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He linked the Dinkins era’s permissive climate, which tolerated the squeegee men (street-corner windshield cleaners who coerced drivers into giving them money at the entrances to Manhattan), to the rise of more serious crime. “The police started ignoring all kinds of offenses,” Giuliani later recounted of the Dinkins years. They “became,” he deadpanned, “highly skilled observers of crime.”

Civil rights advocates warned that Giuliani’s promise to deprive the squeegee men of their $40–100 weekly shakedown might drive them to more violent crime; in effect, they endorsed a lesser form of criminality, hoping that it would forestall more serious crime. The city’s newspapers were happy to print threats from squeegee men, like this one: “I feel like if I can’t hustle honestly, I’ve got to go back to doing what I used to do . . . robbing and stealing.” But the squeegee-men campaign provided Giuliani with his first significant victory, showing a beleaguered citizenry that government actually could bring about change for the better. Within months, the squeegee men disappeared.

Your author is full of pure unadulterated bullship! He doesn't know what he is talking about.

Giuliani's Legacy: Taking Credit For Things He Didn't Do

By Wayne Barrett

Rudy Giuliani's legacy is that he was the luckiest mayor we have had in a long time. He was blessed by being mayor when we had a great national upsurge in the economy. He was blessed by being mayor when we had a national downturn in crime. He was blessed because he had very little to do with either phenomenon in New York, but most New Yorkers and most tourists will think he did.

Most celebrants of Rudy Giuliani seem mesmerized by the disappearance of the squeegee men. As I wrote in my book "Rudy," the issue of the squeegees is where the hocus pocus started:

Candidate Rudy promised to wash them out of our hair. While they seemed everywhere, an NYPD report found that there were only 75 of them in 1993, planted like Calvin Klein billboards in unavoidable locations. So Ray Kelly, the police commissioner who worked for Dinkins, heard Giuliani's campaign cry and drove the squeegees off the streets before Rudy raised his own Windex-free right hand on inaugural day. The whole world, years later, thinks Rudy did it -- the predictable result of endless repetition. But Bill Bratton himself conceded in his 1998 book that by the time he arrived at police headquarters, the squeegees were gone, noting that, "ironically, Giuliani and I got credit for the initiative." Only politics, Bratton concluded, prevented David Dinkins and Ray Kelly from receiving their due.

You and the writer you cite don't know what you're talking about. You need to go back to the W A site for more intensive indoctrination.