Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ, enters his SUV at City Hall while en route to a meeting.
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Booker hired Garry McCarthy, a respected, no-nonsense New York City cop, to run his police department. McCarthy had helped New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cut Big Apple crime. Booker took a huge risk because in Newark, McCarthy had two strikes against him. First, he's white. In a majority-black city fraught with racial tension between residents and police officers, that was sure to anger some locals. Second, he's not from Newark, a provincial town accustomed to giving plum public-sector jobs to its own. So here comes this Ivy League mayor reared in the suburbs entrusting the police department to a white outsider? Political suicide, anyone? "If you're a white Irish cop from New York and have something to add to the city, I'm not shutting the door just because you're a white Irish cop from New York," Booker contends.
Despite the strong law-enforcement team the mayor put in place, Booker's staff begged him to quit harping on crime. After all, violence, especially in a city with Newark's harrowing history, is awfully hard to control. "It's very ballsy," Newark city councilman Oscar James II says of Booker's laser focus on reducing murders. "Some dude decides to go on some crime spree, starts taking people out, and then what? It happens."
During Booker's first year, the strategy did indeed backfire. In August 2007, three local college students were murdered, execution-style, in a city schoolyard. The tragedy was a nightmare that traumatized Newark and its confident new mayor. "It broke me down," Booker says on a Friday evening in June while relaxing in the back of his SUV. "I was feeling a deep sense of frustration and pain. I was just taking all the violence at that point very, very personally."
Instead of shuffling priorities to save face, however, Booker attacked crime even harder. First, he worked with the Newark business community to raise $3.2 million to install more than 100 surveillance cameras throughout the city. The technology led to 109 arrests in its first 16 months of operation. And against the advice of his staff, the police director, even his mother, Booker started personally patrolling the streets with his security team until 4 in the morning. "At some point, I just told him, 'Cory, you keep me on my knees,'" says Carolyn Booker, the mayor's mom.
McCarthy wanted the mayor to get back to his day job. "I grabbed my chiefs and said, 'Look what the mayor has to do to raise his comfort level,'" McCarthy says in his thick Bronx accent. "'Why aren't you guys making sure that he's not uncomfortable?'" Whether the cameras, Booker's patrols or the Policing 101 measures instituted by McCarthy — moving more officers to night and weekend shifts, when, get this, crime is more likely to happen — were most responsible for the turnaround, the results are stunning. Murders dropped 36% in Newark — from 105 to 67 — from 2006 to 2008. Shooting incidents dropped 41%. Rapes fell 30%, and auto thefts 26%. Newark went 43 days without a homicide in early 2008, the city's longest such stretch in 48 years. In the first quarter of this year, Newark had its lowest number of homicides since 1959.
Booker is obsessed with the murder statistics. While Booker and McCarthy discuss a recent homicide investigation in the mayor's office, the creases on Booker's forehead increase tenfold. He admits to posting a murder target for 2009 on his bedroom wall, a practice that he knows is somewhat morbid. (Booker won't share the number he wishes Newark to beat.) Booker has dumped the 4 a.m. chases, however. "I made a deal with Garry that as long as the crime numbers are going where they are going," Booker says, "I will not get in the police cars anymore." He hasn't totally softened, though. While cruising to a July 4 community barbecue in his mayoral SUV, Booker spotted a woman buying drugs in front of about 12 children. He ordered his security detail to pull over and lock her up.