The Republican Mayors Who Proved a Big City Could Be Governed Again

Somewhere in the early 1990s, the smart set decided that big American cities were finished. Not troubled. Finished. Ungovernable, the experts said, a permanent condition, like weather. The best a mayor could do was manage the decline, hold a press conference after each disaster and ask Washington for money. Fiscal crises, crime waves, filthy subways and failing services were treated as the natural order of things, and anyone who suggested otherwise was assumed to be selling something.

Then a handful of Republican mayors, in cities that had not elected one in a generation, took office and acted as though the problem could be solved. They were not all alike. They did not all succeed at everything. Some of what they did drew fierce and fair criticism. (A mayor who pleases everyone is usually doing nothing, which in a big city is a full-time job and a bad one.) But their basic idea, that a city is a thing you can run, with goals and measurements and consequences, changed the way local government is done across the country. This is the story of three of them: Rudolph Giuliani in New York, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles and Stephen Goldsmith in Indianapolis.

The setting

To understand the stir they caused, you need the backdrop. New York's fiscal crisis of 1975 had put the city on the edge of bankruptcy, and the 1980s and early 1990s brought a surge of violent crime, driven in large part by the crack epidemic. Los Angeles was still absorbing the shock of the 1992 riots. Indianapolis had a different problem, an ordinary one: costs rising, services slow, a city government that did what it had always done because it had always done it.

In all three places the voters, in 1991 and 1993, chose someone new. Goldsmith won in Indianapolis in 1991 and took office in January 1992. Riordan won in Los Angeles in 1993. Giuliani won in New York in 1993 and took office on January 1, 1994. Different cities, different problems, one common thread: voters were tired of being told that nothing could be done.

Giuliani and the idea of order

Rudolph Giuliani had been a federal prosecutor before he ran for mayor, and he governed like one. He served as mayor from 1994 to the end of 2001, and the heart of his record was public safety.

The intellectual spark was an article. In March 1982, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling published "Broken Windows" in The Atlantic. Their argument was that visible disorder, such as vandalism, public drinking, graffiti and aggressive panhandling, signals that no one is in charge, and that this invites more serious crime. A broken window left unrepaired tells the neighbourhood that no one cares. Fix the small things, they argued, and you change the atmosphere in which big things happen.

Giuliani picked William Bratton as police commissioner in 1994, and Bratton, with deputy commissioner Jack Maple, built a system called CompStat. The idea was simple enough to fit on an index card. Collect crime data every week, map it, and make precinct commanders appear before headquarters to explain what they were doing about it. In other words, accountability, with numbers. Before CompStat, a police department could go through a bad month without anyone at the top knowing why. After it, a commander who could not explain a spike in robberies found the question being asked in front of his colleagues.

The city also went after the small stuff that Wilson and Kelling had written about. Squeegee men who demanded money from drivers at intersections were cleared. Fare-beating in the subway, once ignored, was enforced, and people arrested for it were checked for outstanding warrants. Giuliani's administration also expanded work requirements in the city's welfare programs and pushed for lower taxes and for private contracting of some services.

What happened to crime? New York's murder and robbery numbers fell steeply through the 1990s, and the city went from a place whose name was shorthand for urban danger to one that tourists and families wanted to visit. The exact figures are in the NYPD's historical statistics, and I'd rather you looked them up than took my word for them.

What the critics said

Here is the strongest case against the story, and a fair one deserves a straight answer.

One. Crime fell across the whole country in the 1990s, including in cities with entirely different policing. The end of the crack epidemic, a booming economy, an aging population, more police hired nationwide under federal programs in the 1994 crime law, and higher incarceration all get credit from various scholars. So how much belongs to New York's methods? Honest researchers disagree.

Two. The tactics had costs. Aggressive enforcement of minor offences fell most heavily on poor and minority neighbourhoods, and the city saw painful cases of police violence. In 1997, officers brutalized Abner Louima in a station house, and in 1999, police shot Amadou Diallo, an unarmed man, in the Bronx. Critics said the strategy rewarded numbers over judgment. They had a point that any serious police department has to answer.

Three. Giuliani's style was combative. Supporters called it leadership. Opponents called it arrogance. That's a matter of taste, and I'll leave it there.

Here is my answer. The first criticism cuts both ways: if crime fell everywhere, then it fell furthest in the city that tried hardest, and a decline that large in a city of that size is not an accident. The second criticism is a reason to train and supervise officers properly, not to give up on order. And the third is the weakest of the three. Nobody ever won a fight with a bureaucracy by being agreeable, and a mayor who gets complaints from the people he is shaking up is at least shaking. On balance, I'd say the record shows that management matters, that measurement works and that a police department can be steered if someone is willing to steer.

Riordan and the businessman's approach

Out in Los Angeles, the story was different. Richard Riordan was a wealthy investor and lawyer who had never held elected office. He ran in 1993, in a city where mayoral races are officially nonpartisan, and won, serving two terms until 2001. He spent a lot of his own money and promised to hire more police officers and to push the department toward community policing, and he was determined to change how the city did business.

His lasting contribution was a change in the city's own rules. Los Angeles was governed under an old charter that left the mayor weak and the departments strong. Riordan pushed for charter reform, and the voters approved a new charter in 1999. It took effect in 2000 and created a system of neighbourhood councils to give residents a formal voice at city hall. Whether the councils work as well as the reformers hoped is argued to this day, but the principle was sound: when the structure is the problem, change the structure.

Riordan's stamp on the city was also personal. He recruited experienced managers from the private sector and made decisions as a manager would, with an eye on results, which was an unusual way of doing things at city hall. He had critics, including some who argued that a businessman's instincts were not always suited to the politics of a diverse and fractious city. And the city's police department faced its own deep problems during those years, which were not solved on any single mayor's watch. I'll say it plainly: Riordan is the least famous of the three, and he gets the least credit, but the idea he stood for, that you can govern a huge city like a serious enterprise, is the same one.

Goldsmith and the case for competition

Now to the one I find most interesting, because it is not about crime at all. Stephen Goldsmith was mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 1999, and he asked a question that should have been asked in every city: why does the government do this itself?

His test was sometimes described as the Yellow Pages test. If you can find a service in the Yellow Pages, with private companies offering it for a price, then the city should ask whether it should be doing the job itself, and if so, whether its own workers could do it as cheaply and well as a competitor. He did not simply privatize. He made city departments bid against private firms for the work, a system known as managed competition. If the city's employees offered the best price and the best quality, they kept the job. If they did not, the work went to a contractor. Nothing makes a government department sharpen its pencil like learning that somebody down the road has a pencil and a lower price.

The stories are instructive. Indianapolis put its street repair work out to bid and its own crews, working with new methods, were competitive. The city also contracted out the operation of its wastewater treatment in 1994, in what was at the time one of the largest deals of its kind in the country. Goldsmith's argument was that the point was never to punish public employees. It was to give them a reason to improve, and to give taxpayers the savings. In 1997 he wrote a book called The Twenty-First Century City, laying out his philosophy.

Critics, including public-employee unions, said competition meant lost jobs, lower wages and a risk that contractors would cut corners or lock in monopolies of their own. Those are real risks. A badly written contract can leave a city worse off than it was. The answer is the same as for any contract: measure the performance, enforce the terms, and keep the ability to switch. A city that ties itself to one vendor has simply exchanged one monopoly for another.

How a city differs from a state

Before we get carried away, let me add the cautions that a serious reader needs.

A city is not a state. A mayor cannot change the criminal code, the tax structure or the education system without the state's consent, since cities are creatures of their state, a point explained in Why Your City Can't Do That, Dillon's Rule and Home Rule Explained. A city cannot print money, as Why Your State Cannot Print Money the Way Washington Does explains for states, and cities have even less room. A city competes for residents more directly than a state does, because the move from one suburb to another is cheaper than moving across a state line. That cuts both ways: the discipline is stronger, but so is the damage when taxes drive people out.

The 1990s mayors had advantages of timing, too. Crime was beginning to fall everywhere, the economy was strong and the voters were hungry for change. A mayor today would face different conditions, so copying the method without checking the conditions would be foolish. The lesson is not "do what Giuliani did." The lesson is the one underneath: set goals, measure results, hold managers to account, and let competition work.

What to take from it

Here is the principle in three parts.

1. Pick a measure and publish it. CompStat worked because it forced commanders to answer to numbers. Your city council can do the same with response times, pothole repairs or permit delays.
2. Ask who else could do the job. Goldsmith's question is as good in a small town as in a big city. Ask what the service costs, who provides it and whether a competitor could do it better.
3. Fix the structure, not just the person. Riordan's charter reform reminds us that sometimes the problem is the rulebook.

If you want a closer look at how local rules interact with the state, Three Towns, Three Rule Books and the Case for Letting States Differ is a useful companion, and Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible covers the idea that problems are best solved close to home. For a look at another reform that bore fruit in the same decade, How the States Rewrote Welfare Before Washington Finally Caught Up tells the welfare story, and The 1994 Contract With America and the End of Forty Years of House Rule covers the national mood that year. On the broader question of doing more with licensed trades and less red tape, the license you need to braid hair and the jobs it quietly kills fits.

The bottom line

• Giuliani in New York (1994 to 2001), Riordan in Los Angeles (1993 to 2001) and Goldsmith in Indianapolis (1992 to 1999) showed that a big city can be managed, if the mayor sets clear goals and measures them.
• Broken-windows policing and CompStat were built on a simple idea: pay attention to small disorder and hold commanders accountable for results. The critics were right that tactics need training and oversight, and right that crime fell elsewhere too.
• Managed competition, tested by Goldsmith, lets public workers and private firms bid for the same job and rewards whichever serves the taxpayer best.
• A city is not a state. Mayors work inside limits set by the statehouse, so copy the method, not the headlines.
• Ask your own city hall three questions: what is measured, who else could do the job, and does the rulebook still make sense? Then show up at the meeting and ask in public.