And this news comes at a good time for Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton. They have been trying to offset the damage caused in May, when rowdy police, including some of New York's finest, went on a spree during a convention in Washington, groping guests and prancing naked through hotels. It's not demographics. It's not economics. What's happening is that you have 38,000 hardworking cops, a mayor who supports us and a public who is with us.
Much credit belongs to an old-fashioned show of strength.
But numbers make up only part of the picture. Since he took over City Hall in January 1994, Giuliani, a hard-nosed former federal prosecutor who has long made a subspecialty of studying local law enforcement, has had a laboratory with 7.3 million residents in which to test some innovative theories. One of the most commonsense measures links cops' promotions and future assignments not to the number of arrests they make but to their ability to keep crime out of their territory. The better way to manage a police department is to prevent crime in the first place and find ways of measuring that. When Captain Jose Cordero of the 40th precinct in the South Bronx learned that shootings in his precinct had edged up 15 percent earlier this year, for example, he authorized sweeping searches of housing projects and mailboxes, two common hiding places for guns and drugs.