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The Peacemaker
By OLLE WASTBERG
Stockholm
TODAY I will send a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee nominating theformer mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani, for the Nobel PeacePrize. As a former member of the Swedish Parliament I have the right tosubmit nominees - in the past I nominated Elie Wiesel, who won in 1986 - andI selected Mr. Giuliani because I believe that he has, through his politicalefforts, saved more human lives than most people alive today.
Mr. Giuliani took office in 1994, when the city was rife with gang violence,rundown neighborhoods, robbery, graffiti and litter. The police had lost thedaily battle against serious crime. The mayor brought with him a policy ofrethinking the fight against crime - a policy that proved to be effectiveeven after he left office: a quick comparison of crime rates collected bythe Police Department in 1993 with those from last year show that murderswent down by 76.2 percent; rapes by 41.1 percent; robberies by 74.2 percent;assaults by 57.5 percent; burglaries by 77.3 percent; grand larcenies by45.7 percent; and car thefts by 84.5 percent.
Or, in more human terms, it would appear that over the last 12 years thepolicies Mr. Giuliani put in place have spared New York perhaps 10,000murders, 15,000 rapes and 800,000 robberies. This is clearly a humanitarianaccomplishment of great magnitude.
In my letter to Oslo, I stress that the Giuliani administration's crimepolicy was unique in two ways. First was its concentration on crimeprevention rather than arrests. I was invited to several statistics-reviewmeetings in which the mayor and his commissioners examined crime trends withthe Police Department's top officers. Interestingly, these police chiefswere primarily held responsible for the number of crimes reported ratherthan for the percentage of crimes solved. A chief who did not keep crimestatistics low risked losing his job. The other unique contribution was thecampaign against so-called quality-of-life crimes. The theory is that if anarea becomes rundown, if young men are allowed to urinate against walls, ifgraffiti proliferate, then the public's sense of security will deteriorate.The need for security guards and surveillance cameras increases, and societyas a whole becomes more closed. The trust necessary in a modern societyrequires vigilance against such crimes that disturb the peace.
Thus, for example, the Police Department's successful effort under Mr.Giuliani to reduce robberies and graffiti in the subway was based oncatching turnstile jumpers. The theory was that a person who planned tospray-paint subway cars or rob passengers would not buy a ticket. Stoppingthe jumpers thus cut down on other crimes. New York's quick recovery as atourism destination after Sept. 11, 2001, despite the remaining terroristthreat, can be attributed to awareness that New York had become one of theworld's safest cities.
Is all of this solely to Mr. Giuliani's credit? No, far from it. His policywas based on the scientific work of the sociologists James Q. Wilson andGeorge L. Kelling, who also served as mayoral advisers. Mr. Giuliani's firstpolice commissioner, William Bratton, played a central role. But it is RudyGiuliani who personified the policy, took significant political risks andconsistently supported a considerably demoralized police force.
Mr. Giuliani's detractors like to claim that his crime-prevention programunduly harmed racial minorities and increased tensions among the city'sethnic groups. This perception is largely false: most victims of crime inNew York were and are members of minority groups; gang violence among WallStreet bankers is a rare thing. The people who suffer most from anineffectual police force are poor people in bad residential areas, and theygained the most from Mr. Giuliani's successes.
Another common objection is that "crime just moved somewhere else." This,too, is not true. The number of reported crimes decreased more or lessconsistently in all 123 police districts. And while the substantial drop inthe use of crack and other drugs since the early 90's may be attributable tomany factors, including AIDS and the nation's economic boom, there is nodenying that police intervention was a major one.
The Nobel Peace Prize long ago freed itself from the directives of AlfredNobel's will, in which the focus was on contributions of the internationalpeace conferences of that time. It now often goes to people like MotherTeresa and last year's winner, Wangari Maathai, who have made humanitariancontributions. The civic actions symbolized by Rudolph W. Giuliani deserveequal recognition.
Olle Wastberg was consul general of Sweden to New York City from 1999 to2004.
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