For instance on his website, Rudy claims that he grew New York City’s police force by 12,000 officers between his swearing in as mayor in January 1994 and mid-2000. That’s a flat out lie. Most of the police he’s counting, 7,100 to a man, were already working as housing or transit cops. They were simply folded into the New York Police Department. The merger of departments didn’t increase the NYPD at all, as reported in Cop-Counting Cop-Out.
The writer who ferreted out the material was Viveca Novack. She points out that the real increase in the force’s size was about 3,600, or 10 percent, during the time Giuliani highlights. But Giuliani does not mention that the tab for hiring 3,500 of the officers was partially covered by the federal government, in fact by Rudy’s anathema, Bill Clinton, whose national agenda contained a policy to expand police presence in cities.
As passed by Congress as part of Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, New York City received enough money to cover the first $25,000 of the salaries of some 3,500 new officers from 1997 to 2000, according to the city’s nonpartisan Independent Budget Office.
Rudy does finally, officially, include the addition of the housing and transit cops to his NYPD tally in fiscal 1995. Those make up the nearly 7,100 officers. This number was vaulted again to 12,000 cops added to the force by a boasting but lying Giuliani still later. But, lying aside, Rudy’s administrative juggling did not put any new police on the city’s streets. Those cops were already patrolling crime-ridden subways and housing projects.
The move may have helped the NYPD from an efficiency standpoint, supposedly to eventually save money for the city. But it’s dishonest and misleading to leave the transit and housings cops out of the count in the first place, and then take a bow for adding them. The number on his blog actually cites another inflated number, 7,555, “ . . . the result of merging the NYPD with Transit and Housing Police Depts.”
In fact, in Rudy’s FY 1996 Message of the Mayor budget document, just two months before, the housing and transit police actually had 7,095 officers, excluding civilian workers. Also, going back to when Rudy took office, the number of police officers he uses for the NYPD, 28,000, is inaccurate. It would have been true six months earlier, under Mayor David Dinkins.
But the NYPD numbered 29,450 when Giuliani took the job, according to the FY 1996 Message of the Mayor. By using the earlier number, Rudy takes credit for 1,450 officers that former Mayor Dinkins, who had begun a special anti-crime initiative, Safe Streets, Safe City, had added.
More that Dinkins and Koch did
As BraveNewFilms.Org reports . . .
Who really cleaned up New York? In the early 1990s, former Mayor Dinkins put 6,000 more police officers on the street.
- The city's murder rate fell by 13.7 percent, robbery fell by 14.6 percent, burglary fell by 17.6 percent, and auto theft fell by 23.8 percent.
- The city's crime rate dropped in all seven FBI major-felony categories for the first time in nearly four decades.
- The notorious porn shops and movie houses along 42nd Street had already been shut down.
- The last graffiti-covered subway car had been taken off the line in 1989, under Mayor Ed Koch who preceded Dinkins.
Some 9/11 lies from Rudy
As Novack reports, Rudy’s claim that on 9/11 he had a new command center “up and running within half an hour” is a lie. First, he was forced to evacuate his primary center on the 23rd floor of Building 7, across the street from the world’s largest target, the World Trade Center. Locating it there in the first place was against the repeated advice of Jerry Hauer, NYC’s first emergency management director, not to mention former Police Chief Howard Safir. No backup site was chosen or created at the time.
Furthermore, Rudy did more truth-twisting in his 2002 book, Leadership, when he said that “we arrived about noon” [on 9/11] at the backup site. In fact, it was two-and-a-half hours after the evacuation. And where was he/”we” in between, scrambling like rats for a new ship to board, while firemen, policemen, first responders, and innocent citizens were dying for want of a Central Command Center.
Along these lines, Novack reports that even the 9/11 Commission of Omission raised the issue of misplacing the OEM headquarters at Building 7, next to a major “terrorist target,” the WTC.
The 9/11 Commission Report said, “The [Office of Emergency Management's] headquarters was located at 7 WTC. Some questioned locating it both so close to a previous terrorist target and on the 23rd floor of a building (difficult to access should elevators become inoperable). There was no backup site.”
In a September 19 interview on CNN, reporter John King asked Giuliani about this. Rudy’s response was as follows: “You know how many buildings in New York are targeted by terrorists? I used to know the list cold. It wasn't necessarily the only building that was. And in fact, you want an emergency center sort of in the main area of the city. We also had backup centers. So if you look at the response, actually, to the September 11, we had a virtual center, we had our center up and running within a half hour.”
As stated, there was no backup center. And it took two-and-a-half hours to find and set-up a back-up command center in the middle of an Apocalypse. So he’s flat-out lying.
More criminal lies
Rudy spews more lies in his bid for the presidential nomination. He talks a lot about cutting taxes, one of the main chapters from the Republican bible, when in fact he has inflated [lied about] his number of cuts during his watch as mayor.
In August, he lied that he spent as much time at Ground Zero and exposed himself to the same health-destroying risks as the workers who actually sifted through he rubble. He appears to be in perfectly good health these days, while some 9,000 Ground Zero workers have put forth a class action lawsuit against NYC for health-and-life-threatening conditions and injuries sustained in the pit.
These injuries are being assessed at more than a billion dollars. Under consideration is creating something like the Victim’s Compensation Fund, where some settlement can be made with each victim. Unfortunately, these health costs will be ongoing and hard to put a fixed number on, as was and is being done with the families of victims who perished on 9/11.
And so, we draw the curtain of Giuliani lies for now to give you time to digest these. Trust that more will be forthcoming, including the latest from the New York Times, Giuliani Sells New York as Town He Tamed. Read it and laugh, cry, or ball it up and throw at the wall. In any case, a more fitting verb than “Tamed” would be “Screwed.”
Jerry Mazza is a freelance wrier living in New York. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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