You may or may not be right. What I think he's doing, is following in Giuliani's footsteps, with a 'broken windows' policy.
Giuliani said that the way to start back toward public order, is to sweat the small stuff. The analogy is that if you leave a bunch of broken windows in buildings on streets, it creates a lowered sense of pride, a lower desire to keep things orderly, etc. So you start by mending the windows. He also cracked down smaller offences. It apparently helped to turn around the disorder of New York.
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By working to change those subtle perceptions, you create a higher expectation of decorum from the average person on the street.
I'm going to pick up on this as I mentioned it much earlier in the thread. Broken windows theory (hereafter BWT) is both controversial and often misunderstood.
The origin of the theory comes from the sociologists Wilson and Kelling. They observed that if an abandoned building had a broken window, before long all the other windows were broken. This observation was confirmed by an experiment where they left a car parked on the street and kicked out one of the headlights. Soon enough, people caused more damage and before long the whole car was stripped.
From this comes the idea that one has to mend the broken windows to avoid much worse trouble. As you say, "sweat the small stuff".
Where there is controversy is whether dealing with low-level problems simply inhibits further low-level problems and/or whether it inhibits greater ones.
The answer, as often, is "it depends". One example is the New York crackdown on fare evasion on the subway. This apparently had a measurable and positive effect on other kinds of crime, including violent crime. Fare dodgers were often committing other crimes (carrying drugs and weapons, for example). The presence of enforcement officers ostensibly to collect fares inhibited criminals and gang members from using the subway network to facilitate other kinds of crimes.
I'm not wholly convinced that BTW policies ("zero tolerance") can have a sustained impact on serious crime without committing huge extra resources to enforcement.
The other element to the policy is the maintenance of "order". It's important to note that order is not simply the absence of crime. An ordered society (or place) is one that is perceived as being safe, comfortable, predictable and consistent. I appreciate that for many people an extreme of this kind of order is the antithesis of urban life. It's about getting the balance right.
Things are constantly in flux. An ordered society is one that not only minimises crime, but also maximises comfort by creating an atmosphere where there is little fear of crime. A theme to which I return often (including earlier on this thread) is that there are many people in society who are not as self-possessed as perhaps the average U75 reader. These people are inhibited from going to certain places at certain times because they fear (rightly or wrongly) that the disorder they have observed could easily become a crime in which they are a victim. If we fail to deal with these people's anxiety (and I'm not talking about people with pathological anxiety, of course) then we are perpetuating an insidious form of social exclusion.
Therefore, the establishment of order becomes a priority in law enforcement and civic management. Putting order first says that it's not good enough just to minimise crime. You must encourage civility, courtesy and consideration. It is about making public space not just somewhere where people are happy to take a calculated risk that they won't be a victim of crime but somewhere where they're actually motivated to occupy. It is necessary to have a debate about which things are acceptable in public and which aren't; that's what's happening here. But that debate needs to start from the presumption that not breaking the law or not doing what many would consider to be "harming others" isn't enough.
