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Greg Hands MP on lessons for London from New York City

Let me take you back to September 1993. The location was the Mad Hatter Bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The event was a meeting of the Friends of Rudy Giuliani an exciting project to try to elect the Citys first Republican Mayor in many decades. The Friends were the fundraising arm, and our guest speaker was Rudy Giuliani himself. I was living in New York at the time, and spent much of the years 1991 1997 there. In that time, I saw New York at its worst during the 1991 1992 recession, and New York at its best under Mayor Giuliani. Returning to our meeting, I asked him a question about improvements to the Citys subway system, specifically about improving the timetable on Lines 1,2,3 and 9. His answer was illuminating he had absolutely no suggestions on improving the efficiency of trains, merely saying we will look at this in due course. Normally, one might think, a politician with no proposals, no ideas, not even a sense of the problem this guy has no chance. But what Giuliani went on to say was devastating, that the biggest problem with the subway was that far too many people were afraid to use it, due to crime and the fear of crime. He said that he could probably pore over the timetables for me, and propose his own solutions, but that this would be a waste of time if there were no passengers willing to enter the stations in the first place. Politicians need to focus, and for Giuliani, the big focus was on crime. In 1993, New York City was in deep trouble. Not confined to the Bronx and Harlem, lawlessness had spread all over Manhattan and many of the outer boroughs. In the middle class black communities of south-east Queens the areas most visitors will know as the route from JFK airport into town, there were the screams of children involved in drive-by shootings, innocent victims in the explosion of the crack trade. Drug-dealing gangs with childish names like the Supreme Team and the Fat Cats were fighting for control of strategic corners, and bodies were turning up all over the place. The subways were being taken over by the homeless. A hundred homeless people were dying every year on the subways bitten by rats, stricken with frostbite or killed by trains. The personal tragedies lived out underground were making life in the City unbearable for the majority the number of people using the subway plummeted. In the summer of 1993 I moved to an area of the City called Chelsea a trendy, diverse, slightly bohemian part of the City, like its namesake in London in the 1960s, famous for its big night-clubs that would stay open from 6pm on Friday night until 6am on Monday morning. The very first weekend I was there, there was a murder on my street corner drug-related, probably a spill-over from one of the clubs. The next week, at the same corner, I was a rather improbable victim of crime, as a topless woman punched me to get the cab I had just hailed. I can assure you its not easy to work out how to react to being punched by a topless woman, but the incident was a bizarre manifestation of a growing sense of anarchy in the City.

"Politicians need to focus, and for Giuliani, the big focus was on crime."

"The biggest problem with the subway was that far too many people were afraid to use it."

One aspect of New York life not captured by the data

was the sheer sense of resignation and hopelessness in the face of crime.

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Back to Giuliani. He was a practical politician, not an idealogue. He correctly judged that the mood of the City was for change. In the Spring of 1992, the City Journal, a conservative think tank, devoted its entire issue to the Quality of Urban Life. Fred Siegel, its chief editor, attacked the forces that had allowed the citys public spaces to no longer be accessible to the public: the slow subversion of civility in New Yorks public spaces has caused even die-hard New York loyalists, black and white, to think about what was once unthinkable leaving. In September 1992, the Giuliani Mayoral campaign was launched. He ticked off a list of problems that instilled a sense of dread in New Yorkers, from drug-dealing on neighbourhood blocks to illegal street vendors to garbage on the streets. He quoted from the Broken Windows theory, often heard about since, but was actually an academic paper written in Britain. The theory holds that a seemingly minor matter like broken windows in abandoned buildings leads directly to a more serious deterioration of neighbourhoods. Someone who wouldnt normally throw a rock at an intact building is less reluctant to break a second window in a building that already has one broken. One aspect of New York life not captured by the data was the sheer sense of resignation and hopelessness in the face of crime, like for example, the hanging of no radio signs in the windows of cars. Giuliani said: this is essentially a negotiation with the worst members of society, a plea to thieves: Dont victimise me that other car doesnt have a sign, go take his radio. Giuliani recounted making a trip to London in 1990 to give a lecture. A questioner called to his attention a brochure with tips on how a visitor to New York might avoid crime. One of the suggestions was avoid eye contact. He wrote later all of a sudden, the depth of my citys problems came into stark focus. Why would anyone visit a city in which you cant look at people? In November 1993, Giuliani won the election by the narrowest of margins. Over the next 4 years I was in the City, an incredible transformation came about. New York went from being the least safe to the most safe of 200 major cities in the USA. Giuliani launched a crackdown on crime that began with nickel-and-dime hustlers and worked its way through to professional criminals and organised mobsters. Under his watch overall crime fell by 50% and murder by 67%, from 1,946 victims in 1993 to 642 in 2001. Police officer numbers shot up, so by 2001 New York City had more than 40,000 police officers. But the methods were more than just flooding the streets with police. Focus was given to the small-scale, so-called victimless quality of life crimes. Graffiti arrests trebled from1995 to 2001. People caught urinating in the streets, jumping a subway turnstile, playing loud music or drinking on the street were ticketed. The famous New York squeegee merchants only 75 of them were banished for ever. The police commissioner, Bill Bratton, famously said of them: They should get off the booze, get off the drugs and get off their asses. Liberal opinion was offended, but the policies worked. Bratton persuaded maintenance departments to work around the clock cleaning trains and buildings as fast as the graffiti vandals struck. In 1994, the first year of new management at City Hall, summonses for quality of life infractions jumped from 175,000 to 500,000. Returning to Britain full time in 1997, I had observed at first hand in New York how, despite being faced with the shrugged shoulders of politicians and the often the police themselves, Giuliani had actually made the most dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of a city. Londons problems do not yet approach those of New Yorks in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the trend in London is similar. Myron Magnet, one of the editors of the

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City Journal, which had been so influential in turning around public policy in New York, came to London in 2000, and wrote the causes that produced New Yorks troubles are operating powerfully in Britain today, citing falling police numbers and a lack of attention to preserving order in our public spaces. Bill Bratton, Giulianis former police chief, made a 1997 trip to London and was appalled that graffiti artists were allowed to carry on unchecked. He said of them: Urban art, my ass. Theres nothing artistic about this crap. The perpetrators are bastards. I hate them. If I had my way, I would throw away the key (Evening Standard, 10th July 2001). What we need in London is a change in the way public officials think about urban policy making. We need to make quality of life crimes such as aggressive begging, grafitti, drinking in public and public urination made the centrepiece of the approach, on the grounds that if you allow victimless crimes to flourish, it sends a signal that nobody is in charge. We need to believe that things can be done with the right political priorities and a proper focus on zero tolerance of all crime we can get there. Greg Hands is Member of Parliament for Hammersmith & Fulham mail@greghands.com

Liberal opinion was offended, but the policies worked. The methods were more than just flooding the streets with police. Focus was given to the small-scale, so-called victimless quality of life crimes. We need to make quality of life crimes such as aggressive begging, grafitti, drinking in public and public urination made the centrepiece of the approach.