Mayor Cory Booker, Newark and First Murder-Free Month in 44 Years!

Milestones in the Black community are to be commemorated, remembered and honored. Each February, a plethora of these moments are celebrated in what is known as Black History Month. Black intellectuals work overtime to promote momentous events that enhance their community while Disingenuous White Liberals (DWL) and Crusading White Pedagogues labor in tandem to promote this goal.

Perhaps, this is why the electrifying news of Newark, New Jersey being murder-free for the month of March 2010 was greeted with shock, awe and cheers! Mind you, it has been 44 years since a month came and went that was also murder-free, so the news of no individual being parted with their life is cause for celebration!

You read that correctly: Newark is murder-free for the first month in two score and four years!:

Mayor Cory Booker can point to a major milestone in the city of Newark.

For the first time since 1966, Newark is marking its first full month without a murder.

Police Director Garry McCarthy says the last time the city went through a calendar month without a murder was in May 1966. Two years ago, the city went 43 days spanning parts of January and February without a murder.

Ten people have been murdered in the city in the first quarter of 2010, the same number as last year but the second-lowest since 1941.

This great milestone came to pass thanks to the daring exploits of Mayor Cory Booker, or Obama-Lite as some have dubbed the Brown Paper Bag Test passing political celebrity. Time magazine dubbed him the Savior of Newark in 2000, and nearly a decade later the first murder-free month has transpired in 44 years!

How did Mayor Booker produce a murder-free month, you might ask? Well, he hired a white cop from New York to lead the Newark Police Department:

Booker hired Garry McCarthy, a respected, no-nonsense New York City cop, to run his police department. McCarthy had helped New York City mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg cut Big Apple crime. Booker took a huge risk because in Newark, McCarthy had two strikes against him. First, he's white. In a majority-black city fraught with racial tension between residents and police officers, that was sure to anger some locals. Second, he's not from Newark, a provincial town accustomed to giving plum public-sector jobs to its own. So here comes this Ivy League mayor reared in the suburbs entrusting the police department to a white outsider? Political suicide, anyone? "If you're a white Irish cop from New York and have something to add to the city, I'm not shutting the door just because you're a white Irish cop from New York," Booker contends.

Despite the strong law-enforcement team the mayor put in place, Booker's staff begged him to quit harping on crime. After all, violence, especially in a city with Newark's harrowing history, is awfully hard to control. "It's very ballsy," Newark city councilman Oscar James II says of Booker's laser focus on reducing murders. "Some dude decides to go on some crime spree, starts taking people out, and then what? It happens." (See pictures of an ammunitions manufacturer.)

During Booker's first year, the strategy did indeed backfire. In August 2007, three local college students were murdered, execution-style, in a city schoolyard. The tragedy was a nightmare that traumatized Newark and its confident new mayor. "It broke me down," Booker says on a Friday evening in June while relaxing in the back of his SUV. "I was feeling a deep sense of frustration and pain. I was just taking all the violence at that point very, very personally."

Instead of shuffling priorities to save face, however, Booker attacked crime even harder. First, he worked with the Newark business community to raise $3.2 million to install more than 100 surveillance cameras throughout the city. The technology led to 109 arrests in its first 16 months of operation. And against the advice of his staff, the police director, even his mother, Booker started personally patrolling the streets with his security team until 4 in the morning. "At some point, I just told him, 'Cory, you keep me on my knees,'" says Carolyn Booker, the mayor's mom.

Mayor Booker might be the next President of the United States (or at the least Vice President), as he is working overtime to create positive urban redevelopment in the city of Newark that had been left for dead after devastating Black riots in 1967. Who is this Mayor Booker, you ask?:

The son of African-American trailblazers (Cary and Carolyn Booker were among the first African-American executives at IBM), Booker was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the predominantly white, affluent town of Harrington Park in Bergen County, New Jersey.^[1] He is an alumnus of Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan where he was an All-American football player.^[2] Following graduation, Booker traveled west to study at Stanford University and earned a B.A. in political science in 1991 as well as an M.A. in sociology the following year. He played varsity football — he made the All–Pacific Ten Academic team — and was elected to the council of (four) presidents. In addition, he ran The Bridge, a student-run crisis hotline and organized help for youth in East Palo Alto from Stanford students.^[3] While at Stanford, Booker also became good friends with Rachel Maddow.

After Stanford, Booker won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he was awarded an honors degree in modern history in 1994. While at Oxford he became friends with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and became President of the L'Chaim Society, the local chapter of Chabad, and brought together a diverse community there.

Long before Mein Obama was decided upon to be the sacrificial first Black POTUS, Booker was being groomed for that role. He is a DWLs wet dream: articulate, bold and engaging. More interesting, he has become a cause celebre among white liberals hoping to pour money into the winning effort of administering hope and vitality to a crime-ridden city and turn it into a shining example of Black ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Whereas aid to Africa (as Dambisa Moyo has argued) should be cut off, aid to Newark from DWLs has come to the tune of $100 million, which has been used to fight Black-on-Black crime in the city and generate positive economic growth:

Crime has dropped significantly in the City of Newark, which currently leads the nation in violent crime reduction. From 2006-2008, crime dropped by the following percentages: murders 36%, shooting incidents 41%, rapes 30%, and auto thefts 26%.^[28] In 2008, Newark had its lowest murder rate since 1959.^[28] Despite the success indicated by these statistics, as the global economic recession set in, robberies rose 27% in 2008 and another 10% through late June 2009.^[28]As of July 26, 2009, murders are down 42% overall, rapes are down 41% overall and robberies are down 12% since 2008.^[29]

The month of March in 2010 marked Newark’s first murder-free month in over 44 years. As of April 1, 2010, the murder rate in Newark was the second best since 1941 and crime rates for aggravated assaults, robberies, carjacking, and shootings were also down for the first quarter compared to 2009.^[30]

In addition to lowering crime, Booker has both doubled the amount of affordable housing under development, and quadrupled the amount under predevelopment. Booker has slashed the city budget deficit from $180 million to $73 million.

Despite criticisms, Booker has also raised the salaries of many city workers.^[28] Most recently, however, the Booker Administration and the City of Newark imposed one-day-a-month furloughs for all non-uniformed employees from July through December 2010, as well as two-percent pay cuts for managers and directors currently earning more than $100,000 a year. Citing the reason for the pay cuts, Booker noted, “In 2006, we took over a city in financial crisis. We have made significant steps to address our financial future and decided that we would not balance the budget on the backs of our residents.” Booker has reduced his own salary twice since taking office, voluntarily reducing his salary by 8% early in his first year as mayor. None of Booker’s senior managers have received pay increases since taking office.^[31]

Mayor Booker’s leadership has attracted approximately $100 million in private philanthropy to the City of Newark and a variety of nonprofits and public/private partnerships have been created and used to better the lives of Newark residents. In April of 2008, the Newark Charter School Fund was established to provide grants in support of Newark’s charter schools to support a successful public school system in Newark.^[32]

The City of Newark also works with GreenSpaces, which has committed $40 million toward the largest park expansion initiative in over a century with a total of twenty one park construction and rehabilitation projects scheduled for completion in every ward by the end of 2010.^[33]

To support the Newark Police Department, the Newark Police Foundation was established in 2006 and provides funding and other services to the Police Department which has had a significant impact on the NPD’s ability to pay for necessary resources that would otherwise not be readily funded through the department’s budget.^[34]

Without private donations to the city of Newark, the augmentation of the police department could never have occurred and the first murder-free month would never have happened.

Let's take a quick look at the population of the city, New Jersey's largest (mind you, Newark has declined by nearly 200,000 citizens since 1950):

As of the census^[3] of 2000, there are 273,546 people, 91,382 households, and 61,956 families residing in Newark; recent census projections show that the population has already increased to around 280,000. The population density was 11,400/mile² (4,400/km²), or 21,000/mile² (8,100 km²) once airport, railroad, and seaport lands are excluded, Newark has the eighth highest density in the nation of any city with over 250,000 residents.

The racial makeup of the city was 53.46% Black or African American, 26.52% White, 1.19% Asian, 0.37% Native American, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 14.05% from other races, and 4.36% from two or more races. 29.47% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There is a significant Portuguese-speaking community, made up of Brazilian and Portuguese ethnicities, concentrated mainly at the Ironbound district.

Newark was once ranked the most dangerous place to live in America (a mere 14 years ago), but with tough police work; more than $100 million dollars in private, philanthropic donations pouring into the city from white liberals praying that Mayor Booker can bring salvation to a city in distress; and the reinvestment of those donations into creating a short-term sense of safety through economic development and revitalized downtown Newark have temporarily removed brought hope to a city long devoid of a such an emotion.

It won't last. Crime only decreases because those who commit fouls that mock societal regulations are put behind bars with longer sentences. Some have called Newark the new "Black Wallstreet" which can only be deemed so thanks to the generosity of white liberals who have given $100 million to a non-profit organization that Mayor Booker set up:

At a time when good economic news is scarce, it's encouraging to hear about three businessmen, all Rutgers alumni, staking a claim to the future in Newark's West Ward.

Victor Baker, Hassan Keith and Jeffrey Montgomery are constructing houses on five empty lots on South 9th Street between 11th and 12th avenues. The Star-Ledger's James Queally described how the trio plans to serve working families in need of affordable housing with five duplex-style homes.

They call the $2 million project "Black Wall Street," after the prosperous black community of Greenwood that thrived in Tulsa, Okla., in the early 20th century.

It's a nickname freighted with historical significance.

Greenwood was indeed a community with enormous wealth for its time and place. There the black middle class supported a vibrant business district, apart from the white city of Tulsa, which restricted black activity and even imposed curfews -- not unusual in many segregated American cities of the time. The journalist Brent Staples and other historians described Greenwood as a "black city within a city" of as many as 15,000 residents, boasting 191 businesses, including 15 doctors, two dentists, one chiropractor and three law offices.

In that sense, "Black Wall Street" connotes hard work, self-sufficiency and success.

How many trillions have been wasted trying to improve African nations? What have philanthropic Americans taxpayers, bestowing gratuitous amounts of money upon African nations to show for their generosity? Nothing.

At least - for a month - white liberals have helped Newark become murder-free.

The solution of every majority Black city in America is to locate an individual of Mayor Cory Booker's ability, as he has been a great salesman in convincing white liberals to donating millions to ensure some form of tranquility in a city long devoid of any peace.

As you can see by this list of crime in America, we might need to clone Mayor Booker if this will ever happen.

Stuff Black People Don't Like would like to thank those people who donated more than $100 million to help pay the salaries of all the new police and the installation fees for the security cameras that have been placed throughout Newark. This, and this alone, has cut down crime and brought about the momentous month of March... the first murder-free month in Newark in 44 years!

Mayor Cory Booker might be a celebrity (thanks to being like Mein Obama, an articulate Black guy), but he is at the mercy of the donors to the Newark non-profit that helps pay the bill to keep crime down in that city.

Here is CNN on the celebration of March free of the madness of murder in Newark!