There is only one Rudy Giuliani, who moved from being a U.S. attorney to cleaning up New York City as its mayor.

But Milwaukee, the source of most of Wisconsin’s social dysfunctions, needs someone to clean up the mess milquetoast Mayor Tom Barrett has allowed to worsen.

Former Milwaukee police detective Steve Spingola describes:

The recent surge of violence has Milwaukee staring at a critical fork in the road. One path leads to Baltimore, a city with the highest per capita homicide rate in nation. The other route runs through New York City, where a legendary mayor transformed a crime-ridden metropolis into the safest big city in America.

In the early 1990s, New York City, a jurisdiction with some of the nation’s toughest gun control laws, was awash with crime and violence. During the four-year tenure of Mayor David Dinkins, Big Apple homicides surpassed the total number of American fatalities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Frustrated, New Yorkers did something radical: They elected Rudy Giuliani, a mayor more interested in leading than placating the grievance community.

In 2013, as New York City experienced the fewest number of homicides in its recorded history, Milwaukee’s per capita homicide rate surpassed Chicago’s, a city dubbed the “gang capital of the United States” by its own crime commission.

The difference between New York City’s dramatic turn around and Milwaukee’s abysmal increase in homicides year-to-date, is leadership. Rudy Giuliani did not become known as “America’s Mayor” for blaming the governor, gun laws and poverty for his city’s crime problem. Instead, Giuliani hired a police chief with an actual strategy and gave Bill Bratton a mandate to get the job done.

Unfortunately, Tom Barrett is not Rudy Giuliani. Together with Police Chief Edward Flynn, Barrett has taken no responsibility for Milwaukee’s ineffective crime fighting strategy, while blaming everyone and everything — save global warming.

To make matters worse, the police chief’s politically motivated termination of Officer Christopher Manney has resulted in the loss of what little confidence rank-and-file officers had in Flynn. How many Milwaukee police officers — aware that their department will throw them under the bus to placate an angry mob — are now going to go risk their lives or livelihoods to disarm gun-toters? The termination of Manney exposed the seedy underside of Milwaukee politics: the use of government machinery to railroad a cop for simply doing his job, which is the principal reason, one high-ranking department official privately noted, “Flynn has lost the coppers.”

Moreover, some of Flynn’s policies, such has a rule that prohibits vehicle pursuits in most instances, have turned the Milwaukee Police Department into a laughing stock.

The solution to Milwaukee’s violent crime epidemic is not rocket science.

Voters — as they did in New York — need to hold Milwaukee’s political class accountable. Next, Milwaukee needs a police chief committed to hiring a full complement of officers, adequately staffing police districts, reducing the department’s abhorrent response times, reinstituting the department’s once nationally renowned detective bureau and forming well-supervised narco-gang units at each district.

Certainly, the $23 million in savings that Milwaukee received as a result of Act 10 could have been used to underwrite these initiatives.

Giuliani drove down New York City’s crime rate by empowering city residents to work in concert with a highly motivated police force to reduce crime. Under Giuliani’s watch, officials who made excuses for their own ineptitude found another line of work. Leadership begins at the top and, until the mayor and the police chief stop making excuses, Milwaukee will continue its march toward Baltimore.