For a week now, ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been appearing on news programs and going out of his way to make racially insensitive comments regarding the unrest in Ferguson over the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. After getting into a heated argument with professor Michael Eric Dyson last Sunday on Meet The Press that drew a lot of media attention, Giuliani has used Fox News as a safe ground to further denigrate the black community and justify the racist remarks he made towards Dyson. This Sunday, he showed up on Fox News Sunday and continued to blame blacks for any mistreatment they may receive from law enforcement.
The former Republican Presidential candidate, speaking with host Chris Wallace, discussed perceptions within the black community that they are treated unfairly compared with whites. While Giuliani did say that he does think that blacks have a legitimate claim regarding unfair treatment, he said the main reason for his is because police have more interaction with African-Americans due to the higher crime rate and, therefore, it is on the black community to fix the problem.
WALLACE: Mayor, let me move you on to the bigger issue, though. Because I want you to take a look at a poll that we found. 70 percent of blacks say people in their community are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police. Only 37 percent of whites make the same complaint. Question, do you think that blacks have a legitimate complaint about racial discrimination by police in their communities?
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
GIULIANI: There is more interaction and more unfair interaction among police officers, white and black, in the black community than in the white community. And I think some of that responsibility is on the police department and on police departments to train their officers better and to make their police departments much more diversified. But I think just as much, if not more, responsibility is on the black community to reduce the reason why the police officers are assigned in such large numbers to the black community.
It’s because blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. And when I assigned police officers with Commissioner Bratton and Commissioner Safir, we did it based on statistics. We didn’t do it based on race. If there were a lot of murders in a community, we put a lot of police officers there.
Below is video of the segment, courtesy of Media Matters:
Obviously, Fox News was extremely deferential to Giuliani, with Wallace agreeing with him and the show’s production team tossing up chyrons during the segment pointing out New York City’s reduction in crime while Giuliani was mayor. Later on in the interview, Giuliani also reiterated his previous opinions that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson should never have even been put into the position of having charges brought against him for shooting an unarmed teenager.
Mr. 9/11 has apparently decided that his new stock in trade is to be the GOP’s whitesplainer-in-chief, helpfully telling blacks what they need to do within their community while letting white Americans know that blacks are just dangerous criminals that need to be stopped-and-frisked and brutalized by the police. I guess since 9/11 happened over 13 years ago, and he can no longer get a huge reaction by constantly invoking his being mayor of NYC that day, Giuliani had to find himself another gimmick.
Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).
