Naaa he wasn't an asshole, just a hard ass. I loved him. But again it depends on your perspective because if you were a New Yorker who was old enough to have lived through the 70s and 80s here (and I am) then you remember how bad it actually was. How bad the graffitti was. The crime. How filthy everything was. I could tell stories for hours about how many times I was robbed. It reached a point where I honestly thought that being a born and bred New Yorker meant that I felt indifference to being robbed multiple times a week. The gang violence and weapons - hell, I remember getting a taco at a mexican place on 2nd and st. Marks in like '83 (which was virtual suicide to be in that neighborhood at that time anyway) and a gang fight broke out in front of it. I sat there calmly eating my taco while watching people getting pounded on and stomped and thrown up against the glass storefront. Then someone pulled out a gun and started randomly shooting and everyone bolted. Not a single person in there, including me was remotely phased by it. This is New York - that's how it is here. No one thought there was anything that could fix the damage Koch did and Dinkins continued.
What Giuliani pulled off is a miracle and should be studied. He came down hard on the city and on top of it he backed the police 100%. The people bitching in Minneapolis have no idea - if that had happened here under Giuliani, he would have said something like, "Of course the cops kneeled on his neck! He was a criminal! In fact, let me read his record off to the cameras. If he wasn't high on narcotics, he wouldn't have died". I'm 100% certain he would have said that because he used to do that kind of shit all the time. Stop and frisk and profiling drove crimes to record low levels, until blacks protested that it's racist so they had to do away with it. Then blacks bitched that crime was on the rise in their neighborhoods again. People don't understand that you don't get, and keep, a city like NYC under control by being nice. This isn't Bismarck, ND - this is NYC. The minute you let up on the leash, the dog lunges at you.
One might say he's probably responsible for the scourge of hipsters and other well heeled out of towners who moved here in the mid to late 90s after he made it safe enough for them to live in "big, bad, New York" and gentrify the fuck out of it. I guess for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.
There's a reason Giuliani has come out lately saying that De Blasio's a failure and he should run again. I'd vote for him in a second.