FATAL ERROR SHOULDN'T UNDO THE GOOD DONE IN NEW YORK

THE RACE HUSTLERS, hate mongers and assorted leftovers from failed
city administrations past are ganging up on Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New
York. Even some Hollywood celebrities, like Susan Sarandon, are
showing up to have themselves arrested outside the mayor's office,
along with the usual suspects, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and
former New York City Mayor David Dinkins.

The putative reason for their protest is the mistaken shooting of
African immigrant Amadou Diallo by four New York policemen. The true
reason for their protest is a desire to stigmatize and therefore
reverse the most amazing urban turnaround since the great Chicago fire
of 1871.

The miracle that the Giuliani administration has wrought in New York
City is so dramatic that it has stunned even those who planned it. As
John Podhoretz details in The Weekly Standard, the city's overall
crime rate has been cut in half in just five years -- with minority
neighborhoods benefiting the most. On the Lower East Side, the murder
rate has dropped 81 percent since 1994, burglaries are down 72
percent, and rapes have declined by 60 percent. The numbers are
comparable in other formerly hazardous neighborhoods.

The drop in crime, petty and serious, is not, as the Giuliani critics
would have it, a mere artifact of a booming economy and a drop in the
teenage population. As former Police Chief William Bratton and William
Andrews argue in the spring edition of the City Journal, New York has
maintained an unemployment rate of between 8 percent and 10 percent
throughout the last six years. That's double the national average. And
the teenage population has remained steady, except among minorities,
where it rose.

Birds of a feather? Dinkins and Sharpton Nor has this urban peace
been purchased at the price of a police reign of terror. Though the
police department has been expanded by 3,000 officers since 1991,
police shootings have declined. In 1995, the police used their guns
344 times. By 1998, the number had declined to 249. And fatalities in
police shootings have dropped, too. In 1996, 30 of the shootings
resulted in death. In 1998, 19 died at the hands of the police.

There are a few key race hustlers in New York, most notably Al
Sharpton, who can stoke the tiniest spark of misunderstanding into a
raging flame of racial animosity. Sharpton came to national attention
by appointing himself an "adviser" to hoaxer Tawana Brawley. He went
on to incite a near riot in Harlem at a shop owned by a Jewish
merchant. Someone took the bait and torched the place, killing an
innocent man. And Sharpton shows up whenever he sees a chance to
encourage race hatred -- his most recent contribution was persuading
Abner Luima, the black man brutalized by New York police, to say that
the cops had said, "It's Giuliani time!" before inflicting their torture.

(This was later unmasked as a total fraud.)

The revival of the New York Police Department was no fluke. As Bratton
and Andrews make clear, the department was reorganized from top to
bottom by the Giuliani administration. Cops were taken out of their
patrol cars and put back on the streets. Computers were enlisted to
keep track of where crimes were occurring, and these data were
cross-referenced with information about the whereabouts of parolees.

Stop-and-frisk operations netted thousands of illegal guns, and the
police studiously denied criminals their infrastructure by going after
fences, chop shops, auto exporters and prostitution customers.
Precinct commanders were given more authority, and Compstat, the
information gathering system, helped them target high-crime areas.
Most famously, the police got tough on "quality of life" offenses like
blasting a radio or panhandling. In the process, they made New York's
streets nicer places for the law-abiding and nabbed a good number of
serious criminals along the way.

The Sharptons and David Dinkins of the world were happier when New
York was overrun by "squeegee men" extorting cash from motorists, drug
dealers strutting the streets unafraid, and teenagers openly swigging
beer and vaulting over subway turnstiles. They liked a New York with
4,500 shootings a year.

But most New Yorkers are delighted with the change Giuliani has
wrought. The mistaken shooting of an innocent man is a tragedy. But to
undo the great work of the NYPD in the name of Diallo would be a crime.