"Petty and vindictive" is the assessment of one of Giuliani’s most reliable
foils, Stephen DiBrienza, a former City Councilman from Brooklyn who in 1998 was
on the receiving end of a memorable act of mayoral pique. DiBrienza was chairman
of the Council’s General Welfare Committee, which oversaw the city’s social- and
human-services programs, principal targets of Giuliani’s reforms. One of the
councilman’s abiding concerns was the warehousing of homeless people in huge
city shelters, some of which held as many as a thousand beds. In December, 1998,
DiBrienza sponsored a bill to limit the number of beds at city facilities to two
hundred, and to require that social services be made available at the
shelters.Giuliani vehemently opposed the measure, arguing that it would require
the city to close down its seven largest shelters. The Council passed the
legislation, and he vetoed it. He said that if he was forced to close the big
shelters he would have to build new ones—and he would put them in the districts
of the chief proponents of the bill. The Council overrode the veto by a
substantial margin. The Mayor called DiBrienza a "limousine liberal" and a
"hypocrite," and the administration announced plans to open a homeless shelter
in a neighborhood in DiBrienza’s district. An eviction notice was sent to a
state-run psychiatric clinic housed in a city-owned building, with the
explanation that a homeless shelter was coming in. In addition to the clinic,
which tended to five hundred patients a week, the building contained a
senior-citizen center and a nonprofit children’s center."Think about it,"
DiBrienza says now. "Here’s a guy who would go to that length, because I beat
him on passing a law that requires smaller-bed shelters. Because we would not
blink, he would throw kids, seniors, and the mentally ill out into the street. I
mean, could I have written a better script to expose the fact of what he was?"
Another example that I am more familiar with is the shooting of a black man by the police. An undercover officer had approached the individual attempting to sell a black man some drugs, the man said no. Some how they got into a struggle and the undercovers backup rushed in and ended up shooting and killing the man. They never identified themselves as being police officers, and being that they out numbered him, deadly force seems extreme. When it hit the news, the mans history was looked into, and there was nothing that could be found as far as a criminal record. Giuliani then broke the law, by opening his juvenile records, and citing a small offense that had happened when he was a minor, almost ten years earlier. Like Bush, Giuliani doesn't believe that anything should stand in his way, including the law.
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