Taking back the public square in El Salvador

Credit: Jose Cabezas/Reuters

Mike Jenkins and I wrote about broken windows policing and its potential use in Central America last year in the World Politics Review.

Broken windows policing is based on a theory expounded by two college professors, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, in an article in The Atlantic in 1982. Kelling and Wilson connected smaller acts of public disorder, like graffiti and public drinking, to more serious crime. Bratton and his disciples spread these policing methods across the U.S., implementing them most prominently in New York City in the early 1990s, where levels of crime and disorder plummeted. Today, crime rates in U.S. cities, many of which used some form of the broken windows policing, including Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, are nearing 50-year lows.

While cleaning up the streets is not exclusive to broken windows policing, that seems to be exactly what authorities are doing with Erasing gang graffiti in El Salvador.

Police and soldiers on Tuesday painted over gang graffiti in a town in El Salvador as part of a vigorous new campaign against criminal outfits that for decades have terrorized the Central American country.

"We are going to erase these tags as many times as is needed," police deputy commissioner Oscar Nuila vowed as the operation was conducted in Quezaltepeque, just north of the capital San Salvador.

Armed security officials, their faces covered to hide their identities, wielded brushes and paint cans to cover over letters and symbols graffitied on walls by the Mara Salvatrucha gang, a feared organization also known as MS-13.

One security team was seen obscuring an expanse of wall on which the words "Mara Salvatrucha" had been painted in black letters. One soldier wrote the word "Paz" ("Peace" in Spanish) over it.

Now they somehow need to get to the point where you do not need security officials with masks over their heads in Quetzaltepeque doing the painting. No masks and the community painting alongside the officers seems like an important goal.