advice to ken:how to transform a city

Over the past seven years, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has completely changed the face of New York City. After years in which the city was beset with problems of soaring crime, collapsing services and decay on the streets, today New York is transformed. By ruthless and bitterly controversial management, the mayor has got to grips with many of the problems that face London today. Here, in an exclusive interview he tells Philip Evans how he did it

RUDOLPH GIULIANI is one of the most acerbic yet successful mayors in New York's history. He says that it was in London, where he was lecturing on security to a group of barristers and stockbrokers as New York's prosecutor back in the early Nineties, that he first understood the scale of the problem New York faced: "At the end of the lecture a guy put up his hand and showed me a card he had been given from his travel agent about coming to New York.

"On it was a list of 10 things on how to avoid being the victim of crime, things like don't use the subway and don't make eye contact. I said to myself: if we're telling people in London not to make eye contact in New York City, we've got to change this. In my first couple of years as mayor, I put a tremendous amount of effort into reducing crime, and a broader concept of improving quality of life.

"Now, I can tell you exactly the number of crimes we had last week in New York City -2,700. We used to have 8,000. I track the exact number every week.

If it doesn't go down, I work with the police department to see how we bring it down. If somebody rides on the subway and experiences threatening behaviour, they will leave the city feeling frightened. We have tried to make them feel and see the changes.

"We have got the homeless people out of the subway. I have a rule: you don't get to sleep on the streets of this city and you don't get to sleep on the subway. We will offer you a place to sleep. We have accommodation centres for homeless people which are decent and hospitable. You can't threaten anybody. You get arrested if you do. If you're an alcoholic or a drug addict, we find a programme for you. If you insist on sleeping in the subway, we have to arrest you. Our policy was very controversial at first.

Now I think it's accepted."

MR GIULIANI also tackled the filth and graffiti which disfigured the subway for so long: "It's critical you get rid of it all. The sanitation department takes any train which is painted with graffiti out of service until it has been cleaned.

Anybody the police arrests for doing graffiti is sent to spend 10 days cleaning up trains. We haven't got rid of all the graffiti in the city but I think that we've got rid of 85 to 90 per cent of it."

In the mayor's first years in the job, his personal style and above all his tough line on crime - made him many enemies, especially in the black community. But as his policies began to get results, and as it became plain that he was prepared to act with equal ruthlessness even towards the Mafia, he began to make converts.

"What you have to be concerned about are results," he says. "Relations are very transitory. Results mean a lot fewer victims of crime, a lot more people working, a lot more people being able to create better lives for themselves, no riots, and no major civil disturbances. You have a city that's perceived in the world as a great city rather than a chaotic city. We have cities in America where there are riots when teams win basketball games. When our teams win we have praise, so the reality is you need results.

"I act exactly the same way towards everyone, I don't believe in discrimination, I don't believe in special privileges for anybody. I expect the same thing of everyone: if they all act the same, they all get the same treatment. If they act differently they get different treatment.

"I'll give you an example with regard to my own ethnic group, Italian American. If I were a panderer rather than someone who is interested in results I would never have prosecuted the Mafia. I would have listened to the people who told me back in 1983-4 that I shouldn't use the word Mafia, because it didn't exist and the Justice Department prohibited the use of the word. My view of it was: there is a Mafia and the best thing for me to do as an Italian American is to try to help get rid of it. It made for very bad relationships for a while with Italian American civil rights groups. They were very angry with me. Now I think I am one of their heroes.

"My concern for the minority communities in New York City is that they make progress towards full inclusion in society. It is really about results, it's about having a safe community."

He believes black extremists such as Louis Farrakhan are losing influence: "I think Farrakhan is very much isolated. I don't think there is the support for radical ideas there was here a few years ago. The ascending middle and upper-middle classes have something to do with it - the rise of education, opportunities, a lot more vitality in this city."

In London many of the city's politicians are strongly critical of the police, especially since

the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In New York the mayor has strongly backed his police force. Civil rights groups have been outraged when Mr Giuliani has supported his officers even after controversial police shootings. Support for the police has been one of the cornerstones of his policy.

"You always have to back the police unless you believe your police department is institutionally corrupt or incompetent, in which case you should change your entire department. There are times in which I have refused to back certain police officers who have done wrong things, criminal things, but as a whole the police

department in New York City is an honourable, effective, good institution."

Of officers accused of wrongdoing in a high-profile shooting, he says: "If I had turned my back on them, I would have the entire police department turn its back on me."

Even as London's police are adopting a new, softer, line on marijuana possession, New York and its mayor claim to operate a zero- tolerance policy on drugs: "My view is you should do everything you can to discourage the use of marijuana and discourage ultimate use of cocaine, heroin and drugs that are worse, though we recognise that marijuana is not the same drug as cocaine and heroin.

"We would not have a 10 per cent decline in crime again this year, 60 per cent in the last six or seven years if we weren't doing a very effective job in dealing with drugs. The core of my crime fighting strategy is drug enforcement. Last year crime started going up at the beginning of the year for the first time. I authorised another 800 to 1,000 police officers a day specifically to try to erase drug deals. We drove crime down by 5 per cent, when it didn't go down in the rest of America. In New York crime is down by another 10 per cent this year."

LONDON is currently suffering a critical shortage of police, and recruitment is close to crisis. Mayor Giuliani says New York has no problem getting policemen: "The [Police] Academy has not historically had trouble attracting officers, despite the high cost of living in New York. But last year, with the economy being so strong we were having some difficulties.

I achieved the 800-1,000 extra officers we wanted, not by hiring more police officers - we were up to 40,000 - but by giving them more overtime. I gave them more money to work an additional seven or eight hours a week, which they liked because it helped with their salaries. Now, with the economy slowing a little, we're not going to have as much difficulty getting officers."

The mayor is a keen admirer of his former subway chief Bob Kiley. If he had not accepted Ken Livingstone's offer to come and run the London Tube, Mr Giuliani wanted him to take over the New York schools system. Does he believe Kiley can turn around our Underground?

"He's a very, very smart man.

He's very well organised and he's been through some of our most difficult problems. Yeah, I think he will do it, I think so."

How has Mr Giuliani been able to defy political gravity for the past seven years, a Republican mayor in overwhelmingly Democrat New York? "I don't know how, but I stick to what I believe in and I keep articulating. I enjoy it. I have a press conference every day, in fact for a while I was having two press conferences every day and press conferences all weekend. Fridays, I do a radio show and the public gets to question me. Then I have a press conference on a Saturday or a Sunday so I average five to six press conferences a week.

The President averages pretty much one

per 12 months. Most governors average about one a month. That's how you deal with political opposition. I'm out there looking for every opportunity I can get to state my position directly to the people, rather than have them totally interpret me through the written press. If I do that I'm never going to get a full explanation of why I'm trying to do something. I use radio a lot and I use television a lot."

Three months ago, Ken Liv-ingstone visited New York and met Mr Giuliani, two politicians about as different as you could get. The New Yorker believes that however you start out, being a big city forces even most radical politicians to become pragmatists: "You become much more conservative doing this job, whatever your political position was before. Running a city makes you practical if you're going to run it correctly."

La Guardia, New York's legendarily feisty mayor in the 1940s, has been Mr Giu-liani's role model - indeed, he doesn't seem to have much respect for any holder of the office in between. He thrives on rows, whether with minority communities, civil liberties groups, or Yasser Arafat after the mayor personally ordered the Palestinian leader to be evicted from the opera house one night: "I'm convinced that being willing to fight is the key to being a very effective mayor of the city.

"I have a great painting of La Guardia. It's split into eight frames. The first shows him walking into his office in the morning. The next six makes it look as if the building he's in has exploded he's throwing papers around, doing this, doing that, in all different direc-

tions. The eighth frame he's walking out with his briefcase. That describes this job.

I wouldn't describe my way as having arguments, I would describe it as debating. I love watching your parliamentary system. I would love something like that in this city."

NEW YORK has a long history as a haven for migrants. Significantly, today immigration is not an issue in the city, as asylum seekers are in London: "I consider legal immigration to be very very valuable to our growth," says the mayor. "People who take the time to come legally generally come here with the purpose of working hard to better their lives. The US south-west border, Texas and California, have more of an immigration problem than we do. We have what I call an undocumented immi-

cracies that resist business principles being applied to them to turn them around, the way we turned around the police department, the welfare system, taxes."

IT WOULD be unthinkable for Mr Giuliani to offer any encouragement to public strikers, as Ken Livingstone has done to the RMT union's Tube strikers in London. He recounts with relish how he is currently being sued by the Legal Aid Society, which used to have a contract to provide New York's services for defendants: "They went on strike and I immediately cancelled the contract. A mayor cannot accept a slight against the publicit doesn't matter whether they are police officers, it doesn't matter whether they are firefight-ers - if services are on contract for the city, you have to be strong."

Mr Giuliani's second and final four-year term as mayor ends in the New Year.

Even his political opponents acknowledge that he has transformed the city.

He has conquered problems in New York that today still baffle London.

There is intense speculation about what the mayor will do next, after his US Senate bid foundered in the face of a prostate cancer operation and the revelation of (yet another) front-page extramarital affair. Today, at 56, his energy and ambition seem as great as ever.

I asked if he might move to Washington, or seek another political job outside New York: "What, you think I'm going to go and live somewhere else or something? No, I'm a New Yorker.

"One of the reasons I think I've been able to do this job and be successful is that I think I really understand this city and I love it. I have a major love affair with the city of New York."

Copyright 2001
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