Giuliani Time Reviewed

Watch Giuliani Time. It closes this Thursday in New York and distribution will be limited nationally I'm sure.

I saw it last night and the director was there and answered questions and urged us to spread the word about the film. It hasn’t been getting a lot of love from the film festival circuit (dinged at Sundance and Tribeca but it did win a best-of-festival award at one in LA).

It got annoying when people started asking him dumb questions like “did you try calling Howard Dean and the Democratic Party about publicizing this film?” Or “how about Air America, you know Al Franken?”

I wanted to announce, “look people, he’s not a moron, he didn’t get funding to make a critical documentary of someone who’s considered somewhere between a saint and a demi-god without being media savvy. “

The movie lets the viewer connect a lot of the dots, which works. When it gets into workfare, the contradiction isn’t explicitly made clear that the welfare rolls were being cleared while there was little low-skilled work to be had and while Giuliani was mercilessly cracking down on street vendors left and right (not exactly an environment that promoted micro-enterprise). The film juxtaposes the two contradictory policies without spoon-feeding the viewer. You never want to underestimate the intelligence or the patience of your audience, an easy thing to do with work like this.

For all my anger at that administration, until I saw that film I had actually forgotten that workfare had actually been the ultimate hypocrisy of his administration. While he was attacking people on welfare and claiming that workfare was necessary to instill the basic discipline necessary to hold down a job, he was constantly putting street vendors out of business and creating more barriers to entry for potential vendors through licensing procedures. These are people who were seemingly the very embodiments of the work ethic he decried for welfare recipients for lacking. What kind of message did that send to people being cut off the rolls?

There are already not a lot of low-skilled jobs out there for you, we won’t prepare you for the ones that are out there (its more important that you pick up our trash), we the city certainly aren’t ever going to consider paying you a living wage for work you’re already doing for your welfare check and now we’ll make it even more difficult for you to start your own micro-venture because Disney and the big retailers don’t like the competition.

Shit like that made me want to wring his fucking neck.

One of (the many) absolutely ill moments of the film is when the city’s then-Commissioner of The Human Resources Administration is on a television news show responding to allegations that workfare was simply an exploitative form of indentured servitude.

“Did you have to get up to go to work?” he asks his interviewer.

“Yes.”

“Do you consider yourself a slave? No. We believe that work will set you free.”

I kid you not, this is what he said. I’m glad he clarified that the city wasn’t running a slave plantation by quoting the gates of Auschwitz.

The Ground Floor
While the film gets great quotes from heavy hitters in politics and policy its the frustration of a five-man work fare crew in a park that does the most make the case that Giuliani’s policies actually deepened poverty.

They saw themselves in an endless cycle of dependency on the city. The work they were doing was not preparing them for any meaningful employment; they were not receiving training or job readiness or any basic education remediation. The performance measure of reducing the rolls made them feel as if the slightest mistake would get them cut from their "benefits" and onto a quick path to homelessness. They knew they weren’t going to be hired by the city. “Why would the city pay us more to do the same work?” asks a guy who probably doesn't have a master’s degree in economics.

Yes, the argument that some, or many, people on welfare lack basic job readiness skills: commitment, follow-through, discipline, attendance, socialization skills etc., and yes in theory a workfare program might succeed in instilling those skills in people but common sense should tell you without an incentive (like a real job, education, new skills, a living wage) people are not likely to commit the kind of focus necessary and (justifiably) will see the program as the simple exploitation of a low-cost labor source.

What Are We Not Measuring?
The film’s focus is on how performance measures drove behavior at the ground level that harmed city residents, many poor and minority. Getting guns off the street is a laudable goal and so is reducing the welfare rolls but without balancing counter measures the pressure to perform led to some pretty disastrous outcomes.

Performance measures ultimately signals the priorities of an organization (what gets measured is what gets done blah blah). In my public policy class we talked about Deborah Stone who argues that performance measures that focus on numbers can become an incentive to alter one’s behavior and not necessarily for the better.

Performance measures drove a culture where there was enormous pressure to collect guns, constitutional rights be damned and to reduce the welfare rolls, the well-being of individuals of people once forced off the rolls be damned. However, there is limited data from that era in both of these areas: 1) police misconduct (amount of money the city is settling per cop etc.) and 2) the outcomes for people pushed off welfare rolls (job attainment and retention etc.).

An administration incredible committed to data measuring signaled its priorities quite clearly by what it chose to not measure just as surely by what it did.

Left Out…
The director himself said that there was tons of material left out and with Giuliani there is so much fucked-upness to include but I was still surprised at some of the things not mentioned in the film:

1. The police misconduct commission he formed then disbanded after the Abner Louima attack. It was one of the most cravenly political moves I’ve ever read about and he’s gotten a free pass on it his whole fucking career.
2. That perhaps the only reason we heard about Louima’s case was because a pair of heroic nurses at the hospital he was admitted to went to the press, Internal Affairs and Louima’s family instead of just taking the cops story of a homosexual encounter at face value.
3. The film alludes to this towards the end, but more time could have been spent on the fact that Mr. Pro-Cop Rudy was reluctant to increase officer salaries. In fact, one of the key recommendations of the afore-mentioned panel was to significantly increase the pay of beat cops to improve the quality of policing at street level. Giuliani mocked that recommendation.
4. We hear Anthony Baez’s mom at a rally but that’s about it. That was one of the first high-profile police brutality cases that signaled a different time under Giuliani.
5. His constant attacks on CUNY and increasing barriers to higher-ed access through decreased remediation, increased tuition and increased admissions testing. It’s difficult to contextualize the destructiveness of his workfare policies without paying attention to his concurrent attacks on one of the city’s most important routes out of poverty into the middle class.

All in all, it was a great film and a hell of a flashback. It’s amazing how much you forget. Please get out there and see it.