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Instead of shuffling priorities to save face, however, Booker attacked crime even harder. First, he worked with the Newark business community to raise $3.2 million to install more than 100 surveillance cameras throughout the city. The technology led to 109 arrests in its first 16 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...
...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 2006 to 2008. Shooting incidents dropped 41%. Rapes fell 30%, and auto thefts 26%. Newark went 43 days without a homicide in early 2008, the city's longest such stretch in 48 years. In the first quarter of this year, Newark had its lowest number of homicides since...
...McCarthy discuss a recent homicide investigation in the mayor's office, the creases on Booker's forehead increase tenfold. He admits to posting a murder target for 2009 on his bedroom wall, a practice that he knows is somewhat morbid. (Booker won't share the number he wishes Newark to beat.) Booker has dumped the 4 a.m. chases, however. "I made a deal with Garry that as long as the crime numbers are going where they are going," Booker says, "I will not get in the police cars anymore." He hasn't totally softened, though. While cruising to a July...
...Booker's tougher policing methods are not getting rave reviews from all residents. "It seems like the cops hate us," says DeAndre Breeland, a legal aide who lives in the South Ward. On a late-June night patrol, two cars from the Newark police department's street-crime unit zipped through some of the city's most notorious neighborhoods, slowing down to check on groups hanging out on stoops and flashing lights to make sure there was no funny business. The glares from Newarkers said it all: Get out of here. Of course, these same detractors didn...
...sterling: as the recession set in, robberies, for example, spiked 27% in 2008 and have risen 10% year to date through late June. But numbers don't tell the whole story. On June 27, a 17-year-old boy was murdered on Martin Luther King Boulevard, near one of Newark's spanking-new affordable-housing communities. "Whenever there's a murder in Newark, the city almost defaults to the terrible memories," says Clement Price, a history professor at Rutgers University, Newark, who has lived in the city for 40 years. "The statistics become meaningless...