« Great Debates | Main | It puts the casenote in the basket »
May 12, 2006
A message to you (about) Rudy
As the token New Yorker out here at my Midwest law school, it's occasionally my job to remind people that right before Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani was not particularly popular and he wasn't considered the leader his actions on that day made him in the minds of out-of-towners. Yes, crime declined on his watch, but the decrease started during the term of his predecessor, and it is largely due to police hired by David Dinkins who only got through training once Dinkins had been replaced by Giuliani. In Slate, Stephen Metcalf does his part to lay waste to the Giuliani myth:
Under Giuliani, Broken Windows started out as a good faith effort to reduce serious crime by going after petty crime. But over time it evolved into a branding mechanism, a means for relentlessly associating New York City's renaissance with Mayor Giuliani's face. Today, Broken Windows is among the most universally discredited theories in the social sciences. Study after study has concluded there is no causal link between the reduction in nuisance crimes, like turnstile jumping or aggressive panhandling, and the reduction in serious crimes, like robbery and murder. And this was easily inferable at the time. The reduction in New York City's crime rate was echoed nationally, in many cities that did not employ Quality of Life policing. In retrospect, the principal causes behind New York City's crime drop had nothing to do with Giuliani. They included: a receding of the '80s crack epidemic, a growth in the black prison population thanks to the so-called Rockefeller drug laws, an increase in the numbers of police initiated by Giuliani's predecessor, and possibly, as the Freakonomics authors famously argued, the legalization of abortion a generation earlier. But, as the journalist Wayne Barrett says in Giuliani Time, "this mythology that Rudy Giuliani single-handedly supercopped, and conquered, crime in New York City" is now in the "bloodstream" of Americans.[...]
[A]s the city's misery index fell, and then fell precipitously, Giuliani struggled nonsensically to keep alive old habits of urban demonology while maintaining his stature as the lonely defender of civic virtue. "I believe it's the way to create a civilized society," Giuliani had said in term one, referring to respect for the city's cops. Fair enough, and coming out of the '80s, no doubt the Big Apple deserved a series of stern lectures on public decorum. But by his second term, Giuliani had evolved from a reasoned municipal savior into a demented scold.
Rudy Giuliani knows one thing more than anything else - crime reduction included - and that's self-promotion. He fired Bill Bratton as police chief as soon as it became obvious that Bratton was getting credit in the national media for the crime reduction on his watch. Luckily for America, his demagoguery has its limits, namely the demagoguery of the religious right-wingers who will destroy him in the Republican primary should he choose to run for President.
Posted by rj3 at May 12, 2006 9:45 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.smorgasblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/smorgastb.r740.cgi/2436
Comments
Whether or not you credit Giuliani for the changes in New York, I still think there's something to Broken Windows. A similar argument went on over at Malcolm Gladwell's blog a few months ago:
http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2006/03/index.html
(scroll down to the posts on Freakonomics). "Study after study" has also shown that Western cultures are really, REALLY bad at giving due credit to the influence of one's environment. We like to believe we have more internal control over our actions, but context is extremely powerful. Look, for example, at all the research on false confessions (Drizin's blog is a good overview of how often they happen and how hard it is to convince people that the defendants was really and actually overwhelmed by the situation).
Posted by: Cella at May 12, 2006 2:00 PM
