GIULIANI BRINGS GET TOUGH MESSAGE TO VANCOUVER

Supervised drug injection sites, like Vancouver's Insite, are a
'terrible mistake' that will exacerbate drug problems, former New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani said yesterday in Surrey.

Giuliani, the Republican mayor of New York City during the 9/11
terrorist attacks, said he favours prosecuting drug dealers and
funding drug rehabilitation programs.

"I think we can rehabilitate people who use drugs," said Giuliani, a
former prosecutor, prior to his speech at the Surrey Regional Economic
Summit yesterday. "But we should not encourage them to use drugs.
That's a terrible mistake, it's just going to make the drug problem
worse."

Later, speaking to a crowd of about 500 people, Giuliani spoke about
boosting economic development by reducing crime.

He credited the introduction of the "broken windows theory" and using
computers to analyze crime statistics (Compstat) for transforming New
York from a "crime capital" to the safest major city of the U.S.

Broken windows is a theory by a pair of Harvard professors in which
police concentrate efforts on small issues - graffiti, theft and
street-level drug dealing - so that bigger issues don't develop.

New York has had a 60 per cent drop in crime since 1994 when Giuliani
took office and homicides have dropped 65 per cent, he said.

Giuliani, the first Republican elected mayor of New York in 25 years,
undertook a number of controversial reforms, including reducing city
bureaucracy, fighting deficits with tax cuts and using police and
social workers to get homeless people off the streets.

He also changed the way welfare was delivered in the city by giving
incentives to welfare agents who helped people find and keep employment.

"We were rewarding people for the deterioration of society," he said.
"Let's reward welfare workers for finding jobs for people."

He required able-bodied New Yorkers to work part-time (18 hours a
week) to receive welfare cheques. If people were unable to find jobs
they were employed by the city. Over an eight-year period, 800,000
fewer people collected welfare.

He then suggested that when employed "crime is not something (people)
even consider."

Giuliani is also credited with cleaning up Times Square, using zoning
to displace pornography shops by making it illegal to have two stores
within 500 feet of a school, a church or each other.