New Jersey Mayor Fights For His City

As Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a moderate Democrat, tries to tackle drug-related violence on city streets. "The battle is to secure this city," said Mayor Booker, whose approach to urban renewal depends as much on fighting crime as re-building Newark's economy. If the city isn't secure, he said, businesses won't come and people won't have jobs.

Newark did not have a centralized narcotics bureau when Mayor Booker took office on July 1, 2006. That wasn't the only problem. "Most violent crime happens at night, yet 60 percent of our police officers were working daytime shifts, 30 percent were behind desks when they should have been on the streets. They lacked equipment, worked in crumbling buildings, precincts had no bathroom facilities, there were few computers. Men were working on typewriters. It looked like something out of Barney Miller," Mayor Booker said. Not everyone was happy with the changes in store. He said many officers retired quickly after his arrival.

However, the strategy appears to be working. As of yesterday, Newark had gone 36 days without a murder....which hasn't happened since the early 1960s. Mayor Booker hopes 2008 will be a breakthrough year, but he isn't ready to declare success. "We've collapsed the murder rate by some 80 percent and shootings are down 60 percent. It's a great stretch...a building block to ultimate success," he said. Mayor Booker has a bigger picture in mind; a national model for urban transformation that is fought on the local level. He called the national government's War On Drugs "a colossal failure that's costing Americans more than they realize." "Philly, Chicago, Detroit, we're all in this together. We're all in a common fight. Let the Feds argue about family values or moral issues or whatever. The best innovation now, in this country, quite honestly is not at the federal level," he said.

My response: I gotta note that this is the same Cory Booker who certain entrenched black liberal and leftist interests bitterly opposed (and that's putting it mildly...the documentary "Street Fight" told the sordid tale) in his mayoral bids, while backing the status quo of previous Mayor Sharpe James and his cronies. Just a few years back, Cory Booker was being called "white boy", "not really black", "a Jew" (he is Baptist), and a Republican. The Black Commentator called him "a cynical pretender", "a prince in the Hard Right pantheon" and alluded to him as "poison fruit" because he dared veer from socialist orthodoxy in addressing Newark's challenges. However, the brotha is making Newark a safer place for black (and other) folks. Kudos to Mayor Booker.