Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani invoked black-on-black crime to explain heavy police enforcement in black neighborhoods during a heated discussion about the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Giuliani sparred with Georgetown professor and author Michael Eric Dyson after the former mayor said “93% of blacks are killed by other blacks.” Giuliani said it was disappointing that there was no discussion about the rate of violence committed by and against blacks in response to a question about disproportionately white police forces in U.S. cities such as Ferguson, a majority black town awaiting a grand jury’s decision on charging Officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting Brown, an unarmed teenager.
“It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community,” said Giuliani, who noted the effort he and his fellow NYC mayors put into diversifying the NYPD.
“White police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70% of the time,” he said later in the discussion.
Dyson countered that the former New York City mayor was making a “false equivalency.”
“Black people who kill black people go to jail. White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail,” Dyson said. “If a jury can indict a ham sandwich, why is it taking so long?”
