Peter Boyer’s New Yorker profile of Rudy Giuliani contains some juicy nuggets I hadn’t heard before,
but he annoyingly takes the Giuliani crime-fighting legend at face value:

Loyalty is the virtue that he most prizes, and its absence in an aide is the surest route to exile. That was the fate of his first police commissioner, William Bratton, whose innovations in police strategies made Giuliani’s stunning reductions in crime possible.

In fact, there are real questions about whether the “broken windows” approach was responsible for the decline in crime under Giuliani. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write in Freakonomics that Giuliani got credit for a nationwide drop in crime that began before he took office and also benefited from an increase in the size of the NYPD that began under his predecessor, David Dinkins.

In addition, as Media Matters points out, Boyer is highly credulous in his treatment of the overhyped Giuliani record on terrorism, which includes many policy failures in the period between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 9/11.

Given all the reporting Boyer did, shouldn’t his story at least acknowledge the questions surrounding Giuliani’s record on his two signature issues?