THE WAR ON RUDY GIULIANI

...First, Dinkins ordered the police not to intervene in 1991 while African-Americans in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights went on a three-day rampage against Hasidic Jews after a station wagon driven by a Hasid ran over a 7-year-old boy...

...At first blush, the Diallo killing would not have seemed the most appropriate rallying point for a war on Rudy Giuliani...

...The rate of fatal police shootings (.48 per 1,000 cops in 1998) in New York is lower than in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C...

...The killing was so grotesque that it immediately captured the attention of the city...

...Under Dinkins, the city's police officers felt they were working for a mayor who didn't really trust or respect them—and this at the height of the crack epidemic, when crazed rock-heads and gangbangers fighting over turf went on a killing and crime spree the likes of which this city had never seen...

...Their response was a hailstorm of 41 bullets...

...Indeed, in the course of his five-plus years as the mayor of New York City, Giuliani has been the entire Corleone family wrapped up in one person—which is ironic, since in his years as U.S...

...in 1998, the number was 249...

...It hasn't been a good year for Sharpton...

...Overall, the city's crime rate has plunged 50 percent in the past five years...

...Using matching databases, they look at crime activity in the previous few days throughout the city and deploy resources to challenge crime where it's spiking...

...In part he has done so by refusing to kowtow to the rhetoric and tactics of those who allege that the city's police routinely brutalize minorities...

...He has been an extraordinary public official by any reckoning, with a rare grasp of the interplay between politics and ideas and an ever rarer grasp of how to translate ideas into policy...

...Still, Herbert's view is what has motivated a ludicrous moral pageant in front of police headquarters orchestrated by Sharpton—in which more than 1,000 people have been arrested in the past two weeks in an entirely cost-free display of civil disobedience...

...Matters got so ugly that somebody torched the place...

...together with the billions of dollars thrown off by the Wall Street boom of the 1990s, it is responsible for turning New York into a safe and prosperous city...

...For example, say there's a rash of burglaries in a given housing project...

...And Giuliani, a man not accustomed to suffering slights easily, spent the week after Diallo's death being slighted again and again...

...Some of this is attributable to tougher prison sentences and national trends for which Giuliani cannot take credit (though New York's crime drop is itself a big contributor to that trend...

...For eight weeks now, ever since four policemen fired 41 bullets at an unarmed African immigrant named Amadou Diallo, hitting him 19 times and killing him, Giuliani has been quiet, subdued, con-trolled—like the Corleone family consigliere...

...Because the four officers who shot Diallo—under investigation by a grand jury that has just indicted them for second-degree murder—clammed up in accordance with their Fifth Amendment rights and have remained mute ever since...

...The outrageously corrupt public-sector unions worked in lockstep with city agencies and the city council to expand benefits while simultaneously diminishing union responsibility...

...The next year, Dinkins chose to believe accounts by residents in Washington Heights that an NYPD officer named Michael O'Keefe had executed a drug runner named Jose "Kiko" Garcia in cold blood...

...And he has treated with barely disguised contempt those, like the influential Harlem minister Calvin Butts, who issue forth the preposterous claim that the crime drop in the city since Giuliani took office is due to feel-good "Stop the Violence" rallies in minority neighborhoods—or even more ridiculously, give the credit to David Dink-ins, who signed into law the 1990 bill that expanded the police department...

...Giuliani is proud of the NYPD...

...The municipal budget surplus this year will hover somewhere around $2 billion...

...Still, the New York City success story has much to do with the approach to policing introduced under Giuliani...

...Ever since the 1960s, New York has been governed by a weird and immensely powerful public-private partnership...

...But when the commission issued a report—which said, in essence, that it should become a permanent quasi-governmental body investigating the conduct of the NYPD—Giuliani responded with another blast of anger, this time at the commission...

...In East New York, one of Brooklyn's worst neighborhoods, the murder drop is 67 percent...

...When he took office at the beginning of 1994, the NYPD was reeling from the four years it spent under the dominion of David Dinkins...

...nearby, in Brownsville, murders decreased by 65 percent, burglaries by 56 percent...

...When Giuliani finds himself embroiled in a political squabble with another elected official, he and his team "go to the mattresses" —they hunker down, refuse to negotiate, and begin a war...

...Twice weekly, on the eighth floor of police headquarters, the top brass have a three hour meeting called Compstat...

...The two incidents that probably cost Dinkins his job both involved the NYPD, and in both cases Dinkins seemed to accept the idea that police officers were part of the problem, not part of the solution...

...This all ties into his central message, which is that New York City can again be a paragon of civic order...

...What happened afterwards isn't clear...

...What the mayor and police chief did do, as they do reflexively whenever there are charges of police misconduct in New York, was defend the NYPD...

...The mayor was furious with the commission because he believed it was doing the dirty work of those who make a living by defaming the police— people like Al Sharpton...

...Libertarians revile Giuliani, who sees his primary task not as defending the rights of individuals to do anything and everything they want to do on the streets of New York but as reestablishing the principle that the first freedom is the freedom from the Hobbesian state of nature into which New York had fallen...

...Like his friend Don King, who is always in the vicinity when a boxing match looks like it is fixed, Sharpton has an amazing talent for getting himself involved in racially charged incidents in New York City—and charging them up still further, to the point that people actually get killed...

...the police officers have not spoken about the case, and nobody actually saw the shooting, though nine witnesses claim to have heard shouting and gunfire...

...At once, Giuliani is cool and calculating like Michael, charismatic and clever like Vito, and prone to sudden rages and instant passions like Sonny...

...Giuliani's primary challenge upon taking office was raising the morale and effectiveness of the NYPD...

...Even so, police shootings of all kinds have steeply declined...

...Giuliani, who is fearless and combative in a most unusual way, has systematically taken on the prevailing ideological power structure in the city of New York over the past five years...

...This is not just pious talk on Giuliani's part...

...Eighty-one Jews were injured and one killed as the cops stood around and did nothing...

...Which would be his worst fear...

...But it does seem to be the case that the officers believed Diallo had a gun and was about to open fire...

...The four cops were searching for a serial rapist on the night of February 4 and followed Diallo into the vestibule of a tenement apartment building in the Soundview section of the Bronx...

...In 1995, Sharpton helped organize protests in Harlem against a discount store called Freddy's Fashion Mart, which was white-owned...

...O'Keefe said he had been fighting for his life in hand-to-hand combat...

...He has gone to the mattresses—trying to sell off city hospitals, laying off thousands of city workers in the teeth of concerted opposition, refusing to sign new consent decrees and fighting old ones in court, and insisting on accountability throughout the city bureaucracy...

...Police will cross-check that database with a database of parolees, and then look to see whether any of the parolees are new to the area...

...THE WAR ON RUDY GIULIANI More Is at Stake Than the Mayor's Career By John Podhoretz New York Rudolph Giuliani's favorite movie is The Godfather, and you need only summon up some of its best-known lines to understand his extraordinary style of governance...

...The revelation of the Louima lie came around the same time that a jury finally found Sharpton liable for the disgustingly false 1987 accusation that an assistant district attorney had raped the fake victim Tawana Brawley...

...But that is not the only fact he has on his side in defense of his NYPD...

...Giuliani obviously didn't handle the Diallo incident perfectly—to do so would probably have required someone other than a Corleone...

...But there is much more at stake in the Diallo crisis than Giuliani's own career...

...the cops had said no such thing...

...And then they could say little else...

...Just a few of these numbers: On Manhattan's Lower East Side, the murder rate dropped 81 percent in five years, rape 60 percent, burglary 72 percent...

...and the charges are certain to be dismissed...

...But that's not quite it...

...That incident brought a blast of anger from the mayor, who appointed a commission to look into the conduct of the NYPD as a result...

...Seven people died in the blaze...

...For nearly two months, the mayor has been accused by all and sundry of gross insensitivity...

...Two of the officers fired off every one of the 16 bullets in their Glock 9 mm pistols—which meant they each had to squeeze the trigger 16 times in three to five seconds...

...Two years ago, police officers in Queens arrested and then brutalized a Haitian man named Abner Louima in the station house in unspeakable ways...

...In 1995, there were 344 police shootings...

...Activists have colluded with judges to force city agencies into consent decrees that require the agencies to give taxpayer money to the activists—who then live parasitically off the agencies they are supposed to monitor...

...Alas, numbers aren't very material when bad things happen—and when bad things happen in New York, they happen in outsize (41 bullets) ways...

...The arrestees are brought to a precinct, issued a bench warrant and freed...

...Sounds logical, but it hadn't been done before...

...It was the crusading anti-cop journalist Peter Noel of the Village Voice who discovered (to Noel's regret) that Louima had lied...

...And here's where the story gets especially interesting, because the forces arrayed against Giuliani have problems with him that have nothing whatever to do with policing and everything to do with his ideas about governance...

...Nonetheless, within a day of the Diallo shooting, Sharpton had become the Diallo family "spokesman...

...That would seem to suggest the officers were in a heightened, adrenalized state brought on by fear, panic, whatever...

...If so, they'll go and check it out—and more often than not, nab their man...

...The protesters wanted to express their disgust with the police department that has made New York City livable again...

...New York Times columnist Bob Herbert puts it this way: "Police misconduct [is] so widespread and at times so insanely violent that it has brought a new kind of terror to the streets of New York...

...In the days immediately following the Diallo shooting, Giuliani and police commissioner Howard Safir were quiet, sober, and restrained...

...The governing idea of the Giuliani NYPD is that the police can extirpate crime at its source rather than simply responding to criminal activity after it happens...

...Giuliani will have none of this...

...The police department has grown by 3,000 officers since 1991, and arrests have skyrocketed from 309,000 in 1995 to 403,000 in 1998...

...Giuliani's insistence on lockstep loyalty from his staff calls to mind Michael Corleone's admonition to his older brother Fredo that he is never to take sides against the family again—ever...

...What is happening in New York City right now is an effort to discredit the ideas and policies of the Giuliani administration—to discredit a specific kind of conservative governance whose success is a dagger pointed at the heart of American liberalism...

...What the protesters really want to do is delegitimize the mayoralty of Rudolph Giuliani...

...To the mattresses they go...

...The actions of four cops, they have said in a hundred different ways since the Diallo shooting, should not tarnish the reputations or the hard work of the other 38,000 NYPD officers, who put their lives on the line on some very mean streets every day...

...In Washington Heights, murders declined by 82 percent, rapes by 61 percent, burglaries by 72 percent...

...John Podhoretz, associate editor of the New York Post, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...

...And nowhere is the crime drop more pronounced and wondrous than in minority neighborhoods...

...His most concerted enemy in the city is the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Norman Siegel, who dislikes every single thing the mayor does— from trying to close down shops that distribute pornography in family neighborhoods to arresting vagrants on quality-of-life offenses...

...The mayor and police commissioner Howard Safir expressed their profound sorrow, offered to pay for the funeral and for the travel expenses of Diallo's parents (his mother lives in his native Guinea, his father in Vietnam...

...The Diallo killing has become the rallying cry for those who want to argue that the NYPD systematically targets black people...

...Sharpton became one of the "advisers" to Abner Louima, and it was certainly one of Louima's advisers who told him to tell the press and investigators that when the cops were torturing him, they said, "It's Giuliani time...

...An extensive forensic investigation revealed that the cop was telling the truth, and the story had been ginned up by drug bosses in the neighborhood who were concerned about increased police scrutiny of their nefarious doings...

...He was heckled and screamed at when he arrived at the city's main mosque for a memorial service at which he did not speak...

...The family would not meet with him, clearly on Sharpton's orders, unless he agreed to suspend the cops—which would have been a clear violation of their rights in the absence of an indictment or other admission of guilt...

...If Giuliani finds his political career damaged beyond his ability to repair it by the Diallo matter, that will be genuinely unfortunate...

...What it does not suggest is a deliberate murder of an unarmed man, who turned out to have had no history of trouble with police in the two years he had been living in the United States...

...in 1998, 19 were...

...But as the Diallo killing has mutated into the worst crisis of his mayoralty, the question is whether the most effective and transformative municipal chief executive of the past 50 years has himself mutated into the hapless and feckless Fredo, the incompetent Corleone...

...Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he was one of the masterminds behind the slow, deliberate destruction of the Mafia...

...In 1996, 30 of those shootings were fatal...

...But if conservatives don't defend him and his achievement, what public official who follows will be brave enough to take on the demagogues who thrive, like Al Sharp-ton, on disorder and chaos...

...This is absurd—it's so much safer on the streets of New York these days, especially in minority neighborhoods, that Herbert really deserves to be sent to a rhetoric-sensitivity seminar...

...And his loyalty to those who are loyal to him is like the Godfather's promise to the undertaker who seeks his help in avenging his daughter's honor: Your enemies will become my enemies—and then they will fear you...

...This is true of any political squabble, major or minor—whether it's a fight over welfare reform with legislators in Albany or a ridiculous row with New York governor George Pataki over which highway in the city should be named after Joe DiMaggio...

...The turnaround in the city's crime statistics since 1994 is an oft-told story, but every time you look at the numbers, they still have the power to make your jaw drop...

...He wanted the group to give the great majority of New York cops a clean bill of health, which would have been a rational finding given all the evidence...

...The mayor in particular expressed his sorrow and surprise, but still urged the city not to turn on its cops...