Friday

March 29th, 2024

National

Rudy Giuliani: Black fathers need to teach kids 'the real danger to them is not the police'

Sarah Larimer

By Sarah Larimer The Washington Post

Published July 11, 2016

Former New York City mayor Sunday said that black Americans must teach their children to respect law enforcement, and that "real danger" to them is violence within the black community itself.

"If I were a black father, and I was concerned with the safety of my child, really concerned about it and not in a politically activist sense, I would say, be very respectful of the police," Giuliani said during an appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Most of them are good. Some can be very bad. And just be very careful."

When host John Dickerson tried to interject, Giuliani continued, saying that the real problem wasn't the police:

"I'd also say, be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don't get involved with them because, son, there's a 99 percent chance they're going to kill you, not the police. And we've got to hear that from the black community. And what we've got to hear from the black community is how and what they are doing among themselves about the crime problem in the black community."

Giuliani's comments came in the wake of the killings of police officers in Dallas, as well as incidents in Minnesota and Louisiana, in which black men were fatally shot by police, sparking national outrage. Authorities on Saturday arrested more than 200 people as unrest continued following the recent shootings. Among them was DeRay Mckesson, a well-known activist in the Black Lives Matter movement. He was released Sunday afternoon.

There were 990 people fatally shot by police in 2015, according to a Washington Post database, and in 2016, there have been more than 500 fatal police shootings, the database shows.

In his "Face the Nation" appearance Sunday, Giuliani said: "The reality is, we have to look differently at race in America, if we're going to change this."

"So maybe whites have to look at it differently and blacks have to look at it differently. Whites have to realize that African-American men have a fear, and boys, have a fear of being confronted by the police because of some of these incidents," Giuliani said. "Some people may consider it rational. Some people may consider it irrational. But it's a reality. It - it exists.

"And there's a second reality in the - in the black community," Giuliani continued. "And the second reality in the black community is, there's too much violence in the black community."

He later added: "So if you want to deal - if you want to deal with this on the black side, you've got to teach your children to be respectful to the police and you've got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police, the real danger to them 99 out of 100 times, 9,900 out of 1,000 times are other black kids who are going to kill them. That's the way they're going to die."

Giuliani on Sunday also later decried the phrase "Black Lives Matter," calling it "inherently racist."

"Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter," he said. "That's anti-American and it's racist."

The statements echoed previous comments Giuliani made on MSNBC, which were also met with criticism.

Columnists

Toons