in New York; in 1994, the year Rudy came to power and instituted his broken windows policy, the number declined almost 20 percent to 1,561;
•By 2001, the last year of Rudy’s administration, there were 642 murders in New York City, a reduction of 67 percent in eight years;
•Overall crime was reduced 57 percent in the eight years;
•Shootings dropped 75 percent;
•There were almost 1,200 fewer rapes in 2000 compared to 1993;
•Robberies declined from more than 85,000 to just over 36,000;
•Auto theft plummeted from almost 112,000 to fewer than 36,000;
•Burglary dropped from nearly 101,000 to just over
•38,000.
One of the most dramatic declines was in the number of violent assaults at the city’s Rikers Island Prison—from more than 2,500 violent incidents in 1993 to just 70 in 2001. Until Rudy came along, those who committed violent offences at Rikers, even those who caused serious injury, were hardly ever charged. Rudy insisted that offenders behind bars be charged and sentenced just as they would be in the outside world. The only difference was, the additional sentence was tacked onto the one already being served. As soon as the inmates realized that Rudy meant what he said, the terrible violence slowed dramatically, then virtually stopped.
Amazing, isn’t it, how even the behaviour of hardened criminals can be changed with fear? But we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it was fear of our parents that kept most of us on the more or less straight and narrow when we were kids. Today, fearing your parents, or anyone else, is pretty well outlawed, but it’s obvious that fear of getting caught and doing some serious jail time is the most effective crime prevention program available.
One of the contributing causes of crime is the knowledge it will not be seriously punished. Evidence abounds in any jurisdiction you care to examine.
Here are two rules you can take to the bank:
•The incidence of crime escalates in direct proportion to the lack of consequences;
•The more crime that goes unpunished, the more crime you will have.
Rudy Giuliani knew it. Today New Yorkers, even the most liberal among them, know it. And well they should because today New York has the lowest crime rate of all major American cities! From the worst, the most dangerous, to the safest. And all it took was eight years of wisdom and common sense!
I won’t go into all the other accomplishments of eight years of conservative polices, other than to say it wasn’t just the diminution of crime that revolutionized New York. The teacher-pupil ratio was greatly improved. The administration built or renovated more than 73,000 subsidized housing units and acquired more than 2,000 acres of new parkland.
All of this was accomplished while reducing the city payroll by more than 20,000 positions despite greatly increasing the number of police and teachers and substantially lowering taxes!
When Rudy took over New York, the city was bankrupt, pleading for help from other cities. When Rudy moved on, he had a budget surplus of almost $3 billion. The “Big Apple” isn’t rotten anymore.
It’s much the same story in several other cities. Cleveland, for example, pretty well followed New York’s example and is experiencing revitalization akin to that of New York and for the same reasons. On the other hand, cities such as Detroit, where the thug-hugging Left is still firmly in control, things are almost as bad as they ever were. It’s not only in Canada where the Left is blinded by ideology!
Here in Canada we’re doing things pretty much the way they were in New York before Rudy came along and clamped down. On July 28, 2006, Margaret Wente, writing in the Globe and Mail, stated the following:
In some Toronto neighbourhoods, kids are dodging gunfire in the playground. Stray bullets are flying through the windows of people’s homes and landing under their beds. “I don’t let my kinds play outside anymore,” one mother said. Another said: “My kids were pretty scared. Everyone slept with Mommy last night.”
Wente wrote that Toronto City Councillor Michael Thompson remembers growing up as a black kid in a tough neighbourhood but says, “There’s a drug culture that’s developing in the city of Toronto. And I don’t want to support it. I have pictures in my desk of the young boys who’ve been murdered.”
Vancouver has the worst drug problem in North America and, now that Amsterdam is cleaning itself up (according to the Washington Post, July 18, 2005), probably the worst drug problem in the Western world.
You will see more panhandlers and street people in downtown Ottawa and Toronto today than you will see in New York.
Fifty-one of us from the Ottawa area were astonished this past spring during a trip to several European cities to discover that the streets of Dublin, Cork, Paris, and London were devoid of panhandlers and, aside from one man sleeping off a drunk in a Dublin doorway, we could see no evidence of the homeless problem that plagues major Canadian cities. In fact, some of the street people we see in Canada may very well be from New York or London. I mean, after all, in many of our cities, Toronto and Ottawa included, we not only provide the street people and druggies with free needles for “shoot ‘em ups,” but free crack pipe equipment, free condoms, and pretty well free rein to set up housekeeping wherever they choose, including in front of Ottawa and Toronto City Halls, which by the way are far from free!
SEVEN
The California Miracle
It began with two tragedies. In June 1992, beautiful 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds was murdered near her California home by two felons with long prison records. She and her friend Greg Calderson had just finished dessert at a popular Fresno restaurant, The Daily Planet, when two men, riding a stolen motorcycle, grabbed her purse and then shot and killed her. She would have been 19 in four months.
Several months later, October 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klass was kidnapped at her home in Petaluma, California. A countrywide search was launched that ended when her brutalized body was found several months later. Once again the murderer, in this case a man named Richard Allen Davis, was a repeat violent offender. Both cases were widely publicized, and exacerbated by an almost out-of-control crime rate in the state, California residents began to demand, just as in New York, that “somebody do something!” (Strangely, the name of Polly Klass surfaced again recently when police searched Davis’s jail cell for any correspondence he might have received from John Mark Karr after Karr claimed he had murdered six-year-old JonBenet Ramsay. No correspondence was found, but Polly’s father complained bitterly about the subsequent and unwelcome publicity.)
New York had Rudy Giuliani to clean things up. In California it was Kimber Reynold’s father, Mike Reynolds, a wedding photographer, who launched what has become known as the “three strikes you’re out law.” In fact, Mike tells me, the “three strikes” bill was actually drafted in his backyard only three months after his daughter’s violent death.
Despite tremendous opposition from California’s powerful left wing, including much of the Democratic Party’s political machinery, Proposition 184, as the “three strikes” initiative is called, was placed on the November 1993 referendum ballot and approved with a substantial majority. Proposition 184 substantially lengthened prison sentences for persons who had previously been convicted of a violent or serious crime. Specifically, a
