On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a campaign stop in Grand Rapids. Giuliani attended a private fundraiser held by Marge Byington before delivering a speech to the Police Officers Association of Michigan. Earlier this year, the Police Officers Association of Michigan endorsed Giuliani.
Giuliani's positions--notably his support for abortion and gay rights--will likely not be terribly popular in conservative West Michigan. On the day he came to Grand Rapids the anti-Giuliani Conservative Declaration of Independence announced that gained 27 additional signatures from Grand Rapids Republicans opposed to Giuliani's policies. The initiative claims to have substantial support in the early primary states and features former Michigan Christian Coalition activist and current Michigan Republican Party Issues Chairman Tom McMillin in a leadership role.
Despite the controversy in Republican circles over Giuliani's position on social issues, Giuliani chose not to defend those positions and instead emphasized his toughness on crime. Giuliani mentioned his qualifications as mayor of New York City and as a former prosecutor, while placing considerable emphasis on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In his seventeen-minute speech, Giuliani mentioned the "September 11" five times, with the first mention coming less than two minutes into his speech.
The majority of Giuliani's speech focused on his development of the "Comstat" program in New York City. Giuliani explained how the program began with a transit police chief keeping crime statistics on napkins and expanded into a strategy that allowed the New York Police Department to base their tactics on "numbers rather than politics." As the program grew, police officers--the total number of which Giuliani expanded to 41,000 from 32,000--met weekly and officers were assigned to specific areas based on the statistics. He credited the program with a 67% drop in homicides and an 80% drop in automobile thefts along with an overall crime reduction of 56%.
Giuliani proclaimed that the program "revolutionized New York City" and that it was consequently expanded to 23 or 24 additional city departments. He cited a similar program in the corrections department as reducing violence by 90% and mentioned that a Comstat-style program was used for the welfare system. This "JobStat" program was designed to move people from welfare into the workforce and reduced welfare rolls in New York City from 1.1 million when he took office to 648,000 when he left.
Giuliani said that if he were elected president, he would implement a similar program to "secure our borders." He told the audience "if we did the same thing to our borders as we did with crime in New York City, we could stop people from coming into this country illegally." A "BorderStat" program, according to Giuliani, would reduce the number of "illegals" coming into the country by moving officers into the areas where undocumented immigrants are crossing. Giuliani also stated that he would accompany the program with more technology on the border and increased training of border patrol agents.
Giuliani also explained how a similar program was implemented in Los Angeles "to measure how effective they [law enforcement officials] are in finding terrorist cells." The program has been used to find indicators that "terrorist cells are operating in your community." Giuliani describe terrorism as "the major threat of our generation" and argued that the United States has to aggressively pursue terrorists. Law enforcement officials play a critical role in dealing with terrorism and can be part of a strategy that increases crime-fighting effectiveness while fighting terrorism. Giuliani expressed concern that it was possible to neglect fighting crime while focusing on terrorism.
Giuliani argued that in the 1990s the Clinton administration failed to focus attention the threat from "Islamic terrorism." He criticized Clinton for failing to respond to a "pattern of behavior" that began in 1993 following the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Giuliani described that bombing as "an act of war" that was treated simply as a crime rather than a terrorist act. He then asserted that police officers would be on the frontline in the fight against terrorism because for the terrorists "this is a war that they would like to carry out in our homes." He concluded by stating that police officers will play an essential role in this fight against terrorism because they "protect our homes" and that as such they must be treated as equals with the military establishment.
