Word: mayoral
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Booker hired Garry McCarthy, a respected, no-nonsense New York City cop, to run his police department. McCarthy had helped New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cut Big Apple crime. Booker took a huge risk because in Newark, McCarthy had two strikes against him. First, he's white. In a majority-black city fraught with racial tension between residents and police officers, that was sure to anger some locals. Second, he's not from Newark, a provincial town accustomed to giving plum public-sector jobs to its own. So here comes this Ivy League mayor reared...
Despite the strong law-enforcement team the mayor put in place, Booker's staff begged him to quit harping on crime. After all, violence, especially in a city with Newark's harrowing history, is awfully hard to control. "It's very ballsy," Newark city councilman Oscar James II says of Booker's laser focus on reducing murders. "Some dude decides to go on some crime spree, starts taking people out, and then what? It happens." (See pictures of an ammunitions manufacturer...
During Booker's first year, the strategy did indeed backfire. In August 2007, three local college students were murdered, execution-style, in a city schoolyard. The tragedy was a nightmare that traumatized Newark and its confident new mayor. "It broke me down," Booker says on a Friday evening in June while relaxing in the back of his SUV. "I was feeling a deep sense of frustration and pain. I was just taking all the violence at that point very, very personally...
...months of operation. And against the advice of his staff, the police director, even his mother, Booker started personally patrolling the streets with his security team until 4 in the morning. "At some point, I just told him, 'Cory, you keep me on my knees,'" says Carolyn Booker, the mayor...
McCarthy wanted the mayor to get back to his day job. "I grabbed my chiefs and said, 'Look what the mayor has to do to raise his comfort level,'" McCarthy says in his thick Bronx accent. "'Why aren't you guys making sure that he's not uncomfortable?'" Whether the cameras, Booker's patrols or the Policing 101 measures instituted by McCarthy - moving more officers to night and weekend shifts, when, get this, crime is more likely to happen - were most responsible for the turnaround, the results are stunning. Murders dropped 36% in Newark - from 105 to 67 - from...