New York - Ensuring freedom - A single leader can change history

What Is a Mayor’s Job?

by Myron Magnet

Ensuring freedom from fear, the last two decades prove.

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A 24-year-old thought that the man who grabbed her from behind and demanded all her money was joking—until his accomplice ripped her handbag from around her neck and fled. A thirtysomething Brooklynite who’d carelessly crammed her wallet into her wide-open coat pocket as she chattered on her cell phone was amazed to find that a pickpocket had lifted it. On dark streets or midnight subways, as one criminologist put it to the Times, Gotham’s young people increasingly live in the “blithe assumption” of public safety.

That amazing story appeared almost nine years ago, and, as crime has continued to fall—with last year’s 414 murders the lowest number since 1928 and the lowest per-capita rate in Gotham’s recorded history—the expectation that you’ll be safe in the street and in your home has only strengthened. Meanwhile, the knowledge of the heroic effort it took to bring about that sense of security has dissipated. Since New York is always a city of newcomers, how many even know that, within living memory, when there was no such thing as a cell phone, you often couldn’t find a public telephone that worked, thanks to vandalism? That the subway cars, the overpasses on the potholed highways into Manhattan, and the city’s buildings, mailboxes, and even delivery trucks were smeared with graffiti, “tagged” with the nicknames of subliterate urchins proving that no one could stop them from doing whatever they wanted to the property of individuals or of the community? That the streets, doorways, and subway stations reeked of the urine of the homeless? That Times Square hosted a sex trade as degraded and dangerous as it was flagrantly visible, driving out wholesome businesses and attracting the bums, the crazies, and the criminals like flies? That the parks were deserts or jungles, not works of urban artistry?

Only we graybeards, who had picked our way around the piles of excrement, canine (in those pre-cleanup-law days) and sometimes human, on the cracked and broken sidewalks, as panhandlers aggressively accosted us and zonked-out bums slept on the benches and pavements next to stolen shopping carts filled with their pathetically motley belongings, recall the omnipresent specter of fear—inevitable in a city with more than 2,200 murders a year in 1990, an average of six per day. In ghetto neighborhoods, where crime raged most fiercely, the fear was worst: housing-project mothers put their kids to sleep in bathtubs for protection against stray bullets from gang wars. The New York Postsummed up Gotham’s angst in that era when it exhorted newly elected mayor David Dinkins in an exasperated 1990 headline: DAVE, DO SOMETHING!

He didn’t—not enough to matter. But in 1994, ex-prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani took over city hall and conjured up perhaps the most miraculous urban transformation in history, one whose lessons every New Yorker should understand, especially as a mayoral election nears. Every urban and social policy expert should study those lessons, too, for they go to the heart of what government is for.
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• Lesson One: Crime kills cities. ...
• Lesson Two: Policing cuts crime. ... 
• Lesson Three: A single leader can change history. ... 
• Lesson Four: Many people can’t—or won’t—see what’s in front of their own eyes. ...

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