Reinventing Government

The Lindsay administration launched a wide variety of new programs, including: public health initiatives such as methadone clinics and lead-poisoning control; expansion of services such as daycare centers; creation of a new agencies and departments such as the nation's first addiction services agency, the first municipal family planning program, the first youth services agency, and the first city office of the handicapped. Through the parks and cultural initiatives, they worked to redefine the post-industrial city as a cultural center. New York in effect created its own version of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. But the impact of these initiatives was often questioned, and the many programs proved expensive: the increased spending during Lindsay's two terms helped to trigger the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

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The Lindsay administration also launched a major initiative to modernize city government: the mayor proposed to streamline 50 overlapping agencies with duplicate functions into 10 "superagencies." Two of his most visible organizational innovations, the Environmental Protection Administration and the Department of Consumer Affairs, were the first of their kind in the nation. In the name of efficiency, City Hall and the Budget Bureau also launched a citywide Operations Improvement program staffed with young MBAs, heavily supported by business consultants from the management consultancy McKinsey & Company.

But Lindsay's long-time rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller accused the mayor of shoddy management and launched an investigation of New York City management, by the so-called Scott Commission, that published its negative findings in a scathing series of reports published in 1973. The Lindsay administration countered the Commission’s criticisms by charging that Rockefeller was seeking political revenge, not objective fact-finding.

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Crime remained among the city’s most serious problems during the Lindsay years and many New Yorkers remained cynical about the administration’s law and order efforts, believing that the mayor "tied the hands" of his police department. Nevertheless, Lindsay pushed forward with a campaign of “modernization” and reform, which included creating of fourth police platoon that operated during high-crime hours (6 p.m. to 2 a.m.), equipping the force with walkie-talkies, and experimenting with one-man radio patrol cars over the protests of the PBA. The city also created the nation’s first toll-free 911 phone number for emergency calls. And, under pressure from a breaking story on police corruption, Lindsay ordered an investigation into corruption in the department; the Knapp Commission determined that a “substantial majority” of the force was routinely accepting bribes.

Despite a dip in the number of robberies, burglaries, and thefts in 1972-73, the number of murders, rapes, and assaults continued to climb, with homicides more than doubling, from 734 in 1966 to 1,740 in 1973 -- although defenders of the mayor's record argued that some of the changes were due to new methods of tracking crime statistics.

Lindsay in Office