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Telegraph - New York has lessons for Boris Johnson, by Irwin Stelzer

Rudi Giuliani is too well known to be ignored as a model. Boris has as his top priority making London a safer place. And he seems to understand the Giuliani “broken windows” approach - little things mean a lot. Stop what Rudi would call “crime” and Brits call “anti-social behaviour” and you’ve gone a long way towards taking control of the streets.

(Except you have no prisons to put them in so you’d just release them after a couple of days anyway so it’s not like it would do any good.)

Giuliani, of course, could hire and fire his police commissioners, which Boris cannot.

Good grief. You can’t vote for your mayors (except for this one very particular and very new case) and you can’t fire your police commissioners. But yes, the royal family is absolutely a very outdated problem.

Giuliani also pursued a policy that Boris should adopt: don’t deal with rabble-rousers who claim to represent minority communities. More often than not, pandering to these self-elected spokesmen by previous mayors resulted in concession after concession, and the alienation of most citizens.

We should all be so lucky.