Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

So I finished reading Cory on the metro today--it was a long ride all the way over to Église d'Auteuil and back, so more than enough time to get through the rest of it.

For those of you just tuning in: I proposed to @CityJournal that I review all the Democratic hopefuls campaign autobiographies, and to my surprise, they were keen. If you scroll down you'll find my notes on some, but not all, of the books in question.)

The good ones were fun to read (Biden and Buttigieg go in that category), so I didn't have to motivate myself by turning them into a Twitter game. Still haven't read Warren or Yang.

"But would you want to spend precious days of your one, short, precious life doing *that,* Claire?"

As Mallory said of Everest ... because they were there.
It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it, right? Why not me.

Anyway: Cory finishes strong. It's worth buying the book for the last three chapters, you can skip the first nine without missing much. But Chapter 9: "Law, Order, and Accountability," and Chapter 10:

"Incarceration Nation," are where he has something to say. Still not something sufficient to explain to me why he should be president and what he would do in office if he were, but it gave me a much better sense of what he did as the mayor of Newark.

Chapter 9 begins with Cory, newly elected mayor, joining the cops in chasing down a criminal who's just tried to stab a cop with a pair of scissors. After they tackle him, Cory realizes he's just a loser--

someone mentally unstable, or on drugs. He begins to feel sorry for him. They were on broad street in midday. People were watching. "'With my last bit of diminishing bravado, I exclaimed,

"Not in our city! Not anymore!' People applauded"

Anyway: the top issue in Newark was crime. Polls showed this was a universal concern. Property crime, violent crime.

In one of his first meetings with the FBI, they rolled through the sata on violent crime in and near Newark. "I said to the agent in charge, Les Weiser, "How do we solve this problem?"

"Agent Weiser looked at me. 'Mayor,' he said, 'we *don't* solve this problem. We just attend to the symptoms of the problem.' I knew that by 'we,' he wasn't just talking about the FBI, he meant law enforcement."

Beyond the crime problem, Newark had a massive budget shortfall with a structural budget deficit and no obvious way to close it. The structural deficit was about 180 million on a 600 million fund.

"We knew immediately that the gap couldn't responsibly be closed and thus that we had many years of unpopular financial decisions ahead of us. But even then we didn't foresee the global financial crisis"--or having a governor who'd cut off revenue to Newark.

The murder rate was rising. Everywhere he went, people told him they wanted more cops. He told all his department heads he wanted all hands on deck: inspections, sanitations, neighborhood services--

he want them playing an active role in crime reduction. He created a multi-department task force, "The Task Force with No Name," to coordinate with the police.

They began investing in and opening new, refurbished parks all around the city, transforming open fields known for criminal activity into community centers.

They focused on people who'd just been released from prison, because without help, they tend just to re-offend. Newark residents started stepping in to help: they led clean-ups of abandoned lots, citizen patrols.

They formed clergy patrols, hosted public town safety halls in churches. Knowing that Seniors were often the local eyes and ears, They formed a Senior Citizen police academy: "We put classes of seniors through a program mirroring parts of our police training process.

'most popular for the seniors was when they got to learn about guns and went to the firing range."

Cory liked being visible: visiting community and tenant meetings, walking through high-crime areas, rolling up kids violating curfew.

"If I saw guys out in the areas known for drugs, I got out to talk to them. I asked if the guys needed work, if they were interested in a job that was safe and reliable. I'd here excuses about how they tried and failed, and I would invite them to let me help them find them a job.

'Show me you're serious,' I'd say. "Come to my apartment in the morning and my team and I will help you find a job.' Most wouldn't show, but I was impressed by the dozens who always would.

I like this side of Cory. He really seems to care about the Newarkers he's mayoring. He likes playing basketball with the kids in areas known for high-crime. They'd bring in crime-scene lights that could flood the whole street.

The police department was a wreck: Deteriorating buildings, vehicles, they were still doing arrest reports on typewriters. Cory goes into high gear on fundraising, creating an "adopt a precinct" program.

Philanthropy allowed them to install hundreds of police cameras, gunshot-detection technology. Cory spent all his time with the cops, trying to figure out what they needed from him. He went out on patrols.

In 2008, Newark experienced its longest stretch without a murder since 1961, and in 2010, it experienced its first month without a murder since 1966.

Then the budget cuts slammed down on them. Newark was forced to cut its police department by 12 percent. They had to pull people from desk jobs, data collection. Then they got hit by an ACLU lawsuit.

Now the DOJ was investigating the department. His chief of staff convinces him to welcome the investigation--in fact, he thinks, he should have asked for it himself. He ordered his team to pounce on every flaw they pointed out. When the report was done,

it pointed out serious problems. The police has failed to establish sufficient legal basis for the majority (!) of our stops. It stopped blacks at a much higher rate than whites or Latinos.

There was wide evidence that the cops retaliated against people who were only guilty of being rude. There was a pattern of use of excessive force. And there were inadequate controls against theft of property of citizens who'd been arrested.

Again and again, the DOJ identified Newark's lack of data collection, analysis, and review. He asked ACLU to be his partner in devising "one of the most comprehensive" transparency policies in the US.

Police body cameras, he writes, and real-time reviews of officer conduct are just the tip of the iceberg; and "some of the most important work we need to do to reduce crime has nothing to do with police."

Mass incarceration has failed, he says. (Couldn't agree more.) We need to focus on getting addicts treatment instead of putting them behind bars. We need mental health treatment.

Dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline, he says, deal better with childhood trauma with programs like Nurse-Family partnerships. He says he's growing more hopeful that these ideas are gaining widespread acceptance.

The takeaway: "We must remember that police can't solve the problem of crime in America alone. We must take much greater responsibility upon ourselves to do that. We must take much greater responsibility for each other."

He could come around to being a "families values" conservative pretty quick, I think.

I liked this chapter. It gave me some insight into what a mayor of Newark does and how he handled it--pretty well, it sounds like.

I'm still none the wiser about how he thinks this qualifies him to be the President or what he'd do in office -- except love everyone a lot.

But he sure must be looking at Pete Buttigieg in total frustration and thinking, "South Bend? You think that's a city?"

Okay, next chapter: "Incarceration Nation."