MADISON, Wis. — Remember squeegee men? Fare jumpers? Times Square squalor? What New York was like before Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton started fixing the broken windows and stopping all the horrors that crawled in through them?

It’s been 15 years, and not only has New York changed, but so has the rest of America. What was once its premier urban disaster has become as safe as Boise, Idaho. Out here, we noticed. So deeply has the lesson sunk in that even Madison, Wis., the Midwest’s most self-congratulatory liberal college town, is asking whether it’s been too generous to vagrant troublemakers.

Madison is an unusually safe city. It had 1.8 murders per 100,000 people in 2006, half the rate of New York. That’s four homicides in 2006, total. Madison is not a city aflame.

It is a city spooked, however: This year, two people have been slain, a 31-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman, both apparently by strangers, though police haven’t caught anyone yet.

A pleasant 20-minute walk takes you from one murder scene to the other. Brittany Zimmerman, a college student from small-town Wisconsin, was slain in her apartment right down the hill from the Capitol and near the University of Wisconsin, amid blocks speckled with rehabbed homes in clever colors. Joel Marino was stabbed in the afternoon outside his house, which overlooks a spectacular city view across Monona Bay.

Between the two places lies Brittingham Park, frequented by the homeless. Neighbors say vagrants drink, get high, and scare away everyone else. They do much the same nearby in the neighborhood where Zimmerman died. Only there, residents say, homeless men wander into apartment buildings to steal. Police are now looking for vagrants, either as suspects or witnesses. They’ve arrested about 25.

As I said, Madison is safe, but statistics do not assuage worry about sending your child into the world. Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy wrote about letting her nine-year-old navigate Manhattan alone. She caught hell from mothers in Atlanta who won’t let their children fetch the mail unaccompanied.

If it’s unthinkable to let children now do what children did 50 years ago all the time under statistically identical conditions, what does that imply for parents who pack their 18-year-old daughters off to Madison’s leading industry, the university? What does it mean when students get murdered in their homes, the police can’t catch anyone, and there are vagrants taking over the park?

I’ll tell you: It means Madisonians start wondering whether offering free Sunday dinners in the Capitol basement is attracting an unsavory crowd.

We’re talking not of women fleeing abusive boyfriends. This is about the 40% or so who are single men, and of those, the aggressive-panhandling subset. “They are downtown preying largely off of that student population and really preying off a lot of our good compassion as Madisonians,” one policeman told a reporter. “In a way, they are taking advantage of us.”

It’s because Madison can’t say no. One panhandler held as a witness told police he made $500 for his crack habit in a few days by soliciting $40 donations for car repairs. A recent hubbub erupted over advocates’ wish to open a “wet shelter” — that is, one for vagrants who’d rather not give up drinking. One Cleveland native, homeless off and on in Madison for years, says back in his old town, people would call security, but “in Madison, it’s like ‘here, here, here.’ There’s too many handouts.”

That this comes up at all is a big step for Madison, where the political polarity is left and lefter. Yet people are noticing that an unstinting compassion has rendered swaths of public space unusable.

Compassion’s a virtue. Courage is one, too, and Madison’s been lacking it. Until now, community leaders appear not to have had the courage to say anything about vagrants or to panhandlers but “here, here, here.” Sound vaguely familiar, New Yorkers?

Now, having been mugged by reality, Madison is mirroring what New York confronted years ago, when Mr. Giuliani took on the squeegee men.

The backlash seems similar, too: “Is this the Madison we want to live in?” demanded one alderwoman, who blogged that all the talk about beggars made it “a bad week to not be a white middle/upper class privileged male.”

Yet the loss of public spaces hurts most those who can’t intimidate back. People tell of birthday parties at the park pavilion where children are hassled by beggars. Bus patrons are immobilized targets. Women on foot are blocked by men bumming cash. The library has grown problematic. Local Catholics lack a cathedral: A homeless man off his meds burned theirs down.

The disorder resulting from Madison’s kindness toward intimidating strangers falls disproportionately on the weak who use public spaces. Ms. Skenazy’s whole point was that New York, post-Giuliani, has become safe enough for a child to travel alone. That was the idea of going after people who, while not committing serious crimes, made the city disorderly.

Order most helps not the privileged upper-class males, who can take care of themselves, but everyone else. It is the easy targets who benefit when authorities are unafraid to look mean about troublemakers.

So Mr. Giuliani’s insight has reached even the most liberal city in the Midwest. It suggests the broken windows concept has appeal everywhere. This is good for civil society. Cities should catch on to this before a couple lives are lost.

Mr. McIlheran is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.