Rudy Giuliani never misses an opportunity to remind people about his track record in fighting crime as mayor from 1994 to 2001.
“I began with the city that was the crime capital of America,” the presidential candidate Giuliani recently told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “When I left, it was the safest large city in America. I reduced homicides by 67 percent. I reduced overall crime by 57 percent.”
While crime did fall dramatically during Giuliani’s tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims.
The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax, Va., who has argued in a series of papers that the “New York miracle” was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce exposure to lead poisoning.
The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical explanation for fluctuations in the crime rate and is based on studies linking exposure to lead in children with violent behavior later in life.
What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.
“Sixty-five to 90 percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead,” Nevin said.
Through much of the 20th century, lead in U.S. paint and gasoline fumes poisoned toddlers as they put contaminated hands in their mouths.
The consequences on crime, Nevin found, occurred when poisoning victims became adolescents. Nevin does not say lead is the only factor behind crime, but he says it is the biggest factor.
Giuliani’s campaign declined to address Nevin’s contention that the mayor merely was at the right place at the right time.
Lead levels plummeted in New York in the early 1970s, driven by federal policies to eliminate lead from gasoline and local policies to reduce lead emissions from municipal incinerators. The Washington Post