The mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, is riding high. He used draconian methods, however, to sweep the homeless off the city?s streets, and his record is now under scrutiny as never before. A Jesuit studying for a doctorate at Columbia University explains why the Churches have been among Giuliani?s sternest critics. EVERYONE who knows New York, whether as a lifetime resident, recent transplant or occasional visitor, agrees that the borough of Manhattan has never been safer, cleaner or more enjoyable to visit. The streets gleam, business is brisk, restaurants are opening faster than reviews can be written and, perhaps most important of all, the fear at night of a mugging or worse is gone. Times Square provides a striking example of change. Forty-second Street is no longer the draw it was for denizens of sex shops. Ford Theatre?s doors are inviting, the new Loews movie theatre offers more screens than can be seen in a weekend of continuous attendance, and the infusion of capital by Disney and other corporate giants has brought a once off-limits corridor back into circulation for resident and tourist alike.

Nearly everyone else also agrees that the mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, deserves much of the credit. Not all of it, of course. Now just past the midpoint of his second and final term (mayors cannot be re-elected to a third consecutive term in office), he has the good fortune of riding the crest of America?s longest and most dramatic period of economic growth. Much of that prosperity has been realised at the heart of the city?s financial district ? the stock exchanges. Giuliani makes no secret that he aims to make the city a safe and secure place for new wealth, and who can argue with that? The titans of Wall Street, their armies of workers, from back-room computer programmers to highly-paid financial analysts, and the collateral businesses they support, from lawyers to accountants, constitute a key component of Manhattan?s day-time workforce and residential population.

The popular perception shared by many New Yorkers is that Giuliani, whatever his shortcomings, has managed the city with remarkable proficiency. Many feel he has achieved what others were incapable of doing: restoring the city?s sanity in the face of what seemed to be intractable urban problems, particularly crime and homelessness. For many this advance is enough and they are content to enjoy the ride. These residents and many others, especially those who are in New York for only short periods of time on business or as tourists, as well as those who live there just long enough to acquire sufficient wealth to finance a move to one of the more classy commuting suburbs, often fail ever to see or understand the underside of the Giuliani years. Now, with a Senate campaign fast approaching that will pit Mayor Giuliani against the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, and which promises to set new standards of mean-spiritedness and expense, it seems the other side of the mayor is beginning to show. Rudolph Giuliani will be remembered for many quite laudable things, but not for compassion towards or solidarity with the city?s poor and underprivileged.

The mayor is a native of Brooklyn, the grandson of Italian immigrants. He enjoys a good deal of support from some communities in Brooklyn, predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle-class neighbourhoods like Bay Ridge, as well as more affluent sections of the borough, including Brooklyn Heights. This profile of support is replicated in other boroughs as well, including Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. On the other hand, in areas composed mainly of poor, minority communities he has little or no backing.

Central Brooklyn is one of those communities. A relatively short subway ride from Manhattan, it is out of sight and out of mind for most of the mayor?s supporters and admirers of the new New York. Like other neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, Bronx and, yes, parts of Manhattan like East and Central Harlem, Central Brooklyn is a picture of urban blight. Housing projects shadow a landscape of dilapidated buildings and boarded-up stores. Schools are in turmoil and hospitals lack adequate funding. At the end of last month came the frightening news that babies are now dying in Central Brooklyn at extraordinarily high rates. Infant deaths in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a housing project in the area that once attracted the attention of Robert Kennedy, stand at 14 per 1,000, an increase of 20 per cent over the 1997 rate and more than twice the city-wide average of 6.8 deaths per 1,000. Aids is rampant in these neighbourhoods and prenatal care is woefully inadequate. The mayor?s magic has not touched this community.

The city?s health commissioner has announced that reducing levels of infant mortality will be one of his top priorities for the year 2000 but the mayor himself has announced no new initiatives for Central Brooklyn, no state of emergency, no crisis, no drop-by visit, no press conference. If a similar crisis were to occur on Manhattan?s East Side, or at any of the hospitals where white, affluent children are born, there is no doubt that he would be engaged on it 24 hours a day seven days a week, marshalling all the resources that made his Times Square millennium celebration such a success.

The underside of these recent years is not limited to difficulties faced by the boroughs, places that are out of sight and out of mind. In Manhattan itself the mayor is relentless in his efforts to clear the streets of homeless people.

In fairness, homelessness is a national problem and New York remains one of the most generous communities in the nation for its commitment, in theory at least, to seeing that everyone has adequate shelter. That theory became more abstract late last October when Giuliani decided that providing shelter for the homeless could no longer be cost-free. He proposed new rules requiring those seeking shelter from the city to be subject to compulsory evaluations for work, jobs searches and work assignments, along the lines of a workfare programme that has been in place since 1995 for those receiving public assistance.

The proposed work requirements carried draconian sanctions that evoked an outcry. Those who failed to comply with the rules would be denied shelter and, if they were the heads of families (which in most cases meant single mothers), their children would be taken from them and sent to foster care. For example, a homeless person in a city shelter who showed up for assigned work an hour late would be evicted from the shelter for 90 days for the first infraction, 150 days for the second and 180 for the third. The proposed rules, released at a time when the city had already entered its prolonged Christmas shopping frenzy, offered a Dickensian end to the twentieth century: work had not been required as a condition for shelter by the city for nearly 100 years. So much for a year of jubilee.

The mayor and his advisers argue vociferously that the new dispensation would be in the best interests of the homeless, part of a larger strategy to end a culture of dependency and to replace it with motivation, self-reliance and hard work. They point to their success in enabling recipients of public assistance to find meaningful employment and to be self-reliant. Advocates for the homeless are aghast and point to the mayor?s fundamental lack of understanding of the needs and plight of those who seek shelter, many of whom are mentally ill. That the new rules were announced at the start of the cold weather season seemed to make little or no difference to Giuliani and his allies. Those who resist the changes, he argues in his combative and confrontational style, do so because they are afraid of losing their livelihoods, derived from federal, state and city funding, if the numbers of homeless fall. In other words, their objections to the proposed rules are based on self-interest and self-preservation.

On 22 February the mayor?s initiative suffered a serious setback. A state court ruled that the proposals violated an earlier court decree which guaranteed the homeless a right to shelter. The judge found that the rules themselves were too complex and a person who was unable to understand the requirements might simply for this reason be sent back out onto the street and to possible death from exposure. The judge also found that the rules wrongly assumed that most homeless people were capable of holding on to a job. Socially dysfunctional people should continue to receive shelter, he ordered. Although the court based its decision on single adults, advocates for the homeless, who had gone to the court to block the mayor?s rules, argued that it should also apply to homeless parents and their children.

LOSING in court is nothing new to the mayor. He has been checked frequently by the state and federal judiciary on a range of issues. Just in the past two years, and at an extraordinary cost to the taxpayers in legal fees, a federal district court has criticised the city sharply for violating the First Amendment of the Constitution and has reversed the mayor?s directive that funding for the Brooklyn Museum of Art should cease because of its controversial showing of the Sensation exhibition; a state court has halted the mayor?s plans to demolish the city?s 120 neighbourhood gardens and to turn the land over to housing developers; and other decisions have reversed the mayor?s penalising of an Aids organisation and his efforts to disqualify disabled individuals from welfare benefits.

But what is more remarkable than this string of reversals is the mayor?s skill in making them work for him. Giuliani never accepts defeat passively but instead opts to use these setbacks as part of his strategy to reassert his position. When it comes to the courts, with seemingly little regard for his ethical obligations as a member of the Bar or for his oath to uphold the Constitution, he bitterly criticises judges who oppose his programmes, routinely accusing them of blatant political partisanship, bad judgement and liberal delusion. As spun in the tabloid press and in sound-bites on the media, the mayor?s attacks are presented in self-congratulatory form, a means of showing the city that he alone has the courage and the integrity to stand up to anyone and everyone.

The second initiative to clear the streets of the homeless was sparked off by an attack on a 27-year-old office-worker a few days before last Thanksgiving. Nicole Barrett had moved to New York a year or so earlier from Texas and found a job working as a temp for an employment agency in Manhattan while living in Queens. As she was walking at the corner of East 42nd Street and Madison Avenue, a man came up behind her, hit her head with a large paving stone and then walked off. Although Barrett would later make a full recovery from injuries that were first regarded as life-threatening and permanently disabling, the horrific nature of the attack, taking place in broad daylight in the centre of midtown Manhattan, spiked fear in the hearts of many.

Although initially there was no evidence about the suspect, it was immediately assumed that Barrett?s attacker was a homeless person, probably suffering from mental illness (he later turned out to be a convicted criminal whose profile was not at all representative of the city?s homeless population). Less than three days after the attack, the mayor declared that the homeless had no right to sleep on the streets: Streets do not exist in civilised societies for the purpose of sleeping there. . . . Bedrooms are for sleeping. On cue, the next morning his police commissioner announced that the city would begin arresting any homeless people who tried to sleep on the streets and refused to go to a shelter.

Many of the city?s churches, most notably Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, responded angrily to the new policy, advising the mayor that the police were not welcome to arrest those sleeping on church steps. Two weeks later, 1,000 protesters gathered at Union Square to demonstrate against the arrest policy and the new work rules. At that rally the rector of Saint Mary?s Episcopal Church called the mayor?s actions evil and the mayor a racist.

A more restrained and appropriate protest came in the form of a letter-writing campaign organised by the city?s churches. Voices of Faith United, with a membership representative of all of the city?s religious communities, provided churchgoers with a model letter addressed to the mayor, appealing to his sense of compassion for the mothers and their children and the mentally ill who would suffer the most under the new policies towards the homeless. When St Ignatius Loyola Church, one of the most prestigious and influential parishes in the city, endorsed the campaign with a letter distributed in its Sunday bulletin and signed by the pastor, Fr Walter Modrys SJ, and his associate, Fr Mark Hallinan SJ, the mayor responded. One of Giuliani?s senior strategists and policy advisers, Anthony Coles, arranged for a meeting at City Hall with Fr Hallinan. Others in attendance included two members of the mayor?s cabinet and Fr George Anderson SJ, an associate editor of America magazine and a leading expert on questions of homelessness and poverty. In a letter to the parish following the meeting Fr Hallinan wrote: While neither the mayor nor his advisers should be cast as modern-day Simon Legrees, it goes to the other extreme to think of them as modern-day Abraham Lincolns freeing the poor from their slavery to welfare dependency and winning for them a life of dignified independence.

The mayor?s interaction with the city?s religious leadership is not limited to the question of homelessness. On yet another subject that has exposed the underside of New York life ? police misconduct and brutality ? preachers have spoken out. Anger over police attitudes and conduct towards the poor and people of colour was reignited by the recent acquittal of the four officers accused of murdering Amadou Diallo, a 22-year-old immigrant from Guinea. Diallo had been gunned down last year in a hail of bullets in the vestibule of his building when the officers in question believed he had a gun (the object turned out to be his wallet). The Revd Calvin Butts III, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street, and the most influential of the city?s black ministers, blamed the mayor for creating a divisive atmosphere in the city. From the pulpit of Saint Patrick?s Cathedral, Auxiliary Bishop James McCarthy responded to the verdict by calling on the faithful to re-examine their own tendencies towards violence, towards fear and perhaps towards prejudice ? racial prejudice at that.

The religious leaders are far from isolated. The mayor?s two immediate predecessors, Mayors Koch and Dinkins, have joined the chorus demanding police reform. The national media have sharply criticised Mayor Giuliani for his handling of the Diallo case and for his response to the case of Abner Louima, a suspect who was beaten and sodomised with a night stick while in custody in a Brooklyn precinct house. In both instances the mayor?s response was muted, giving a clear impression of absolute reluctance to say or to do anything that might be prejudicial to the police department. When the United States Civil Rights Commission conducted a hearing in the wake of the Louima beating, the mayor testified that the police department was dedicated, professional and restrained in the use of force. The city?s Public Advocate, Mark Green, testifying before the same commission, disagreed and blamed the mayor for setting a tone that gave the police a licence to abuse. The state attorney general came to a similar conclusion, noting that most police searches were matters of personal judgement by the officer and involved a disproportionately high number of blacks and hispanics who were violating no laws.

The mayor?s dispassionate response to police brutality belies an even greater chasm between him and the black community. A poll taken last spring showed that nine out of 10 black New Yorkers believe that the police often engage in brutality against blacks, and that fewer than a quarter of all New Yorkers believe that the police treat blacks and whites evenly.

Over the next eight months these and other issues will be reviewed, debated and no doubt distorted in the course of a Senate campaign that will cost more than $70 million. Polls show that voters? loyalties are closely divided between Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, with the mayor enjoying a slight but statistically significant lead. For Catholics, the race will be a difficult test. Both the mayor and the First Lady support women?s right to abortion, including late-term abortions. Both profess to support religious liberty. Mrs Clinton is an unknown quantity when it comes to actual governance, although that is not of particular importance in a race for the Senate. She has just begun to outline her legislative agenda on domestic and foreign policy questions.

The mayor, through governing New York for more than six years, has achieved a great deal in urban renewal, tax code reform and workfare. Today, though, he is more isolated and more on the defensive than ever before as a consequence of his attitude towards a part of his constituency that has never supported him and about which he seems to care too little.

Yet it is not at all evident that neighbourhoods like Central Brooklyn and East Harlem are high on anyone?s agenda, except for the stalwart charitable, religious and philanthropic segments renowned for their generous help to those in need. At the same time police brutality is nothing new and belief in uneven treatment based on race is not an attitude that was formed overnight. Bishop McCarthy?s call for a re-examination of the whole question of violence and prejudice speaks to the need for a deeper reflection on the part of all. Perhaps the events of the past six months and the approaching election will enable more of those who are able to afford and to enjoy what Manhattan has to offer to review their own roles and participation in the remaking of the city.

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