SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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PLEASE NOTE: The following transcript is a portion of the official hearing record of the Committee on Government Reform. Additional material pertinent to this transcript may be found on the web site of the committee at [http://www.house.gov/reform]. Complete hearing records are available for review at the committee offices and also may be purchased at the U.S. Government Printing Office.
56–931 CC
1999
NATIONAL PROBLEMS, LOCAL SOLUTIONS:
FEDERALISM AT WORK
PART I
FIGHTING CRIME IN THE TRENCHES
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
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ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
MARCH 3, 1999
Serial No. 106–7
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/reform
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York
STEPHEN HORN, California
JOHN L. MICA, Florida
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia
DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
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STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio
MARSHALL ''MARK'' SANFORD, South Carolina
BOB BARR, Georgia
DAN MILLER, Florida
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas
LEE TERRY, Nebraska
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois
GREG WALDEN, Oregon
DOUG OSE, California
PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin
JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California
HELEN CHENOWETH, Idaho
HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
TOM LANTOS, California
ROBERT E. WISE, Jr., West Virginia
MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
GARY A. CONDIT, California
PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington, DC
CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
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ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
JIM TURNER, Texas
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
HAROLD E. FORD, Jr., Tennessee
———
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont (Independent)
KEVIN BINGER, Staff Director
DANIEL R. MOLL, Deputy Staff Director
DAVID A. KASS, Deputy Counsel and Parliamentarian
CARLA J. MARTIN, Chief Clerk
PHIL SCHILIRO, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
Hearing held on March 3, 1999
Statement of:
Giuliani, Rudolph W., mayor, New York City
Shorstein, Harry L., state attorney, Jacksonville, FL; John F. Timoney, police commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department; and Robert Cheetham, senior analyst, Philadelphia Police Department, Crime Mapping Unit
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Burton, Hon. Dan, a Representative in Congress from the State of Indiana, prepared statement of
Cheetham, Robert, senior analyst, Philadelphia Police Department, Crime Mapping Unit, prepared statement of
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Giuliani, Rudolph W., mayor, New York City, prepared statement of
Horn, Hon. Stephen, a Representative in Congress from the State of California, information concerning early childhood development programs
Owens, Hon. Major R., a Representative in Congress from the State of New York, prepared statement of
Shorstein, Harry L., state attorney, Jacksonville, FL, prepared statement of
Timoney, John F., police commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department, prepared statement of
Walden, Hon. Greg, a Representative in Congress from the State of Oregon, prepared statement of
NATIONAL PROBLEMS, LOCAL SOLUTIONS:
FEDERALISM AT WORK
PART I
FIGHTING CRIME IN THE TRENCHES
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1999
House of Representatives,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:11 a.m., in room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dan Burton (chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Burton, Morella, Shays, Ros-Lehtinen, Horn, Barr, Hutchinson, Terry, Biggert, Ryan, Owens, Mink, Maloney, Fattah, Kucinich, Blagojevich, Davis of Illinois.
Staff present: Kevin Binger, staff director; Daniel R. Moll, deputy staff director; Barbara Comstock, chief counsel; David Kass, deputy counsel and parliamentarian; John [Timothy] Griffin, senior counsel; Mark Corallo, director of communications; Corinne Zaccagnini, systems administrator; Carla J. Martin, chief clerk; Lisa Smith-Arafune, deputy chief clerk; Tom Bossert, assistant to the chief of staff; John Mastranadi, investigator; Jacqueline Moran, legislative aide; Phil Schiliro, minority staff director; Phil Barnett, minority chief counsel; Cherri Branson, David Rapallo, and Micheal Yeager, minority counsels; and Jean Gosa, minority staff assistant.
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Mr. BURTON. The committee will come to order.
Good morning. A quorum being present, the Committee on Government Reform will come to order. I ask unanimous consent that all Members' and witnesses' opening statements be included in the record.
Without objection, so ordered.
Today's hearing is the first in a series that will take a close look at the relationship between State and local governments and the Federal Government.
Many of the most innovative and successful public-policy reforms enacted in recent years originated at the State and local levels. From crime and welfare reform, to education and taxes, State and local governments have led the way in reforms.
For example, much of the highly successful welfare-reform law that we passed in the 104th Congress was taken directly from reforms enacted in Wisconsin by Governor Tommy Thompson.
President Clinton vetoed welfare reform twice, but once the law was enacted, it revolutionized the welfare system across America, and the welfare rolls declined dramatically.
Also in response to the Governors and the mayors, the Republican Congress curbed the practice of imposing unfunded Federal mandates, which placed burdensome demands on State and local governments. And while Governor Huckabee has abolished the marriage penalty from the income-tax laws in Arkansas, we are still working to eliminate the marriage penalty at the Federal level.
So once again we have a Governor and the State far ahead of the Federal Government. The successful reforms in many States and local governments have been widely reported. However, less attention has been paid to determining the appropriate role that the Federal Government should play in helping them solve their problems.
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So we want to hear from State and local leaders across this Nation on this issue. I think it is important to learn what has enabled these leaders to govern successfully.
Over the next several months, this committee will hold a series of hearings entitled, ''National Problems, Local Solutions: Federalism at Work.'' Through these hearings, the committee will highlight successful and innovative reforms at the State and local levels.
The committee will show that many of the solutions to the problems facing America originate at the State and local levels and not at Washington, DC, determine which existing Federal programs best assist States and cities, explore new ways that the Federal Government can help State and local governments in the most cost-effective way, and participate in the national dialog regarding the respective roles of the local, State, and Federal Governments in addressing America's problems.
An examination of these issues fit squarely within the committee's jurisdiction over inter-governmental relations.
The States have often been described as the laboratories for change where new policy ideas are created, developed, and tested. Ideas are measured by the results they produce, and successful ideas are shared and disseminated from State to State.
As new ideas are implemented, and as public policy changes at the State and local levels, the Congress and the administration must reassess the role of the Federal Government. As old assumptions and ideas are replaced by innovative and successful reforms, it is reasonable to take a fresh look at the role of the Federal Government and its relationships to State and local governments.
Today's hearing, entitled, ''National Problems, Local Solutions: Federalism at Work, Part I—Fighting Crime in the Trenches,'' is the first installment in our series of hearings that does exactly that, reassess the role of the Federal Government.
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We will hear from three public officials, a mayor, a prosecutor, and a police commissioner. They have all enjoyed great success in fighting crime at the local level.
First, we will hear from the mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani. Mayor Giuliani has been a leader in fighting crime for almost 30 years. He first served as an assistant U.S attorney in New York. He then became an Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Gerald Ford.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan named him Associate Attorney General, the third highest position in the Department of Justice.
Mayor Giuliani also served as the U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York during the Reagan administration. And in 1993, he was elected the 107th mayor for the great city of New York.
The statistics describing Mayor Giuliani's first term in office are nothing short of staggering. New York City has the lowest crime rate among the nine American cities with a population over 1 million. Overall crime is down 50 percent, and murder is down by 69 percent.
Mayor Giuliani is in an ideal position to suggest ways the Federal Government can help cities fight crime. While crime is on the decline nationally, New York City's success has contributed disproportionately to the national trend. For example, from 1993 to 1997, New York City accounted for 38 percent of the total reduction in the FBI index crimes in cities with a population over 100,000, 28 of the reduction in homicides and 63 percent of the reduction in larceny theft.
In 1997 alone, 146 percent more crimes were committed in Detroit and 95 percent more in Dallas than in New York City. In other words, crime has been reduced to a far greater degree in New York City than the national average.
It deserves mention that New York City's success in reducing crime was accompanied by a 21-percent decrease in the use-of-force allegations against police officers from 1995 to 1998.
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Now I would just like to say as an aside, that I have been to New York City many, many times over the years, both as a private citizen and as a public office holder, and during the first term of Mayor Giuliani, I want to tell you, New York City has been transformed. You can walk through Manhattan without any fear. There are policemen in cubicles on every other corner, or every corner. The area has been cleaned up. The restaurants are really nice.
I just want to tell you, it was like a transformation. And Mayor Giuliani, from one citizen to a great mayor, you have done an extraordinary job and people across this country ought to visit New York City. [Laughter.]
This is an unsolicited testimonial to try to get you a little tourism. [Laughter continues.]
Now, you see, you've got some applause from one of your Congressmen. [More laughter.]
On our second panel, we will have State Attorney Harry Shorstein of Jacksonville, FL, and Police Commissioner John Timoney of Philadelphia.
After serving in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, for which he was highly decorated, Mr. Shorstein returned to Florida, where he gained experience as both a defense attorney and a prosecutor. He served as the division head in the office of the public defender and subsequently as the division head and chief assistant State attorney. Mr. Shorstein has served as the elected State attorney for Jacksonville since 1991.
Mr. Shorstein has received high praise for his juvenile justice reforms, which combine prevention with punishment and rehabilitation. Since the implementation of Mr. Shorstein's juvenile justice strategy, juvenile crime in Jacksonville has plummeted. Murder is down 78 percent, and vehicle theft is down 58 percent.
According to a recent Florida State University study, Jacksonville's approach to juvenile crime under the leadership of Mr. Shorstein has averted more than 8,700 crimes between 1992 and 1995. Mr. Shorstein is a Democrat, but his approach to juvenile justice has enjoyed widespread bipartisan respect. He has earned the support of Jacksonville's Republican mayor, a Democrat sheriff, and a Jacksonville City Council.
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He has briefed Democratic U.S. Senators at their 1998 issues conference and Republican U.S. Senators at their 1998 retreat.
The juvenile justice model developed in Jacksonville by Mr. Shorstein deserves national attention. It has been featured on CBS' ''60 Minutes,'' ''The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,'' and ''NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw,'' among many others.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney will be joining Harry Shorstein on our second panel. The Commissioner was born in Ireland.
Won't be long until we will all be Irish. Isn't St. Patrick's Day coming up here pretty quick? [Laughter.]
He was born in Ireland and began his law-enforcement career in 1969 as a rookie police officer in New York City. The Commissioner rose through the ranks and was appointed first deputy commissioner on January 13, 1995, the second highest rank in the New York City Police Department. Commissioner Timoney was appointed police commissioner on March 9, 1998 in Philadelphia.
Although he has been a commissioner less than a year, there are already signs of his progress. Murders are down 19 percent, narcotics arrests are up 70 percent, and arrests overall are up 17 percent. One of Commissioner Timoney's most innovative reforms, Operation Sunrise, an anti-drug initiative, has resulted in 2,363 arrests, and the seizure of $1.9 million in drugs, 73 guns, and 122 vehicles.
Commissioner Timoney is also implementing high-tech solutions to stalk criminals and reduce crime. Under his plan, police personnel input timely, accurate crime data into a computer system linked throughout Philadelphia. Analysis of the data through mapping techniques allows Commissioner Timoney to distribute his resources where they are most needed.
He has recruited a former economics professor and British police science expert under Margaret Thatcher's government, Gordon Wasserman, to assist with this high-tech program.
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In the wake of the success our witnesses have experienced over the past few years, it's time to ask these questions.
How has the Federal Government impacted your success in fighting crime? Has the Federal Government hindered your crime-fighting efforts? And, if so, why? What future steps should we take to assist your crime-fighting efforts?
Today's witnesses will help the committee answer these questions. The Congress needs to know when to help, how to help, and when to step out of the way.
We need to be a partner with State and local governments, not a hindrance and not a nuisance.
I'd like to welcome all of our witnesses to the committee. We are delighted you are here with us today, and we look forward to hearing your testimony. And with that, we will start off with Mayor Giuliani.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Dan Burton follows:]
INSERT OFFSET FOLIOS 1 TO 4 HERE
[The official committee record contains additional material here.]
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. BURTON. Yes, sir.
Mr. OWENS. May I have a chance to make one opening statement on my side.
Mr. BURTON. Oh, yes, sir. We will be glad to—we will yield to my colleague, Major Owens, for an opening statement. And if any of my other colleagues would like to have an opening statement, we will yield to them too.
Mr. Owens.
Mr. OWENS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, Mr. Mayor.
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I want to start by congratulating you, Mr. Mayor. As a fellow New Yorker, I applaud your leadership in lowering the crime rate in New York City. Every citizen, including my constituents in the 11th Congressional District, benefits from the comfort level achieved in neighborhoods over the past few years.
They also benefit from the improvement in the city's image, which enhances our huge tourism industry and generates budget surpluses, which one day, because I also serve on the Education Committee here, one day I hope will be used to replace some of the 250 coal-burning furnaces in public schools, which pollute the schoolyard air and add to the children's asthma crisis that we have in the city.
I also hope the surplus from the tourism revenue will one day be used to build new schools and end the widespread practice of overcrowded schools, which forces students to eat lunch at 10 a.m. because the cafeterias can only function by feeding children in shifts.
These are some of the problems I think the surplus accumulated from our successful tourism industry should be dedicated to. What I'm saying, Mr. Mayor, is that the stakes are high for all of us. When law and order are pursued with a respect for civil rights and justice, we all benefit.
However, when a preoccupation with a scorecard on crime drives the crime-fighting effort to the point of diminishing returns, then all of those benefits face the danger of sudden evaporation. One or two massive riots in any large city could overnight greatly alter the image of that city. One immediate consequence would be a drastic decline in revenue from a much-needed tourism industry.
The greatest consequence, however, of such an urban upheaval, would be the damage done to the psyche of its citizens and the poisoning of relations among its diverse groups.
My hope here is that New York City has maximized its short-term benefits from reduced crime. My understanding is, and we all applaud that—however, we face a loss of these benefits over the long haul because your administration now seems to have an obsessive preoccupation with a quest for some imaginary trophy to be awarded to the No. 1 crime fighter in the Nation.
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The casuality of this obsession, is civil rights and justice in New York City. There are immediate dangers looming, and the tips of the iceberg are clearly visible in the series of unjust police atrocities that have occurred over the last 2 years.
The recent shooting of Amadou Diallo has moved the city closer to a negative climate that could be very harmful. The cases of Diallo and Abner Louima are well known. However, within the neighborhoods where citizens feel they are targeted, the accounts of serious police abuses are endless—within my district, the accounts are endless.
First, people feel there is a strangeness there that surrounding the fact that police killings, and police atrocities of any kind, never occur with white victims in white neighborhoods. The victims are never white.
This is 1999, not 1963, but those of us who were in positions of urban leadership in the sixties, can now clearly see some unfortunate parallels. We should all read the Kerner-Lindsay Commission—called the Kerner report usually, but Mayor Lindsay was the mayor of New York City at that time and also was co-chairman of that commission.
That report talked about the alienation of large segments of a city's population and how it creates what they called two societies, and how the highly visible and dramatic police abuses in these situations always are the spark plugs to set off spontaneous violence and riots.
Before the New York City model is offered to the Nation, and I'm glad to see the positive features of that model offered to the Nation, before that is done, however, I strongly urge that you examine its weaknesses in the areas of civil rights and justice for ordinary citizens in their day-to-day interaction with the police.
The communal environment of our great city has been polluted with an extremism that must be checked immediately. I have attached a set of very familiar questions related to civilian review boards, special prosecutors to police abuse cases, and the nationwide process of requiring residency for local police.
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These are logical, reasonable, common-sense demands that you have heard often, and they are often repeated. They, nevertheless, no matter how often repeated, still make good sense. It is imperative that these demands are addressed, will be addressed, if the long-term law-and-order benefit of what we have now is to continue over the long term, is to be achieved and preserved in New York City and in America in general.
And I have here five questions, and one of those questions asks for statistics, which relate to the perception of people in my district and neighborhoods like mine, who think that they are victims unnecessarily. So among these questions, which I hope you will get back to us with answers on, to the committee, are statistics on the number of parking tickets written by police precincts so we can see which neighborhoods get the most parking tickets, the number of cars towed by the police by precinct, the number of youth arrested, the number of them prosecuted by precinct, the number of whites killed in New York City by the police, the number of non-whites killed, the amount of money paid by New York City in settlement of police misconduct cases, the number of white youth in juvenile detention centers.
Some of my constituents told me the other day that they worked in juvenile detention centers and they have never seen a white youth there. Where do white youth who are in trouble go in the city? And is that another example of segregation, special treatment, that our youth are subjected to?
So these are pretty common-sense questions. Most of you heard them before. I think they are imperative if we are to go forward and realize over a long term the benefits that have been gained by the crime reduction in the short term.
The population of the city must be an ally and not an enemy.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Major R. Owens follows:]
INSERT OFFSET FOLIOS 5 TO 8 HERE
[The official committee record contains additional material here.]
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Mr. BURTON. Thank you, Mr. Owens. We will get back to questions shortly so some of those questions you asked can be answered.
Are there further opening statements by Members of the committee, further comments? On our side? Any on your side?
Danny. Mr. Davis.
Since I'm named Danny, sometimes I let it slip and use that first name first.
Mr. DAVIS. Well, you know, we are so close together, Indiana and Illinois, and so we do that.
Mr. BURTON. OK, buddy.
Mr. DAVIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I certainly would like to welcome and thank the witnesses, New York Mayor Giuliani, State Attorney Shorstein, and Police Commissioner Timoney for taking time to share with us today, and look forward to your comments and insights.
It is my understanding that the panel, in all probability, will assert that the role of the Federal Government is not an appropriate one in much of the crime policy area. However, the approach to fighting crime is an issue that should not be overlooked.
I maintain that an individual is innocent until proven guilty, and this should be kept in mind at all times. However, oftentimes civil liberties have been threatened at time by police misuse, abuse, and misconduct. I know that in my own hometown of Chicago, IL, we have had several cases of concern where it is evident that there is a deepening crisis of police-community relations.
Names like Jeremiah Mearday, Jorge Guillen, and Andrew Sledd come to mind as only a few. I know that many times those in the African American and Latino communities are weighed down by the burdens of danger and fear. Our communities are visited with the plagues of crime and drugs. As we continue to struggle to overcome these plagues, we are further weighted down by an even-more devastating epidemic of police brutality.
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This has caused a rising tide of disaffection and mistrust in our community justice system. Not only does police brutality directly threaten our life and safety, but it also destroys the trust and cooperation between communities and police that is necessary if we are to effectively address the problems of crime and drugs and justice.
We also need to address the issue of new controls on those who engage in police brutality and misconduct. In Chicago, for example, there are over 8,500 complaints filed of excessive force from 1993 to 1995. And almost three-quarters of the cases were never resolved.
The failure of current police procedures to address the issues of alleged police brutality have been documented well in community forums, hearings, and the newspapers.
I'd like to submit, Mr. Chairman, some of these articles for the record. I also, again, want to thank the witnesses, indicate that we look forward to their testimony, and I trust that at the end of the day, not only will we have gleaned information relative to our ability to fight crime and reduce criminal activity, but hopefully, we can also find a way to create a more harmonious relationship between those whom we expect to enforce the law and those who must abide by it.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to your testimony.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Greg Walden follows:]
INSERT OFFSET FOLIOS 9 HERE
[The official committee record contains additional material here.]
Mr. BURTON. Thank the gentleman.
Mayor Giuliani, welcome. We are looking forward to your statement. You might want to even allude to some of the questions that have been asked so far. We will have a question-and-answer session after your opening remarks.
Mayor Giuliani.
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STATEMENT OF RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI, MAYOR, NEW YORK CITY
Mayor GIULIANI. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with you some of the things that are going on in New York City and how we can improve the relationship between city government, State government, local government, and the Federal Government.
As I think you all know, New York City is the Nation's largest city. We are also the world's most diverse city; 100 languages or more are spoken in the city of New York. Every racial, religious, ethnic group and subgroup is represented in the city of New York. And it is a source of a lot of challenges, obviously, but of probably the greatest strength that the city has, that people of so many different backgrounds, so many different points of view, religions, cultures, join together in one place.
And it gives the city a vibrancy. It gives the city a culture. And it offers really a proving ground for solving human problems that's probably on a scale unmatched anywhere. Although, in many, many ways, New York City is very much like every other American city. It goes through the same sets of problems, the same sets of difficulties. The scale of our problems is sometimes larger. And sometimes when we have solutions, the scale of the solution has to necessarily be even larger.
When I became mayor of New York City, I believed very, very strongly that the city of New York was in a tremendous crisis. We had lost 320,000 jobs in a 2 1/2-year period. That was the largest job loss we had since the depression.
If you looked at the city from the point of view of the way people looked at it from outside the city of New York—and many people shared that view inside—the city was thought of as the crime capital of America, and the welfare capital of America. It was thought of as a place that was too frightening for people to come to. And it was thought of as a place that did not offer people opportunity.
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I tried very hard in the 5 1/2, 6 years to turn that around. We began with crime. We began with crime because it was the most basic problem that we had to solve. Until people can feel reasonably secure about their well-being, then nothing else can work. Schools can't work; businesses can't work. People want to leave.
There was a poll taken in 1993, which is the year I ran for mayor, in which about 70 to 75 percent of the people in the city said that if they had a choice, they would rather live somewhere else. That represented the views of the poorest people, the richest people, the middle-class people. Roughly, all shared that same view.
Now, those numbers have roughly been reversed. That still means that there are 20 to 30 percent of the people that haven't felt the opportunity, haven't felt the change, still feel alienated. And it's our job, city government, and all of ours, to reach them and to see if we can make them share in the turnaround that has taken place.
But it is a substantial turnaround. And I'm going to focus on one or two aspects of it.
We have talked about crime. In the area of crime, the city of New York really has had a great deal of success based upon many things. I'm going to emphasize three of them as things that can be replicated elsewhere, and much of which is being done elsewhere. It isn't just unique to the city of New York: the CompStat program, the broken windows theory, and drug enforcement. I believe that those are the three main reasons why crime is down as dramatically as it is.
The CompStat program is a program of measuring crime every single day. We have 77 police precincts in New York City. Every single day we gather all of the crime statistics from each one of those precincts. They go into a computer program. And then on a weekly, monthly, regular basis they can be analyzed. So we can determine if crime is going up or if crime is going down. And if it is going up, why? And what has to be done about it.
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It allows for two things to happen. It allows for very, very intense strategic planning to take place so that in a city as large as New York, 7.5 million people with sometimes as many at 2 to 3 million visitors, you can focus on where the increase in car theft is taking place, where the increase in mugging is taking place, where the increase in rapes are taking place. And then you can develop strategies for reducing it before it becomes a major problem.
In the past, crime statistics were used after the fact. We looked at crime statistics a year after the crimes actually took place. Now we look at the crime statistics essentially the day after the crime takes place so that we don't let crime get out of control and that we can bring about crime reduction.
That's played a very, very large part in the crime reductions that have taken place.
The second is the broken windows theory, which simply means that you cannot allow things to fester for long periods of time that you might regard as small things.
Senator Moynihan described this in 1993 with the phrase that always stuck in my mind. He gave a speech in the city of New York at a time in which we were averaging 2,000 murders a year, which had become records, even for the city of New York. And he said that we were engaged in a process of defining deviancy down. What he meant by that was we were looking at deteriorating standards of human behavior: graffiti, street-level prostitution, street-level drug dealing, aggressive behavior on the streets. And we were ignoring it because we felt we had no capacity to deal with it, that we had more important problems to deal with.
So we were finding excuses and rationalizations for deteriorating standards of behavior. He called it defining deviancy down.
It seemed to me, when I listened to that, and I was planning to run for mayor then, that we had to, essentially, just reverse the ship. Rather than defining deviancy down, we should set higher standards. And we should continually try to ask people to act better, to act better toward each other, to be more civil. And if we did that, we would start to ultimately affect even the more serious crime.
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Professor Wilkens, of Harvard and later Northwestern and other universities, wrote a book about this about 25 years ago. He called it the broken window theory. It meant if you have a building and somebody breaks a window and you say to yourself, I'm too busy with my business, I'm too busy with everything else to worry about that one broken window, it is very likely that in a short period of time somebody will break another window and another window. Eventually, they will break all the windows in your building, and your building will fall down because you thought the first problem was so small you didn't have to deal with it.
On the other hand, if somebody breaks your window and you fix it right away, and you find the person who did it, and you make it clear to them that this is unacceptable behavior, that you can't destroy property of other people, and this is an important thing, then you are probably going to save your whole building. And if you keep fixing those windows right away, eventually, they will get the point.
So other cities that tried the broken window theory before New York, smaller cities, by and large, cities with populations of 100,000, 120,000, 150,000. In 1994 I put that theory in place in the largest city in America. I was faced every time we did with tremendous cynicism as to whether it could work in New York. New Yorkers love to say, ''It can't work here.''
And the fact is, it has worked better in New York now than in some of the smaller cities. And it means that we are improving our standard of behavior.
I have some charts. If I could show you these things in charts, it may actually illustrate things even more effectively than a lot of words.
The first chart is a chart of the total FBI index crime complaint. And what it demonstrates is that in 1998 New York City had the lowest level of crime since the FBI started measuring crime; 1968 was the first year they began measuring it. And that crime decline represents about a 50 percent decline since the time that I have been in office.
And 1998 was the safest year that New York City had since before 1968.
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The second one, which is maybe even more dramatic, because it is the area of crime that unfortunately you can measure the most accurately, murder, New York City, as I said, was averaging about 2,000 murders a year in the early 1990's. In fact, we hadn't had a year with less than 1,000 murders at any time in the 1970's, 1980's, or 1990's. Last year we had 629 murders, which was the lowest number that we had since 1966.
For example, Mr. Davis, and this is not meant in any way to create a conflict with Chicago. I think you have a great mayor, and there are things you are doing in your city that I wish we were doing in our city, like the reform of the school system, which I think is a model for the rest of the country.
But Chicago, which has half the population of New York City, had 700 murders last year. And that was a decline. New York City, which has double the population, had 629.
So the city has established itself, not only as the safest large city in America, but when you compare cities with populations of 100,000 or more, I believe we are now city No. 167. So a city that was thought of as the crime capital is now seen as a place that has, to a large extent, become a much safer place.
Crime statistics for a whole city, however, are hard to measure. And I think Mr. Owens made that point before. I think that you have got to look at individual neighborhoods—you almost have to look at individual blocks. The CompStat program that we have allows us to do that.
Washington Heights in Brooklyn—in Manhattan, rather—is an area that used to be the cocaine center for the city of New York and for much of the Northeast. I had the benefit, before I was mayor, of being a U.S. attorney, for 5 1/2 years. So I guess maybe I had a preparation in understanding where the problems were.
But this was a community that was at the center of the crack epidemic for much of the Northeast and much of America in the early 1980's. The crime rates in the 33rd and 34th precincts in Washington Heights were among the highest. And it was one of the areas of intense activity when I was a U.S. attorney, including an area in which we lost police officers to drug dealers who slaughtered them in the line of duty.
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I'm very, very happy to report that, you know, crime is down in Washington Heights by even more than in the rest of the city. Washington Heights has an 80-percent decline in murder; the city has a 70-percent decline in murder.
In 1993, the year before I came into office, there were 75 people murdered in Washington Heights. Last year, there were 15. In my view, Mr. Owens, 15 is too many, but a lot better than 75 of 1993.
And the same thing is true for overall crime decline. It is down 51 percent. It means the people in Washington Heights, and that is a multi-lingual, diverse community, now can live in a lot more freedom, a lot more liberty, can pursue their own opportunities, and have a much different quality of life than they had back in 1993.
One other community, which is in East New York, the 75th precinct, which I know Mr. Owens knows well—I picked that precinct because I knew you were going to be here and I wanted to show you the results in the precinct. But also because in 1993 that precinct led the city in murders. It had 125 murders in that one police precinct in the city of New York.
Last year, it had 41, for a decline of 67.2 percent, which is a major reduction in crime. And I thank God that as I talk to you now this year, there haven't been any, which we hope continues for the rest of the year.
And there hasn't been a period of time in which there haven't been murders for this long in that precinct for something like 35 to 36 years. And we hope that that continues.
The point that Mr. Owens made before, I also tried to take a look at on a citywide basis and on a local basis, and that is, what is happening with the behavior of police officers?
Are police officers becoming less restrained? Are they acting in an improper way? Are they using their weapons more, let's say, in order to produce for us these declines in crime?
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And I understand and share the shock and horror at the terrible incidents that take place when police officers act improperly, when police officers act violently, when police officers act brutally.
When I was a U.S. attorney, I not only prosecuted drug dealers and prosecuted organized criminals, during my time as assistant U.S. attorney and a U.S. attorney, I prosecuted many police officers, police officers for corruption, police officers for brutality, police officers for acting in a criminal way—and feel that they have to be held to a higher standard.
But we can't allow the understandable emotions that emerge from a horrible incident to cloud reality and to cloud truth. And we can't allow perceptions, if they are false, to overwhelm truth. Otherwise, we are really not advancing society.
The reality is, and I think this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, that the New York City Police Department, as it has reduced crime, has even by a greater extent reduced its own use of weapons, reduced its own use of force. The New York City Police Department, as it matches up with other police departments in this country, it's one of the most restrained.
In this city, for example, in Washington, DC—and again this is not meant at all, because I understand all of the internal problems. Some cities do one thing well and other cities do something else well. In this city, there is a six-time greater chance that you will be shot by a police officer per capita than in the city of New York. In the city of Dallas, there is like a four-times greater chance.
New York City is among the most restrained police departments in the country in the use of weapons and in the shooting of their guns. That doesn't mean that they can't make a mistake. That doesn't mean that some of them can't act criminally, which is tragic and unfortunate.
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But it does mean when that does take place, much like if a terrible murder takes place in New York City today, between and among civilians, I could—we all could—feed into the impression that murder is running rampant in the city of New York, or we can say to people, this is a tragic, awful thing. Justice should be brought to this situation.
But the reality is that murder is down 70 percent. And whereas there used to be 125 murders here, there are now only 15. Or the reality is that there have been 75, there now only 25.
So, I hope that offers some other way of looking at this because it is enormously important, where if we are going to have reality square with perception rather than having false perceptions rule us.
Let me see if I can give you some of the reality of what has taken place in the last 4 or 5 years. While citywide arrests—if we could put that chart up—while citywide arrests have gone up to record highs, which is one of the ways in which we have also brought down crime, we arrest a lot of people, particularly drug dealers, police officers using their guns has decreased by 50 percent, by over 50 percent, almost 51 percent.
And, just to give you the actual numbers, back in 1993, there were 212 people who were shot intentionally by police officers in the city of New York. That was a time in which we had 10,000 fewer police officers. We now have 10,000 police officers, and in 1998, there were only 111 people that were shot by the police.
That's a per-capita decline of 67 percent. So, before people attack an entire police department and make it appear as if they are bringing about this level of record safety by shooting wildly, the reality is just the opposite. They have reduced dramatically, even more than they have reduced crime, the use of their weapons, the times that they shoot, and the times that they use violence with regard to effecting arrests.
Can they do better? Yes.
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Should we avoid all of these incidents if we can? Yes. Yes we should.
And are we trying to do that? The answer to that is also yes.
The CompStat that I mentioned to you that measures crime in every precinct of the city based on an innovation of Police Commissioner Safir of a year and a half ago, now measures all civilian complaints, all reports of abuse. So when a precinct commander comes into the police department every 2 or 3 months and is being evaluated, in the 75th precinct, for example, with regard to what's happening to murders, what's happening to rapes, are there more car thefts, are there problems that the community is having from the point of view of crime, one of the things that is featured in that review is, have your civilian complaints gone up or down? Have your allegations of use of force gone up or down? If they have gone up, what are you doing about it? Is it a particular officer that is causing the problem? Is it a group of officers?
So I think the reduction in the use of force by police officers, which is dramatic, comes about from deliberate policies that are intended to accomplish that.
And I would be happy to answer any more or additional questions about that.
I would like to touch on quickly, two other areas, other than crime, because I think it illustrates the ways in which we can cooperate together.
One is welfare reform, which you mentioned before, Mr. Chairman. And then the other is the area of taxes.
In the area of welfare reform, we have reduced the number of people on welfare by about 460,000 to 470,000 people since 1995. We began our welfare reform program about a year and a half before the Federal welfare reform bill passed and the President eventually signed it.
It has been enormously successful. And what we are doing is trying to substitute work for welfare every place that we can and in every way that we can. And if I could urge on you and on the Members of Congress, both with regard to crime reform and welfare reform, the maximum degree of flexibility that you give us is by far and without any doubt the best way to allow us to accomplish the reduction and the changes that are taking place.
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Our welfare offices by August of this year will all become job centers. Instead of the sign that used to be on the door that said Welfare Office—actually the sign used to say, Income Support Center—we are changing all the signs and we are putting up the sign that says Job Center. But it is more than just a sign.
The purpose of that sign is to turn the people inside that office into employment counselors. And when you walk into a Welfare Office now in New York City, and you ask for welfare, out of compassion, understanding, and a much, much higher form of wisdom, we ask you: ''What kind of job would you like? What have you done? What's your work history?''
If you have a work history, we try to followup that work history with finding you a job in the area in which you have a work history. If you don't have a work history, we try to create one for you so that you begin to have a work history because that is the only way in which you are going to get a job. And we are, to the largest extent possible, trying to turn our welfare offices into employment offices.
The change has been dramatic. The welfare numbers are down below 700,000 since in the first time since the 1960's; we went to a million people on welfare in 1970 and virtually stayed forever. But the most dramatic change that I can't measure for you, and I would invite you to come and see it.
I would invite you to come to the job centers, take a visit, have them take you around and talk to the people who work for the city of New York in the job centers now, the people who work for our Human Resources Administration. And what you will find is, that they now have a very, very positive, very refreshing outlook about their work, which used to be very depressing work 5 or 6 years ago.
Just registering more and more people for welfare doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment. It gives you a sense of helping, but it doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment. Finding jobs for people, having competition between job centers that used to be welfare offices over who can find jobs and who can find them more quickly, and which jobs are the most lasting, creates a real sense of positive attitude. You are really helping someone. I think this is something in which we need to make further refinements, because a lot of the regulations that used to exist in the Federal agencies that administer welfare have not been changed, even though you changed the law.
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They still impose enormous mandates on us, enormous burdens that should not exist, and tremendous contradictions between the prior philosophy, which was largely to encourage people to be on welfare, and the present philosophy, which is, welfare should exist, it should be there, it should help people who need help, but our first endeavor should be to have people help themselves, that we should, in essence, fight hard to keep people from dropping out of the work force. Because if we do that, we give people a chance to take care of themselves.
And although you changed the law, and the reform is taking place, some of the Federal agencies have not changed the regulation. So that creates a real problem, I think, not only for New York City but for a lot of communities in the city.
And I will reserve my comments on taxes and some of the further comments that I have on some of the questions that came up
from you and from Mr. Owens, until later, when we get to the questions.
But thank you very, very much for this opportunity to address these issues.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Giuliani follows:]
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[The official committee record contains additional material here.]
Mr. BURTON. Well, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just hope that everybody in America gets a chance to go to New York and see first hand the fantastic results that have been achieved under your administration. I do not want you to take conventions away from Indianapolis, but at the same time, I do think people ought to be aware of what you have been able to accomplish because it is really sensational.
I cannot tell you, my family and I were there visiting, along with some of our friends, and we had always heard that you couldn't be safe in downtown Manhattan. You get around Broadway, the porno shops and everything, you had to be very, very careful. And it was just the opposite. There was a policeman on every corner. They were courteous. We didn't' feel any danger whatsoever. And I was just amazed. I didn't think things could change that much.
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So you are to be congratulated.
Mayor GIULIANI. Come often and spend a lot of money.
Mr. BURTON. Spend a lot of money, yes. I don't have a lot of money, but I will come often if I get a chance.
Mayor GIULIANI. Whatever you can spend we appreciate. [Laughter.]
Mr. BURTON. All right. I do have a few questions I would like to ask, however.
You said that you had 320,000 jobs lost in a 2-year period, and that's been completely reversed since your administration took office. Briefly, could you tell us how you did that?
Mayor GIULIANI. The turnaround in jobs, which I have in front of me here, is really based on many factors. I think the crime reduction has a lot to do with that. I think we were losing jobs because people were afraid to put their business in the city of New York. Or they were leaving the city because they were afraid.
I also think we had a tax policy that was destroying the private sector. So one of the things that I began doing in 1994, at a modest level and then increased dramatically as the city's fiscal health improved, was tax reduction. I reduced taxes by $34 million the first year, $200 million the second year, and now the tax reductions are at $2.4 billion.
So we put money back into the private sector. The hotel-occupancy tax was the best example of about 10 examples. We had a hotel-occupancy tax that was the highest in the country. We were, in fact, losing all of our conventions, not only to Indianapolis but to every city in the country, because nobody wanted to pay our hotel-occupancy tax.
In the first year that I was in office, I persuaded the City Council and the State Legislature to cut it by 33 percent. And now we collect about $70 million to $80 million more from the much-reduced hotel-occupancy tax than we used to from the higher one.
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Mr. BURTON. You know, I——
Mayor GIULIANI. And jobs are up dramatically in hotels and restaurants, by about 20 percent.
Mr. BURTON. That is a point that I hope everybody gets very clearly across this country. When Ronald Reagan cut taxes in the early 1980's, we were bringing in about $500 billion in tax revenues annually. And all I heard around here was, my gosh, it's going to cause the depletion of our tax revenues. But because it stimulated economic growth, we almost tripled the amount of tax revenues in 3 years. It went to $1.3 trillion from $500 billion.
And you make the same case. When you cut the taxes, you brought more industry and business into New York City, and therefore, you brought in more tax revenue because there were more people producing taxes.
Mayor GIULIANI. One of the things that we are trying to do now, is to eliminate the sales tax in the city of New York. And we have persuaded the State legislature to eliminate it on clothing purchases of $110 or less, which will help the citizens in the city who are the poorest. It's a big burden on them.
But eliminating the sales tax on clothing would be the best jobs program that we could possibly create. Much healthier than the jobs programs that used to come out of Congress and that used to be forced on cities and States, that I used to investigate as a U.S. attorney and put people in jail for defrauding.
And a jobs program that says, no sales tax in the city of New York means 20,000 more jobs, 25,000 more jobs in department stores, retail stores, outlets. And those are good entry-level jobs when you are going through a welfare-to-work change in New York City or in America.
The tax reduction can help. It can be the most effective form of a jobs program.
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Mr. BURTON. You just had a moratorium for 1 or 2 days, didn't you, on sales taxes in New York——
Mayor GIULIANI. We had a moratorium—as part of the effort to convince the State legislature to eliminate the sales tax on clothing purchases, we did four pilot programs, 4 weeks over a 2-year period in which we eliminated the sales tax or we eliminated at a certain threshold level. And in those weeks, sales increased from 50 to 250 percent in our stores.
The main reason that I want to do it is in order to produce more jobs. If the store could count on an increase of 10, 15, 25 percent more in revenues, it can hire more people. And therefore, the transition we are going through, 450,000 fewer people on welfare, the growth of 300,000 private-sector jobs during that same period, we could match the reduction with the growth in jobs.
Mr. BURTON. So by reducing the sales tax during that brief period, you increased from one- to fivefold the amount of people that were buying products in New York City.
Mayor GIULIANI. Absolutely. And that offered the—it was a very hard sell for a lot of reasons internal to the politics of New York City, which is not all areas of the State can reduce the sales tax or eliminate it. But we at least got the elimination of the sales tax on clothing purchases of $110 or less.
What we are trying to get, just do away with it completely on clothing, and we could see a big jump in employment.
Mr. BURTON. I see my time is running out. Let me just get back to the issue I wanted to talk to you about in general, and that is crime. What can we do at the Federal level in Congress to assist you in helping continue to bring down those crime rates and those crime statistics in New York City?
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Mayor GIULIANI. The more of what you do in the area of block granting and discretion given to local communities, the better. When you did the crime bill, you made a change that was very important to the city of New York. You allowed us to include civilians in the hiring of police officers. That was enormously important to us because we had a lot of police officers, but we needed civilians.
That kind of flexibility is important, and the more often you can do block grants, the better off we are going to be.
Probably the area where the Federal Government could help the most, and where there is the greatest lack, is in the area of drug enforcement, both from the point of view of using our authority through foreign policy and our ability to persuade much more effectively than we have. And in the area of border enforcement, assistance in terms of drug enforcement all throughout the country. That's an area where I don't think the same emphasis has been there that used to be there, particularly with making it a major priority of our foreign policy.
The State Department should be talking about drug enforcement and agreements with countries about reducing the crops and the trans-shipment countries cooperating with us. They should be talking about that as much as they are talking about international trade, border disputes, because it is as important to our future and to our children's future as any of the other things that we are engaged in.
And after all, foreign policy is the art of trying to enforce what is needed for your country into the policies and programs of other countries, through persuasion, if you can, through, more than that, if you have to.
Mr. BURTON. Mr. Owens.
Mr. OWENS. Yes, Mr. Chairman. To stay on the high road, let us all recognize that tourism is one of those areas where we get back some of that tremendous amount of money that flows overseas to foreign countries. And we would like to see more of our money flow back to this country via tourists visiting.
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We will make a deal with you and recommend all the foreign tourists coming in that their second stop be Indianapolis. If you want a deal?
Mr. BURTON. How about 50–50? You take half, we take half. [Laughter.]
Mr. OWENS. It is important that we understand our big cities are the primary place that tourists go. They are major features of American culture. I would like to see our big cities survive. I would like to see our big cities thrive. I would like to see the experiments in diversity succeed and get good results. That is the reason I want to engage in this dialog with you, Mr. Mayor, because we have a problem in terms of perception, you know.
When I perceive smoke, there is fire somewhere. The reality is that there is fire somewhere.
We ought to take perceptions into consideration, knowing full well that they don't really reflect reality, necessarily. But the perceptions are important.
Dealing with perceptions may be over-exaggerations based on highly visible, atrocious cases. When someone is shot down with 41 bullets fired, you know, it sets off a chain reaction of emotions that is hard to contain.
Would it cost much for the city to have a safety valve through an effective civilian-review board? This is not anything new. You have heard this proposition many times. And mayors before you have heard it many times.
A civilian-review board, which is effective because the people feel it is really going to reflect the decisions of the civilians. That you don't have a veto by the police commissioner which abrogates the whole thing, you know. Nobody has the faith in the civilian-review board that has veto by the police commissioner or that has its budget greatly reduced or to be ridiculed by the mayor.
So a low-cost remedy for perceptions that may get out of control, it seems to me, would be a civilian-review board.
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On the appointment of a special prosecutor, it is just common sense to say that district attorneys work with police everyday. The likelihood that they are going to be objective in the prosecution of police is nil, I mean, as hard as they may try.
Our former colleague here, Elizabeth Holzman, was district attorney of Brooklyn, she set up a special unit to investigate police-brutality cases. And they put 5,000 policeman around her office the next day.
The police demonstrated—5,000—around her office. To give you a visible markup of what that kind of intimidation can do. So special prosecutors for these cases seems to me a reasonable remedy. And we have been asking for this for the last 25 years.
Let's have dialog and move on with it.
The residency requirement. Now towns and cities across the Nation have residency requirements. In New York State, there are residency requirements in many counties and cities. But New York State Legislature discriminates against New York City and will not let them have home rule and impose a residency requirement, where you reduce the likelihood, or you greatly help the situation, by having more police who live in the cities, live in the neighborhoods, and are not suspected by the population of treating them with contempt because they come from outside. They make all kinds of remarks. They really don't know in many cases the culture, etc.
I think three of the policemen in the Amadou Diallo shooting were from outside of the city. That strikes me as strange. And also, they were mostly young people. The oldest was 27, and so they have life and death decisionmaking over people in the streets. And it was a very young group—inexperienced.
One of them came from the New York, East New York precinct that you just mentioned. And he shot a young man out there, and that young man had been allowed to bleed to death. And he had no life-threatening wound, but they didn't treat him right away. So he bled to death.
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All of these facts examined by the public, it adds up to a certain set of perceptions that are very serious. So could we not deal with that?
And then I asked for some statistics that you might provide us with. Obviously you have the statistics so, by precinct. So people who complain that we are getting more parking tickets in our neighborhood than they are in other places, and other parts of the city are allowed double parking. Nobody ever gives them a ticket. But we have all these tickets. The number of cars towed away as people try to reach their quotas in cars towed away, to create more revenue for the city. It is greater in our neighborhoods than they are. The number of youths arrested and hassled on the street corners are greater, etc., and some of the other questions. I will submit them to you.
And then most of all, the question of you must deal with the fact that whites are almost never the victims of police brutality, or certainly police killings. We have very few records of whites being victims. And that creates a perception which you have to deal with also.
Mayor GIULIANI. That was a lot to deal with at one time, but I'll just try, and I'll submit answers——
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Mayor, if you need more time when the light goes out, go ahead and finish. [Laughter.]
Mayor GIULIANI. The first thing I can assure you, although this I do not have the statistics on, that people throughout the city of New York feel they get too many parking tickets. I get that complaint—I do a radio show every week between 11 and 11:45 on WABC, a local station in New York. And one thing that can be said, is fair, impartial, equitable, and across the board is we give out a lot of tickets all over the place. And they all blame it on the mayor. Every community, ethnic, religious, racial of all different kinds and mixed complain about parking tickets.
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But I honestly don't know, I have never looked at, which I get so many complaints about it, I just have an intuitive feeling that that goes on——
Mr. OWENS. They do collect statistics by precinct?
Mayor GIULIANI. Oh sure. I'll get that for you.
Let me take up a few of the things that you mentioned. First of all, the percentage of police shootings, and we have gone back to 1991 to 1998. But I can assure you, and I will submit the statistics to you, that it pretty much breaks out about the same every single year.
Over the last 7 years, when there has been a police fatality, police shooting that ended up in a fatality, about 50 percent of the victims have been black, about 13 percent have been white, about 36 Hispanic, and about 1 percent Asian.
21Now, when you look at shootings in society, in other words, what is going on in New York City, that is almost exactly the same as the percentage of shootings that take place in the population.
Over that same period of time, 49.5 percent of the people who were murdered in New York City were black, 35 percent were Hispanic, and 11.6 percent were white, and 2.5 percent were Asian. And the reality is that as a percentage, police officers, slightly more, actually shoot white people than they are shot in society, if you understand what I am saying. I can give you the chart.
Then if you look at people arrested for murder, 54.5 percent arrested for murder between 1991 and 1998 were black, 35 percent were Hispanic, 7.5 were white, 2.6 were Asian, and 5 percent are unknown. And that spans the administration of two different mayors, Mayor Dinkins and myself.
So when you try to take a look at police officer shootings, you say to yourself, well, a police officer is shooting blacks in a higher percentage than the shootings are taking place throughout the entire city, the answer is no, it is about exactly the same.
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Mr. OWENS. The statistic I asked for accidental shootings, not criminal cases——
Mayor GIULIANI. I will submit this all to you, but I can assure you these numbers work out about the same. And if you will look at the raw numbers, that means that from 1991 to 1998, police officers in fatal shootings shot 100 blacks, but 5,553 blacks were the victims of murder during that period of time. Both worked out to about 50 percent.
So it doesn't look like police officers are shooting blacks, over a 7-year period, in a higher percentage than is happening in society. The only difference is, police-officer shootings of blacks or anybody else are infinitesimal in comparison with the number of times that somebody else in society murders them: 5,553 blacks were murdered in New York City; 100 were fatally wounded by the police. That is a very big difference.
Mr. OWENS. You are mixing criminal cases with accidental shootings of victims like Amadou Diallo, Eleanor Bumpers, and the people who obviously were not criminals.
Mayor GIULIANI. The percentage goes down even more dramatically. It goes in the other direction.
Mr. BURTON. Let me interrupt just a second, Mr. Owens. We will have a second round of questioning if you would like to have it. But why don't we let him complete——
Mayor GIULIANI. On the civilian-review board, we do have a civilian-review board. I have increased its budget over the last 2, 2 1/2 years. I have increased the number of investigators that it has. Not only that, we just added 13 senior investigators to the civilian-review board so that we could have a much higher level of investigatory talent there. They are disposing of their cases about three times as fast as they have in the past.
And, the number of civilian complaints in the city is no where near the all-time highs that we used to have in the mid-1980's of 6,000 and 7,000. And between 1996 and 1997, which is the last statistic that I had, they actually went down 13 percent.
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So I think the civilian review board, which is civilian controlled, not police controlled, independent, is doing its job more effectively than it has in the past. I don't agree that they should ultimately have the disciplinary authority. I think they can make the recommendation. I think you are going to destroy a police department if you take the disciplinary authority away from the police commissioner.
And this police commissioner, police commissioners say for prior police commissioners in New York City, have not been unwilling to dismiss police officers. We had a very tragic, unjustified killing in New York City by a police officer named Livotic. And he was acquitted, you might remember, by a court in the Bronx. He was dismissed by the police commissioner. So the police commissioner has shown that he has dismissed many, many people on civilian complaints that turn out to be justified.
Then when you ask me about residency, I agree with you that the Police Department of New York City should be representative of the city of New York. It is better that it be representative.
We have done everything within the law to allow us—we have done things that my predecessors didn't do. First year that I was in office, the present police commissioner, who was then the fire commissioner, gave 5 extra points to people who live in the city of New York for taking the exam, and for taking them into the police department. We increased the residency; we increased the percentage of residents.
The only thing I have to tell you, and this was reflected in an article in the New York Times this week. There is no connection at all between police misconduct and residency. When we look at police complaints, and this I find, according to the Times article, is true of police departments throughout the country, there is no connection between residency and police officers acting properly.
And in fact, for some reason that I can't quite explain, when we look at police complaints, we actually get more civilian complaints against resident police officers than we do against non-resident police officers by about 10 percent.
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So I don't know, even if we achieve residency, is this really the answer to a police department being more courteous and more respectful either in New York or in the other cities that appear to have the same experience.
Mr. BURTON. Mr. Horn.
Mr. HORN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would like unanimous consent to put two pages in the record here.
Mr. BURTON. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
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[The official committee record contains additional material here.]
Mr. HORN. Thank you very much. These are resolutions of the National Association of Counties Board of Directors and appropriate committees.
One concerns resolution on early childhood development programs, such as establishing a flexible Federal program that allows counties and States to develop home visitation programs for children and their families, including prenatal care. And there is a whole series of other worthwhile things.
The second resolution is the resolution on services for emancipating foster youth. And among other things, it would be permitting the States and cities to extend Medicaid to children up to age 22 who are in foster care but left the system at age 18 and to youths who were in assisted adoptions.
This is a predicate to a book review that appeared in the New York Times back in May 10, 1998, headed ''Thugs in Bassinets'' and the book, ''Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence.''
It is a fascinating book in terms of what is affecting the young people in the first few months through 3 in a neurological sense of absolutely having no objection to violent behavior. And what needs to be done in the school system and the health system, in our cities, in our rural areas is to work with that type of child.
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And I just wanted to put that in the record, and ask then another question, which I have an interest in this since I was a small person. My mother was welfare director of the county for 25 years. She was also probation officer for 5 years. She was superintendent of the county hospital for a number of years.
So I grew up with these problems. It is rather fascinating what has happened in America. We have a lot of very well-meaning people that try to help young people, but some of this is, without question, psychological in terms of the behavior of the completely amoral behavior in killing each other and not having one sign of remorse.
That leads me to another question, which I have long advocated, as an educator, and that is that the neighborhood schools should not just relate to education but also to the city's or the county's health services, to the city or county recreation services so we could get one-stop service for both the children and the parents.
I agree with you completely in praising the mayor of Chicago. He deserves great praise. I think the major mayors of our cities and the major county executives ought to have the education programs under them. Now, in 1975, when I was vice chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, we went to New York, held 1 week of hearings on the school system.
Three of us were university presidents at the time: Father Hesburgh as chairman, myself as vice chairman, and Maurice Mitchell of University of Denver. We were shocked to learn that in about the 1890's the State of New York had, in its wisdom, put a merit board over the hiring of various teachers in the New York schools and various administrators.
I understand that, I am half Irish, and I know that a lot of my Irish ancestors barely went beyond the third grade. I guess in New York, they were able to teach the sixth grade for never having gone beyond the third grade.
So the State moved in and wanted meritocracy. Well, that was all very well, but when you look at the assistant principal test, none of three college presidents on the commission could even get 50 percent of the answers. They might as well have been students of physics and chemistry. That had nothing to do with the job they are doing, which is mostly the disciplinary job and the counseling of younger people. I don't know if that law is still on the books and that New York has freedom in that then they didn't have before. That was the State merit board put in over the school system.
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So I would just like to know your reaction to the role of the mayor in education, getting those services in one place, and have you any thoughts on dealing with the violence that is some youths from bassinet on?
Mayor GIULIANI. Well, Mr. Horn, I believe that law was repealed, the merit law.
Mr. HORN. Well, we criticized it.
Mayor GIULIANI. The fact is, that in New York, the mayor does not control the educational system. And that is true not only for New York City but all of the big cities in New York and most of the cities in the country. And it is a very, very big mistake.
And the changes that have occurred in Chicago are the best example of what could happen. I had two votes on a board of seven, and could be outvoted at any time. You know, 4–3, 5–2. And therefore, have some indirect influence, but not the kind of control that you would have over a police department or a welfare system or a fire department. And you can't make the changes that you would like to make.
You can't make sure, in the way you would absolutely like to, that the money is actually getting to the schools and the classrooms. I have tried innovative ways to do that, which maybe produce half the results you could have if you really had control.
I'm sorry that Mr. Owens left because I wanted to describe to him—he was talking about how we don't have enough schools and we haven't built enough schools. Since I have been mayor, we have actually added 95,000 seats to the school system, which is the largest increase since the baby boom.
I inherited a deficit of 78,000 seats. In other words, there were 78,000 places in which we had new students but we didn't have seats for them. And we have rectified some of that, not all of it. Could have done it a lot faster if I had control of the school system.
And now, when I put money into the school system, and I have increased the budget dramatically of the school system—but now when I put money in I try to tie it to performance-based measures. We put $120 million more into what I call Project Read. In order to get that money, you have to give 10 to 12 hours more of reading instruction to students.
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We have had 133,000 students go through it. Their reading scores have gone up by 60 percent. We are specifically restoring arts education to the public schools.
So when I put money into it, it has to be in return for an arts program going in. We have now done that in 835 schools. And we are way ahead of schedule on doing that.
But I have to almost set up, like a review committee, every time we do something because I have to make sure that the additional $100 million or $200 million has actually gone into the school system.
I am fortunate to have a chancellor, Rudy Crew, who I think is the best in the country and is willing to take on the educational bureaucracy in aid of the children.
The biggest problem that we face, however, is principal tenure. The chancellor and the superintendent who oversee the school system are all based on contracts that are performance-based. However, they run a system that is a job-protection system. You cannot remove a principal who has tenure, no matter how bad the school performs, no matter how many kids have dropped out, no matter how many kids don't graduate. The principal is there for life, cannot be touched.
And what I maintain is, that politicians who debate education have to stand on one side of the line or the other. Either you are in favor of a job-protection system or you are in favor of a school system, and it is about educating children. And that is a major debate we are having in New York.
Governor Pataki is a very strong supporter of ending principal tenure, but there is an awful lot of resistance to it. And you can imagine where it comes from, which is the supporters of the status quo in education.
Mr. HORN. Thank you. We will pursue that in our second round on a number of other issues.
Mr. BURTON. Mrs. Morella.
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Mrs. MORELLA. Mayor Giuliani, it is a pleasure——
Mr. BURTON. Excuse me, I didn't see Mr. Davis. Pardon me.
Mrs. MALONEY. You are jumping over me.
Mr. BURTON. I apologize. I must be getting myopic. The gentlelady will be recognized, then you, Danny, after we recognize Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and it is a great privilege to welcome the mayor from the great city of New York who has done a great deal to improve the safety of the residents of New York City, I might add, combined with Federal policies that banned assault weapons, passed the Brady Bill, helped get guns off the streets, yet sent over $800 million to the city of New York to hire more police officers and augment the Police Department's efforts. And we now have, I understand, a 24-year low in crime in the city of New York.
I am very pleased with that, but I am sure that you agree that a local police force, in order to be successful, must enjoy the trust and respect from the community they serve. The recent tragedy has seriously damaged that trust. I am sure that all New Yorkers share your deep concern over the tragedy over the shooting of a 22-year-old, who was shot 41 times by four police officers.
But the main problem here is that we have a serious problem and what are we going to do about it. I am sure, Mr. Mayor, that even though the number of police shootings have decreased in recent years, as you have pointed out with statistics, but I am sure you agree that the problem is beyond simple numbers.
It is a problem now of broken trust by many of New York City's minority residents, a distrust that they feel toward the Police Department. I am really puzzled by the fact that you downplayed recommendations made by your own task force on police-community relations.
And, Mr. Mayor, how do you respond to the fears of many of New York's minority residents that as the New York Times stated, people, ''are frisked on the basis of race.'' And what do you plan to do about restoring that trust? About alleviating those fears?
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I specifically would like to hear how you plan to respond to your own task force recommendation. I know that you responded to roughly 61 percent of their ideas. But in the area of minority recruitment, expanding the cadet force, the police oversight board that was passed by the City Council but was a stronger oversight board that you vetoed, you then enacted a weaker CCRB. You stated that it is funded, yet I have read some reports where it is under-funded by $1 million.
In the area of minority recruitment, the city is 66 percent minority, yet the police force is roughly 30 percent. And why haven't you responded to this really serious, obvious disparity before this tremendous tragedy?
I would like to ask you, specifically, about alleged selective responses to information requests by your Police Department. A Dominick Carter of New York 1 has alleged that Mr. Safir will not respond to his request for statistics, specifically the number of minorities on the street crime unit. If you could help get that number, that would be helpful.
I really look forward to your comments.
Mayor GIULIANI. I look forward to my answers.
I think Dominick Carter should directly communicate with the police department, rather than using me and you as the go-between for information for the media. So I would suggest that Dominick——
Mrs. MALONEY. He says he has. He says he has asked but never received it.
Mayor GIULIANI. Yes, but I really don't think it is the role of a Member of Congress and the mayor to try to aid the media in getting information from the police department. So why don't we see if we can have him work with the police department to do that.
I responded to the recommendations of the task force that I agreed with. And I put them into effect.
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I disagreed with certain recommendations of the task force, and certain recommendations of the task force were entirely unrealistic, like residency requirements. Residency requirements are set by the State of New York. They are set by the Legislature of the State of New York. I can't change them. They have been in effect for 25 or 30 years. And the political reality is they are not going to be changed because you would be asking legislators from outside of the city of New York to vote to get rid of jobs for their citizens.
And I can't present them with a compelling case. I would be happy to present you with the same statistics that I gave to Mr. Owens. The reality is, you know—the difference between perception and reality, and the reason that we are all, we all pride ourselves on being educated human beings, is that there are times in which perception is correct and there are times in which perception is incorrect.
And do you serve an incorrect perception by just pandering to it? Or do you tell the truth about it?
And it seems to me we expand all of our horizons when we react to the truth as opposed to pander to incorrect perception.
The reality is, in the same New York Times that I think you incorrectly quoted, and I will go back to that in a moment, that you cited, had an article this Sunday that pointed out that there is absolutely no connection between residency and proper behavior.
And in our own statistics, in the New York City Police Department, we actually have a higher percentage of resident police officers who have complaints that are filed against them. And that appears to be, according to the New York Times, the experience of just about every other city that has similar residency requirements.
So you can't make out, whether you like residency or you don't, given the political realities of life that we live in, you can't make out a compelling case to do away with residency.
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But having said that, here is what we have done that you didn't mention, in fairness to the work of the Police Department and my own work, and the work of the people who have tried to make a change here.
We have done more to change residency than any prior administration——
Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Mayor, my question was not about residency.
Mr. BURTON. The gentlelady's time has expired. Can we let the mayor finish because we are running short on time?
Mrs. MALONEY. My question was about residency.
Mayor GIULIANI. Oh yes it was. You asked me about the recommendation of the task force that I implemented and I did not implement. The major recommendation that I disagreed with and did not implement, was a recommendation that I impose a residency requirement. So if you would like an answer to the question, the answer revolves a great deal around residency.
The task force, that you said, I did not implement their recommendations—one of the major recommendations that they made that I didn't implement was a residency recommendation.
First of all, I can't impose residency.
Mrs. MALONEY. My question was minority recruitment, expanding the cadet force, the police oversight board, and restoring the trust—what are you doing to restore the trust between the minority community and the police department.
Mr. BURTON. Before the mayor answers, Mrs. Maloney, your time has expired. Let the mayor conclude his answer because we have other Members and the mayor is under time constraints.
Mayor GIULIANI. I think what we are doing to restore the trust of the minority community in New York City is precisely the same thing that we do for all communities in New York City. I don't have a separate agenda for the different communities of New York City.
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What we are doing to restore the trust of the minority communities in New York City is reducing murder in New York City by 70 percent. So that in a community that had 125 murders last year or 5 years ago, there were only 15 murders last year and none this year. What we are doing to restore the trust of the minority community in New York City is having employment rates that are the highest in 20 to 25 years. What we are doing to restore the trust of the minority community, we are seeing national businesses go into Harlem and other areas of the minority community that wouldn't go there in 30 to 40 years because they were too afraid to put businesses there because crime was so high.
Crime is down now, national businesses are investing. What we are doing for the minority community in New York City is funding the New York City public school system at the highest level that it has ever been funded, producing reading and math score improvements for the last 5 years.
But we are doing that for the whole city of New York. What we are doing for the minority community is making a Police Department that has reduced crime more than any in the country, become the most restrained in the country.
Because over the same 5 years, something I didn't hear in all the things you said before, because the question is, are you feeding incorrect perceptions or are you creating correct perceptions. The correct perception is that the New York City Police Department, in the last 5 years, has actually a better record for restraint than it does crime reduction.
It is more restrained by 67.2 percent. It has reduced crime by 50 percent. And when you compare your Police Department, the New York City Police Department, to the police department in just about every other major city in this country, the New York City Police Department is more restrained.
So, yes, there are times in which there are tragic circumstances. And all of us in politics can do one of two things with those tragic circumstances. We can exploit them to feed misperception or we can try to learn from them, put them in proper perspective, and explain to people that although this was a terrible thing that happened, and the criminal justice system should answer it, we shouldn't use it to give people increased fears that they shouldn't have—any different than if there was a terrible murder today in New York City among civilians, which happens 50 times more than any encounter with the police, that we would use that to give people the misperception that crime is not down because there was some terrible murder involving four or five civilians.
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So that is what we are trying to do, deal with people honestly in order to create a situation of real trust, rather than pander to them.
Mr. BURTON. Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Chairman, a point of personal privilege?
Mr. BURTON. We don't have the time to allow a point——
Mrs. MALONEY. Point of personal privilege, since it was alleged that I misquoted the New York Times to put the article in the record. I think that is legitimate if someone alleges that I misquoted to have the article put in——
Mr. BURTON. I will allow you to put the article in the record, without objection.
[NOTE.—The document referred to was not supplied for the record.]
Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you, sir.
Mr. BURTON. Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. MORELLA. Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor Giuliani, we appreciate your passionate commitment to making New York City the shining city on the hill. You know, the District of Columbia Subcommittee, is one of the subcommittees of this Government Reform Committee, and we have been trying very hard to revitalize the District of Columbia with I think a great element of success, looking to some of the procedures and techniques and policies that you have employed: the CompStat, the broken windows, establishing a culture of civility, and cleanliness, and anti-crime.
I want to pick up on the crime scene, and then, if I have time, go into the job-income support concept that you employed.
I think throughout the country, violent crime has gone down. The difficulty is, the age of the perpetrator has also gone down, and the age of the victim has also gone down. Now in looking at your statistics, I don't know whether or not in the city you have compiled anything with regard to age and what that does show are probably a little less dramatic than the rest of the country. The crime reductions in New York City have been about five times the national average, but there have been crime reductions throughout the country and crime reductions in New York. Our victims are getting younger; our perpetrators are getting younger. But it isn't quite as dramatic as it is in the rest of the country. But we share the same problems.
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Then we can see an increased role in our society to begin to look at what is happening with our younger people and what their values are and what they are doing with their time.
Mayor GIULIANI. No question about it.
Mrs. MORELLA. And you talked about increased flexibility for cities. I would imagine that you would give strong support to something like a youth development block grant that could bring Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, all of those groups together?
Mayor GIULIANI. Enormously valuable programs. We have many of them in New York City. We have Police Athletic League. We have the Boys' Clubs and the Girls' Clubs. We do a lot to support them. They are enormously valuable.
We have a program called Beacon Schools which we have just expanded to 81 schools in which we—I think Mr. Horn referred to something very much like it in which we use the school as the community school. And the school remains open until 11 p.m. The school is the place that not only the young people are educated, but the parents can come back for adult education, job training, language assistance. We try to make the—health services. We try to make the school the center of the community that needs rebuilding. And it is an enormously valuable program.
The program was put in——
Mrs. MORELLA. It would be good to see a correlation between those programs.
Mayor GIULIANI. And we have gotten money from the crime bill and other laws that you have passed that we have been able to use to expand those programs. And those are areas that could be very, very crucial collaborations. And we have been able to get the money more recently with not as many mandates attached to it as used to be the case before because the fact is this is true of every city in America. There is no one formula that works. And when you try to have a mandate, we then start using money in unwise ways just to get your money.
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The more flexibility you give us—give us money and say use it to try to improve the opportunities for young people—we are going to be able to use that money a lot more wiser than if the Federal Government tries to micromanage the program.
Mrs. MORELLA. Which is a good reason for getting good people in local government to make sure they do use it wisely.
With your income support plan, I believe in welfare reform and it appears to be working, but I have some concerns about people being able to make livable salaries, to earn livable salaries. I have great concerns about child care. I have great concerns about medical care for the children. I don't know whether you would like to comment on what you are doing to ameliorate that problem.
Mayor GIULIANI. New York City has an enormous infrastructure of services for people. We have a hospital system and this way we are unlike any other city. We own and operate 11 acute care hospitals and 7 long-term hospitals. And anyone in New York City can get medical service for free. And they get it, if no place else, in the public hospitals of the city, which account for about 23 to 25 percent of the hospital beds in the city.
We have a vast array of services for young people, which we also provide in the schools. Most of our schools have health care facilities as well as public hospitals right in the neighborhood that can care for young people who do not have the ability to access hospital services. So we keep trying to expand it but——
Mrs. MORELLA. How do you handle child care? It is so frightfully expensive and there don't seem to be adequate facilities.
Mayor GIULIANI. We have put a lot of money into our budget for day care. And when I said before that we require people on welfare to work, we don't require them to work unless we can help them find day care. So that, as part of the welfare-to-work program, we have invested hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars in day care. So that if a woman comes in, wants welfare, has two children, they are, let us say, 5 and 7 years old, and needs day care to help during the hours that the children are home from school, we will not require that woman to work unless we are able to provide the day care for her.
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And, at this point, we are able to do it. We are going to need more assistance, more money, when we start getting into further reductions in welfare. Up to this point, we have been able to afford it in our budget, with the help of the State, and the money that we get from the Federal Government.
Mrs. MORELLA. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. BURTON. Mr. Davis.
Mr. DAVIS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayor, let me again compliment you and all of New York City, for your crime reduction activity and the ability to reduce crime. You also mentioned, though, that in the process of doing so, you have also reduced allegations of misconduct or complaints against the police, that there has been a reduction in the number of instances where overt action is alleged. Did you put into effect any additional training activities or—how did you accomplish that?
Mayor GIULIANI. Well, the most dramatic and maybe the most reliable thing to look at are shooting incidents, fatalities, because they all have to be reported. There is a practice in New York City, which predates my administration, I am not sure exactly when it began, but it probably is one of the most helpful in bringing those shooting incidents down to very, very low levels, and lower than in most cities. Every single fatality, even if completely justifiable, goes before a grand jury. It has to be investigated criminally. And every single shooting incident has to be investigated with a formal report of what happened, why it happened. So it is treated very, very seriously. And that has probably helped a great deal.
At the same time, we invest a lot of money in training. And we keep increasing it and improving it. And I mentioned before the CompStat program that we have. The CompStat program not only intricately measures crime at every single precinct in this city, on the same basis that we put emphasis on that, we look at the number of complaints in that precinct.
So if we were reviewing the 75th precinct that we were looking at before, at the police department today, it would be an analysis of how many complaints have there been about police officers? How many complaints of use of force? We divide them into use of force or abusive behavior. And if they are going up, then the precinct commander is expected to describe: which police officer, is it a certain group of them, are they being trained, do they need retraining, do they need discipline? And the commander is expected to present a picture in which we have got to see those things start going down, otherwise, he or she is going to be removed. I think that is one of the ways.
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The other way that we did it is—the civilian complaint review board that was mentioned earlier was very, very inefficient. And there are many reasons for that including just the whole structure of it. It is a difficult process to start with. We have tried to improve it. We have put more people into it. We have hired more senior people. We have given them more resources. And they are doing their job better now. They are not doing it perfectly. They are never going to be able to do it perfectly, but I think they are doing it better now.
Mr. DAVIS. Let me shift for a moment. In the past you have mentioned that the Department of Human Resources was going to develop a program where individuals who are known drug users and also are on public assistance, where their benefits may be paid to a third party contractor.
Mayor GIULIANI. Yes.
Mr. DAVIS. Could you tell me how that would work?
Mayor GIULIANI. I can. It is a program that we are doing on a pilot basis right now with just a small number. The idea of it is we don't want the city, State, and Federal Government to be funding the drug trade. And, therefore, if you are a drug addict and you want welfare, you have got to show us that you are doing something about your drug problem. And, therefore, you have got to be going into treatment, serious treatment programs. You have got to be presenting us with a plan to do something about it.
But if we are going to be required to give you money and you are not doing anything about your drug problem, we don't want to indirectly be handing that money over to the local heroin dealer or cocaine dealer, which is what you are doing. So what we will do is have a third party take over that money, make sure the money is spent on the children, is spent on food, is spent on the needs that the person has. For sure as heck, we don't want to be giving the money to an addict that then turns over $100 bucks or $200 bucks or $500 bucks to the local heroin dealer or organized crime. So that is the idea of it.
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But also it is part of the much bigger picture of trying to get much more intelligent, rigorous drug treatment programs than the unaccountable drug programs. And here is an area where a Federal mandate absolutely hurt us. And this is mostly the State of New York because they run our drug treatment programs, the city doesn't. We spend 60 to 70 percent of our drug treatment dollars keeping people addicted and we spend only 30 percent in drug-free programs.
Methadone maintenance is the treatment of choice in New York City. And the reason it is the treatment of choice, just speaking very candidly with you, is that Federal mandates give you more money more quickly and large industries have developed handing out methadone to people because it is a lot easier saying take your methadone than it is to put them into Phoenix House or Daytop Village or one of the places where you can have the possibility of drug freedom.
Mr. DAVIS. Let me just ask is this a court ordered or court sanctioned—I mean the power of attorney, in effect, is what the individuals or the contractor receives over the person's money.
Mayor GIULIANI. No, it is something that you work out with the Human Resources Administration. It is part of a theory of the social contract, which is if you want benefits, then there are certain things that you owe society in return for those benefits. If you are not working and taking care of your own family and you are expecting everybody else to take care of your family, then we expect you to work as soon as you can. If you have a drug problem and that is the reason you are requiring the rest of society to support you, then you should be doing something about your drug problem.
We shouldn't be sustaining your drug problem, the taxpayer shouldn't be sustaining your drug addiction for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years and then when you multiply this out nationwide, the United States of America and the city of New York and the city of Chicago and elsewhere are supplying a lot of the funds for drug dealers, if we don't do something about it, right? So it is that really the attempt is to try to do something about it.
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And, finally, we are handing the welfare money to the drug addicts only because the drug addict has two or three kids that have to be supported. But if the drug addict is using the welfare money to buy the heroin, the kids aren't getting supported. We want the money to the place that it would actually help people.
Mr. DAVIS. Thank you very much. And when you have generated enough data for a report, I would appreciate it.
Mayor GIULIANI. On that one, I would be happy to keep you informed. That is a new program, like the last 2 months, so I don't really have any. But I would be happy to keep you informed.
Mr. DAVIS. Thank you very much.
Mr. BURTON. Thank you, Mr. Davis. Mr. Hutchinson.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mayor, greetings to you. I congratulate you on the good work you have done in New York City. Coming from Arkansas, while I was U.S. attorney, there were a number of drug cases that we handled that originated and had suppliers in New York City. So I am delighted with the progress that you have made because it does impact a large part of our country.
Yesterday I had an interesting debate at Georgetown Law School concerning mandatory minimum sentences with Judge Sporkin, who has been outspoken on mandatory minimums. I wanted to get your feedback a little bit. I understand you all have had a measure of success in New York City on crack cocaine and the street vendors in regards to that. And, of course, crack cocaine, you have a 5 gram level for mandatory minimum for possession of crack cocaine in that amount.
Could you comment on your view of mandatory minimums and the impact it has had on crime in your city, both firearms and drugs and, specifically, crack cocaine?
Mayor GIULIANI. Mandatory minimum sentences, I think, can be enormously helpful in creating a certainty of punishment if you are caught which then has a much bigger deterrent impact than the calculation that many criminals, particularly drug criminals, can make that, No. 1, they can find a way to beat it and, No. 2, if they don't beat it, they can find a way to convince the judge or, eventually, the Department of Parole or whatever to let them out of prison in a very short period of time. I think it has a very dramatic impact, particularly in the drug area, which, after all, is professional crime.
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I think you know this as well as I do. I mean, drug criminals know the criminal penalty process better than U.S. attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys, or lawyers. I mean, they have it memorized because it is their business. We used to have drug dealers in New York City that would know precisely the levels at which you could plead and how much drugs you had to have in your pocket. And then they would go back and replenish it. But if they got caught, they could always claim to be a low-level drug dealer. But on a given day they would be selling five times as much, but they would never appear to be doing that.
So having these mandatory minimums, which convinces someone that you are really going to have to do actual time and it is going to be 5 years or 10 years, I think can be very, very helpful in playing itself out in professional criminal areas because they will calculate what they are doing based on it. And I think actually they are more necessary for State courts than for Federal courts. Because with the sentencing guidelines that the Federal courts have, you come pretty close to having mandatory minimums and maximums and a judge's discretion is restrained. In a place like New York where there is no restraint on discretion, they would be enormously valuable. The areas where we have them, we get a big impact. The areas where we don't we are very much in need of it.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. If I recall correctly, while you were the Federal prosecutor years back, that you advocated prosecutions even at the Federal level of street pushers——
Mayor GIULIANI. Yes.
Mr. HUTCHINSON [continuing]. Because believing in the sort of broken window theory that you have got to prosecute crime at all levels. Are we having the right balance in terms of our Federal law enforcement going after the kingpins and the big dealers versus the street pushers?
Mayor GIULIANI. You should do more street-level prosecution. U.S. attorneys should. That was a very valuable exercise for me and my office as a U.S. attorney. What we did was we would take in a small number, because that is all we could really do, of street-level cases, we started it in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was called ''Federal Day.'' We would never let the drug dealers know the day of the week it was going to be. Some days it would be a Wednesday; some days a Thursday; some days a Friday.
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But when they came into Federal court with the ability to focus more on an individual case, they tended to have high bails so they didn't go right back out on the street. They were getting 10- and 15-year sentences for what they would spend a year in jail in the New York State system for, it had a massive impact. It was a tremendous learning experience for me, because after we did it for about 3 months, all of the other crimes in the Lower East Side went down by 30, 40, and 50 percent. It taught me firsthand that if you put the emphasis on drug enforcement, you can reduce all other crimes.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Let me see if I can get a couple of quick questions in. The FBI was started in the early 1980's being engaged in the drug war and in drug prosecutions, supporting the DEA and our Federal effort. Do you see the same commitment on the part of the FBI today as was initiated in the early 1980's? And, second, I want to ask a question. Do you believe the drug war is winnable?
Mayor GIULIANI. That is an excellent question because I think the right answer to that is it is winnable to the extent that the reduction of any social problem is winnable. It is as winnable as turning around welfare, which nobody thought you ever could do and now the successes are faster than I even believed was possible, and I was in favor of turning it around. If we have the national will, we can—maybe we can't win the war on drugs and maybe that isn't the right way to describe it. We can vastly reduce the problem of drugs. We could reduce the problem of drugs as fast and as quickly as we have turned around welfare and we need it even more.
But the national will isn't there and—no, I don't see it as a lack of commitment on the part of the FBI or the DEA. I think they have tremendous commitment. I think this has to be something that goes to very top. I mean the President of the United States has to lead the effort against drugs if you want to affect our foreign policy. If you want us to enforce our priorities on other countries, which is what we are really talking about, then it has to be a major obsessive concern of our foreign policy apparatus. They should be as concerned about that as they are wars in various parts of the world, settling border disputes, dealing with international trade because, frankly, if we don't turn around the problem of drugs, then, you know, we are going to lose a very, very large percentage of our young people.
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This is enormously important to the United States of America and our foreign policy should be driven by the things that are important to the United States of America and I don't see that kind of commitment at the foreign policy level, at the border patrol level, and I honestly don't see the commitment to even law enforcement that used to be the case when I was more familiar with it in the 1970's and the 1980's. But I am not as familiar with that part of it as I was 8 or 10 years ago.
Mr. HUTCHINSON. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. BURTON. Just say Amen to that last one. Mr. Blagojevich.
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayor, you mentioned a moment ago street-level prosecutions. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of community prosecution? I know you have it in Brooklyn—the community prosecution program which you have in, as I understand it, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. And if I could just tell you that the President's 21st Century Policing Initiative calls for $200 million of Federal funds to be dispersed to the various community prosecution programs across the country. I have letters from the different district attorneys from across the country, the national district attorneys' office, arguing for that money. Last year the President asked for $50 million. We were able to fund it to the level of $5 million.
I am interested to hear what your thoughts are on the program, how it is working in Brooklyn and Manhattan and the level of funding that you received last year, which, in my view, is significantly too little, and that is $5 million, as well as the President's request for the $200 million.
Mayor GIULIANI. Well, the community—there are two different things—I want to make sure that I am responding to the right thing—community courts and community policing. You are asking about community courts?
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. I am talking about the community prosecution program——
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Mayor GIULIANI. Right.
Mr. BLAGOJEVICH [continuing]. The idea that you have prosecutors in neighborhoods that work closely with community leaders, sort of the extension of the COPS program.
Mayor GIULIANI. We have two programs like that and they work very, very well. And they allow us to put focus on a lot of the quality-of-life crimes that if you went to a higher court, citywide court, it just wouldn't get the same kind of attention because in that court they are going to be dealing with a person who was arrested for murder, the person who was arrested for rape, the person who was arrested for the far more serious crimes. It allows communities to have more innovative solutions to problems.
One of the things that we have made a lot of inroads in that might not seem like a big thing but it is, I think, in many, many ways is reducing graffiti. Graffiti is an act of vandalism. A city that has increasing amounts of graffiti is a city that has increasing amounts of people who are vandals and disrespect the rights of other people. A city that has a reduction in graffiti is a city that is moving in the right direction.
One of the things we do in our community program is if we catch someone doing graffiti, what we will often do is just have the person sentenced to 5 days or 10 days of cleaning up graffiti. It has a practical result: it cleans up a lot of the graffiti in the neighborhood. But it also has a symbolic and maybe even teaches a lesson. It teaches the person how important this is. And our community courts and our community programs have allowed us to do that.
I think they are very valuable. I don't know what the right level of financing of them would be, but we could cer