We are, by many measures, one of the more diverse cities in the country, growing more diverse all the time, and one of the more harmonious in terms of how we live together.
Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.
There could have been more planning in New Orleans, but you look at all the devastation that happened there - have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet? For that magnitude of a disaster, that's not all that bad.
I would argue that's because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly more money.
Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there is, it's very small.
Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as quickly and as fairly as we can, and keep moving the city forward.
Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.
