He also quickly set about undermining his own most notable accomplishment. Prior to 9/11, Giuliani was best known for the remarkable decline in New York's crime rate during his tenure. Many have questioned whether Giuliani's hardcore policing methods were really responsible for New York's metamorphosis. The crack epidemic had ended, the economy had rebounded, and New York had hired thousands of new cops and changed its policing style under Rudy's much-derided predecessor, David Dinkins. What is certainly true is that some of the city's success in fighting crime was despite Giuliani, instead of because of him.
Giuliani hired Bill Bratton as police commissioner, and Bratton put together a team of cops who transformed the way America polices itself. Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple had invented a statistics-based system called Compstat that entailed "flooding the zone" with cops in whatever physical location showed an uptick in crime. As head of the city's transit cops Bratton had applied the "broken windows" theory, which posits that cracking down on petty crimes catches perps guilty of bigger crimes and sends a message of order, and had cleaned up the subways. Together, Compstat and "broken windows" and Bratton's team helped push New York's crime numbers down.
They also pushed Bratton to center stage, and that drove Rudy crazy. Only a year into Rudy's first term, when Bratton was praised in the pages of the New Yorker, NYPD press spokesman John Miller was asked to downsize his staff of 35. The former ABC newsman refused, saying he wouldn't be "a loyal Nazi," and quit.
In 1996, Bratton's face appeared on the cover of Time. Giuliani got rid of him. He also, apparently, initiated an investigation into whether a Bratton book deal constituted a conflict of interest. It was speculated that Rudy fired the man many called the nation's best police chief because he was, simply, insanely jealous.
To replace Bratton, Giuliani brought in Howard Safir -- a move that alienated the remaining players on Team Bratton, particularly Bratton's No. 2 man, John Timoney. When a visibly dismayed Timoney referred to Safir as a "lightweight," Giuliani, in a move that would set the tone for his zero-tolerance policy toward dissent, first tried to demote Timoney to captain, then forced Timoney out of office, ordering him to take a leave of absence until his retirement. Jack Maple, the man responsible for Compstat, resigned days later.
Giuliani, having destroyed what might have been the best management team in NYPD history, had to start from scratch. Bratton's successors continued using the tactics of the men Rudy had canned, but twisted and distorted them. Giuliani and Safir, in trying to one-up the strategic balance of the Bratton team's approach to law enforcement, opted to jack up the "enforcement" and not pay so much attention to the "law."
Safir's NYPD beefed up the Street Crime Unit, a corps of hyper-macho officers once described by the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff as "a rogue police operation whose members make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi." They were given leeway to enact "stop-and-frisks" of ordinary citizens -- supposedly to discourage them from carrying guns. While Safir's office implemented easier arrestee processing methods, New York's nonwhite citizens became increasingly alarmed by a police force they perceived as hostile, overzealous and racist. Go figure: members of the Street Crime Unit, Hentoff reported, delighted in wearing T-shirts emblazoned with such intimidating slogans as "We Own the Night!" and the Hemingway quote, "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it never care for anything else."
In two years, the Street Crime Unit officially reported 40,000 stop-and-frisk confrontations, but only 9,500 of those searched were arrested. In a radio interview, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was alarmed enough by these stats to tell WNYC's Brian Lehrer: "I've spoken to many officers who say they do not fill out the required forms for every stop-and-frisk. They may fill out one in five or one in 10. We may have several hundred thousands of these police actions without arrests."
Inevitably, perhaps, "the hunting of man" resulted in the killing of man. In 1999, unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo, mistaken for a rape suspect, was shot 41 times by Safir's Street Crime Unit while he fumbled for his keys at his own doorway.
Giuliani's response was callous. He refused to meet with black leaders for a month -- then again, he pretty much always refused to meet with black leaders. And he absolutely refused to reconsider his police department's policies. But it was his response to the killing of another young black man a year later that was, perhaps, his Katrina moment with the New York public.
In 2000, 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by an undercover detective participating in Operation Condor. The cop had approached Dorismond to ask where he could buy marijuana. Dorismond was offended, a scuffle ensued, and Dorismond died.
In the outcry following Dorismond's death, Giuliani was snide and unapologetic. He released Dorismond's juvenile records to justify Dorismond's homicide eight years later. He also, famously, sneered that Dorismond was "no altar boy" and defended his comments with a breathlessly cynical legalism, saying it was impossible to libel the dead.
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