Tonight I interviewed a sergeant with the campus police department. He’s starting a community policing division, and some of what he had to say was neat. When he first started doing it years ago, his supervisors thought he was slacking off. He’d spend hours in the residence halls, chatting with students. At first, he told me, students were suspicious. Why were the police asking them about the football game? What were the police really there for? Soon, they got to realize that there was no hidden motive. His job was to patrol the campus and keep a presence in the dorms, and, as long as he was doing that, he figured he might as well make sure people knew his name and that people knew he wasn’t out to get them.

After a while, his supervisors realized that the officer that seemed to waste his shifts chatting with students was one of their top officers. He was solving crimes no one else could, until soon there really weren’t many crimes for him to solve. The crime in the buildings he patrolled dropped sharply. And the reason, he told me, is pretty simple: people knew he was there all the time, so they thought twice about doing anything stupid. And when people observed someone else doing something that affected them, they felt comfortable reporting it to him, whereas they might not want to call the police ordinarily.

But this reminds me a lot of the “Broken Windows Theory.” For those not familiar, some researchers somewhere watched an abandoned building for a while. Nothing much happened. One day, the researchers smashed out one of the windows, and kept watch. In a matter of days, people smashed in all the other windows. The reason put forward is that, when people see things in disrepair or decay, they don’t see as much of a problem with making the problem worse. As a very minute example, consider a trashcan in the bathroom. Would you ever throw your paper towel on the floor? If you’re the least bit civilized, no, it’d never cross your mind. But what if the trashcan was overflowing? You could probably fit your paper towel in. But you just throw it on the floor, partially because you have no choice and partially because you’re dismayed at the level of disrepair. And extrapolate that feeling to the people who would go around committing more egregious acts. I think it’s the exact same thought process.

At work, I probably drove the maintenance people nuts. I considered it a complete disaster if a light in the bathroom was out for more than a day, for example. There were nine bulbs in each bathroom, but a single flickering bulb is all it takes to make the bathroom seem like a run-down place. Pretty soon, I’d tell my coworkers, we’d have graffiti and people breaking the mirrors. We never did find out if I was right, because we never let the chance present itself. (I won’t lie: OCD was another factor that I insisted that burned-out bulbs be replaced ASAP.)

Sometimes we’d be insanely busy. And it felt like the building would be nice and clean for hours and hours, and all of a sudden, the floors were a mess. People would drop crumbs, and, as long as there were crumbs on the floor, why bother picking up the napkin you dropped? And when the people at the next table saw napkins on the floor, why should they bother picking up the plate they dropped? And when the kids a few tables down finished their soda and knocked the bottle over, why not leave it on the floor?

As Malcolm Gladwell would say, there’s a tipping point. Things would be nice and clean for hours on end, until all of a sudden there’s a subconscious signal that it’s no longer necessary to be tidy. And I’m not sure how many of my coworkers understood it on a scientific level, but I think most them intuitively got it. Even though we were really busy, we’d try to find an employee who could spare 15 minutes to go around and pick up. Not only did this have the positive effect of solving the “broken windows” problem, but I think it even went the other way: they saw that, not only were the windows not broken, but we were actively addressing the issue. And every once in a while, you’d get someone who would pick up the trash under their table when you got near them. You’d basically reversed the problem.

Our toilet in our dorm room was getting really gross. In addition to the predictable filth, the top of the toilet had become really dusty, and there were probably about five cardboard rolls from finished-off rolls of toilet paper. The other day, I couldn’t take it any more, so I cleaned the toilet bowl and the seat. I didn’t really have the energy to do the whole thing, so only half the toilet got cleaned. There was still considerable room for improvement, but you were no longer afraid to use it.
Today, our toilet is sparkling clean. I don’t know who did it. I never asked anyone to, and I didn’t do it. But I take partial credit. I think I sent a subconscious signal by cleaning half the toilet. All of a sudden, the other part of the toilet was thrown into contrast, and the message was sent that we don’t like our things to be filthy. Someone else picked up on that, and finished the job. And I think the toilet’s going to stay clean for a while.

And now that I’ve talked about sending subconscious messages with my toilet, I think it’s time I acknowledged that I’m up way too late and went to bed.