He and other officials suggested at least a six-month bar on chase coverage, to see if it made a difference.Television executives responded indignantly, saying if anything their coverage acted as a deterrent because televised chases invariably ended in either the arrest or the death of the suspect. Miscreants did not slam their foot on the accelerator to get attention, one argued, they did so in an effort to get away.The showdown between city officials and the media is the latest chapter in Los Angeles’ efforts to wean itself off dangerous car chases, which became compulsive viewing in 1994 after O J Simpson, wanted for the murder of his wife and her boyfriend, led the cops on a slow goose chase around the city’s freeways.Local stations now regularly interrupt regular programming to cut to live chases. One internet service offers to page its customers to alert them to a new chase. Under the media spotlight, the police have initiated ever more chases – almost 800 in 2001, the peak year.More than 60 per cent of the miscreants are wanted only on minor traffic violations.

With dozens of injuries and deaths reported each year – including a four-year-old girl killed by a falling light-pole that was hit by a fleeing vehicle last summer – the police have come under heavy pressure to revise their policies.Mr Bratton, who moved to Los Angeles from New York with a broad mandate to reform the corruption-ridden police department, has lobbied to stop all but the most essential chases. But he has met resistance from the rank-and-file, who have a long history of pandering to the tastes of the media.. He is small, intense and talks too quickly when he’s excited – which is often. He doesn’t dominate a room like some of his more obviously charismatic peers. His schmoozing skills are limited by an inability to make vacuously charming conversation.

And, as an architect, he only completed his first important building three years ago. So what is it about Daniel Libeskind that has won him the greatest and most emotionally-charged building project of the millennium? What makes him the billion-dollar architect?

He is small, intense and talks too quickly when he’s excited – which is often. The 55-year-old and his relatively small team based in Berlin saw off some highly impressive offerings from five other extremely powerful practices, including Foster & Partners in London and a powerhouse team called Think, which contained three of the world’s best architects.The key to Libeskind’s triumph is not architectural savvy, but death and longing. And the sombre proof of this lies in another of his projects – the quite extraordinary Jewish Holocaust Museum in Berlin. Libeskind does loss like no other living architect and in Berlin he delivered a building so drenched with physical and spiritual meaning that it is beyond normal modes of criticism; every angle, every void, every play of light and shadow is linked, by meticulously calculated geometry, to the positions of the homes of hundreds of the city’s lost Jewish families.Libeskind’s solution to the reinvention of the 16-acre New York site came in a second of pure revelation. Over tea at the Four Seasons Hotel in London last month, he admitted that when he first visited the site, no ideas came to him and that he had turned to his wife, Nina, and said: “What am I going to do? And then, when I walked down to the bedrock, I saw the whole scheme.