Iam sure readers are well conversant with the February 1969 'Time Magazine' study undertaken by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo where he left two identical cars in two very different neighbourhoods; one in the high-crime Bronx, New York, and the other in affluent Palo Alto, California.

Predictably, the Bronx car was vandalised almost immediately, while the Palo Alto car sat untouched for days. After a week, Zimbardo himself smashed part of the untouched car with a sledgehammer. Within hours, the previously safe neighbourhood turned into Bronx. By evening, the car was overturned; by the next morning, it had been stripped bare.

Building on this, criminologist James Q Wilson and George Kelling came up with 'Broken Windows Theory' in 1982. They argued that visible signs of disorder cre

See Full Page