That whole vaunted decline in crime that occurred while he was mayor, remember how tough his cops were against un armed and innocent civilians and Squeegee Bums, looks as if it wasn't all his doing...
First of all demographics were changing in NYC, as they were around the country, and the typical perpetrators of crime, young men, were being assimilated easier into the work force...
Second, the Clinton years saw steady growth in employment opportunities so crime, overall, was dropping...
But one of the best reasons for a drop in crime rates in NYC as well as in other Urban areas was because we got the lead out...
That's right, unleaded gas, unleaded paints, the use of lead in pipes and toys all started to have an effect on the behavior of people...
One of the reasons that lead is so dangerous to people is that it literally drives people crazy. Well if not totally crazy, at least irrational and prone to anti-social behavior...
So the deleading of America coincides with a drop in irrational crime...
So Rudy, you just happened to be in the right place at the right time...
I bet the Squeegee Guys and graffiti artists feel a little vindicated. They can sleep easier at night knowing that they in fact weren't the cause of the spike in criminal behavior that Rudy said they were...
"Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.
The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.
What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/07/AR2007070701073.html
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