Report raises doubts about Giuliani crime plan

FORMER New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s plan to help reduce crime in Trinidad and Tobago is riddled with problems and, just like one advanced to Mexican law enforcement authorities this year, may be unworkable. Recent newspaper reports have sung high praises of the alleged proposal by Giuliani and Partners and several local businessmen have reportedly expressed interest in it.

However, an August 20, 2003 BusinessWeek report reveals that a 146-point plan given to Mexican Police Chief Marcelo Ebrard on August 7 “may defy translation” and Giuliani’s “policies face their sternest test yet in the “Big Enchilada” — Mexico City.” The plan proposes the creation of a sophisticated crime database, similar to the Compstat system Giuliani created in New York, to pinpoint crime hotspots and measure police performance. Giuliani and Partners received US$4.3 million from “wealthy Mexican businesspeople fed up with the city’s chronic crime” to conduct a nine-month study of the plan’s feasibility but the total cost to implement the plan over the next three years could exceed US$60 million. The plan may also be “a non-starter” because “it clashes with Mexico’s constitution, which follows the French system of separating maintenance of public order from investigation and prosecution, rather than the Scotland Yard model of law enforcement that is followed in the US.” 

Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday said Giuliani’s proposal would not work in TT because this country’s present Constitution does not allow for the Police Commissioner to be accountable to any Government official and this is the critical pillar in Giuliani’s anti-crime plan. Panday also described Giuliani’s reported offer as a straight case of the former NY mayor seeking business opportunities in TT, which he was entitled to do as a businessman. The plan appears to be devoid of the social dimension to crime-fighting which Mexican experts describe as a fundamental flaw. According to Rafael Ruiz, a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Morelia: “If we don’t attend to the causes that create these types of people, while sources of permanent and well-paid employment do not grow, we are still going to have people on the corners washing windshields.”

Coparmex, an organisation of Mexican business officials that tracks crime in Mexico, has high hopes for Giuliani’s recommendations, but company representative Jose Antonio Ortega concedes that many of the ideas contained in the Giuliani plan “may not be much different than what Mexican experts themselves have proposed.” Giuliani and Partners is officially described as an eight-year-old consulting firm run by the former NY mayor which specialises in helping chief executive officers secure “the future of their firms by protecting their financial and physical assets, knowledge, people and brand.” Other senior comPany officials include former NY police commissioner Bernard Kerik, former office of emergency management commissioner Richard Sherier and former corporation counsel Michael Hess.