1996:342).

We see the color line in Los Angeles developing spatially in the century after his warning, creating a gradient across the city’s ever-expanding sphere of economic and social influence. This analysis follows the evolution of Du Boi’s urban theorizing from an analysis of an urban core in The Philadelphia Negro to an analysis of an urban periphery in Darkwater. In the same way, we transition to an urban periphery of Los Angeles known as the Antelope Valley, a region at the northern edge of Los Angeles County and home to over half a million residents (Greater Antelope Valley Economic Alliance 2020). It ranks at the bottom of Los Angeles County’s life expectancy maps (Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Office of Health Assessment and Epidemiology 2010), at the top of assessments of carceral spending (Million Dollar Hoods 2021), and is widely understood to be a place of last resort for those pushed out of Los Angele’s urban core. Transforming from a sparsely populated agricultural area into a glittering industrial hub of military aerospace production resulted in widespread employment, unionization, homeownership, and economic prosperity. How Antelope Valley traversed this history illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between this peripheral place and the Los Angeles urban core and illuminates the lasting analytical power of Du Boi’s vision of the production of space in Darkwater.

Racialized housing displacement

In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois studied the movement of Black residents into Philadelphia’s urban core, illuminating how that flow was received and battled against by the city’s more established populations. His writing in Darkwater extended this analysis, emphasizing that the development of East St. Louis was both a consequence and cause of St. Louis’ economic development. The latter’s growing civil society had begun to serve as a check on unfettered capitalist expansion, allowing labor exploitation to proceed unchecked. This turned East St. Louis into a destination first for White workers in St. Louis and then, fatefully, for Black workers migrating out of the South seeking work. Du Bois clearly viewed the two places—the “austere king” and “miserable town[s]”—as having a relationship produced through economic and social forces, an analysis distinct from the more unidirectional succession and mobility model later advanced by the Chicago School (Du Bois 1920:93).

White reaction to Black movement and economic competition within East St. Louis turned violent in what came to be known as the 1917 riot. Seeing their presence as a threat to an ongoing strike, White rail workers turned upon Black workers in a deadly paroxysm of violence, a harbinger of the Red Summer that was to come in 1919. A century later, the development and de industrialization of urban cores, and the proliferation of satellite cities around them, have only deepened the need to understand this trajectory of his analysis.

The Antelope Valley fits Du Boi’s analysis of the mutually constitutive relationship between urban cores and peripheries. Just as East St. Louis grew as a solution to St. Loui’s industrial demands, the Antelope Valley grew by solving economic and racial problems in the core of Los Angeles. At the close of World War II, Los Angeles County was faced with the loss of military investment as the defense department began to disperse military production across the West. The distant Valley satisfied the dispersal mandate, while retaining investment within the county’s economic boundaries. Through these investments, the Valley boomed for a generation. During this period, its main cities, Lancaster and Palmdale, were entirely White and closed to Black home rentals or purchases. Black workers pulled to military-industrial employment were forced to commute from Los Angeles or move to an all-Black town on the periphery of the Valley, Sun Village. Sun Village’s civil rights organizing made initial breaks in the Valley’s system of segregation, but after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, that system began to definitively crumble.

By the early 1990s, the Cold War had come to an end, and the flow of aerospace investment into the Valley dwindled. As the Valley’s economy collapsed, it transformed into another solution to the problems of the urban core: Los Angeles residents seeking affordable housing found that they could afford the Valley’s depressed housing market. Their movement to the Valley has produced a sizable demographic transition. Since 1980, Lancaster’s and Palmdale’s White-only population in the census has dropped from above 80 percent to below 35 percent, while the cities’ Black populations have increased from less than 5 to 22 and 13 percent, respectively.

The region’s White polity has rebelled against this movement, attempting to block working-class and non-White Angelenos from seeking the Valley as a refuge from the metropolis’ crises of housing precarity, economic scarcity, and racist policing. These circuits of banishment and backlash bind the core and periphery. In this manner, both the East St. Louis–St. Louis relationship and the Antelope Valley–Los Angeles relationship illustrate the political and economic imbrication of cores and peripheries rather than relationships based on succession and assimilation as the Chicago School might have posited.

Policing the plexus of social problems

Starting in the late 1990s, the nation’s largest rental assistance program, Housing Choice Vouchers, funneled poor families in Los Angeles toward the Antelope Valley as part of the regional restructuring described earlier. The Valley’s weak housing market made voucher tenants attractive to landlords who struggled to fill empty units. Voucher tenants, predominantly Black and most often women raising children, became the face of the Valley’s demographic change. Rather than build an economy that could employ these newcomers, the valley attempted to expel them. In what follows, we use data from interviews, historical records, and litigation to trace a reactionary force akin to that which Du Bois charted in East St. Louis. However, unlike that case, no White riot was necessary to reassert the region’s hierarchies; rather, a participatory form of policing absorbed communal violence into law enforcement.

In 2007, led by the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, the Valley crafted a multi-jurisdictional, multi-agency policing program targeting these tenants. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors provided funding to hire staff to inspect voucher tenants, as well as funds for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to provide officers who would accompany these investigators as they visited tenants’ homes. Crucially, these officers could also query other agencies and databases to find grounds to evict tenants. Finally, the Housing Authority of Los Angeles County provided names and addresses of tenants, participated in investigating and enforcing rule violations found through city and sheriff inspections, and implemented a fraud hotline for local residents to call to file complaints. Lancaster and Palmdale had also passed crime-free and nuisance housing ordinances that empowered citizens to surveil and file complaints about their neighbors, with penalties that included and encouraged eviction.

City workers and sheriff’s deputies searched tenants’ homes to find reasons to evict them and encouraged residents to file complaints against tenants that could trigger inspections. Neighbors used the housing authority’s complaint hotline and local nuisance ordinances against neighbors to trigger inspections, evictions, or merely exhaustion. These laws put the power of policing into the hands of private renters and homeowners and gave them an enhanced status in their communities, in Du Boi’s terms, a sort of “public and psychological wage” associated with not being a voucher tenant. To act upon these powers was to grow them, and neighbors began to file complaints by the hundreds.

Policing reproduces race-class displacement and the mended windows response

Sheila Williams, a Black single mother and preschool teacher, experienced this policing in the fall of 2009. As conveyed in litigation against the city and county, “Sheriff’s deputies came to her home one day while she was at work, allegedly responding to a call about a potential burglary. There was no burglary; Ms. Williams’ son and his friends were at the home” (The Community Action League et al. v. City of Lancaster and City of Palmdale 2011:40). The deputies determined that the home was a voucher unit, so rather than leaving once it was clear that there had been no burglary, they called a city-funded housing investigator named Allen Mullins and flagged the home to the Department of Children and Family Services. Mullins and the deputies searched the entire home. Her son called her at work to tell her about what was happening. She came home immediately, but by then, the deputies and investigator had left.

Although the search found no infractions, her neighbors saw the raid which destabilized her home and damaged her reputation in the neighborhood. Soon after, the Housing Authority attempted to terminate her voucher, presumably as a delayed result of the police action. She successfully defended herself in an administrative hearing, but soon after, a Lancaster City vehicle, likely driven by Housing Authority of the County of Los Angeles (HACoLA) staff, passed the house several times a week, sometimes parking in front of her home. She described feeling “under constant surveillance” and “her family even more suspect in the eyes of her neighbors” (Ibid:41). These intrusions did not result in formal punishment but damaged her ability to live in her home. William’s landlord no longer wanted to rent to her because of the intense monitoring, and neighbors filed nuisance complaints that pressured the landlord to evict her. Ultimately, the false burglary report was an opportunity for multiple agencies to search her home, invade her privacy, frighten her family, degrade her, and attempt to terminate her voucher.

This policing regime produced a significant rise in evictions. In 2008–2009, the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale were home to 3,532 voucher residents. Local residents made 446 complaints about voucher renters to the Housing Authority’s fraud hotline, resulting in 414 investigations and 195 termination proposals. At each step, the Valley accounted for more complaints, investigations, and terminations than the rest of the county combined, despite being home to only one-sixth of all voucher tenants. While 1 percent of voucher tenants had their lease terminated in the rest of the County, 4.5 and 8.3 percent lost their vouchers in Lancaster and Palmdale, respectively. Given that Black tenants make up the supermajority of voucher tenants in the Valley, the evictions also worked to forestall the Valley’s demographic change. In sum, the Valley’s criminalization of Black poverty had expanded to include civil housing violations and policing subsumed and institutionalized the anti-Blackness of local residents.

But voucher tenants and their local allies resisted this policing partnership in three ways that represent themes of mended windows. First, in organizing against the policing of their homes and subsequent evictions, they used a combination of local protest and federal litigation to break apart the policing partnership that had been mobilized to evict them. Second, in so doing, they resisted and counteracted the social forces that had separated them first from each other and second from Los Angeles through the practice we call Du Boisian recognition. Third, movements building on their work pushed to mend the Valley’s own broken windows, attempting to redirect investments from policing into social services.

In a prior generation, tenants might have lived in public housing, known each other, and had a basis for mobilization through tenant councils. Today, tenants are physically and politically divided by the voucher program, an obstacle to the recognition and assertion of their shared interests. But as they organized against policing and refused the notion that voucher tenants were inherently disorderly, they mended these ruptures and rededicated themselves to the cause of making collective demands. A second mending was of the geographic rupture that had pushed voucher tenants out of Los Angeles and into the Valley, where few social services and legal resources were located. This meant that people in peripheries were policed by agencies jurisdictionally centered in the core, and difficult to reach and petition. As tenants and organizers mobilized, they built strategic coalitions with lawyers in Los Angeles who offered staff assistance, filed litigation on their behalf, and navigated the terms of settlement that arose as litigation succeeded. The successful defense of their housing was not an ending; today, a successor movement known as Cancel the Contract seeks to shrink investment in policing and redirect funds to invest in public goods—reimagining how to address a plexus of social problems previously responded to only through repression.

Discussion and Conclusion

What is lost and gained in the study of race and urban policing without a structural analysis of the conditions that manufacture social, racial, and economic disadvantage? This article marshals theoretical insights from W.E.B. Du Boi’s The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996), Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil (1920), and Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2007) to attend to this question. Using two unique empirical cases that parallel categories Du Bois studied in The Philadelphia Negro ([1899] 1996)—labor, housing, and criminalization—we find that socioeconomic exclusion reproduces the extractive logics of racialized surveillance and control that Du Bois foretold in his early writings. Specifically, we find that visible manifestations of “disorder” can be deployed as a proxy for potential criminal activity (Park 1915; Park and Burgess 1925; Shaw and McKay 1969), allowing law enforcement to identify and remove undesirable residents through incarceration. Thus, systematic exclusion can lead to the use of broken windows policing to target “disorderly” families and neighborhoods, rather than target these same people and places as deserving of investment (J. Q. Wilson and Kelling 1982).

In response, we use a “mended windows” framework to study how inequalities are reproduced and unevenly distributed across social groups. This leads us to locate solutions in repairing fundamental causes of resource inequalities rather than policing. Mended windows builds upon Du Boi’s analysis of urban racial and social hierarchies as a “plexus of social problems” (Du Bois 1898), foregrounding the recognition of social forces that shape stratification and reconciling the possibilities for cultivating safe communities by investing in people, places, and futures over presumptions about the inevitability of disorder. A mended windows approach acknowledges the nation’s past in order to address contemporary demands for racial equity through processes of relationality and reparation. As Du Bois teaches us, “Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:585). This outlook calls on social scientists studying contemporary urban policing to understand its impact on the social problems that ground our work (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Lewis 2021).

While some scholars focus on reforming police to improve their public perception, our analysis leads us to consider the experiences of minoritized populations in questioning policing altogether. We do so following two critical Du Boisian insights. First, Du Bois ([1899] 1996) understood that hegemonic powers operating at scale were inherently local. Thus, diagnosing practical ways to invest in systematically excluded communities requires first centering those that have been excluded, asking them about their unmet needs, and institutionalizing local resources to meet these needs (see Note 4). Second, Du Bois ([1899] 1996, [1935] 2007) assessed that policing served the property interests of White supremacy often at the expense of minoritized populations. Thus, we do not presume that policing can address a community’s safety concerns. Instead, our case studies lead us to a simple conclusion that Du Bois endorsed nearly 125 years ago: If people’s fundamental needs are not being met, then bringing in the police will not build community safety and opportunity because policing is not equipped to address the underlying social problems driving inequality.

The mended windows framework’s utility can be seen in a burgeoning empirical literature showing that addressing material insecurity and deprivation fosters greater public safety. In housing, for example, South et al. (2023) illustrate that fixing abandoned buildings reduces weapons violations and gun assaults in neighborhoods, with no evidence that those crimes were displaced elsewhere. In education, Baron et al. (2022) exploit variation in the rollout of additional funding to Michigan public schools to demonstrate that students whose elementary schools received funds went on to have lower arrest rates as adults than students whose schools did not. Similar effects are obtained with healthcare. He and Barkowski (2020) found that Medicaid expansion was associated with declines in burglary, vehicle theft, homicide, robbery, and assault, while Aslim et al. (2022) estimated that providing Medicaid to inmates exiting prison reduces the number of times a person is re-imprisoned in the subsequent year by 11.5 percent. Scholars also endorse a mended windows approach to reducing community violence. Sharkey (2018), for example, argues for eliminating inequalities known to be root causes of violence.

We read these studies as evidence of Du Boi’s reflections as he left East St. Louis. From its ruins, he noted the material roots of contemporary conflict “in a world which never needs to be hungry.” Du Bois asked, “But why does hunger shadow so vast a mass of men? Manifestly because in the great organizing of men for work, a few of the participants come out with more wealth than they can possibly use, while a vast number emerge with less than can decently support life” (Du Bois 1920:99). Consequently, Du Boi’s time in East St. Louis left him with two questions. The first was about how to produce goods and services to satisfy the wants of men—a question he deemed answered by the world’s newfound industrial capabilities. The second question concerned how to distribute the world’s plenty in a just manner (Du Bois 1920:98–99). The studies cited above demonstrate that a more just distribution of the world’s goods to support public safety is no longer in doubt; the question of how to achieve it remains pressing.

We encourage scholars to consider how a mended windows framework might reorient social movements against police violence and, along the way, change the conditions that unsettle Black life by investing in just futures. Thus, mended windows contributes to the building-up that accompanies the abolitionist demand to end oppressive carceral structures, as is the case within current demands to defund the police. These struggles are Du Boisian in the sense that they articulate the same underlying inequalities and logically conclude that communities need investment, agency, and political support to increase “public safety,” not policing. After all, “If we are going, in the future . . . with regard to all social problems, to be able to use human experience for the guidance of mankind, we have got to clearly distinguish between fact and desire” (Du Bois [1935] 2007:591). In this sense, it is necessary and overdue that we embrace a Du Boisian sociology as praxis so we may continue acknowledging history while imagining liberatory futures.