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In November, a uniformed Newark police officer catches some air outside his station house just before a shift change. He holds his hat in his hands, looking at pictures that he’s taped inside of his wife and children and a mass card with a picture of Jesus. City Hall, battered and in need of sandblasting, wrapped in plastic and scaffolding, towers over the station.
The work going on at City Hall represents a fresh start in Newark. Cory Booker’s 2006 election as mayor ended twenty years of control by former mayor Sharpe James, and Booker is intent on giving the city a facelift that goes beyond gilding the City Hall dome. The new mayor’s team has its hands full trying to shrink a bloated government, lower the homicide rate that in 2006 broke an eleven-year high, keep existing businesses, recruit new ones, and make residents feel safe and hopeful. In other words, Booker faces a crucial transition from newly elected mayor to true leader. He outlined some of his plans during a far-ranging conversation with New Jersey Monthly at his office.
You represent a changing of the guard in Newark, but it would appear that you’ve caught the attention of many people outside the city as well.
You win an election and then you get calls, you know, presidential candidates from the Democratic side...but what was so affirming to me was getting phone calls from all these new mayors—“Mayors 2.0,” we call it. [Baltimore’s] Martin O’Malley, [San Francisco’s] Gavin Newsom, and [Philadelphia Mayor-turned-Pennsylvania Governor] Ed Rendell really stepped forward. But they weren’t congratulations calls; they were saying, “Let me tell you some things that worked for us and some things that didn’t work for us.” To me, it showed me where city and municipal politics is going. You know, partisan politics is sort of toxic, because people are saying, “My party’s right, no matter what, and your party’s wrong, no matter what.”
Do you see this “Mayors 2.0” group as providing a sense of new leadership?
I do, because when you are a mayor, you have to be there for every constituency and every constituent group, no matter who it is, whether you’re Republican or Democrat, if you’re dealing with crime or violence. Here you’re really in the community and you get to feel them—and more important, they get to feel you. I have no disrespect for congressmen. It’s a great job and we need them, but running down to Washington, where you’re sort of removed from your community and you’re one of 435, it’s a much different relationship with what you do than having a chance to be in the community and doing the kind of things that we [mayors] do.
In the Jersey model, public servants can seemingly hold eighteen jobs. Does that in any way appeal to you?
Not at all. My staffers cringed when I was with The Record of Hackensack’s editorial board. I said, “Shoot me if I ever run for a second office.” And I am serious. Shoot me. One mayor, and I won’t say his name, is a phenomenal public servant and he has two jobs. But he has to, because his mayoral job pays him $20,000 or $30,000 a year. I’ve seen how hard this guy works, and I told him, “Nobody would pay the CEO of a company, whether it’s a city with a budget of $20 million or Newark, with a budget of $700 million, a salary like that.” Pay fair salaries, and they won’t have to hold more than one job.
But if you’re going to hold three political jobs, you get one pension.
Right. It’s so obvious and I very strongly believe that we have to rework the pension laws, the laws with vacation time, comp time. These are the things that are killing taxpayers.
Are there going to be more answers coming out of Trenton?
Government is now faced with the same problems that big business was back in the ’80s. Both of my parents worked for IBM, and Big Blue used to be that. Companies at that time were judged by how big they were, the size of the mainframe.
The size of the CEO’s paycheck…
Right. And then companies nailed IBM to the wall, and suddenly they realized that companies now are not designed that way. It was about the speed of the laptop, the connectivity to others’ technology, not your independence, and companies were spinning off. Government hasn’t gone through that shift yet. We’re still in that Big Blue model where bigger is better, and New Jersey has created a system that politicians are perpetuating. It’s obvious that change needs to be made. Constituents get that a lot quicker than politicians do.
Shortly after you were elected, you were on the front page of The New York Times, in Esquire magazine, and on Oprah. Did you get any flack on your national profile when there was a lot of work to be done at home?
Actually, none at all. Because I’ve spent so much time here at home, I am able to communicate to people that it’s not about me. It’s about creating a new awareness for the city. If my appearance in those places, pushing a positive message for Newark, gets us new investment in the city, it’s worth the trip. There are so many people with ties to Newark, either living in the suburbs here or across the country, and we need to let them know we’re starting something new.
How do you restore that commitment?
You know, I was on a plane and I hear the guy behind me making small talk.
The person next to him asks where he’s from, and he goes from the “I’m from the New York area” answer to “I live in North Jersey” to “I live in Vailsburg.” And all the while, I’m thinking, C’mon man, just say you live in Newark. Show your Newark pride. It was driving me crazy, but we now have to instill that pride in our people.
People have heard you talk about all the problems the city ignored, or created, over the years.
We spent the first four and a half months just picking up rocks around here, looking under them and seeing abuses. These independent authorities that are touching Newark—sewer authorities, water authorities, for example—are very independent and not looked at, yet consumers pay a considerable amount. So inside and outside of City Hall, we hear stories of layers and layers of jobs and corruption that make me deeply concerned.
So the first term is just turning over these rocks?
We spent this early time in office identifying the messes so we could start to clean them up. Every month it was a different set of stories. Inside City Hall, we had been approving virtually every workman’s comp claim....We were just printing money, and some of it was going to elected officials who filed claims who were having slips and falls on the job and getting settlements. There’s a new order of business in Newark that has to happen, and there’s going to be a major culture shock. Eventually there will be a tipping point for it to be wiped out. I expect it to start in year two.
How do you let Newark residents know how bad it was while instilling in them hope for the future?
It’s a fair question. But there was a culture in the past that we have to break through on virtually every level. There’s nothing that we can’t deliver.
Have you cracked the code yet with residents?
No, not yet. I’ve got an opportunity, but right now it’s just an opportunity. You’ve got to earn the public’s trust by showing results. I’ve been tested a little bit, and I will be tested more in the future. Even if the public’s not with you, but you know something is the right thing to do, you’ve got to get out there and champion something.
How do you do it?
What I am preaching here is returning the city to a philosophy of intolerance. You know, when there’s somebody urinating against a building in broad daylight and somebody walks by and says, “Oh, that’s a shame,” that’s not enough. We are launching a campaign with our police department to crack down on these quality-of-life crimes. We can’t have officers drive by them any more; we need to be indignant that people would treat their city this way.
How do you fight the drug problem?
We’re reorganizing our police department to work more efficiently. In the past, we had 60 percent of our police officers on duty during the daytime. Well, crime happens at night. Obviously, we’ve been looking at murders. In analyzing the profiles of the victims and the murderers, overwhelmingly they are involved in narcotics. Literally, we didn’t have an active narcotics bureau in the police department, so the only narcotics work we were doing was buys and busts, which is the lowest-level street narcotics work. That’s no way to solve the problem. It’s chewing up an inordinate number of young black men in our criminal-justice system.
What we now need to work on is developing a comprehensive drug-enforcement strategy where we’ll go up on wires and surveillance so you’re not just getting the street-level kids, you’re getting the people who package and transport it so we can clean out entire sects [gangs]. Of course, we also found that the gangs are organized around the drugs. I am obsessed with crime, and this is where we can have police enforce the quality-of-life crimes as a way to check people out. They get a ticket for offenses [and] they have to come [in] and we find out if there are any outstanding warrants on them. They’ve gotten so brazen, and we have to stop it.
You speak in broad terms about the issues surrounding a renaissance for the city. What tangible things have to change?
We are going to have to go through some difficult times, but we’ve got to stop the drug business, we have to make people feel safe in their homes, we have to bring in businesses to create new jobs.
When I spoke at the League of Municipalities meeting in Atlantic City shortly after I got into office, I got a lot of congratulations on winning. I guess I wasn’t terribly politic about it, but I said, “Look, in New Jersey, we’ve proved that any idiot can get elected.” That’s not my goal. My goal is to go back to the convention midway through my term and have a real story to tell.
