DIARY
ne reason for my being here is to find out how the place is policed. In the course of the past seven years, almost every form of crime in New York has fallen. Between 1993 and 1998, robbery fell by 55 per cent, bur- glary by 53 per cent, car crime by 61 per cent. In 1990, there were 2,245 homicides, roughly three times the number in the whole of Britain. Last year, there were 671. I arrived from Washington at Penn Station last Thursday, and joined a very long taxi queue. After a bit, I was approached by a black man who looked smart, apart from the absence of socks, and called me `sir'. He invited me to step out of the queue and fol- low him towards a taxi. I did so, and we moved quickly for half a block. He was Joined by a very fat black man in shorts, who tried to carry my bag with an insistence that made me slightly uneasy. At this point, there were shouts. A white man in a check shirt came sprinting up and yelled to my 'taxi- drivers' to get out. They vanished, and the man showed me his police badge, 'They was going to rob you,' he said. 'Get back in line. Come on — this is New York.'
Iwas the beneficiary, I think, of what Jack Straw and others call 'zero tolerance', but what the NYPD prefer to call 'quality of life Policing'. The idea is that small things matter because they create the space for big things. Its a question of who owns the streets. If they're full of graffiti and litter and bogus taxi-drivers and vagrants and addicts, New Yorkers don't own them. The success is the work of the Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and his police commissioners — first the famous Bill Bratton, and now Howard Safir. Bratton took the view that crime is caused by crimi- nals rather than by social conditions, and that police can catch criminals and prevent crime if they're in the right place at the right tune, in sufficient numbers. There are now 41,(0) police officers in New York, not to mention the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, to look after roughly seven million People. London, with much the same popu- lation, has only 25,000 police, and numbers are. falling. Here in New York, the key policeman is the precinct commander. What matters most is what's actually happening, and the man who runs the precinct is the most likely to know. Under the famous Compstat system, information from every precinct is pooled at a weekly central meet- ing at One Police Plaza, so that they can work out what's better, what's worse and who's needed where.
.he week I arrive, the Compstat meet- ing I am promised is cancelled for the funeral of a policeman killed in a car chase. CHARLES MOORE But I go to see Commissioner Safir (pro- nounced 'Safer') just before he leaves to attend the requiem. Outside his office stands a vast Victorian police-station desk with matching lamps and pictures of Teddy Roosevelt who, among his many achieve- ments, was NY Police Commissioner. Safir has recently been in London, he says, and it reminds him of New York in the dark days of 1992: he didn't see enough police pres- ence and he felt 'the sense of disorder in the streets, the smell of urine in the under- passes. You'll see three or four people on blankets smoking something or other.' He says that, for the Met, it is 'time to get over' the Macpherson Report's accusations of institutional racism: 'It's the easiest thing in the world to cave in to the activists who have an agenda.' It's not even worth speak- ing to the Revd Al Sharptons. They are against you whatever you do.
But it is not only Sharpton and the New York Times who are complaining. Since the apparently indefensible police shootings of two black men, Diallo and Dorismond, with- in the past 18 months, others have weighed in. When I saw Bill Bratton in England just before I left for America, he told me that Giuliani had lost vital public backing by sticking up for the police regardless of the facts. (Giuliani sacked Bratton, allegedly for being too successful and for telling the world about it. Now Bratton says he wants to be Mayor.) He attacked Safir for doing whatev- er Giuliani wants. Taxed with this sub- servience, Safir surprisingly replies, 'Amen to that. People mustn't confuse real and reflected power. Nobody elected Howard Safir or Bill Bratton. If you want success for the police, you need money and backing. Sometimes I'll say, "Rudy, you're wrong," but I'll close the door first.' I feel very sorry for nice John Stevens, the new Met commis- sioner, who has less money, no clear chain of command because of the confusion over the powers of the Mayor, the Home Secretary and the police authority, and no politician who is serious enough about crime to give him the backing he needs. Safir's men let me 'ride along' with a police patrol in Washington Heights, an area gradually being reclaimed for sanity. The two officers with me are a laconic His- panic from the Dominican Republic and a clever, relaxed young Egyptian. We cruise around for three hours answering whatever calls come through. We search unsuccess- fully for a man said to be exposing himself on the subway. We go to a night shelter where lunatics are turning violent. We are witness to an unbelievably minor traffic accident. We go to a swimming-pool where youths have been jumping in, creating whirlpools round girls and then feeling them up; one crazed-looking boy is arrest- ed and dragged off. Whenever anything happens, police and other services are there at once and in large numbers. As we move round the streets, the officers fre- quently know the people they meet. They are greeted by the many, mainly Domini- cans, who sit out on chairs in the sun. You could call this 'community policing' but, as Safir says, community policing is no use if it just means walking around all day without any goals. People only feel good if there are fewer crimes. In almost all respects in Giu- liani's New York, there are fewer crimes.
Giuliani's success causes real agony to the New York Times and its allies, partly because he seems to be a dislikeable person, but mainly because he never listens to them and he proves them wrong. 'Prison Popula- tion Growing Although Crime Rate Drops' is a characteristic Times headline which touchingly captures the confusion of the New York liberal mind. Heather Mac Donald, in Myron Magnet's excellent City Journal, records the constant sense of shock and dis- belief that such minds must endure. The New York Times was horrified at the Street Crime Unit's motto, 'We Own the Night', and neglected to mention that the slogan 'frames a silhouette of an old lady bent over a cane'. Apparently, New Yorkers have 'exchanged the fear of crime for fear of the police'. I get the feeling that this is an exchange most of them have been happy to make. By making it, after all, they have got their city back.
In Rudy!, his interesting but extremely hostile biography of Giuliani, Wayne Bar- rett sportingly concedes that Rudy has got a few things right. The city is 'dramatically safer and cleaner. The tax load dipped and the budget surplus soared', but, above all, `medical coverage for gay city workers was extended to their domestic partners'. For this relief, Rudy, much thanks.
Charles Moore is the editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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