David Dinkins Thinks He Got a Raw Deal

David Dinkins was mayor of New York City from 1990 to the end of 1993. His successor, Rudy Giuliani, was credited for turning around New York’s crime problem, but current mayor Bill DeBlasio thinks that’s unfair:

“Dinkins got a raw deal largely because of race,” Mr. de Blasio said in a telephone interview before his re-election. “And he got a raw deal because he was not a loud, showy personality and he wasn’t always trying to claim credit. But any normal assessment of history would say, wait a minute, he added cops, that’s why this turned around.

“The thing I learned from that is an audacity of how to deal with what appeared to be an intractable problem,” Mr. de Blasio added. “The fact that we’re the safest big city in America today directly links to his actions with getting resources from Albany to get us the size of the police force we needed. None of his predecessors figured out how to do it. I’m not sure his successor, who took a lot of the credit for work done with resources Dinkins got — I’m not sure his successor could have pulled it off in Albany as a political reality.”

Let’s roll the tape:

Unless Rudy Giuliani was a time traveler, he’s not the guy responsible for New York City’s crime decline—and this isn’t just because Dinkins was the guy who put 5,000 more cops on the street. It’s because crime began declining in 1990, when Dinkins took office, and kept declining at roughly the same rate after Giuliani took over.

I don’t doubt that Bill Bratton and CompStat helped. Maybe broken-windows policing helped too. Violent crime in New York has declined more than in many big cities. But these things helped only at the margins.

Giuliani was lucky. He inherited Dinkins’ increase in the police force, and he inherited the effects of the EPA’s phaseout of leaded gasoline. He may have done a good job with the resources he was given, but he’s not the guy who made New York City safe. It’s long past time to acknowledge that.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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