Abraham Beame, New York City
Perhaps no big-city mayor has faced the kind of revolt that confronted New York City’s Abraham Beame, who took office in 1974 and inherited a $1.5 billion budget deficit. His drastic budget cuts, which included layoffs in the police and fire departments, inspired one of the most notorious campaigns ever mounted by organized labor, writes Miriam Greenberg, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in "Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World."
To sway public opinion against the layoffs, a group of 24 police and fire unions calling themselves the Council for Public Safety printed 1 million pamphlets entitled “Welcome to Fear City.” With a skull on the cover, the leaflets greeted tourists with a “survival guide” cautioning them to stay in their hotels at night and avoid public transportation.
Along with the pamphlets, police unions organized demonstrations and blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, according to Andrew T. Darien in his book "Becoming New York's Finest: Race, Gender, and the Integration of the NYPD." Under union orders, officers rampaged through black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, blowing whistles and banging trashcan lids, Darien wrote, and thousands of off-duty cops roamed the streets for several nights, some displaying their guns.
Beame successfully obtained a restraining to prevent the officers from distributing the leaflets, but the Committee for Public Safety later printed new ones titled, "If You Haven't Been Mugged Yet..." New York would take years to recover from a campaign that, Greenberg wrote, "wreaked havoc” on the city's image.
