Excerpt: "Rudy Giuliani may soon be the first western diplomat of the modern
era to have stoked a racist police riot."
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks at a rally for Donald Trump
in Bangor, Maine, last month. (photo: Sarah Raice/Getty)
Rudy Giuliani: Divisive New York Past Has Many in Fear of Trump Cabinet Post
By Spencer Ackerman, Lois Beckett and Jamiles Lartey, Guardian UK
17 November 16
He was hailed as Americas mayor after 9/11, but black residents who
remember his time in New York believe his record of fueling racial tensions
should disqualify him from serving as the USs top diplomat
Rudy Giuliani may soon be the first western diplomat of the modern era to
have stoked a racist police riot.
The former New York mayor has shamelessly promoted himself as a key member
of the Donald Trump administration first as a potential attorney general,
then openly touting himself to become secretary of state.
But Giulianis one-man campaign is already facing a backlash including
from a Republican senator who said several of his colleagues believe
Giuliani is unsuited to a key cabinet position.
Black residents who remember his time in New York with dismay believe his
divisive record should disqualify him as the USs chief diplomat.
Giulianis approach to policing created an environment of terror for
communities of color, said Lumumba Bandele, a lifelong New Yorker and
police reform advocate. If he takes on a national role, We should all be
preparing for worst-case scenarios, he said.
His record on police abuses and freedom of expression is frightening, said
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
In the wake of September 11, Giuliani was seen as a uniter, hailed as
Americas mayor and a trustworthy leader for all New Yorkers. But Giuliani
has a fraught history with New Yorks black and brown residents. For
decades, he has defended police killings and abuse of black men and fueled
racial divisions.
Giuliani set the tone for his mayoralty before his election, on a hot summer
morning in September 1992. The largely white New York City police force was
angry with the citys first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins had proposed
removing police representatives from a board that hears complaints about
police brutality, a position unacceptable to the police and its powerful
union.
A protest march by 10,000 off-duty police officers blocked traffic on the
Brooklyn Bridge as uniformed officers stood aside. By the time it reached
City Hall Park, it had taken an angry turn. Officers chanting Dinkins Must
Go! pushed through the barricades and climbed the municipal steps. The New
York Times described it as a beer-swilling, traffic-snarling,
epithet-hurling melee. Newsday compared city hall to an embassy in some
far-off hostile land
under siege.
The signs the police waved labeled the mayor a washroom attendant, claimed
he was on crack said his true color [was] yellow bellied and asked if he
had hugged a drug dealer that day. A subsequent official NYPD report, which
recommended discipline for 42 officers and called the march an
embarrassment, conceded some protesters used racial slurs and said the
rally was unruly, mean-spirited and perhaps criminal.
Nearby, Giuliani, the man whom Dinkins beat in the 1989 election and who was
waiting for a rematch, waited to address the crowd. Channeling its momentum,
Giuliani addressed Dinkins policies by chanting Bullshit! He laid the
low morale of the NYPD at Dinkins feet. The police, returning the
sentiment, chanted: Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.
Giuliani would later say he had attempted to calm the fury of the protesters
and that he had tried to move them away from city hall. He did not respond
to requests for comment on Wednesday through his spokeswoman, Jo Ann
Zafonte. The New York Times reported at the time that, during the city hall
protest, at least one Giuliani supporter circulated through the crowd
handing out voter registration cards.
A recently elected city councilwoman from Flatbush, Brooklyn, attempted to
cross the barricades. I try to forget the police riot at city hall, Una
Clarke told the Guardian this week.
But 24 years later, she remembers clearly what the white officers who
blocked her path said to one another when she explained she was a
councilwoman on her way to a meeting: One guy looked at the other and he
said: This nigger is a council member, do you believe her? And I was
stunned and taken off by it. Because Im a Jamaican, frankly, I decided I
was not going into my pocketbook to give him an ID.
In Giulianis opinion, he was not the one playing incendiary racial politics
in a confrontation with his political rival. The mayor plays the racial
card when he thinks it is to his advantage and then he condemns other people
when he believes theyre doing it and that is very phony, Giuliani said
afterwards. He would later suggest that outrage at police officers using
racial slurs against city officials was a distraction.
The real question is, has the relatively minor occurrence of racial
epithets, if they occurred at all, been made the major focus of this rally
for political purposes? he said in late September 1992.
Clarke remembered Giuliani telling her that she made up her encounter with
police during the riot. Rudy Giuliani said I was lying, she said.
As mayor, Clarke continued, he played every ethnic group against every
ethnic group. For me, racially, hes not changed.
At the time, Dinkins chief political aide compared Giuliani to the Ku Klux
Klan leader David Duke, accusing him of trying to flame racial tensions
rather than try to bring people together, and then make excuses about it.
Dinkins walked back the comparison on 23 September but kept the pressure on
Giuliani, reminding the New York Times of the kinds of comments that Rudy
Giuliani made out here with a mob of police, drinking beer, behaving in an
unruly fashion, and then egging them on.
The city hall riot was the most dramatic episode in a long career marked by
tension over police violence towards Americans of color and Giulianis
fierce defense of police officers and law enforcement. Patrick Lynch, the
current president of New York Citys police union, did not immediately
respond to a request for comment on Giulianis record as an advocate for law
enforcement.
Bandele, an activist with Communities United for Police Reform, said that
the riot set the tone for Giulianis eight years as mayor, from 1994 to
2001.
In our communities, folks knew him for what he was. His nickname was Adolf
Giuliani, so that gives you a sense of how people saw him. In communities
of color, in LGBT communities, in immigrant communities, his presence was
unwelcome and we were glad to see him go, Bandele, a lifelong New York City
resident said.
The idea of Giuliani becoming the secretary of state, thats frightening
and its also really clear about the direction that Trump is going in, said
Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder. Giuliani represents the old: an
archaic system that systematically devalues black life.
From the start of his mayoralty in 1994, Giuliani signaled dismissiveness to
the citys black leadership. After longtime Harlem congressman Charles
Rangel claimed that year Giuliani was not reaching out to black New York,
the first-year mayor suggested black New Yorkers needed to watch their
mouths.
I want to reach out to all of the communities in the city. It has to be a
two-way street. And theyre going to have to learn how to discipline
themselves in the way in which they speak also, Giuliani said.
In the summer of 1997, after an altercation at a nightclub, four Flatbush
police officers beat and sodomized a Haitian immigrant in the 70th precinct
house. The broomhandle officers forced into Abner Louimas rectum tore his
colon and perforated his bladder. Louima claimed, and later retracted, that
the police torturing him told him: Its Giuliani time.
The invented quote became a slogan for Giulianis opposition. Taking on a
life of its own, it became a shorthand to describe the brutality of the
Giuliani era, from actual police violence against black New Yorkers to the
dismissive tone the mayor took with his critics. As soon as Giuliani handily
won re-election and Louima recanted the comment, Giuliani said his critics
owe the people of the city an apology.
One of those critics was Dinkins, who retorted that Giuliani had missed the
point. The problem is not what was said but what was done. The mayor
continues to insist that only police officers can investigate police
officers, Dinkins said.
In 1999, Bronx police officers, apparently carrying out a stop-and-frisk,
shot and killed immigrant Amadou Diallo in his apartment building vestibule.
The officers shot at Diallo 41 times after he reached for his wallet to show
ID. The killing attracted national attention right as Giuliani was nurturing
national political ambitions. He called it unfortunate but pleaded that
the police should be given the benefit of the doubt.
The officers who killed Diallo were acquitted. Giuliani told the Today show
that the Diallo killing does not reflect the overall record of the New York
police department. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about Diallo and
defiantly performed it at Madison Square Garden amid police protest.
Giuliani criticized Springsteen for the song, as he would later criticize
Beyoncé for her songs and performances referencing police violence.
The next year, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, an undercover cop solicited a
man named Patrick Dorismond for a drug sale. A fracas ensued, and a
different officer shot Dorismond dead.
The mayor began by unsealing Dorismonds police record, to include his
juvenile file. The formerly secret documents shed no light on what happened
on Eighth Avenue that night. But Giuliani harnessed innuendo, infamously
saying Dorismond isnt an altar boy.
As it happened, Dorismond literally was an altar boy. When this was pointed
out to Giuliani, he shot back: I think thats not a correct juxtaposition
of statements, nor intended for any kind of decent or useful purpose. It
would take until May for Giuliani to concede he had made a mistake.
Fourteen years later, when the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson
inspired a nationwide movement against police violence, Giuliani re-emerged
as a defender of law enforcement, and a critic of black protesters, whom he
deemed racist.
Giuliani used his record on fighting violence in New York City to add luster
to an old conservative talking point: that black Americans were wrong to
protest about state violence by police officers because a larger percentage
of murders were caused by black men killing other black men.
Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to
see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this, Giuliani said
in widely criticized remarks on Meet the Press in November 2014, an exchange
one New York City reporter dubbed vintage Giuliani.
White police officers wouldnt be there [in black neighborhoods] if you
werent killing each other, Giuliani went on to tell Michael Eric Dyson, a
black Georgetown professor on the show with him.
This is a defense mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir,
Dyson told him.
In 2016, he called Black Lives Matter inherently racist and said asked why
activists never protested about the deaths of everyday black residents of
Chicago.Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is
killed? he asked.
In fact, Black Lives Matter activists had held protests over gun violence in
Chicago, including over the brutal murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee. In
March, Lamon Reccord, one of the most prominent and controversial young
activists in protests against the police killing of Laquan McDonald,
organized his own protest in honor of Tyshawn, one of many ongoing community
protests and interventions led by black Chicago residents to address
neighborhood gun violence.
Giuliani has frequently pushed back against potential critics by arguing, as
he did on Fox and Friends in August talking about Beyoncé, that I saved
more black lives than any of those people and adding that maybe 4,000 or
5,000 were African American young people who are alive today because of the
policies I put in effect.
New Yorks crime rate did fall dramatically, starting in Dinkins era and
continuing in Giulianis: violent crimes declined 43% from 1990 to 1996.
Homicides in the city dropped 66%, ahead of the national average decline of
50%, from 1990 to 1997. A narrative took shape that propelled Giulianis
career: he had made New York safe. While its true that Giuliani presided
over a historic decrease in violence, its less clear how much of the credit
for this should go directly to the mayor and his policies.
Not a lot, said Frank Zimring, a prominent criminologist at the University
of California Berkeley, and the author of The City That Became Safe: What
New York Teaches About Urban Crime and Its Control.
The credit for the financial investment in increased New York City police
manpower goes to Dinkins, Giulianis predecessor, and to the New York
governor, Mario Cuomo, Zimring said. The credit for new police strategies
goes to police commissioners Bill Bratton who Giuliani, to his credit,
hired, and then, not to his credit, fired, Zimring said and Ray Kelly.
(Brattons public approval ratings had been higher than Giulianis, which
the mayor reportedly disliked.)
Zimring has argued that New Yorks precipitous crime decline was driven in
part by changes in policing, including a more data-driven focus on crime
hotspots, though he called the much-discussed zero tolerance and the
broken windows strategies little more than slogans.
Unfortunately, New Yorks successes in crime control have come at a cost,
he wrote. Although declines in violence benefited black New Yorkers, as
Giuliani argued, Police aggressiveness is a very regressive tax: the street
stops, bullying and pretext-based arrests fall disproportionately on young
men of color in their own neighborhood, he wrote.
A report by the New York state attorney general found a massively
disproportionate racial impact in the NYPDs stop-and-frisk tactics after
examining 175,000 of these incidents from January 1998 to March 1999. Black
New Yorkers, 25.6% of the city, comprised 50.6% of stops. Hispanic New
Yorkers, 23.7% of the city, comprised 33% of stops. White New Yorkers, 43.4%
of the city, comprised 12.9% of stops. In the most strongly white
neighborhoods in New York, the study found, the disparity between minority
and white stop rates is most pronounced.
The report stopped short of calling Giulianis favored police tactic racist,
something that would take a judges ruling in 2013, which concluded that
the citys highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that
officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner.
At times, Giuliani has taken inclusive stances with regard to immigrants and
Muslim New Yorkers. After 9/11, Giuliani was dubbed Americas mayor by Oprah
Winfrey in his finest hour as a politician.
In a sweeping speech to the United Nations in October 2001, Giuliani praised
New Yorks very strong and vibrant Muslim and Arab communities as an
equally important part of the life of our city.
Ive urged New Yorkers not to engage in any form of group blame or group
hatred. This is exactly the evil that were confronting with these
terrorists, he said. And if were going to prevail over them, over terror,
then our ideals and principles and values must transcend all forms of
prejudice.
This is not a dispute between religions or ethnic groups. All religions,
all decent people, are united in their desire to achieve peace.
Yet by 2010, the political winds had shifted, and Giuliani shifted with
them.
That summer, outrage grew from the fringes of the right after a local Muslim
leader had proposed building an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan,
within walking distance of the former Twin Towers. The project, strongly
defended by Giulianis successor, Michael Bloomberg, as a religious-freedom
issue, became the target of a smear campaign, which dubbed it the Ground
Zero Mosque or even the Victory Mosque, suggesting that the American
Muslims who would go to the center for a moment of reflection were
celebrating 9/11.
Giuliani joined in. Calling into a radio show in early August, he called the
cultural center a desecration and falsely asserted that the imam behind
the project, a man who had written a book called Whats Right With Islam Is
Whats Right With America, had supported radical causes. In a later
interview with the Today show, he suggested the project itself was radical:
If youre a healer, you do not go forward with this project. If youre a
warrior, you do.
In the years since, and particularly since joining Trumps campaign,
Giuliani has intensified his stance. He has boasted of placing undercover
agents in New York mosques and stated good Muslims would benefit from
surveillance in their communities. On Fox & Friends, Giuliani implied that
only mosques with something to hide would object to police infiltration: If
youve got nothing going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in
His name would you not want to have police officers there?
All I can say is God bless Rudy Giuliani, said Una Clarke, who was at the
police riot decades ago. Its a bundle of racists getting together to see
if they can take us back to the old age.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani speaks at a rally for Donald Trump
in Bangor, Maine, last month. (photo: Sarah Raice/Getty)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/rudy-giuliani-new-york-mayor
-trump-cabinethttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/17/rudy-giuliani-
new-york-mayor-trump-cabinet
Rudy Giuliani: Divisive New York Past Has Many in Fear of Trump Cabinet Post
By Spencer Ackerman, Lois Beckett and Jamiles Lartey, Guardian UK
17 November 16
He was hailed as Americas mayor after 9/11, but black residents who
remember his time in New York believe his record of fueling racial tensions
should disqualify him from serving as the USs top diplomat
udy Giuliani may soon be the first western diplomat of the modern era to
have stoked a racist police riot.
The former New York mayor has shamelessly promoted himself as a key member
of the Donald Trump administration first as a potential attorney general,
then openly touting himself to become secretary of state.
But Giulianis one-man campaign is already facing a backlash including
from a Republican senator who said several of his colleagues believe
Giuliani is unsuited to a key cabinet position.
Black residents who remember his time in New York with dismay believe his
divisive record should disqualify him as the USs chief diplomat.
Giulianis approach to policing created an environment of terror for
communities of color, said Lumumba Bandele, a lifelong New Yorker and
police reform advocate. If he takes on a national role, We should all be
preparing for worst-case scenarios, he said.
His record on police abuses and freedom of expression is frightening, said
Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter.
In the wake of September 11, Giuliani was seen as a uniter, hailed as
Americas mayor and a trustworthy leader for all New Yorkers. But Giuliani
has a fraught history with New Yorks black and brown residents. For
decades, he has defended police killings and abuse of black men and fueled
racial divisions.
Giuliani set the tone for his mayoralty before his election, on a hot summer
morning in September 1992. The largely white New York City police force was
angry with the citys first black mayor, David Dinkins. Dinkins had proposed
removing police representatives from a board that hears complaints about
police brutality, a position unacceptable to the police and its powerful
union.
A protest march by 10,000 off-duty police officers blocked traffic on the
Brooklyn Bridge as uniformed officers stood aside. By the time it reached
City Hall Park, it had taken an angry turn. Officers chanting Dinkins Must
Go! pushed through the barricades and climbed the municipal steps. The New
York Times described it as a beer-swilling, traffic-snarling,
epithet-hurling melee. Newsday compared city hall to an embassy in some
far-off hostile land
under siege.
The signs the police waved labeled the mayor a washroom attendant, claimed
he was on crack said his true color [was] yellow bellied and asked if he
had hugged a drug dealer that day. A subsequent official NYPD report, which
recommended discipline for 42 officers and called the march an
embarrassment, conceded some protesters used racial slurs and said the
rally was unruly, mean-spirited and perhaps criminal.
Nearby, Giuliani, the man whom Dinkins beat in the 1989 election and who was
waiting for a rematch, waited to address the crowd. Channeling its momentum,
Giuliani addressed Dinkins policies by chanting Bullshit! He laid the
low morale of the NYPD at Dinkins feet. The police, returning the
sentiment, chanted: Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.
Giuliani would later say he had attempted to calm the fury of the protesters
and that he had tried to move them away from city hall. He did not respond
to requests for comment on Wednesday through his spokeswoman, Jo Ann
Zafonte. The New York Times reported at the time that, during the city hall
protest, at least one Giuliani supporter circulated through the crowd
handing out voter registration cards.
A recently elected city councilwoman from Flatbush, Brooklyn, attempted to
cross the barricades. I try to forget the police riot at city hall, Una
Clarke told the Guardian this week.
But 24 years later, she remembers clearly what the white officers who
blocked her path said to one another when she explained she was a
councilwoman on her way to a meeting: One guy looked at the other and he
said: This nigger is a council member, do you believe her? And I was
stunned and taken off by it. Because Im a Jamaican, frankly, I decided I
was not going into my pocketbook to give him an ID.
In Giulianis opinion, he was not the one playing incendiary racial politics
in a confrontation with his political rival. The mayor plays the racial
card when he thinks it is to his advantage and then he condemns other people
when he believes theyre doing it and that is very phony, Giuliani said
afterwards. He would later suggest that outrage at police officers using
racial slurs against city officials was a distraction.
The real question is, has the relatively minor occurrence of racial
epithets, if they occurred at all, been made the major focus of this rally
for political purposes? he said in late September 1992.
Clarke remembered Giuliani telling her that she made up her encounter with
police during the riot. Rudy Giuliani said I was lying, she said.
As mayor, Clarke continued, he played every ethnic group against every
ethnic group. For me, racially, hes not changed.
At the time, Dinkins chief political aide compared Giuliani to the Ku Klux
Klan leader David Duke, accusing him of trying to flame racial tensions
rather than try to bring people together, and then make excuses about it.
Dinkins walked back the comparison on 23 September but kept the pressure on
Giuliani, reminding the New York Times of the kinds of comments that Rudy
Giuliani made out here with a mob of police, drinking beer, behaving in an
unruly fashion, and then egging them on.
The city hall riot was the most dramatic episode in a long career marked by
tension over police violence towards Americans of color and Giulianis
fierce defense of police officers and law enforcement. Patrick Lynch, the
current president of New York Citys police union, did not immediately
respond to a request for comment on Giulianis record as an advocate for law
enforcement.
Bandele, an activist with Communities United for Police Reform, said that
the riot set the tone for Giulianis eight years as mayor, from 1994 to
2001.
In our communities, folks knew him for what he was. His nickname was Adolf
Giuliani, so that gives you a sense of how people saw him. In communities
of color, in LGBT communities, in immigrant communities, his presence was
unwelcome and we were glad to see him go, Bandele, a lifelong New York City
resident said.
The idea of Giuliani becoming the secretary of state, thats frightening
and its also really clear about the direction that Trump is going in, said
Cullors, the Black Lives Matter co-founder. Giuliani represents the old: an
archaic system that systematically devalues black life.
From the start of his mayoralty in 1994, Giuliani signaled dismissiveness to
the citys black leadership. After longtime Harlem congressman Charles
Rangel claimed that year Giuliani was not reaching out to black New York,
the first-year mayor suggested black New Yorkers needed to watch their
mouths.
I want to reach out to all of the communities in the city. It has to be a
two-way street. And theyre going to have to learn how to discipline
themselves in the way in which they speak also, Giuliani said.
In the summer of 1997, after an altercation at a nightclub, four Flatbush
police officers beat and sodomized a Haitian immigrant in the 70th precinct
house. The broomhandle officers forced into Abner Louimas rectum tore his
colon and perforated his bladder. Louima claimed, and later retracted, that
the police torturing him told him: Its Giuliani time.
The invented quote became a slogan for Giulianis opposition. Taking on a
life of its own, it became a shorthand to describe the brutality of the
Giuliani era, from actual police violence against black New Yorkers to the
dismissive tone the mayor took with his critics. As soon as Giuliani handily
won re-election and Louima recanted the comment, Giuliani said his critics
owe the people of the city an apology.
One of those critics was Dinkins, who retorted that Giuliani had missed the
point. The problem is not what was said but what was done. The mayor
continues to insist that only police officers can investigate police
officers, Dinkins said.
In 1999, Bronx police officers, apparently carrying out a stop-and-frisk,
shot and killed immigrant Amadou Diallo in his apartment building vestibule.
The officers shot at Diallo 41 times after he reached for his wallet to show
ID. The killing attracted national attention right as Giuliani was nurturing
national political ambitions. He called it unfortunate but pleaded that
the police should be given the benefit of the doubt.
The officers who killed Diallo were acquitted. Giuliani told the Today show
that the Diallo killing does not reflect the overall record of the New York
police department. Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about Diallo and
defiantly performed it at Madison Square Garden amid police protest.
Giuliani criticized Springsteen for the song, as he would later criticize
Beyoncé for her songs and performances referencing police violence.
The next year, on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, an undercover cop solicited a
man named Patrick Dorismond for a drug sale. A fracas ensued, and a
different officer shot Dorismond dead.
The mayor began by unsealing Dorismonds police record, to include his
juvenile file. The formerly secret documents shed no light on what happened
on Eighth Avenue that night. But Giuliani harnessed innuendo, infamously
saying Dorismond isnt an altar boy.
As it happened, Dorismond literally was an altar boy. When this was pointed
out to Giuliani, he shot back: I think thats not a correct juxtaposition
of statements, nor intended for any kind of decent or useful purpose. It
would take until May for Giuliani to concede he had made a mistake.
Fourteen years later, when the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson
inspired a nationwide movement against police violence, Giuliani re-emerged
as a defender of law enforcement, and a critic of black protesters, whom he
deemed racist.
Giuliani used his record on fighting violence in New York City to add luster
to an old conservative talking point: that black Americans were wrong to
protest about state violence by police officers because a larger percentage
of murders were caused by black men killing other black men.
Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to
see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this, Giuliani said
in widely criticized remarks on Meet the Press in November 2014, an exchange
one New York City reporter dubbed vintage Giuliani.
White police officers wouldnt be there [in black neighborhoods] if you
werent killing each other, Giuliani went on to tell Michael Eric Dyson, a
black Georgetown professor on the show with him.
This is a defense mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir,
Dyson told him.
In 2016, he called Black Lives Matter inherently racist and said asked why
activists never protested about the deaths of everyday black residents of
Chicago.Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is
killed? he asked.
In fact, Black Lives Matter activists had held protests over gun violence in
Chicago, including over the brutal murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee. In
March, Lamon Reccord, one of the most prominent and controversial young
activists in protests against the police killing of Laquan McDonald,
organized his own protest in honor of Tyshawn, one of many ongoing community
protests and interventions led by black Chicago residents to address
neighborhood gun violence.
Giuliani has frequently pushed back against potential critics by arguing, as
he did on Fox and Friends in August talking about Beyoncé, that I saved
more black lives than any of those people and adding that maybe 4,000 or
5,000 were African American young people who are alive today because of the
policies I put in effect.
New Yorks crime rate did fall dramatically, starting in Dinkins era and
continuing in Giulianis: violent crimes declined 43% from 1990 to 1996.
Homicides in the city dropped 66%, ahead of the national average decline of
50%, from 1990 to 1997. A narrative took shape that propelled Giulianis
career: he had made New York safe. While its true that Giuliani presided
over a historic decrease in violence, its less clear how much of the credit
for this should go directly to the mayor and his policies.
Not a lot, said Frank Zimring, a prominent criminologist at the University
of California Berkeley, and the author of The City That Became Safe: What
New York Teaches About Urban Crime and Its Control.
The credit for the financial investment in increased New York City police
manpower goes to Dinkins, Giulianis predecessor, and to the New York
governor, Mario Cuomo, Zimring said. The credit for new police strategies
goes to police commissioners Bill Bratton who Giuliani, to his credit,
hired, and then, not to his credit, fired, Zimring said and Ray Kelly.
(Brattons public approval ratings had been higher than Giulianis, which
the mayor reportedly disliked.)
Zimring has argued that New Yorks precipitous crime decline was driven in
part by changes in policing, including a more data-driven focus on crime
hotspots, though he called the much-discussed zero tolerance and the
broken windows strategies little more than slogans.
Unfortunately, New Yorks successes in crime control have come at a cost,
he wrote. Although declines in violence benefited black New Yorkers, as
Giuliani argued, Police aggressiveness is a very regressive tax: the street
stops, bullying and pretext-based arrests fall disproportionately on young
men of color in their own neighborhood, he wrote.
A report by the New York state attorney general found a massively
disproportionate racial impact in the NYPDs stop-and-frisk tactics after
examining 175,000 of these incidents from January 1998 to March 1999. Black
New Yorkers, 25.6% of the city, comprised 50.6% of stops. Hispanic New
Yorkers, 23.7% of the city, comprised 33% of stops. White New Yorkers, 43.4%
of the city, comprised 12.9% of stops. In the most strongly white
neighborhoods in New York, the study found, the disparity between minority
and white stop rates is most pronounced.
The report stopped short of calling Giulianis favored police tactic racist,
something that would take a judges ruling in 2013, which concluded that
the citys highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that
officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner.
At times, Giuliani has taken inclusive stances with regard to immigrants and
Muslim New Yorkers. After 9/11, Giuliani was dubbed Americas mayor by Oprah
Winfrey in his finest hour as a politician.
In a sweeping speech to the United Nations in October 2001, Giuliani praised
New Yorks very strong and vibrant Muslim and Arab communities as an
equally important part of the life of our city.
Ive urged New Yorkers not to engage in any form of group blame or group
hatred. This is exactly the evil that were confronting with these
terrorists, he said. And if were going to prevail over them, over terror,
then our ideals and principles and values must transcend all forms of
prejudice.
This is not a dispute between religions or ethnic groups. All religions,
all decent people, are united in their desire to achieve peace.
Yet by 2010, the political winds had shifted, and Giuliani shifted with
them.
That summer, outrage grew from the fringes of the right after a local Muslim
leader had proposed building an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan,
within walking distance of the former Twin Towers. The project, strongly
defended by Giulianis successor, Michael Bloomberg, as a religious-freedom
issue, became the target of a smear campaign, which dubbed it the Ground
Zero Mosque or even the Victory Mosque, suggesting that the American
Muslims who would go to the center for a moment of reflection were
celebrating 9/11.
Giuliani joined in. Calling into a radio show in early August, he called the
cultural center a desecration and falsely asserted that the imam behind
the project, a man who had written a book called Whats Right With Islam Is
Whats Right With America, had supported radical causes. In a later
interview with the Today show, he suggested the project itself was radical:
If youre a healer, you do not go forward with this project. If youre a
warrior, you do.
In the years since, and particularly since joining Trumps campaign,
Giuliani has intensified his stance. He has boasted of placing undercover
agents in New York mosques and stated good Muslims would benefit from
surveillance in their communities. On Fox & Friends, Giuliani implied that
only mosques with something to hide would object to police infiltration: If
youve got nothing going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in
His name would you not want to have police officers there?
All I can say is God bless Rudy Giuliani, said Una Clarke, who was at the
police riot decades ago. Its a bundle of racists getting together to see
if they can take us back to the old age.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
