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GLOBAL*BEAT - FROM POLITICS TO SAINTHOOD: "GIULIANI TIME" - Contributing writer CATRIONA STUART provides an in-depth and provocative look at documentarian Kevin Keating's new film on the career of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani that serves as a cautionary tale.
View the film trailer for "Giuliani Time" by following this link.
In the days following September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani secured his place in history as the Big Apple's heroic mayor.
But before he was named a Time magazine "Person of the Year," knighted by Queen Elizabeth or adopted as "America's mayor," Giuliani was better known for his war on squeegee-men and his disdain for a dung-flecked depiction of the Virgin Mary. In short, before Giuliani won over the world, his reputation on the New York City political scene was anything but untarnished.
In his new documentary, "Giuliani Time: The Man Who Would Be King," director Kevin Keating steps back in time to the days before the dust and rubble from the World Trade Center bombings blanketed both the city and Giuliani's reputation. He recalls a bygone era before the press revered Giuliani with a kind of secular idolatry that propelled him onto the front pages of most national newspapers and magazines. Keating runs through interviews with a laundry list of the New York left-wing elite to paint a portrait of a man whose get-tough policies may have cleaned up the city but trampled on civil liberties and the First Amendment in the process.
It is a worthwhile view, not for a long-term historical view of the man and his career, or an artfully crafted piece of documentary filmmaking, but as a solid reminder of the rancor that Giuliani had inspired before he was king.
The film begins in the tight-knit, Dodger-loving section of Brooklyn then known as Pigtown, where Giuliani grew up. Under a montage of historical footage, Wayne Barrett, a senior editor at the Village Voice and the author of Rudy: An Investigative Biography, narrates his ascent from the son of small-time mob muscle to one of America's most successful public prosecutors and then to the most widely-recognized mayor in the world.
Crime is what made Giuliani. Early in his career, he grabbed headlines and public attention with landmark public corruption cases and the successful prosecution of the head of the Sicilian mafia. He then made his bones with conservatives by taking a tough stance against allowing Haitian asylum-seekers into the country. Later, when he latched onto the broken-windows theory of policing - the notion that if you prosecute "nuisance crimes" like panhandling and turnstile-jumping, higher-level offenses take care of themselves - Giuliani stumbled onto the ideological underpinning of many of his most hotly contested tactics. 'Stop and Frisk,' racial profiling and 'zero tolerance' prevailed as police enforcement measures.
Politics aside, the numbers do not lie. Crime did go down.
"So Rudy Giuliani said 'I'm getting these people off the streets' and suddenly the idea was 'gee wait a minute, the police are not powerless," said Myron Magnet of the Manhattan Institute, and the film's most staunch Giuliani supporter. "They actually can make the city orderly."
From 1991 to 1999, the New York Times reported that misdemeanor arrests rose by 64 percent. And the violent crime rate declined by more than 50 percent under Giuliani's watch, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
But "Giuliani Time" is not an apolitical look back at the man's tenure as mayor of New York City from 1993 to 2001.
As both major political parties maneuver their prospective candidates for the 2008 Presidential election, Giuliani seems to be positioned as one of the Republican front runners. And while the movement to "draft Rudy for President," is already underway, Keating's film positions itself almost as a warning to those who would consider this man for the highest office in the land.
Consider the title, ripped from the headlines of the 1997 Abner Louima scandal in which a 30-year-old Haitian immigrant was sodomized with a plunger handle while in police custody, injuring his bladder and small intestine. During the attack, Louima claimed one of the two white officers taunted him with the phrase, "It's Giuliani time."
Indeed, Giuliani's crime reduction policies had come with a price tag.
Keating seeks to resurrect the memory of brutality and callousness that he characterizes as "Giuliani Time."
And he has his own set of numbers to point to.
Though Giuliani boasted that he moved close to a half-million people off the welfare rolls, in 2000, the city's poverty rate remained nearly twice as high as the national average. By December 2000, the homeless population was at its highest point since 1989 and NYC food services were experiencing record demand. By January 1999, 74,000 requests for food were denied.
Nor is crime, the once unassailable accomplishment of that administration, a sacred cow to be revered in "Giuliani Time."
"It's in the bloodstream of New Yorkers. And apparently it's now even in the bloodstream of Americans, this mythology of Rudy Giuliani single handedly, superhero, conquered crime in New York City," Barrett said.
In truth, says Barrett, New York City had begun to follow a pattern of declining crime rates that was taking place in large cities across the nation. The number of serious crimes had already begun to fall during the last three years of the Dinkins administration, the first time the city had seen crime drop in 36 years. And even as minority communities vilified the then-mayor in the street protests for routinely violating civil rights in their neighborhoods, Giuliani's heavy-handed policing tactics were repeatedly praised.
Then came Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant who was killed after four officers from the city's Street Crimes Unit fired 41 shots at him as he reached for his wallet. The killing divided the city and sparked protests on behalf of both police and citizens groups. The incident blew open racial tensions that had been simmering on both sides since Giuliani's era of aggressive policing began.
"I think that's ultimately going to be the great failing and the great disappointment for this mayor," said former NYC Police Commissioner William Bratton. "In [a] city of minorities, a city of immigrants just don't trust the mayor, because he's unable to put himself in their shoes."
That too, may be Keating's Achilles heel. Giuliani helped change the reputation of a city which until only recently was known as an unwelcoming destination with dirty, crime-ridden streets. And while Keating does sprinkle his documentary with a few voices of support for the former mayor, he does not give serious treatment to those who sided with the former mayor, who had many allies.
All told, Giuliani Time is best taken with a grain of salt and a copy of the New York Times archives in hand, for while it does explore crime and civil liberties in-depth, it also glosses over enormous swaths of the mayor's eight-year administration. Political scuffles over higher education and affordable housing, for example, fall by the wayside unless referenced by the dizzying roster of interview subjects.
The film however, does examine Giuliani's often fractious relationship with the First Amendment. In fact, the Keating's film project began in the fall of 1998 at the behest of a prominent constitutional lawyer who was concerned about the mayor's numerous instances of placing limits on free speech rights.
The free-speech crackdown began under the guise of cleaning up the streets. Despite a decades-old tradition of street art in New York City, in the mid-1990s police began arresting anyone who sold art, books or any other material s on the street without a peddler's license.
Of the nearly 400 NYC street artists, said Robert Lederman, a street artist and activist, almost all had been arrested at least once. "We became basically a hunted subculture in the city," he said.
All told, the Giuliani administration was taken to court on 21 separate occasions on charges that it had violated the First Amendment. That includes the now infamous Brooklyn Museum debacle where the mayor pulled funding for the museum after viewing an exhibit which featured an African-influenced painting of the Virgin Mary that included splotches of dung, which is employed by some African cultures as a symbol of fertility.
"Public funds should not be used to support sick demonstrations by people even if they call themselves artists," said Giuliani, showing little tolerance for an artistic view he could not comprehend.
"He uses the levers of power to punish any critic. He doesn't have that right," said former NYC Mayor Ed Koch. "That's why the First Amendment is so important and why I, on occasion, have referred to him as Pinochet, Caligula, maybe it's a combination of the two."
The rising backlash to his policies eventually led to massive street protests, particularly within NYC's immigrant communities. High profile news of a marriage-ending romantic affair with a political aide seemed to seal Giuliani's image as a failure both in and out of the mayor's office.
But then came September 11, and suddenly Giuliani was the right man at the right place. His quick response and high media exposure resurrected his floundering political career. As the film suggests, it's perhaps the single reason that we probably haven't heard the last of Rudy Giuliani.
CATRIONA STUART is a freelance writer who frequently trips on the dividing line between written and multimedia storytelling. She lives in Oakland, California alongside 400,000 other people.
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
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