When America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani assumed his title role in New York City, he brought with him a reputation of being a tough on crime. With the help of Police Commissioner Howard Safir the five boroughs saw radical decreases in violent crime during the second half of the 1990s.

These drastic statistics were welcomed and it heralded what appeared to be an effective new method of policing: broken windows.

It is a theory of criminology which suggests that visible signs of disorder (broken windows, graffiti, anti-social behavior) if left unpunished, will result in larger crime and more crime upon the citizenry.

But the policy ran into trouble as police mistreatment of the underprivileged escalated, particularly toward people of color, with its adjacent policies like “stop and frisk.”

The idea that ignoring small crimes leads to big crimes is a convenient and natural assumption for anyone who has been around children. After all, how is one to know where the line is, if it is not drawn for them?

Cities across the United States adopted various versions of broken windows and it came at a time when most of our largest cities appeared to be at the precipice of collapse.

Anyone who is old enough to remember traveling in our largest cities in the early 1990s must remember them as dirty, prudence would govern which streets we walked and at when time of day we walked them. So any policy that seemed to be reducing violent crime was welcomed.

By the time Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt saw their seminal book, “Freakonomics” published in 2005, enthusiasm for the broken windows policing had begun to wane. Freakonomics postulated that the reason for America’s decline in violent crime was not new policing methods but rather a declining population in unwanted children.

That decline, they reasoned, was the direct result of Roe v. Wade.

Yes, America was on the highway to Hell because of the once unbounded misbegotten, but that the advent of abortion meant, for the most part, the end of unwanted children. Making abortions safe and legal and (almost) on demand eliminated a generation of would be criminals.

Given the current state of our community’s addiction problems and with them, elevated crime levels, we may tend to long for those days of cleaning up what we once called the underbelly of society.

Can a balance to be struck? Could it be that we abandoned effective policies because they were ripe for abuse? Should we try to re-institute such policies in a more kindly manner? Perhaps law enforcement can be coupled with social justice.

In the 1850s Karl Marx equated economics with justice. Put simply, it is economic injustice that causes social unrest. After almost two centuries of failed Marxist states, fixing economic injustice through common ownership of property and liberal doses of socialism, seems a pollyanna notion.

Billionaire twins Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have often been credited for saying, without a hint of irony, the world is driven by envy.

We live in a world where the chasm between the haves and have nots seems to be ever widening and we believe there is a causal relationship between economic injustice and social unrest.

We too have been the victims of vandalism and despite the current social theories, it is difficult not to feel violated, to feel a victim of violence, when one’s property is attacked.

When the blood stops it boiling though, we try to find the sense in what drives people to seemingly senseless acts.