The Bad Old Days of Mayor Guiliani
“Quality of life” were just other words for civil tyranny.
Rudy Giuliani’s political career has been up and down. Now known for his right-wing Trump ass-licking and multiple charges related to election-fixing, he was once a conservative mayor of New York who fucked up the city with his life-hating policies.
Guiliani was elected mayor in 1994, the first Republican to be chosen for this office since John Lindsay in 1965. Guiliani had initially been a Democrat, then an Independent, but political affiliations were secondary to his thirst for power. His mistrust in the existence of fair American elections was an obsession, long before he was convicted for his open disruption of the electoral system in Georgia in 2020.
Like Big Daddy Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced Governor of New York from 2011-2021, Guiliani had a gift for seeming down-to-earth. After the 9/11 attacks, some people found Guiliani’s conversational-sounding presence reassuring. They were listening to the medium, not the message, which was Islamophobic. They were also not paying attention to the fact that Guiliani claimed his efforts to be on par with the rescue workers at Ground Zero, even though he logged in only 29 hours at the site in the three months following 9/11. His stolen valor should rather have illustrated his reliance on lies. One wonders if his bold-faced lying paved the way for other politicians, such as Donald Trump, to adopt open mendacity as a political tactic.
During Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, many people supported what they thought were his great “quality of life” policies. Guiliani’s viewpoint was that you must convict anyone for any level of crime, even the smallest, including fare beating, jaywalking, or panhandling. The justification was that finding small-time crooks would eventually lead to larger enemies. People believed that crime in New York City was reduced under Giuliani’s administration. What they failed to understand was that crime was dropping all over the US, and Guiliani was not personally responsible. The people defending Guiliani didn’t want to see that once you start arresting everyone, it quickly leads to a local fascist dictatorship.
Under Giuliani’s mayorship, everyone was arrested for everything. Guiliani resorted to using defunct laws from the 19th century that were never expunged from public record in order to bust the most people. One of the most ridiculous was the reinstitution of an obscure law banning dancing. This was ostensibly to hurt businesses operating without an expensive cabaret license. What constitutes dancing is subjective, but arrests were made with impunity toward anyone moving to a beat. I was kicked out of a couple of bars for dancing – which to me is like breathing – because businesses were so fearful of racking up city violations. There was no public dancing allowed in New York City between approximately 1994-2001. I understand this may be difficult to believe for anyone who did not live in New York City during that time.
The level of arrests during Guiliani’s “quality of life” frenzy was truly astonishing. Two of my friends were arrested, one for drinking a beer outside on a stoop, and one for smoking pot behind some garbage cans outside. I thought the cops were just being hard on them because they both happened to be Black males. Same for a drag queen friend who was also arrested for smoking pot. Then one muggy September night in 1997, I was smoking a joint in a park with three other people, celebrating a friend’s birthday. My friends and I were conscious of not doing this openly, making sure there were no children or police around, and hiding in the bushes under the cover of darkness. Nevertheless, a paddy wagon roared up out of nowhere, and the cops roughly piled three of us in. I spent 26 hours in the Tombs, AKA the Manhattan House of Detention, while the arresting officers took the rest of my Maui Wowie, making sure I knew they would be smoking it themselves. I was subjected to a strip search in a broom closet, resulting in my participation in a winning class action lawsuit against the NYPD for police brutality. Before Guiliani’s term ended, at least a dozen or more friends and acquaintances had met a similar fate.
Even more disturbing, Guiliani used city funding to hire thousands more police, instructing them to be super-reactive, with no room for sympathy or humanism. The shooting of unarmed suspects Amadou Diallo, Gidone Busch, and Patrick Dorismond, and the sexual torture of Abner Louima in police custody, appeared to set a standard that has ballooned to disastrous levels throughout the nation.
Although many New Yorkers were able to see Giuliani for who he really is after his numerous convictions and his disbarring, they did not see it when he was mayor applying his “quality of life” policies. The thing is, if you see others being mistreated, don’t think you are immune. This applies to any harsh political regime, including the current iteration of the US government. If they are coming for others, they will eventually be coming for you.