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CORY'S CHALLENGE

OVERCOMING NEWARK'S NASTINESS

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August 10, 2007 -- AS Newark cops round up suspects and families prepare to bury the three innocent college kids slaughtered Saturday in a secluded school lot, it's fair to ask: Can Newark itself survive?

One thing is clear: If New Jersey's largest city is to heal itself and cast off its reputation for crime, it will take a massive effort, on every front.

And no time is better for that than now.

Certainly, there are grounds for hope. The most important: the city's mayor, Cory Booker, who took office last year.

Booker knows what he's up against: Entrenched political corruption and a bureaucracy that'll fight ruthlessly to sustain it. Enduring lawlessness. Pandemic poverty.

He's hired top managers - tapped for their talent, rather than their race, residency or political ties. And he knows the one issue that, more than anything, will determine Newark's fate: crime.

"Everything," Booker says correctly, hinges on the city's ability to stem it.

Which is why he's made crime-fighting his personal quest. And why last weekend's murders - and the blame he received for them - stung.

Booker's already taken big steps: For police director, he named one of the NYPD's shining stars, Garry McCarthy. McCarthy, in turn, created new units - a central narcotics division and a squad to track fugitives, for instance. He runs weekly CompStat meetings, the statistics-driven reviews with top brass that worked so well in targeting troubled Gotham neighborhoods.

And he and Booker subscribe to the well-regarded "broken windows" theory, which holds that even small quality-of-life infractions can't be tolerated, lest they send a message that crime pays.

So cops are writing tickets furiously for public boozing and littering - some 4,000 in just the first three months this year.

But there's a long way to go. At Newark's Penn Station, for example, self-appointed "taxi dispatchers" continue to corral cabs for riders - and then demand "tips." Rudy Giuliani dispatched these shakedown artists in New York, along with squeegee men, in his first weeks in office - setting the stage for Gotham's historic crime drops.

Still, the early results in Newark are promising: Most crime categories fell sharply from last year, with shootings down a stunning 80 percent. Police morale is up.

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