Jewish World Review April 15, 1999 /29 Nissan 5759
Mona Charen
Hooray for the NYPD
(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
THE RACE HUSTLERS, hate mongers and assorted leftovers from failed city
administrations past are ganging up on Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York. Even
some Hollywood celebrities, like Susan Sarandon, are showing up to have
themselves arrested outside the mayor's office, along with the usual
suspects, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and former New York City Mayor
David Dinkins.
The putative reason for their protest is the mistaken shooting of African
immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York policemen. The true reason for
their protest is a desire to stigmatize and therefore reverse the most
amazing urban turnaround since the great Chicago fire of 1871.
The miracle that the Giuliani administration has wrought in New York City
is so dramatic that it has stunned even those who planned it. As John
Podhoretz details in The Weekly Standard, the city's overall crime rate has
been cut in half in just five years -- with minority neighborhoods
benefiting the most. On the Lower East Side, the murder rate has dropped 81
percent since 1994, burglaries are down 72 percent, and rapes have declined
by 60 percent. The numbers are comparable in other formerly hazardous
neighborhoods.
The drop in crime, petty and serious, is not, as the Giuliani critics would
have it, a mere artifact of a booming economy and a drop in the teenage
population. As former Police Chief William Bratton and William Andrews argue
in the spring edition of the City Journal, New York has maintained an
unemployment rate of between 8 percent and 10 percent throughout the last
six years. That's double the national average. And the teenage population
has remained steady, except among minorities, where it rose.
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Birds of a feather? Dinkins and Sharpton
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Nor has this urban peace been purchased at the price of a police reign of
terror. Though the police department has been expanded by 3,000 officers
since 1991, police shootings have declined. In 1995, the police used their
guns 344 times. By 1998, the number had declined to 249. And fatalities in
police shootings have dropped, too. In 1996, 30 of the shootings resulted in
death. In 1998, 19 died at the hands of the police.
There are a few key race hustlers in New York, most notably Al Sharpton,
who can stoke the tiniest spark of misunderstanding into a raging flame of
racial animosity. Sharpton came to national attention by appointing himself
an "adviser" to hoaxer Tawana Brawley. He went on to incite a near riot in
Harlem at a shop owned by a Jewish merchant. Someone took the bait and
torched the place, killing an innocent man. And Sharpton shows up whenever
he sees a chance to encourage race hatred -- his most recent contribution
was persuading Abner Luima, the black man brutalized by New York police, to
say that the cops had said, "It's Giuliani time!" before inflicting their
torture.
(This was later unmasked as a total fraud.)
The revival of the New York Police Department was no fluke. As Bratton and
Andrews make clear, the department was reorganized from top to bottom by the
Giuliani administration. Cops were taken out of their patrol cars and put
back on the streets. Computers were enlisted to keep track of where crimes
were occurring, and these data were cross-referenced with information about
the whereabouts of parolees.
Stop-and-frisk operations netted thousands of illegal guns, and the police
studiously denied criminals their infrastructure by going after fences, chop
shops, auto exporters and prostitution customers. Precinct commanders were
given more authority, and Compstat, the information gathering system, helped
them target high-crime areas. Most famously, the police got tough on
"quality of life" offenses like blasting a radio or panhandling. In the
process, they made New York's streets nicer places for the law-abiding and
nabbed a good number of serious criminals along the way.
The Sharptons and David Dinkins of the world were happier when New York was
overrun by "squeegee men" extorting cash from motorists, drug dealers
strutting the streets unafraid, and teenagers openly swigging beer and
vaulting over subway turnstiles. They liked a New York with 4,500 shootings
a year.
But most New Yorkers are delighted with the change Giuliani has wrought.
The mistaken shooting of an innocent man is a tragedy. But to undo the great
work of the NYPD in the name of Diallo would be a
crime.
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©1999, Creators Syndicate
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