George L. Kelling

George Lee Kelling, who lived from 1935 to 2019, was an American criminologist who taught in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark and held fellowships at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. With James Q. Wilson and his own wife Catherine M. Coles, Kelling developed the broken windows theory, the influential proposal that visible signs of disorder and neglect in a neighborhood encourage further disorder and crime, which became a significant influence on American policing strategy beginning in the mid-1980s.