Trashing Giuliani ...A silly documentary tries—and fails—to tar the record of America’s Mayor.

A new documentary, Giuliani Time, premiers in New York today. Fair and balanced it’s not. Publicity materials trumpet that the film is “certain to bust open the myth of Giuliani” as America’s Mayor that developed after 9/11 and reveal his inner “totalitarian” impulses. (The think tank where I work, the Manhattan Institute, plays a starring, albeit nefarious, role as the shadowy right-wing organization where Giuliani got many of his extremist ideas.)

The film’s main indictment charges Giuliani with ushering in policing tactics that led to widespread brutality against minorities. “It’s not Dinkins Time anymore; it’s Giuliani Time” is the taunt police officer Justin Volpe supposedly uttered as he violated Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a toilet plunger in a Brooklyn precinct house bathroom nine years ago. (Louima later admitted that Volpe never used the phrase; activists had encouraged him to add the incendiary detail to his story.) The film, to its credit, acknowledges that Mayor Giuliani quickly condemned the attack and visited Louima in the hospital, and that Volpe is currently serving a 30-year jail sentence for his vile act.

The movie also focuses on the tragic death of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo. In the summer of 1999, four detectives from the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, while searching for a serial rapist who fit Diallo’s description, unleashed a hail of 41 bullets when they mistakenly thought the innocent Diallo had drawn a gun on them. It was a grievous error—not, as the movie insinuates, an intentional racist outrage. The film also fails to mention that complaints of police brutality and incidents of police shooting declined dramatically during the Giuliani administration. In 1990, the NYPD shot 108 people, 41 fatally. By 2001, those numbers had plummeted to 28 and 11, respectively—even though a third more cops were on the street.

The Diallo portion of the film reminded me of an old friend of mine, Abdoulaye, a Senegalese immigrant who was a security guard in the building where I worked in the early nineties. To make ends meet, Abdoulaye and his brother split shifts as livery cab drivers at night—an extraordinarily dangerous profession pre-Giuliani. Between 1990 and 1993, 193 livery cab drivers were murdered, virtually all of them minorities and immigrants. Over the course of just a few months, Abdoulaye was beaten and robbed at gunpoint, his brother stabbed nearly to death. Fed up with New York’s crime, they eventually decided to move to Dallas and pursue the American dream in a city that they (rightly, at the time) regarded as safer and more civilized.

After Rudy Giuliani took office, attacks on livery cab drivers began to drop precipitously, along with crime generally. In early 2000, however, a sudden rash of 10 livery driver murders between January and May once again had drivers fearing for their lives. But where the Dinkins administration had dithered, the Giuliani administration acted swiftly and effectively to protect the drivers. Mayor Giuliani ordered the installation of bulletproof partitions or security cameras in all livery cabs and helped pay for them with city funds. The city offered free mobile phones to drivers, authorized a $10,000 reward for information, and established a relief fund for the slain drivers’ families.

Meanwhile, the NYPD assigned scores of detectives to investigate the murders, purchased a raft of decoy cabs, and intensified its Taxi Robbery Interdiction Program, which stops livery cabs for random safety checks. After the arrest of a passenger for drug possession during one such stop, the ACLU sued on illegal-search-and-seizure grounds. The Giuliani administration ingeniously responded by handing out window decals that informed passengers that the driver consented to police stops, thus allowing the program to pass constitutional muster.

The result of all this hard work: livery cab murders again fell. Not one murder of a cab driver occurred for the rest of 2000, and the number has remained low ever since.

Not that you’d know any of this from Giuliani Time. The film insists that nothing really special happened in New York with regard to crime. The 70 percent reduction in murder was dumb luck, it seems—merely part of a nationwide trend. But crime in New York fell farther and faster than crime nationwide, and continues to drop while many other cities have experienced a reversal. New York’s crime decline has driven the national numbers; and other cities have adopted the tactics that worked here or hired away top NYPD brass to run their departments.

The film also targets Giuliani’s “mean-spirited” welfare policies. In fact, those policies led to 650,000 people moving from a life of dependency to the world of work, and the Bloomberg administration has continued them, unaltered. Giuliani is also guilty of “restricting free speech,” the film asserts, because he had the audacity to question whether city tax dollars should fund “art” flamboyantly offensive to the large numbers of taxpayers who are Catholic. It’s worth noting here that the last film the movie’s director and producer, Kevin Keating, was involved in was Fidel, a favorable portrait of a man not known for fostering free speech.

The film gives lots of screen time to Wayne Barrett, a Village Voice reporter, who discusses Giuliani’s father’s possible connections to organized crime. But the movie points out that Giuliani’s father moved the family from Brooklyn to Long Island to keep his children away from such influences. Even Barrett has to admit that, first as U.S. attorney and later as mayor, almost no one in history has done more to combat the Mafia than Giuliani.

The ultimate irony, however, is that the premier of Giuliani Time will screen at the Sunshine Theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Built in 1898, it was once a Yiddish vaudeville house. The theater closed its doors when the neighborhood began to decline after World War Two. It wasn’t until the late nineties, at the height of the Giuliani renaissance, that a new ownership group purchased the theater and spent millions restoring it. The Sunshine reopened in December 2001, during Giuliani’s final days in office.

Today, the Lower East Side, like so many formerly blighted neighborhoods in the city, flourishes, with people from myriad backgrounds living together in relative harmony, enjoying all that this incredible city has to offer, participating in what Rudy Giuliani likes to call “the genius of American life.” New Yorkers know the real story of the Giuliani era: it’s all around them every time they walk out their front door. And no left-wing documentary will convince them otherwise, especially one as silly and patently ideological as this.

In fact, the documentary inadvertently affirms Giuliani’s solid record of achievement in taming the once “ungovernable” New York. It could serve to bolster Giuliani’s credentials with fair-minded people, who will judge those interviewed—the cynical academics who attempt to explain away New York’s crime decline, the able-bodied guys receiving welfare who whine about having to work, the narcissistic artists who object that having to get permits to sell their art on the streets is an assault on free speech—as untrustworthy special-pleaders. If Giuliani really is running for president, perhaps he should send the film out to all the Republican Party’s delegates. As the song goes, if you can make it there. .

sang a different tune a while back....

Our Crime-Fighting Revolution

Charles Upton Sahm on what’s revitalizing American policing

Charles Upton Sahm Mr. Upton Sahm works for the Manhattan Institute.Adapted from the new issue of City Journal.

Everybody knows about the NYPD’s breathtaking crime-fighting successes over the last decade. Less well known is that NYPD-trained police chiefs are taking over police departments across the country, bringing with them the methods that worked so well in Gotham — above all, data-driven policing — and getting similar results.

This NYPD diaspora has reached at least a dozen American cities.They range in size from giant Los Angeles, where former NYPD commissioner William Bratton has cut violent crime by 18% since becoming police chief two years ago (despite staffing levels proportionately far below those of other big-city forces) to smaller Sarasota, Fla., where former Queens precinct commander Peter Abbott has slashed crime by double digits over the same period. But hands-on, New York-bred police leadership has made the biggest difference to date in Miami and Providence.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney started his career in the rough-and-tumble South Bronx during the early ’70s. Later, as chief of departments and first deputy commissioner under Bratton, Mr. Timoney played a key role in the force’s transformation. He went on to become Philadelphia’s top cop from 1998 to 2002, when the city’s homicide rate fell by one-third.

In January 2003, Mayor Manny Diaz named Mr. Timoney chief of the Miami police, a force with a reputation as a haven for trigger-happy cops.On the day of Mr.Timoney’s swearing-in,a federal criminal trial began against 13 Miami cops on charges resulting from questionable shootings. Mr. Timoney swiftly revamped firearms training, tightened use-of-force rules, and equipped many officers with nonlethal weapons such as stun guns.

Result: the department recently went 20 months without any officer shooting a single bullet, a statistic no other major urban police force can match. (The streak ended in September during an armed robbery,but a new one has been building since.) What made the record truly impressive, though, was that a 30% increase in arrests and an 8% drop in crime accompanied it.The Miami Herald, once one of the Miami police’s sharpest critics, has glowingly praised the department’s turnaround, emphasizing its positive effects on police-community relations.

In January 2003, another NYPD-associated crime fighter, Dean Esserman, took the helm of another troubled force, this one in Providence, R.I. A former Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Mr. Esserman served as general counsel to the New York Transit Police and later advised then-NYPD boss Bratton on corruption, before becoming chief of police in Stamford, Conn. None of these jobs, though, posed problems comparable with those he would face in Providence.

For years, notoriously corrupt Mayor “ Buddy” Cianci ran the city. The police even went by the nickname “Buddy’s Boys.”The Feds’ Operation Plunder Dome sent Cianci up the river. During the trial, his former police chief, Urbano Prignano, testified in court to widespread official misconduct, some involving Buddy’s Boys. Racial tensions also simmered in the city, coming to the boil in January 2000 after two white officers shot and killed a black off-duty cop. Crime climbed between the late 1990s and 2002.

Mr. Esserman quickly introduced New Yorkstyle police tactics, including an aggressive task force (working with federal prosecutors) that removed weapons from the streets in record numbers and, even more important, a Compstat (computerized statistics) management-accountability system that has focused the whole department’s attention on crime reduction and held commanders responsible for achieving it. Serious crime has fallen dramatically — 13% in 2003 and 12% in 2004 — and police morale has soared. Mr. Esserman has replaced most of the Cianci-era commanders with his own trusted people.And he’s improved relations with minorities, in part by opening new police substations in minority neighborhoods.

Before the 1990s, the belief held in both policing and political circles was that crime resulted from factors beyond anyone’s control, and that police could do little to influence crime rates. Gotham’s crime turnaround — which continues under the current commissioner, Ray Kelly — shattered that myth. The New York-bred police chiefs at work in other American cities continue to prove that, properly led, cops can cut crime.

The undercover operation began after the crime rate had been drastically reduced. Glover complained that cab drivers refused to pick him up because of his color. Giuliani said essentially, "You have a point. The city is safer now. There's no excuse for drivers being afraid to go to Harlem." (And, moreover, he was right. Driving a cab in New York is no job for someone who doesn't want to go into bad neighborhoods. New York isn't Detroit; we don't have zones of the city that have been written off.) Instead of applauding this action, Glover was furious and denounced Giuliani yet again.

Not being a naive guy by any stretch of the imaginaion, I'm sure Giuliani knew this is what would happen. He showed up Glover for the hypocrite he is. Even hard-core Dems of my acquaintance saw this. I'd say that one of the pleasures of the Giuliani years was that he had no fear of confrontation and never hesitated to call the bluffs of liberal/leftist loud-mouths.

Unlike Dinkins Giuliani also refused to make under the table payoffs to agitators like Sonny Carson -- lead organizer of the Crown Heights riots -- in order to keep them from picketing City Hall, etc.

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