'Giuliani Time': Just When You Thought You Knew How Evil He Is

"Peddlers, panhandlers and prostitutes, they all need to be cleaned out [of Manhattan]." The first time I heard Rudy Giuliani speak was on a NBC nightly news broadcast. It was 1996. I was living in Oakland, Calif., at the time -- 3,000 miles away from Manhattan, where, as mayor, Giuliani was implementing his "clean-up campaign." But the sting of his speech still scared me.

It was the first time I had heard hygienic metaphors to describe poor people like me who were surviving in an underground street-based economy. Rudy Giuliani had become mayor of New York City on a campaign that constructed a new scapegoat for all of America's crime problems: "the squeegee man" (aka a person who cleans car windows at stop lights).

Giuliani was emboldened with "the broken window" philosophy, which claimed that if broken windows remain unfixed for a period of time the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

The theory was promoted by the hyperconservative Manhattan Institute and was already litmus tested by N.Y. Police chief Bill Bratten. In his now-infamous statement, Giuliani publicly linked three street-based economies and communities with dirt or trash: They were something to be cleaned up as a means to create the perfect U.S. city.

Under his rule, ridding Manhattan of the newly designated and oxymoronic "quality of life" criminals such as panhandlers, recyclers, window washers (aka squeegee men), sex workers, hot dog peddlers and street artists was the way to have a crime-free, user-friendly, corporate dollar-fueled city.

All of these memories came to me as I watched the little-seen but important documentary Giuliani Time. The two-hour-and-20-minute feature, produced and directed by Kevin Keating, uses a series of in-depth interviews with policy makers, advocates, sociologists and urban planners to reveal how Giuliani's policies during his reign from 1994-2001 led to extreme and dangerous police empowerment and subsequent decimation of human and civil rights of poor people and communities of color. The film shows how he created a template for criminalization that would be eventually emulated and implemented by mayors across the country -- from Atlanta to San Francisco.

The movie begins with a look at Giuliani's family roots with crime and vice: His uncle Harold was a loan shark out of a bar he ran in Brooklyn and eventually did hard time in Sing Sing. It then follows Giuliani's ambitious rise from state attorney general to a mayor who appropriated as his own the "quality of life" crime campaign from then-police chief Bratton.

The film shows a somewhat dense series of interviews outlining Giuliani's draconian strategy of using New York police to attack and manipulate the short-lived mayoral run of David Dinkins. Once he achieved his position as mayor, Giuliani began an onslaught of race-based profiling and harassment of African-American communities in New York by the NYPD.

Simultaneously, he launched a campaign to cut people off welfare en masse, regardless of its impact on poor families, to have homeless people considered criminals, and to have the simple acts of sitting, standing and sleeping outdoors and surviving on a street-based economy designated as crimes.

His welfare policies succeeded in making Giuliani the mayor best known for getting 600,000 welfare recipients off welfare and into a new form of slavery, "workfare." Workfare, is the hard labor (that isn't considered real work by the welfare system and most of society for that matter) one must do to get the minimal cash aid distributed by welfare. This includes doing previously union-held jobs like crack-of-dawn street sweeping and public restroom cleaning, and other forms of menial labor, for much less than minimum wage.