by George L. Kelling

About the author: George L. Kelling, the coauthor of Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, is a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a fellow of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.

The assault and torture of Abner Louima by New York City police officers in August 1997 was an abomination. It was an appallingly deviant act, not representative of the New York City Police Department, of policing generally or of good order-maintenance tactics. But critics of the police—from radical civil libertarians to political opportunists seeking an issue in the race to unseat popular GOP Mayor Rudolph Giuliani—are exploiting this disgraceful event in an...