Tom Roeser talked to “a top level authority on police attitudes” and got an earful for Chicago Daily Observer about law enforcement in Chicago under the new superintendent:
Jody Weis’ appointment…an FBI agent who never wore a uniform nor patrolled a beat…signaled a mayoral disapproval of the department that is ruining morale. [The source] contrasted this with the record of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who stood by his department and beat off civil libertarians who tried to super-enforce infractions that hobbled the New York police.
He calls it a “soft revolt.”
“When the mayor and the police superintendent are more interested in pacifying the ACLU than in keeping down crime and going the extra mile for prevention, it’s bound to happen.”
Giuliani cleaned up NYC and lessened the cop-shooting of blacks, claiming as “the most fundamental of civil rights . . . the guarantee that government can give you a reasonable degree of safety.” He is quoted by Stephen Malanga in City Journal.
“Murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes,” he explained. “But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.”
NY Times and ACLU howled, and leftist commentators continue to try to debunk his claims. His top cop plowed ahead:
His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street.
Not complaining to state legislators to pass yet more unenforced and unforceable laws in a Prohibition-revisited effort to throttle honest citizens while don’t-give-a-hoot gangsters thrive — the Daley-Weis response.
The policing innovations led to a historic drop in crime far beyond what anyone could have imagined, with total crime down by some 64 percent during the Giuliani years, and murder (the most reliable crime statistic) down 67 percent, from 1,960 in Dinkins’s last year to 640 in Giuliani’s last year.
Blacks were among those who profited most from Giuliani-Bratton policies, as detailed by Deroy Murdock:
Take Brooklyn’s largely black 75th Precinct, New York’s toughest. In 1993, 110 of its residents were murdered. In 1998, homicides dropped to 37. Through June 20, 12 people were killed, compared to 19 a year ago.
Between 1993 and 1998, homicides in Bedford-Stuyvesant’s 81st Precinct tumbled 62%, from 26 to 10. In Harlem’s 28th Precinct, murders plummeted from 35 to eight, a 77% plunge.
The New York Post estimated what would have happened had crime galloped at its dismal pre-Giuliani pace. Sixty-four more Asians, 308 more whites, 1,842 more Hispanics and 2,299 more blacks would have been murdered.
In contrast with aggressive policing much bemoaned by liberals, Weis bemoans the situation:
“There are just too many weapons here,” Weis said Sunday. “Too many guns, too many gangs.”
The question is, what do Daley and Weis intend to do about it?
Blithe Spirit 