Rudy Runs the Rapids
Before he got a grip on the problems, New York had over 2,000 murders a year and a crime rate that made everyone—residents, businesses, and visitors alike—feel threatened. As David Letterman put it: "New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make a sudden move." In a 1993 poll, roughly 60 percent of New Yorkers felt things were so bad they would leave the city the next day if they could.
Giuliani, a Republican mayor in a city that was Democratic by a margin of 5 to 1, correctly believed that public safety is the most fundamental civil right. Easy to say—but how to proceed in actually restoring order? Giuliani's instinct fired his conviction that lawbreaking should never be excused; his intellect led him to embrace the "broken windows" theory: that there is no such thing as a harmless breach of the law. A window broken with impunity on one street is a signal that unlawful behavior is acceptable; other quality-of-life crimes then proliferate, attracting criminals, and eventually whole neighborhoods are defiled and destroyed.
Giuliani began by rounding up the "minor" infringers—the squeegee men who held up cars, the street hustlers, the turnstile jumpers, the public urinators, and the pornographers. In Times Square, once he purged the most offensive pornographic emporiums, Giuliani was on the way to making the area a civic showpiece.
Giuliani took big steps and small ones. He supported President Clinton's crime bill. He backed Republican demands for tougher sentencing. He not only dramatically increased the police force but also revolutionized police methods. He brought in an outstanding police chief with whom he developed a comprehensive program that identified crimes by neighborhood and street-corner location, in real time. Wherever crime surged one day, the next morning a special team descended, so that crime rates began to fall. Murders dropped by almost 18 percent in Giuliani's first year as mayor and close to 70 percent by the end of his two terms, with an almost equivalent drop in all violent crimes. The proactive policy was one of the most successful metropolitan crime-prevention programs in history.
His success in countering the negatives in New York was matched by an accentuation of the positive. As mayor, Giuliani broke the city's welfare culture. Nobody thought the welfare rolls could be reduced without hardship. He did it both by verifying the qualifications of those who sought aid and by requiring long-term recipients to work in return for public assistance. Welfare offices became job centers, shifting from handouts to hand-ups. By the end of Giuliani's first term, over 500,000 people had moved off the rolls. A culture of complaint had been transformed into a culture of responsibility.
New Yorkers had endured decades of politicians who basically shrugged their shoulders at the city's problems, as if helpless in the face of rising crime, rising welfare, and declining economic and social amenities. Giuliani got results, inspiring the city once more to have faith in its political leadership.
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